Readwrite mobile says that the very first cell phone call was placed 40 years ago today by Motorola Division Manager Martin Cooper. It was not until many years later – March 6, 1983, that it went on sale.

We now take our cellphones for granted – but what a difference a few decades make. The original Motorola DynaTAC sold for $3,995 ($9209 in today’s dollars) was 10 inches high (plus the antenna), and weighed 1 3/4 pounds. And of course it could only make phone calls. The smartphones we throw in our pockets today have more computing power than a . . . [more]

I love this time of year: many companies traditionally announce some of their more “out of the box” improvements right at the end of the first quarter or beginning of the second quarter. Here are just a few I noticed in my mailbox; you will see Google is the real leader in 2nd quarter upgrades:

Google Fiber to the Pole

Making the Internet more accessible when you are on the road. . . . [more]

The Law Commissions of Scotland, England and Wales have proposed a clarification of British law about unfair terms in consumer contracts, to ensure that that law applies to end-user licence agreements for software and online services (EULAs).

Canadian jurisdictions do not (so far as I know) have legislation with ‘unfair terms’ in the name, while the UK has implemented the EU Directive on Unfair Terms. (French courts held a decade ago that online contracts, notably the AOL (2004) and Tiscali (2005) subscriber agreements, were subject to the comparable French law – and invalidated a large proportion of the . . . [more]

I accidentally sent an email to the wrong person yesterday. No privacy violation problem with the email content, but very embarrasing of course. I am sure that every Slaw reader has misdirected an email at least one time. We have all probably dialed a wrong number on the telephone also. We may have texted the wrong person too.

Even though we all tell ourselves that we will carefully read the screen, we won’t rely on our email quick addressing options, we will keep our contacts updated, and all of the other best practices we can think of, these things happen. . . . [more]

Maintaining its commitment to online access to justice, the UK Supreme Court is now uploading to YouTube oral summaries of its judgments from the Bench.

Argument in important cases is already available live on-line, through a partnership with Sky News (see here ) but is not being uploaded due to volume and space constraints.

Details of hearing dates together with case summaries can be found on the Court’s website and are worth diarizing. It is very difficult to retrieve the data if you miss the live broadcast.

There is also a superb blog with detailed commentaries on cases. . . . [more]

When signing up for online services or newsletters, most of us feel some level of anxiety about handing over our closely-guarded e-mail address to an unknown and potentially untrustworthy third party. To work around this problem, some create “throw-away” e-mail addresses that can given out indiscriminately, but having to deal with multiple e-mail addresses can be a significant headache.

Gmail (and Google Apps) offers support for a more convenient solution to this problem: an instant “throwaway” e-mail address can be created by appending a “+” sign, followed by any combination of words or numbers, to your e-mail address. E-mails sent . . . [more]

Another Google product which may soon disappear is Google Alerts. Alerts are absolutely essential to keep track of a brand or an issue online, especially for crisis communication and reputation management. It’s important for lawyers dealing with these issues to identify web mentions as they occur and to respond proactively as needed.

Unfortunately I haven’t been pleased with the service for several years, noting the results were spotty and largely incomplete. Although I don’t have enormous “Google trust issues,” I have been looking for years for an effective alternative to Alerts without much success. Danny Sullivan at . . . [more]

Simon touched on Google’s latest offering Keep in a post yesterday, and how this product comes on the heels of Reader being abandoned. I’ve slowly come to grips with my Feeddemon and Google Reader partnership drawing to a close, but there’s something more frustrating at play here.

What I’m finding troubling is the lack of trust I now feel for Google and their commitment to “free”. Google was supposed to be the safe bet, but it clearly wasn’t. And now we’re forced to question what’s next? Gmail? Analytics? Apps? Feedburner? … We may just be a “spring cleaning” away from . . . [more]

I attended a presentation yesterday organized by the National Capital Association of Law Libraries (NCALL) where a representative from the Library of Parliament (LOP) outlined plans to make all older federal parliamentary debates available for free via PDF within the next few years.

Currently, pre-1900 debates are available in digital format on the Canadiana.org subscription website. Senate debates from 1996 onwards and House of Commons debates from 1994 onwards are available online on the parliamentary website.

LOP has teamed up with Canadiana.org in a five-year collaborative effort to create a free-of-charge portal that will offer searchable access to federal . . . [more]

Google giveth and Google taketh away. The most recent taking was, of course, the wildly popular Google Reader. And the new gift today is Google Keep, a kind of reprise of the older (and discontinued) Google Notebook.

Keep was announced today on the Official Blog. If you’ve got an Android device you can give it a whirl — let us know what you think. The rest of us will have to wait until Google fulfils its promise to make it accessible via Google Drive.

The woods are full of notetaking apps, the most prominent perhaps being Evernote. It’s going . . . [more]

The ongoing Megaupload case is a controversial lightning rod case for issues on cloud storage, privacy and copyright. Megaupload basically ran a file storage and viewing service. The US Department of justice shut them down, seized assets, and launched criminal prosecutions alleging that it is an organization dedicated to copyright infringement. 

Ben Schorr mentioned the case on Slaw recently, starting with the comment that “One thing has become clear in the last few months: Hollywood has declared war on the Internet.”

Wikipedia summarizes the situation well, and points out that:

Techdirt argued that while the founder of Megaupload had a . . . [more]

By now everyone who uses Google Reader has seen the news – this tool has been given its crash papers. TechCrunch’s headline Good Riddance, Google Reader broke my heart, and judging by the comments, the hearts of others as well. Perhaps I have a secret aversion to change – wait a minute, no, I definitely don’t.

Like many others, I moved to Google Reader in 2009 when Newsgator decided to discontinue its online application. Since then, my library team and I have used Reader to select and aggregate information from feeds in a number of areas for our practice groups. . . . [more]