Philippe Matthews Show Guru Advice, Author Reviews, Tech Reviews, Entertainment News

You can substantially improve your chances of spending your money wisely if you consult your fellow customers first--by checking into a crowdsourced review site like TripAdvisor (vacation spots and hotels), Yelp (restaurants), IMDB or RottenTomatoes (movies), Edmunds (cars), Angie's List (contractors), Amazon (books) and so on.

Lady Gaga is hot property in terms of brand promotion, meaning Amazon's pulled off a huge coup: It's offering her new album for just $0.99. As part of the deal, you get free access to 20GB of Amazon's new (unlicensed?) cloud music locker--a service that normally costs $20 per year

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Liberty Media's offered $1 billion to buy Barnes & Noble. But it's not because of the bookseller's massive, inviting physical locations--the proposed purchase is most appealing because of one item the store offers: the Nook. Just another sign that the era of the ebook truly has arrived

1. Microsoft has closed its guerilla design/thinktank lab Pioneer Studios--the group behind the highly-praised but then cancelled Courier tablet concept.

CTO John Donovan, left, sees digital water balloons as a fun primer on handset-to-handset apps—and a lure for wayward subscribers. | Photographs by Darren Braun As leader of Donovan’s tech council, Sanjay Macwan is helping revamp AT&T from a phone company to a technology company.

E-books realize their unbound potential faster than expected as pixels push past paper in Amazon sales. Oh, and, hey, look! Kindles for sale! Since April the first, for every 100 print-and-paper books Amazon has sold, it's also sold 105 e-books, according to a fresh Amazon announcement . Kindle e-readers arrived, along with a small but fast-growing digital bookstore, in November 2007--by July 2010, Amazon notes, Kindle book sales had surpassed hardcover book sales, and then six months later beat the paperback books sales rate

1. Apple 's cloud music service (possibly to be called iCloud) is looking more like a done deal--"multiple" sources are saying Apple's just signed a deal with EMI and is close to signing Sony and Universal too.

We're used to fairly similar LCD screens on pretty much all our mobile gadgets and TVs. That's all about to change

Very early this morning, Space Shuttle Endeavour docked with the International Space Station for the final time, marking another milestone at the end of the Shuttle program. 1. Long noted for its absence, Intel is now promising to have its silicon inside smartphones in early 2012, five years after the iPhone reinvented the genre and took ARM chips to new levels as the de facto standard CPU

Amazon's clever moves to change (and own) the Android app market space just got lots better: PopCap, a hugely successful games company, has signed an exclusive deal to launch its Android games with them. For any of the 50 million app downloaders who've racked their brains or thwapped their thumbs on an iPad or iPhone touch screen full of digital jewels, PopCap Games--or at least its runaway hit, Bejeweled--will ring a bell

The year was 1848. a young British naturalist named Henry Walter Bates had gone to the Amazon with fellow countryman Alfred Russel Wallace to look for evidence of the origin of species. Over the course of his 11-year stay, he noticed that local relatives of a European butterfly known as the cabbage white--the pierids--were bedecked in the showy reds and yellows of rain forest butterflies called heliconids

Google's Music Beta system sounds like a great idea from a user point of view--you get almost instant access to your tunes, no matter where you are or which computing platform you're using (the only downside being its gobbling of bandwidth).

Today, what's hot in music isn't necessarily what's on Billboard's Hot 100--often considered the industry's benchmark ranking index. For one, most indie acts won't ever sell enough CDs to rank among the world's Justin Biebers or Lady Gagas

The online retailer is pulling a Netflix, dangling the promise of a rich reward--not to mention some serious bragging rights--to the team that increases customer purchases. Overstock.com is about to pull a Netflix