General Meeting - Holiday Tech Gadgets IV

The holidays are coming & everyone wants a new tech gadget. What cool devices offer a lot of functionality & the most bang for the buck? You can spend time reading reviews & watching video on the web. Or you can go to the stores & look at the gadgets in display cases. But even after all that, you still may be reluctant to make the buy.

Wouldn’t be great if you could actually see things out of the box & being demonstrated by some of the top techies in Cleveland who really use the products? Well, you can,  come on down to Holiday Tech Gadgets IV!!!

The Greater Cleveland PC Users Group & the Cleveland Digital Publishing Group join forces at 9:30am Saturday, Dec. 10th & will demonstrate a variety of digital cameras, wireless music streaming with a Sonos Multi-Room Music System, Siri Voice Navigation on an iPhone 4S, a Microsoft Kinect that has a natural user interface and the red hot Kindle Fire tablet.

There is going to be a raffle to raise money for the Salvation Army We have a "ton" of prizes including a Kindle ereader (see below). Currently, this is what is planned.

Eric Wethington of Dodd Camera will be back to show the latest & greatest in digital photography. Non-traditional is the calling this year. Mirrorless & translucent mirror cameras are coming to the fore. Nikon J1/V1, Olympus EP3/EPL3, and the Subminiature Pentax Q are among the new class of cameras. Eric will try to have at least 2 of the 3 listed. Stocking stuffers to include: a Black Rapid, a Hufa, and maybe some lens "Shot" glasses for a cool stocking stuffers.

Terry Wade of Audiocraft will show the Sonos Multi-Room Music System. More Music, More Rooms, Less Wires. All the music you want all over the house wirelessly. Bring your home up to date with streaming music.

Scott "Scooter" Seifert, MacTech for Team Spike Consulting will demonstrate Siri on the new Apple iPhone 4S. Siri is the intelligent personal assistant that helps you get things done just by asking. It allows you to use your voice to send messages, schedule meetings, place phone calls, & more. But Siri isn’t like traditional voice recognition that requires you to remember keywords & speak specific commands. Siri understands your natural speech, & it asks you questions if it needs more information to complete a task.

Kevin Dutkiewicz, Head Technician / Systems & Network Administrator at Simplex-IT & Sarah Dutkiewicz of Cleveland Tech Consulting will show the Kinect from Microsoft is a motion sensing input device by Microsoft for the Xbox 360 video game console. Based around a webcam-style add-on peripheral, it enables users to control and interact with the Xbox 360 without the need to touch a game controller, through a natural user interface using gestures and spoken commands. Microsoft is rumored to be bringing out a Kinect for computers some time in 2012.

John "Raffle Guy" Kullander & his daughter Kristin Gardner will be showing off Amazon's Kindle Fire, one of the newest tablets in the red hot tablet category. It's more than just a Kindle, it runs Android and can do a lot of the same things as other tablets, but at a lower price.

We will be doing a raffle to raise money for the Salvation Army, prizes currently include:

• Kindle ereader with certificate to download free ebooks from O'Reilly
• 2 Wireless Mobile Mice 4000
• Xbox 360 Game Halo Reach
• Wireless Comfort Desktop (mouse keyboard combo)
• PowerShell book signed by the authors Matt Hester & Sara Dutkiewicz
  
• iPad 2: The Missing Manual, 3rd Edition
• iPhone: The Missing Manual, 5th Edition
• Mac OS X Lion: The Missing Manual
• iMovie '11 & iDVD: The Missing Manual
• iPhoto '11: The Missing Manual
• Gimp 2.6 for Photographers
  
• Windows 7 Plain & Simple
• Windows 7 Inside Out
• Windows 7: The Missing Manual
• More coming . . .
  

Check back soon for more details.



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