December 2007
Meet The Pay Pal Mafia
An inside look at the hyperintelligent, superconnected pack of serial entrepreneurs who left the payment service and are turning Silicon Valley upside down. Fortune’s Jeffrey O’Brien reports.
Sex, Math and Scientific Achievement
Why do men dominate the fields of science, engineering and mathematics?
How Technology Almost Lost the Iraq War
In Iraq, the Critical Networks Are Social — Not Electronic.
How To Upgrade From Vista To Windows XP →
Find The Best Buy At Amazon With SavvyGraph
Web site SavvyGraph displays the average rating and number of reviews for each on a simple graph to give you a quick method for comparing items on Amazon. The idea is that the higher the rating and number of ratings a product has, the better it’s likely to be. So products garnering a place on the top right of the graph (high rating, high number of reviews) are the best buys. You can hover...
"Story Of Stuff" Is a Online Video Hit
Do the halls of malls give you a case of the jingle hells? You could kick back for a 20-minute break from rampant consumerism to learn more about the toxic mess it makes of the planet. Fun, right? Actually, it is with The Story of Stuff. It’s a short, friendly movie covering the ABCs of consumer culture. The sky may be falling, but we can prop it up, the film suggests. The Story of Stuff was...
The Best Gadgets of 2006
Last Year’s Products Make This Year’s Best Gifts.
Great Web Games You Don't Have To Pay For →
The Steroids Social Network →
Secret Surfing
How to keep prying eyes away from your Web browser, e-mail, and IM.
Why You Should Ignore All the New Year Predictions
Fimoculous blogger Rex Sorgatz dug up a 2007 audit on the 1989 book, Future Stuff. The book describes 250-some consumer products that “should be in your supermarket, hardware store, pharmacy, department store, or otherwise available by the year 2000.” It gets a few things right, like Viagra and flat-screen TVs. But mostly it’s wrong. My favorite prediction isn’t “The...
Ten Things That Won't Happen Next Year
1. The writers won’t win the current strike 2. DreamWorks isn’t going to leave Paramount after all 3. Apple won’t reinvent TV viewing 4. “Juno” won’t win an Oscar 5. Google won’t buy a major media company 6. Indiana Jones won’t be the biggest film of 2008 7. Katie Couric won’t quit 8. The Disney-Pixar deal won’t...
My Genetic Code Can Beat Up Your Genetic Code
James Watson, co-discoverer of DNA’s double helix, and Craig Venter, who helped unravel the human genome, have copies of their own personal genomes. Now Iceland-based deCode Genetics is offering the rest of us the next best thing: a chance to compare our genomes against the some of the scientific literature’s genetic discoveries. Beginning today, $985 and a swab of goo from the inside of your...
Freecycle Turns Trash Into Treasure
Freecycle is a global recycling phenomenon. Since it started in Arizona in May 2003, it has grown to more than 4 million members in more than 4,100 cities, from Istanbul to Inwood. It boasts of keeping more than 300 million tons of trash out of landfills every day and has inspired imitators. There are, says founder and executive director Deron Beal, as many heartwarming stories as there are...
You Are The Hero In "Drawn To Life"
Drawn to Life is like no other video game. In this Nintendo DS game, you draw your hero, watch him or her come to life through animation, and then play with your hero in a world that you help to create. If this sounds intriguing, you’re right — it is. The game revolves around your saving a village of little creatures called Raposas from the evil doings of a character named Wilfre. Wilfre has...
“This trend continued in 2007, when after a fairly promising upfront early in the...”
– Internet Crushing TV Networks (webpronews.com)
A New Way To Stay Awake
In what sounds like a dream for millions of tired coffee drinkers, Darpa-funded scientists might have found a drug that will eliminate sleepiness. A nasal spray containing a naturally occurring brain hormone called orexin A reversed the effects of sleep deprivation in monkeys, allowing them to perform like well-rested monkeys on cognitive tests. The discovery’s first application will...
A New Blackberry Concept
A new Blackberry concept has just surfaced. Apparently, RIM’s thinking of using an angular keypad for future models of Blackberry. It was also revealed that the same design might be used for the onscreen keypad of future touch-screen Blackberry phones. The company claims it will make things easier for the user. We hope so, RIM. The circular keypads of Nokia 3600 and 3650 were bad enough....
Searching For The Elusive Wii
Ever wanted to know what it’s like to get laughed at for a whole day? Try finding a Wii this week. That was my task Tuesday: to comb the San Francisco Bay Area for one of Nintendo’s elusive video game consoles. And let me tell you, the results were not pretty. Desperately seeking a Wii
Persepolis an Animated Triumph
Persepolis isn’t just a good animated movie. “It’s a small landmark in feature animation,” writes Nick Pinkerton of the Village Voice. Rendered with handcrafted charm in black and white, it tells the poignant-yet-funny story of a girl growing up amidst the Iranian revolution. But “bare synopsis doesn’t begin to convey [its] imaginative breadth,” says Newsweek’s David Ansen.. Though artistically...
$100 Laptops Fetch $600 on eBay
The $100 laptop is turning into the $600 laptop on eBay, reports the San Jose Mercury News, sealing the novelty value of the computer aimed at children in developing countries. Nonprofit One Laptop Per Child is also hawking the laptops through year’s end, but many shoppers shelled out extra in private auctions to ensure Christmas delivery. Buying from OLPC is better for your wallet and...
SnowCrystals.com →
MIT Professor Becomes Internet Star
Walter H. G. Lewin, 71, a physics professor, has long had a cult following at MIT. Now he has emerged as an international Internet guru, thanks to the global classroom the institute created to spread knowledge through cyberspace. Professor Lewin’s videotaped physics lectures, free online on the OpenCourseWare of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, have won him devotees across the...
Video: New Footwear Promises Better Fitness →
The Race to Build the Supergreen Car →
Study: Wii Gaming No Substitute For Exercise
Younger gamers looking to con a Wii out of parents this year by selling them on the physical benefits of “active” gaming, it’s time to dream up a new strategy. A UK study entitled “Energy expenditure in adolescents playing new generation computer games” reveals that a round of Wii Sports doesn’t work the body nearly as hard as proper exercise. While it expends...
Plan Your Outdoor Expedition Online
Looking to get in a good run or bike ride now that it’s begun to cool off? A handful of Web sites let you plot a new route by clicking away on an interactive map or satellite photo. I got into this habit two years ago, when a reader tipped me off to Gmap Pedometer, which used Google Maps data to let users measure distances with any Web browser. A steady stream of updates added a calorie...
Video Websites That Beat YouTube In Quality
Sharing your personal videos online is great, but how many times have you wished your production looked better? Videos on YouTube, the world’s No. 1 video-sharing site, often are fuzzy. The same goes for other popular sites, including Yahoo Video, AOL Video or MySpaceTV. The culprit is a kind of Catch-22 for online video: To make sure the videos start playing immediately, image resolution is...
The UpDown Is A New Way To Invest
Investing social network The UpDown has a slightly different take on investment communities than the likes of Marketocracy, Covestor, and others. Users invest a simulated portfolio starting with $1 million and are paid based on their ability to consistently out-perform the S&P 500. And users who refer a friend pick up 10% of any earnings that friend rakes in. Since the beta launch in June,...
In Japan, Blu-Ray Is Clobbering HD-DVD
And yes the holly war between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray is yet to be over, and today the BDA or Blu-Ray Disc Association, asked the Japanese company GfK Marketing Services Japan Ltd. to investigate on that matter and to find out which format between the DVD, HD-DVD and BLU-RAY is the leading one in Japan… And guess what? The HD-DVD is almost none existent… Sometimes images worth a 1000 words...
The Man Behind Godzilla
Behind this successful movie monster there is a formidable special-effects man. His name: Eiji Tsuburaya. He created not only Godzilla, but also Rodan, Mothra, Ultraman and a pantheon of fire-breathing reptiles and aliens. He also inspired a generation of imitators and ushered in the golden age of monster movies, or kaiju eiga, of the 1950s and ’60s. Japan’s Master of Monsters
The Real Chinese Economy
China’s economy, predicted to become the world’s largest by 2012, actually is 40% smaller than previously estimated, the World Bank concludes, after updating the way it calculates GDP. Although China’s $5.33-trillion economy is still the second largest in the world behind the $12-trillion US, the new appraisal suggests it won’t be taking top honors that soon, and it’s less...
Beyond Monopoly: Great Board Game Gifts for Geeks →
DNA Dating
The first dating service to use lab-based genetic profiling launched online last week. Scientific Match promises to pair up people who will be physically attracted to each other because their DNA is different. Well-matched couples will like each others’ natural scents, have more fun in bed, and bear healthier children than those who are genetically similar, the company claims. The service,...
Inside The CIA's "Black Site"
A Yemeni man never charged by the U.S. details 19 months of brutality and psychological torture — the first in-depth, first-person account from inside the secret U.S. prisons. Inside the CIA’s notorious “black sites”
Meet Me In Etherverse
The appeal of online virtual worlds such as Second Life is such that it may trigger an exodus of people seeking to “disappear from reality,” an expert on large-scale online games has said. ‘Exodus’ to virtual worlds predicted
Last-Minute Geek Gifts →
What's Hot And What's Not, 2007
Every December, Google compiles its ‘Zeitgeist’ – a look at which search terms people are typing into Google most often, and which terms are increasing or decreasing in frequency. The results, or at least the slice of them Google chose this year, are a bit bizarre, and for those trying to do serious work on the web they’re not especially encouraging. Google Zeitgeist: a snapshot of the...
DNA Dating
The first dating service to use lab-based genetic profiling launched online last week. Scientific Match promises to pair up people who will be physically attracted to each other because their DNA is different. Well-matched couples will like each others’ natural scents, have more fun in bed, and bear healthier children than those who are genetically similar, the company claims. The service,...
Piracy As A Leading Indicator Of Sales →