I subscribe to The Mossberg Solution -a newsletter by the tech writer for the Wall Street Journal. He has a good article on bluetooth solutions for the car. It is called “No Hands, All Ears For Sound in Cars. Check it by clicking here. I “preach” in my classes to NOT dial, text message or read emails while you are driving. You need to figure out a solution. I use the Jawbone headset. it has a noise cancellation feature.  It measures the ambient noise and helps eliminate background sound so you can hear clearly. To see a demo click here. Mr. Mossberg speaks about adapters that you can put in your car. His articles are always in depth and informative.

According to a post on Jessica Beganski’s Blog, a REALTOR who specializes “west of the River” in Connecticut they will.  She attended a seminar with Ken Gronbach (now demographer, once ad exec) hosted by Horizon Home Mortgage, who offered some trends that will effect the real estate market.

An aggravating factor in the real estate market will be that the homes Baby Boomers (born 1945-1964 and about 79 million in size) built, won’t have anyone to buy them. Gen X (born 1965-1984) is a smaller generation by about 10 million.  The only remedy would be an influx of immigration.  When do you think we’ll start to see McMansions converted into condos???

Gen Y (born 1985-2005), the largest generation of about 100 million, is about 4 years away (at the peak of the generation) from buying their first house and having a significant impact on the real estate market.

With the increase in population will come an increase in crime in inner cities, driving everyone who moved into upscale downtown apartments back out to the burbs.

As people work more out of their homes, he predicts office space will be become harder to lease. 

Know how hard it is to find a contractor?  Help is on the way – technical schools are full and have waiting lists of Gen Y’ers waiting to get in. 

 Check out his website at http://www.kgcdirect.com/

What’s old any more? Who knows? The basic delineation is email. Can they open them, read them and respond? My parents can’t. They try, but just can’t. They are not one of the 80 year olds that get it. But I found a great solution – MyCelery. This device is a state of the art color fax machine. Friends and family email them at their mycelery.com account. The phone rings and tells them they are getting an email . . . over their fax. It prints out the email and the pictures. If they want to respond, they hand write the email with the persons name at the top. The software recognizes the email address and emails the person the handwritten note back . . . as an email. My parents love letters. They print out emails now (when they can figure it out) and reread those emails over and over.

So – all the grand kids are ready to email their grand parents at least once a week with a photo or two, so are the kids. We are really excited to keep the generations connected with this device. With a great grandchildren here, we will keep the photos and emails coming.

Here is a video demonstrating the product.

I recently updated to Microsoft Office 2007 and have been playing around and getting comfortable with Word, PowerPoint and Excel. I found a great new feature in Word 2007. When you open a new document it asks if it is a document or a blog post. You can now create a blog post and publish it right to your blog from your computer. You can use the features of Word, to add hyperlinks and pictures, which has quite a comfort level for many of us. It works with many of the popular Blog software platforms. I found a great video on CNET that explains it very well. Click here to view. A great feature if you want to blog and you are not online, or if you just don’t feel like Jotting!

Social Networking, one of the new buzz words, and most likely if you are reading this blog, you are involved in other social networks other than blogs, like Linked In, Plaxo, Flickr, Digg, etc. etc. There are connections, plain and simple. Ways to connect with others who have the same interests and may be interested in doing business with you. More of social networks that WORK for Realtors later . . . but for now, another great video from CommonCraft.