Utility PG&E unveiled a tome (close to 300 pages) detailing the ins and outs of its smart grid plans on Thursday. Here is what you need to know from the report: Read More »
Archive for June 2011
Boxee will soon roll out a firmware update that will group its growing app catalog into categories. This may seen like a small improvement, but it touches on a bigger issue: As connected devices become more popular, content discovery on them will become more challenging. Read More »
Is Facebook’s long-awaited iPad application finally set to launch? Mark Zuckerberg has reportedly said the company plans to “launch something awesome” next week. The new product was developed entirely at Facebook’s Seattle office, the company’s only engineering outfit outside of its Silicon Valley headquarters. Read More »
According to a news report on Thursday, the Federal Trade Commission is looking into Twitter’s business practices. Although that doesn’t mean Twitter is under official investigation, it means the company’s behavior must have raised enough critical flags to catch the regulator’s attention, which is rarely good. Read More »
Electric car and motorcycle racing can deliver important breakthroughs and innovations for the future of electric vehicles. While it might seem like some of these racing events are frivolous and niche, they’re the ultimate testing ground for cutting edge and high performance electric vehicle technology. Read More »
For anyone concerned about the difficulty of doing advanced analytics tasks with Hadoop, the future might be just around the corner. A stealth-mode Palo Alto, Calif.–based startup called Platfora is working to make Hadoop usable even for the non-data scientists among us. Read More »
If you want to shop for real-world goods, you’ll often give your business to the store that offers the best shopping experience, price and convenience of location being equal. Which is why I do my iPhone app shopping on the iPad. Read More »
If regular users are going to start video chatting in the living room, it will need to be drop-dead simple to do. The good news for Comcast and Skype is that they seem to have succeeded in creating a pretty user-friendly solution. Read More »
GoDropBox is a third-party add-on for Google Apps that adds a public mailbox to your Google Docs account, enabling anyone with the appropriate link to upload files to your account. This is handy for web workers who would like to accept files too big to email. Read More »
An open letter by a RIM executive describes the problems the company is facing and what it needs to do to come back. But it also highlights how precarious the situation is for RIM, which can’t afford to lose the trust of its employees. Read More »
In the wake of Google pulling the plug on its energy tool PowerMeter, Microsoft says it has now killed its energy service, Hohm, too. Microsoft writes on its blog that it will discontinue its Hohm service starting on May 31, 2012. Read More »
I teach technology and innovation to working professional MBA students who are changing courses and teams every ten weeks. Collaboration tools are critical to our effectiveness. Over the last two years, my courses have served as testing grounds for two locally-grown, student-designed tools: Acceledge and Piazza.… Read More »
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