Squawk Box - July 8, 2008 - WiFi hotspots in cars? And wearable computing - answering a call by sticking your finger in your ear? Conference call organized by Dan York

Do we really want to turn our cars into rolling WiFi hotspots? Will this be a boon to the "always-on" culture or just yet another source of driver distraction? And do we really want wearable computers that involve us answering a phone by sticking a finger in our ear?

On today's Squawk Box we'll journey a bit into new technologies coming out in the consumer space. First, in the past few weeks Chrysler has announced that starting with the 2009 models they will introduce "UConnect Web" where the car gets turned into a WiFi hotspot using a 3G cellular connection. Is this a good thing? Or just more distraction? How secure would it be? What kind of capabilities would it have? Who would use it? Some links:

http://www.wired.com/cars/coolwheels/news/2008/06/car_internet
http://www.autoblog.com/2008/06/26/chryslers-whats-new-2008-uconnect-web-w-video/ (picture and video)
http://blog.chryslerllc.com/blog.do?p=entry&id=403 (another video)
http://www.slashgear.com/chrysler-uconnect-web-turns-car-into-wifi-hotspot-2612280.php
http://techdirt.com/articles/20080624/0137231486.shtml (excellent cartoon!!)

We'll then touch on some of the new work in "wearable computing". NTT DoCoMo just put out a news release talking about some of their work - part of it is about new work to track your eye motion - and part of it involves a Bluetooth headset that involves bone conduction through sticking your finger in your ear!

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5j7QMfrKIwFnaoxdaCMGaiYzKycmAD91H9BPG1

Some of this tech has been around for a while (there are web references to the finger phone as far back as 2000)... here's some more pics: http://www.funponsel.com/blog/archives/2006/07/02/ntt-docomo-presents-yubi-wa-ring-phone/

If time permits we'll talk about the impending Apple 3G launch on Friday... and probably the people already camped out waiting for it...