Company develops "silent calling" system for cellphones
Finally. Someone has actually come up with a device that will please both hyperactive cellphone addicts (you know who you are) and the easily annoyed (ditto). An Israeli company called Silent Communications has developed a system that lets phone owners pre-record a set of canned messages and then play them back via an onscreen menu. So, for example, if you're stuck in a meeting and need to get word out that you're going to be late for your next appointment, you could dial a number and send out your "running late" message (we always thought that this is what texting was for, but Silent Communications has even developed their own SMS-to-voice engine to allow you to create custom voice messages on the fly). We could see some practical uses for this; we'd love to be able to just press a button and have the phone tell the local take-out place what we want, without having to repeat the same order ourselves over and over again. But we can't help being a little nervous that we'd hit the wrong button and end up telling our boss we want him to send over a half-pepperoni, half-soy-cheese pizza and a six pack, when we just wanted to let him know we're stuck in a long meeting.
