Surfers Enhance Experience With TV
If you surf the World Wide Web and watch television at the same time, you’re part of a growing number of consumers dubbed “telewebbers.”
A new survey by Dataquest Inc. found that the number of adults watching TV and simultaneously surfing the Web increased from 8 million in 1998 to 27 million last year.
Few telewebbers are watching television on a PC, according to the survey. Instead, most have the TV on as background noise while surfing the Web.
“The fact that the number of telewebbers is increasing attests to the potential for including TV-like functionality in the PC and Internet functionality in TV programs,” says Dataquest analyst Sujata Ramnarayan, author of the report.
About 82 percent of telewebbers have the TV on as background noise at least once a week. Using the Internet while watching the news to get more information about a story is the most common use, Ramnarayan said, followed by getting sports information while watching a game.
Some telewebbers use the Internet for TV listings, while others use chat rooms to talk about what they’re watching. Overall, nearly 40 percent of telewebbers are interacting with the TV show’s related Web site at least once a week.
As you shuttle back and forth between the TV remote control and computer mouse, here are a few new, entertaining or useful Web sites to explore:
* Diagnosis trouble: Ominous sounds are emerging from your car’s engine and you’re unsure how to proceed.
iCARumba.com hopes you’ll turn to their Web site, which the company says enables consumers to “find out what may be wrong with their car, locate a service center near them, schedule an appointment, keep their service records online and receive reminders when it’s time for routine maintenance work.”
Consumers also can rate the auto repair shops they’ve used so future customers have the benefit of their experience.
http://www.icarumba.com
* Plain English, please Today’s high-tech environment is peppered with jargon. For those of us who don’t know a bit from a byte or a hard drive from a hard sell, there’s Whatis.com.
Just enter the word and the system spits out a definition. For example, you’ll learn that an octet is a sequence of eight bits, or an eight-bit byte, while COLD stands for “computer output to laser disk,” which is a system for archiving data such as business records to optical disks in a compressed format.
http://www.whatis.com
* Bargain basement: First-time home buyers and others looking for real estate that doesn’t bust the budget have a new resource to explore.
e4close.com bills itself as an “online marketplace for foreclosed and repossessed homes.” Plug in specifics such as location, price range, number of bedrooms, etc., and you’ll get back a list of properties that meet your criteria.
The company says it currently has 118 Spokane-area properties in its database with more being added daily.
http://www.e4close.com