An unboxing and preview of Pivothead POV video recording eyewear. The HD camera that sits between the sunglass lenses is capable of shooting 1080p video. Actual footage shot with the sunglasses, uploaded at 720p, starts at about the 1 minute mark.

A full review of the sunglasses, invented by Cherry Creek High School grad Chris Cox, will appear in Monday’s TechKnow section.

AT&T file photo

Attaching cellular antennas to the mast of a satellite COLT at the San Diego exercise site.

When the Waldo Canyon Fire exploded this week, cell service in the Colorado Springs area nearly grinded to a halt as airwaves were clogged due to high demand and, possibly, damaged cell sites.

Authorities, struggling to find service, immediately urged residents to stay off their cellphones except for emergencies.

AT&T said today that it deployed a COLT and ARMZ to the area on Tuesday to help boost cellular capacity. Verizon has said that it installed so-called channel capacity cards.

I’ve heard of COWs (cell on wheels), but not COLTs or ARMZ. COLT stands for cell site on light truck and ARMZ stands for AT&T Remote Mobility Zone, essentially a cell site in a suit case.

The deployed COLT increased mobile coverage and network capacity for hundreds of people at the command center, while the ARMZ unit provided wireless service to cell phones and other communications devices for emergency personnel. The portable units use satellites for communication and a generator for power. Read more…

Ryan Bales

Ryan Bales hopes to bring deals to online banking

If financial website mint.com and deal website groupon.com had a child, new website budgetable.com would be the resulting product.

Budgetable.com, created by Louisville software engineer Ryan Bales, links up to users’ bank accounts and credit cards to track spending. It also provides deals and coupons for stores users shop at. The deals are based on spending habits the site gathers from banking data.

For example, if the site saw that I spend $40 at Starbucks every week it would offer a coupon for half off a frappuccino that I could use to save some money. The goal is to bring deals to consumers at places they actually shop at.

Bales thought of the application after trying to buy a TV online and not being able to find a promo code for the discount box on the checkout page.

“With deal sites, promo codes, and online coupons it’s all a mess,” Bales said. “I thought it would be really cool if I could bring deals and coupons into the online banking system.” Read more…

RJ Sangosti, The Denver Post

Waldo Canyon fire continues to grow near Colorado Springs.

As authorities fighting the Waldo Canyon fire struggled with mobile phone service last night, residents in the Colorado Springs area were urged to only use their cellphones for emergencies.

In following the coverage, I assumed the wireless network congestion was caused by extremely high demand and damaged cell sites. But one of our stories this morning stated that an evacuee couldn’t call her husband “because the smoke was so heavy it was clogging cell phone service.”

I checked with officials from the major wireless carriers to see whether this could actually happen. Verizon Wireless spokesman Bob Kelley said the lack of cell service was “unlikely caused by smoke.” Read more…

Daniel J. Schneider, The Denver Post

The #WaldoCanyonFire hashtag displayed on KMGH Channel 7's live broadcast during the fire, June 26, 2012.

Hashtags are one of the simplest, but also among the most effective, tools Twitter offers when it comes to Colorado’s plague of wildfires.

If you’re not new to Twitter, you know what a hashtag is. But if you don’t, here’s a quick look:

A hashtag is any string of letter and numbers preceded immediately by a hash, or pound sign. The Twitter Website and Twitter client apps automatically link hashtags together, so you can click to get more relevant tweets. Think of them like topics.

Anything can be a hashtag: #pants, #lol, or a personal favorite: #partylikeajournalist. The hashtag ends at the first space or punctuation mark, and capital letters are frequently used to separate words.

Why do we care? Because in this age of fast-moving, free-flowing information, Twitter has become a key channel for information flow in times of disaster for several reasons:

• It’s fairly robust (the Fail Whale is much rarer than it once was),
• It’s fairly ubiquitous (being available on both iOS and Android smartphones and tablets, and in any web browser), and
• Particularly visible during 2011′s Arab Spring revolutions, and Japan’s tsunami and nuclear crisis, you can tweet from any phone that can send a text message, no matter how dumb.

When disaster strikes, a hashtag is sure to follow shortly.

Read on for a list of wildfire hashtags and more

File photo

Ergen wants to build an advanced wireless network.

Dish Network chairman Charlie Ergen, scheduled to testify tomorrow about the future of video before the House Communications and Technology subcommittee, believes the satellite-TV company’s commercial-skipping technology can help protect children from junk food and beer ads.

According to prepared testimony filed with the subcommittee, Ergen also says Douglas County-based Dish will take on significant risk to “build the most advanced wireless network in the U.S.”

AutoHop, launched in May, allows Dish subscribers who have the company’s Hopper DVR to automatically skip commercials while watching recorded content with a click of a button at the beginning of the recording.

“This means that allowing your kids to watch TV doesn’t have to mean they have no choice but to see commercials for junk food and alcohol,” Ergen said. Read more…

AP Photo/Orlin Wagner

Most text donors give more than $250 combined annually through all channels.

Three-quarters of text donors have had the same phone number for at least five years, according to a new survey by the mGive Foundation, the Denver-based nonprofit that collects 85 percent of all text donations from wireless carriers.

“There are two numbers that follow you throughout: your social security number and your mobile number,” said mGive Foundation executive director Jenifer Snyder.

In comparison, 14 percent of email addresses expire every year, whether through inactivity or job changes, she said.

The study found Read more…

A quick unboxing of the Samsung Galaxy SIII (S3), the white version from Sprint. This video also provides a preview of the Samsung Pebble Blue Flip Cover Case designed specifically for the Galaxy S3.

We’ll have a review of the supposed iPhone-killer in the coming days. The phone was slated to hit stores today, though a supply-demand crunch has pushed the release back for some markets. The S3 is available from all four major carriers – T-Mobile, Sprint, Verizon and AT&T.

The S3 sports a 4.8-inch display, which as you can see from the photo below, is massive when compared to the iPhone’s 3.5-inch screen. Read more…

UPDATE SEVEN: Twitter now has an official blog post explaining how the ‘cascading bug’ messed up their system, and denying any hack.

UPDATE SIX: Hacking group UGNazi is claiming responsibly for Twitter’s intermittent connectivity issues today. Group member Hannah Sweet (@Cosmothegod on Twitter) said, in an email to some news outlets, that they took down Twitter for supporting the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA). The group also claims on their website they’ve hacked Google and BP websites in the past. The intermittent disconnects came after Twitter would move its servers, and the group would attack the new location. At the moment, Twitter is working fine.

Twitter has made no reference to hackers. On their own communications twitter account they said, “Today’s outage is due to a cascaded bug in one of our infrastructure components. We’ll provide updated information soon.”

UPDATE FIVE: The site is working again as of 12:59. It looks like it’s a pretty serious server issue so users might be having connectivity issues all day long. Look here for any additional word from the company.

UPDATE FOUR: Folks, the Twitter engineers appear off their game today. The site is back down as of 12:48 MST, and the problem seems to be extending a bit to the mobile site as well. The mobile page is not loading as quickly as usual, but still is more effective than twitter.com. There are no other updates on the status site, but I’ll keep checking. Read more…

File photo

Amazon's Jeff Bezos has spent $42 million on a clock.

Investopedia has a list of the Top 6 outrageous uber-rich purchases, with a $200,000 pigeon topping the list.

Two items disclosed in the past 24 hours would probably supplant the pigeon.

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison is on the verge of buying Lanai, a pineapple island near Maui. Asking price? $500 million to $600 million.

No problem. Ellison, worth an estimated $36 billion, will pay for the purchase in cash, Read more…