Technology

A tap on the HealthMap iPhone application brings up a cluster of red pins on a map, representing nearby cases of swine flu. Another tap brings up a form for ordinary Americans to add to the collection by reporting bouts they have or know about.

In the near future, you might not even have to visit a bank or an ATM to deposit a check. You’ll simply snap a couple of photos of it with your cell phone. Applications to do just that are already available for Apple’s iPhone and gadgets from USAA, a company that provides insurance and banking mainly for military veterans.

Because its large touch-screen is interactive and inviting, Apple’s iPad offers media companies, game makers and other content providers a way to display material that consumers supposedly will be more likely to pay for.

The German maker of a new tablet PC is setting out to rival Apple’s iPad with the promise of even more technology, such as a bigger screen, a webcam and USB ports.

Like many working parents, Beverly Flaxington armed her daughter with a cell phone in fifth grade, when the time came for her to venture out alone. At first, it was a great way to stay in touch.

In times like these, when money is tight, people are losing jobs faster than they are being created and bill collectors are on the prowl even late on Sunday nights, every scam in the book that promises a freebie seems to crawl out of the Internet. If you’ve become suspicious of anything that says it’s free, you’re a smart consumer. Normally, I would agree that “free” comes with a price, but every now and then, I find a useful Web site that truly is free. Here are a few of my favorites:

Bigger is better when it comes to paychecks, contracts and football players, but it doesn’t work that way when it comes to high-tech business tools. As technology progresses, devices — and their price tags — shrink even as they become more sophisticated.

The holiday season of 2009 may be a frugal one for many of us, given the slow economy, but that doesn’t mean you need to let your cravings for the latest high-tech gadgets go unsatisfied. Fortunately, there are many new but affordable gadgets that can help you improve your business or relax a little better when you finally reach that well-deserved weekend.

For the few of you out there who haven’t heard of it, Twitter (http://twitter.com) is to social-networking Web sites like MySpace and Facebook what a haiku is to an epic poem. You open a Twitter profile page, select a username, and post very short messages of 140 characters or less (called “tweets”) on the site.

Your company wants to create an informational video explaining its marketing techniques, but you can’t wait weeks for the finished product. Instant Video Presenter, from ej4, a video-making company, comes to the rescue with a professional newsroom-style video in minutes.