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

Ramon Ray, journalist and editor at Smallbiztechnology.com , sums it up perfectly: "Small businesses can do BIG things using low-cost technology and readily available expertise." It doesn't matter if you're running a business out of your home, the local Starbucks (free Internet), or an abandoned warehouse, if you have the right tools to reel in a large consumer base, it's not necessarily important how small your business is because it's doing big things.

Fact: The United States uses more water in a day than it uses oil in a year. In four days, the United States uses more water than the world uses oil in a year.

Much-hyped and criticized startup Color is the high-school prom service of photo-sharing apps. Color lets partygoers kick the disposable camera habit--all photos can be shared in real-time, without having to get photos developed or wait for digital pics to be uploaded and tagged on Facebook

Swiss manufacturer ABB has revealed a prototype robot called Frida that's designed to be dexterous enough to replace a human being on a production line.

"As game designers," MIT's Scot Osterweil says , "we're convinced that game playing is a lot like science: There is problem-solving, exploration, collaboration, hypothesizing, testing and learning from your failures.” Osterweil, research director of MIT’s Education Arcade, is one of the masterminds behind a new science game made for the Smithsonian Institution.

The founder of Blu Cigs, battery-powered electronic cigarettes that mimic the look and feel of traditional cigs and deliver vaporized nicotine to users, believes he's discovered an innovation that could help his company compete with R.J. Reynolds and Philip Morris. Jason Healy, president of the Charlotte, North Carolina-based company, and his team have spent about a year developing the "Smart Pack," a first-of-its-kind e-cig pack which features unique ID technology that detects nearby e-smokers.

Many of our Most Innovative Companies appear to want to weaken an element of patent law. But don't patents protect innovation?

Dear John: My partner and I are architects, which means our business relies on our professional know-how and expertise. It's not a business whereby we sell widgets and that can implement systems and procedures which anyone can follow

Modern humans have, up until this point, done a pretty horrible job of cutting down on the amount of greenhouse gases that are released into the atmopshere to stave off climate change. As we inch ever closer to the tipping point where reducing emissions won't make a difference, some scientists are suggesting that we try to "geoengineer" the planet to counteract our emissions with everything from algae-lined buildings and forests of synthetic trees to ships that spray climate-altering clouds into the sky. These are ideas fit for a big-budget Hollywood movie (and they may even work).

Forget lying in a memoir, we should be talking about what it means that Mortenson's Central Asia Institutes in Pakistan and Afghanistan are failing. The 60 Minutes expose of much-lauded author and social entrepreneur Greg Mortenson (Three Cups of Tea; Stones into Schools) is rocketing around the web

Scads of

The Ugandan government, facing social unrest over high food and fuel prices, will order its ISPs to block Twitter and Facebook.

Is Google a search engine, an ad outfit, or a clean energy company? Every day it gets a little harder to answer that question

Rovio's incredibly popular Angry Birds game is about to take the next technological step with the Magic edition for Nokia phones. The secret here?

Gas prices are creeping upward, climate change is slowly causing the number of dangerous weather events to increase, and we still don't have a definitive solution to preventing a future where we are all forced to live in flood-proof, solar-powered bomb shelters.