Thinking Tech

Pitching legend Satchel Paige once said "Don't look back. Something might be gaining on you." Well, here's something for the truly paranoid: clothes whose fibers contain cameras to see what's...

July 24, 2009 8:46am | By John Dodge

Broadway grannies and tempestuous teenagers are just the start. What I saw at CompuTex is a growing glut of flash drive capacity. Gigabytes in the hand are getting literally cheap as chips.

2 | July 24, 2009 7:02am | By Dana Blankenhorn

So it was with interest that I read a News.com story today bearing the headline "AT&T chief: iPhone won't be exclusive forever." by John Dodge

1 | July 23, 2009 8:03pm | By John Dodge

Los Angeles is looking at retrofitting 140,000 street lamps with LEDs. Pittsburgh, Knoxille, Ann Arbor, Anchorage and San Jose are also in various stages of LED street lamp replacement. by John Dodge

July 23, 2009 1:09pm | By John Dodge

The problem is not in the data. The problem is in auditing what Google, Amazon and the government do with that data, and making certain it aligns with what we consider to be good public policy.

1 | July 23, 2009 9:24am | By Dana Blankenhorn

This post is about two things: a July 16 story from WardsAuto.com that claims Toyota will come out in 2015 with a "shockingly" low-priced hydrogen fuel cell (HFC) vehicle and the eternal debate...

July 22, 2009 10:01am | By John Dodge

The technique combines encryption and peer-to-peer technologies. A message encrypted with a public key is then timed to re-encrypt at a specific point, and then all copies run through the Vuze...

1 | July 22, 2009 8:35am | By Dana Blankenhorn

Will we choose an Internet of free competition or monopoly rents? Will we have security or liberty? It's time to decide.

2 | July 22, 2009 6:58am | By Dana Blankenhorn

Just when most of us have yet to spring for pricey 3G mobile wireless, Sprint starts advertising 4G service in Baltimore with more cities "soon" to follow. When it comes to mobile broadband for...

7 | July 21, 2009 11:36am | By John Dodge

In the race for space, it seems the big lift is going to be getting the money for the show. There are two ways to do it. Both start with Aldrin, Armstrong or Collins making a trip like the one I...

2 | July 21, 2009 5:24am | By Dana Blankenhorn

Energy giant Dominion Retail just offered me an electricity rate of .0874 ($8.74) per kilowatt hour (kWh). That's pretty good so I sprung for it. Switching electricity suppliers wins me a savings...

1 | July 20, 2009 1:15pm | By John Dodge

If we want wind power, and hydrogen, and geothermal plants, and better solar panels, the way to get them is through market incentives resulting in more investment, combined with tax laws that...

3 | July 20, 2009 10:20am | By Dana Blankenhorn

Dave Carroll's United break guitars song on Youtube garnered 300,000 more views over the weekend and at this moment (11:25 EDT) sits at 3,446,242 views. Since I posted Thursday about Dave...

2 | July 20, 2009 8:41am | By John Dodge

Yesterday, I watched my 85-year-old uncle cut up a cheap tarp to make seat covers for some wet chairs at a outdoor family gathering. He went about the task like the engineer he has always been,...

4 | July 19, 2009 6:39pm | By John Dodge

Drive down a suburban highway, or along the margins of any mall, and you find PC expertise confined to sad repair shops without inventory, if you can find any at all. The industry's retail...

2 | July 17, 2009 10:09am | By Dana Blankenhorn

"United breaks guitars" is the most powerful example yet about how social media empowers consumers and tarnishes images of big companies. In spring, 2008,  Dave Carroll of the Sons of Maxwell...

1 | July 16, 2009 1:52pm | By John Dodge

Remember those magazine "readers" a few years ago which mimicked print magazines online? Zinio is one. Another was Olive. There were others, too. The Boston Globe is just getting around to...

3 | July 16, 2009 12:07pm | By John Dodge

If we can settle on a standard size for a solar cell, standard connectors and interfaces, then we may save enough on upgrades to make investing in even today's technology start to make sense.

2 | July 16, 2009 9:59am | By Dana Blankenhorn

The idea of zero energy homes is rapidly becoming the rallying cry for homeowners who want to save money, do the right thing and untether themselves from utility bills. Include me as an unabashed...

July 15, 2009 9:51am | By John Dodge

Governments are battleships, and lawsuits can be wars. They move slowly, far more slowly than tech competition does.

3 | July 15, 2009 6:05am | By Dana Blankenhorn