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

We branded it the Great Search Engine War of 2011 , when Google launched an all-out attack on Microsoft's Bing , accusing its arch-nemesis of copying search results. After several months, however, it's unclear what impact the war has had on Microsoft. Has Bing been planning a response?

With the launch of the Nintendo 3DS this Sunday, the company continues its history of revolutionizing how games play, and how we play with them. While I have issues with Nintendo 3DS as a gadget , there is no denying that it is a remarkable gaming machine. With the 3-D capabilities come interesting media opportunities--it allows you to take 3-D photos, a 3-D version of OK Go's "White Knuckles" music video comes with the handheld, and Netflix will stream in 3-D this summer

The home of the future will be bedecked with smart sensors that send their data to the cloud so you can manage the house from afar--yes, this is a story we've heard before. But now Microsoft has joined a plan to build a smart city jammed with exactly these smart homes in Portugal. Living PlanIT , which calls itself "one of the world's leading smart city and urban development technology providers" has been working on a plan for a smart city in northern Portugal for quite a while--currently a 2013 unveiling looks likely

Recent moves by two of the biggest names in tech may be shedding light on their plans for digitally connected televisions.

Amazon just revealed its own specially curated version of the Android Marketplace, but has chosen to label it the "Appstore." Apple , in turn, has now sued Android for trademark violation. The move is a not-so-subtle shot across Amazon's bows. The suit was filed last week, but has emerged at more or less the same time as Amazon's official unveiling of its Android Appstore--Amazon's version of the free-for-all Google Android Marketplace that, on launch, contains 3,800 apps

Users pretty much ignore search ads, a new eye-tracking study says. So-called organic search results were viewed 100 percent of the time, and study participants—the study was conducted by user experience research firm User Centric —spent an average of 14.7 and 10.7 seconds looking at them on Google and Bing, respectively. (For tips on search engine optimization, click here .) But just over one-quarter of participants (28 percent) looked at right-side ads on Google, and just 21 percent did on Microsoft's Bing

Illustrations by Ron Kurniawan The Boy King: Larry Page served as CEO during Google's startup days. | Photograph by Paul Sakuma/AP How new CEO Larry Page will lead the company he co-founded into the future. Tarsorrhaphy.

01 / YouTube For transforming itself from Google's folly into a global network.

1. The battle for advertising market share between Facebook and Google just took an interesting turn: Some Facebook app developers are reporting that Facebook's instructing them to stop using Google's AdSense network. It's because Google hasn't signed Facebook's terms for ad partners, and it's unlikely to--it could impact Google's business model for earning cash.

Last week, Mozilla VP of products Jay Sullivan indicated that HTML5 would eventually replace Adobe Flash. Along with Mozilla Firefox, every browser maker out there seems to be jumping on the bandwagon of HTML5, a term that has become the most overused buzzword in the tech industry. But HTML5 is more than just the "trend de jour," says Ryan Gavin, senior director of Internet Explorer

Kinect hacks are often impressive, revealing how powerful the Microsoft device actually is. A new one that combines 3-D modelling, data gloves, and gesture control, hints at how you may control your PC in the near future. Hacker Sebastian was trying to explore how a functional man-machine interface could be made with Kinect--a more "scientific" kind of hack than some of the fun and arty ones we've seen, and mirroring all sorts of million-dollar research that companies like Microsoft are themselves exploring (because more natural ways of interacting with PCs are definitely on the horizon)

Humorist and TED speaker Ze Frank tells FastCompany how his new startup can help save us from living our entire online lives in blue and white. Ze Frank, the performer and humorist who once won a Webby for his personal website, is a guy who is plainly awed at the oddity of human beings on the Internet. He says the blue-and-white sterility of our popular social networks--Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Foursquare--is threatening to choke out the messy, weird home-made kitsch once typified by MySpace pages and message boards

Last month, Nokia's new CEO Stephen Elop sent an e-mail to his staff, the contents of which would change the course of the company. In a candid, pointed missive, the Canadian executive said, "our platform is burning." Nokia's Symbian operating system had fallen far behind in the age of smartphones, which threatened Nokia's 200 million worldwide customers

It's not all beer-pong and barbeque at SXSW. Isn't the Interactive portion of the festival supposed to be about sharing ideas?

It may be iPad 2 day, but that doesn't stop the Apple news mill from grinding--now there's a fresh leak from China that hints what the iPhone 5 may look like. It's convincing