Track Your Family with Microsoft

Microsoft researchers have put a new twist on telling time, creating a digital wall clock with hands for each member of the family. Instead of numbers, the hands point to places — work, school, home — and can track a person's location to show where he or she is at any time. Not good for teenagers, perhaps, but something parents might find interesting. Don't expect to buy the clock in stores anytime soon. That invention, and hundreds of others, were on display yesterday at Microsoft's annual science fair of the most futuristic ideas from the company's research division. The people-tracking clock is an idea out of Microsoft's research laboratories in Cambridge, England. Technology in cellphones these days can easily track a person's location, and that information could be sent to the clock to be seen by those at home. "It sounds very trivial but it has very nice properties," said Andrew Herbert, the managing director of the Cambridge lab. "You can glance at it and know where everyone is." The Seattle Times: Business & Technology: Microsoft's festival of future