Srinivas Padma: Personal Musings on Life, Growth, and Connections

Today, GPS is a beautiful thing. A receiver in your car can learn its own location from 24 government owned satellites overhead your tax money at work. You're guided to a destination with colorful moving maps on a touch screen and an authoritative voice. But good GPS models must fulfill three requirements. First, each must be tiny, self contained and battery operated, so you can take it hiking or biking. Second, each must display live traffic and accident data - and offer to reroute you as necessary. And finally, each must pronounce actual street names not just "Turn right," but "Turn right on South Maple Street." That feature makes an enormous difference when you're flying blind in a new town. Here are a few top notch GPS models: Magellan Maestro 4250 ($450): Like any gadget in a car, GPS receivers are a distraction, and therefore a safety risk. So it's amazing that speech recognition didn't arrive in these units sooner. On the Magellan, it...

GPS_Embedded_Shoes : Isaac Daniel calls the tiny Global Positioning System (GPS) chip he’s embedded into a line of sneakers “peace of mind.” He wishes his 8-year-old son had been wearing them when he got a call from his school in 2002 saying the boy was missing. The worried father hopped a flight to Atlanta from New York where he had been on business to find the incident had been a miscommunication and his son was safe. Days later, the engineer started working on a prototype of Quantum Satellite Technology, a line of $325 to $350 adult sneakers that hit shelves next month. It promises to locate the wearer anywhere in the world with the press of a button. A children’s line will be out this summer.