Home Interaction

If you know how to use an iPod or iPhone, you know how to do laundry. That’s the idea behind the new frontloading washer and dryer from Kenmore, and it’s a good line to use on teenagers when the hamper is overflowing.
 
And to top it off this laundry pair comes in dark purple, a color Kenmore calls blackberry. Get it? Blackberry. A word that wired teens instantly connect to.  As in, “Hey Mom, I can’t clean my room, I’m using the Blackberry.” This is the stuff dreams are made of.
 
The Kenmore Elite SteamCare Washer with Time Manager and Steam ReFresh dryer will be in Sears stores and online by March. Each machine costs $1,800 to $1,900, depending on color—white, lemongrass (a light green tinged with yellow), or blackberry. The LCD touchscreen uses interface technology, similar to a smart phone, with colorful icons to help you choose your settings.

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When Google announced the previously rumored phone call feature for Google Voice inside Gmail, we all got excited for a Skype-challenging VoIP service that’s already embedded in our email. But the most charming element of the announcement was yet to come.

Instead of a boring old ad campaign of TV commercials, YouTube videos, billboards, and what have you, Google decided to do something a little bit more fun. The company is constructing several old-style British phone booths that will be using the new Google Voice feature–all for free. The phone booths, modeled on a 1957 vintage example, will be installed in high-traffic areas, like college campuses.

The Google Voice phone booths seem to be completely free–there’s no way to contribute money, for one thing–so I suspect the calls will be limited to the States and Canada.

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