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Tracking your kids school attendance has never been easier, especially if you live in Brazil. An initial pilot program in Vitoria da Conquista has been tracking 20,000 students in 25 different schools – all by a single wearable microchip sewn into each student’s clothing. A corresponding system at each school can detect if a student has been attending or not and is even capable of sending an SMS to partent – notifying them of their kid’s attendance. Apparently the program is so affective, the city of  Vitoria da Conquista wants to expand it to cover all 43,000 students – playing hooky just got a lot less fun in Brazil.

Source: TheVerge

Apple’s Thursday (January 19th) scheduled NYC event didn’t garner much enthusiasm, mainly because we had heard that there wouldn’t be any new hardware shown at the event. Rumors were pointing to a media event based on Apple’s desire to get into the textbook business, with the majority of people invited being in the publishing business.

Now the chatter we’re hearing is that Apple will unveil a framework for publishers, helping them build interactive e-books for schools – something like “Garage band for e-books”. Up until now, publishers have been frustrated by the lack of support and inovation in the industry – furthermore, schools have also been frustrated at having such great hardware (ipad) but nothing of relevance to teach kids with.

If Apple was to release, either an app or framework tools for publishers, we could see the textbook industry go through a complete revolution – all of which would be great news for Apple and its iPad business. Two days away….

Source: AppleInsider