As the father of a teenager, there are times when Clark would have liked to have known where his daughter was at a given moment. But high-tech location services have always been very expensive.

Now Google has launched Latitude, a free application compatible with most smart phones -- excluding the iPhone. Latitude allows your cell phone (and you) to be located and positioned on a Google map for others to see.

What Latitude is not is a stalker service; it's a permission-based program that requires you to voluntarily agree to be tracked and lets you control who can track you.

Google is positioning Latitude for the social networking crowd. As Clark says, the idea is that you and your buddies can locate each other on a Saturday night if they sign up for this service.

In a separate development, Google has made 1.5 million public domain books available for free download to select phones -- including the iPhone.

This could be great if you're stuck at the airport gate and want to read a chapter of a book. But there's nothing more annoying to Clark than reading an entire book on a cell phone screen. Unless, of course, you're doing it on a Kindle -- the electronic book reader from Amazon.