Drive the DriveSafe.ly Way!

Imagine this scenario:

You're waiting for a very important email/text/voicemail on your smart phone, but you also need to get to... um... Costco before it closes (you're desperately out of cat litter and vitamins and the coupons expire that day)! On top of that, there's a huge traffic jam on 65 and 459, so you have to take 31.

Traffic is slow, but not too bad, and there's a police car right next to you.

Ding! You've got email/voicemail/a text! Joy! But you don't dare do anything because you're driving through Vestavia!

Ack!

Well have I got an AWESOME phone app for you - and it's available for the iPhone, the Blackberry and the Droid!

DriveSafe.ly

This is a free app which "reads text (SMS) messages and emails aloud in real time and automatically responds without drivers touching the mobile phone. DriveSafe.ly is the solution to texting while driving."

Lisa Salazar over at 3 Geeks and a Law Blog says "you can, of course, upgrade to a paid version that will give you Caller ID, more words read, ability to change the voice and the reading speed, plus the creation of an ad-free auto-response. The price is $3.99/mo. or $13.95/yr."

Google Announces Free Download of 10 terabytes of patents and trademarks

From BeSpacific:

Google Public Policy Blog: "When we launched Google Patent Search in 2006, we wanted to make it easier for people to understand the world of inventions, whether they were browsing for curious patents or researching serious engineering. Recently, we’ve also worked on a number of public data search features, as well as experimental features like the Public Data Explorer...That’s why we’re proud to announce that the USPTO and Google are making this data available for free at http://www.google.com/googlebooks/uspto.html. This includes all granted patents and trademarks, and published applications -- with both full text and images. And in the future we will be making more data available including file histories and related data."