We’ve all heard about taking your work home with you, but what happens when your work decides to visit you online and start telling you what you can and can’t say during your off-hours? To wit: the Associated Press has issued an internal memo telling staffers that they should be careful expressing personal opinions on Facebook or …
Accessories & Peripherals
A Flying Car? Yep, and Now It’s Officially Road Legal, Too
Meet George Jetson, or at least the sort of flying car he might have driven if he wasn’t a haft-nosed cartoon and his UFO-style bubble-craft looked more like a smart car with wings. That’s it up top, an actual shot of its maiden outing on March 5, 2009 in Plattsburgh, New York, where a retired Air Force colonel put it through its paces …
Why Doesn’t Amazon Want to Disclose Its Carbon Footprint?
Just how environmentally-friendly is Amazon.com?
Sure, the company has a page dedicated to how it’s “constantly looking for ways to further reduce [its] environmental impact,” boasting that “online shopping is inherently more environmentally friendly than traditional retailing” and linking to a study to back that up.
It talks about …
Roll Over, Movie Bootleggers: It’s All About 3D Prop Printing Now
Never mind digital bootlegging, the new wave of counterfeiting is all about 3D printing and the creation of replica props from movies and television. Don’t believe me? Then you’re obviously not lawyers for Paramount Pictures, and you’ve clearly never heard of Todd Blatt.
Blatt was served with a Cease & Desist letter by Paramount …
Daily Deals Site ‘LivingSocial’ Nearing $1 Billion IPO?
Is LivingSocial about to follow Groupon’s lead, and go public? CNBC certainly thinks so, reporting that the site has met with bankers to discuss the possibility, and suggesting a surprisingly high valuation that may have come from said meetings.
CNBC cites an anonymous source “familiar with the matter” as claiming that the daily deals …
Which Government Asks Google to Remove the Most Info from the Internet?
The British Government doesn’t like people being able to find certain things on the internet. What other conclusion could anyone come to after seeing Google’s transparency report of requests from government agencies to remove content and/or hand over user data for the last half of 2010, when the U.K.’s items requested for removal is …
Americans Prefer E-Readers to Tablets (and the Gap is Growing)
The future of mobile computing may be… e-Readers? Yes, even though iPads and other tablets are more attractive and more multifunctional, they’re also far less successful than e-Readers in the U.S., with 12% of Americans owning an e-Reader against only 8% owning a tablet device. And again bucking conventional wisdom, the gap is …
Amazon Starts Selling Ads Based on Your Browsing History
Amazon wants you to buy something. But not necessarily from them.
Amazon has teamed with San Francisco company Triggit to resell ad inventory space targeted at specific user demographics in real time, using Triggit’s Digital Side Platform technology.
Here’s how AllThingsD describes what Amazon hopes to do:
“Amazon uses the
…
Needed: Consistent User Interfaces for High-Tech Cars
Until last week, I’d never driven an Audi in my life. But when I got to try the new Audi A7 for my latest Technologizer column over on TIME.com, I didn’t have to learn anything new to drive it–everything from the gear shifter to the brakes to the turn signals were similar or identical to the ones in dozens of other cars I’ve driven. The …
Need a Clock That’ll Run for 10,000 Years?
Yes, someone’s actually building an honest-to-goodness 10,000-year clock, or a clock that’ll run for 10,000 years. If you’re a Neal Stephenson fan (like me) and you’ve read his last novel, Anathem—in which a group of cloistered monks tend an ornate millennial clock—you already know about the actual clock. It’s been around for some …
Barnes & Noble eBooks Outsell Print Books Three to One
For those who still think that eBooks aren’t going to last, you might want to talk to Barnes & Noble CEO William Lynch, who told investors on a conference call yesterday that his company’s digital books now outsell all formats of its print books—combined—by a factor of three to one.
That’s not the only good news the bookstore …
FCC Proposes $11M in Penalties for ‘Mystery Fees’ from Phone Carriers
The solicitation of “mystery fees” – or “cramming” – is a dubious practice utilized by phone carriers to milk coin out of their customers, charging anywhere from $1.99 to $19.99 per month for services they don’t actually need.
It’s a sketchy practice, to say the least, as thousands of people are charged unknowingly for …