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

Google's Android OS has made great strides in seizing marketshare among smartphones, but the fragmentation of devices has finally caught Google's attention--for its Honeycomb tablet OS, hardware specs will be much tighter.

1. Today in Europe Microsoft will file an antitrust complaint against Google with the authorities

%excerpt% See original here: 4 Tips for Conducting a Job Interview Using Skype

Charging sales tax on Internet purchases can be a messy, nebulous issue. Case in point: You can buy the latest Stieg Larsson novel on Amazon.com without paying any tax. But order the same book from Barnes & Noble’s website, and you'll still pay the 9.5 percent tax you would have paid at a store location in San Francisco, because any company with brick-and-mortar operations in California must collect sales tax online.

How would you like to build one of the most famous brands in the world, take it global and open up 16,000 stores, only to watch as your company loses its mojo in the face of the economic collapse? That was the situation Howard Schultz found himself in in 2007. Concerned about Starbucks' trajectory over the 2000s, Schultz, who had stepped back from day-to-day operations and became chairman of the board, re-entered the CEO suite when he sensed that the company was headed in the wrong direction.

Have you considered starting a yoga business of your own? It takes hard work and dedication, just like the practice of yoga itself.

Photographs by Darren Soh An elderly women holds a sign that says "Please, sir hold on. I'm not asking for a red envelope." | Photographs by Darren Soh It is a couple of weeks before Chinese New Year and Chen Guangbiao is sitting in the back of his SUV, barking orders out the window at his press secretary, a serious lady with a serious clipboard: "Beijing News, Beijing Evening News, Beijing Youth Daily ..."Chen, a member of China's new and fast-growing billionaire ranks, has just paid these newspapers to publish articles listing the charitable deeds he's done over the course of the year.

Social Media has forced businesses to reassess the definition of influence. Influencers are telling us what to do on a regular basis across the social sphere, but who is listening and how does it affect our behavior and buying decisions

Here's a frustrating dilemma: having 500, a thousand plus Facebook friends and the prospect of zero fans on your new Facebook business page. If only you could migrate those folks right over and have an instant fan base

We continue our examination of the business book The Innovator's Dilemma with an interview of author Clayton Christensen. Why was the book successful, and what technologies will be disruptive this decade

BPA (bisphenol-A) is a potentially toxic estrogen-mimicking compound used in plastic production that has been linked to breast cancer, early puberty, infertility, and other maladies. It's dangerous enough that it has been banned in baby bottles in Europe, Canada, and even China--but not in the U.S. And it turns out that it's almost entirely unavoidable

Last year, Google launched Buzz , a social network "built right into Gmail, so you don't have to peck out an entirely new set of friends from scratch," boasted the search giant. "Buzz brings this network to the surface by automatically setting you up to follow the people you email and chat with the most…[and] building an easy-to-use sharing experience that richly integrates photos, videos and links, and makes it easy to share publicly or privately." Much to Google's dismay, Buzz turned out to be a huge bust, and not only because it was incredibly unpopular among users. The social network was riddled with privacy concerns, so much so that the Federal Trade Commission charged the company with using "deceptive tactics" and violating "its own privacy promises to consumers." Today, Google settled with the FTC.

Google encroaches on social, with its new +1 feature. You click on stuff that your friends like.

BlackBerry maker RIM just revealed it's signed up to license the patent portfolio of Nathan Myhrvold's IP firm Intellectual Ventures. This will give the company access to a lot of innovative thinking and 30,000 patents. Intellectual Ventures was founded in 2000 as a kind of innovation, invention, and IP asset library or archive, but unlike a "dead" patent hoarder, IV actually raises money (more than $5 billion so far from Fortune 500 companies and academic institutions) to action some of its ideas--most recently we saw the firm associated with a novel nuclear reactor design that could have prevented the disaster that's befalling Japan

A new coating for concrete structures could result in seriously tough structures that better resist damage and thus saves money in reconstruction and repair. Better yet, the coating relies on waste ash from burning coal in power stations.