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

1. As if to remind us that the world of TV is changing incredibly fast, Netflix has signed a deal with Lions Gate Entertainment to bring all the Mad Men archive shows to the digital online channel. The show is highly acclaimed and Netflix is reported to be paying around $1 million per episode--meaning it fully expects to recoup more than that from subscriptions and ads (curiously fitting given the show's setting!).

1. Late yesterday the maker's of many a student's favorite pocket calculator, Texas Instruments, said it would buy chip-maker National Semiconductor.

In the face of rising Android handset sales, some commentators are suggesting Apple's iPhone is soon doomed to become a mere footnote in the development of smartphone tech. But for a number of reasons, Apple's phone is most definitely "not dead yet!" A weekend post in Business Insider carried news of Comscore's latest sales figures for the U.S

Apple seems to be planning some clever, instant social media sharing skills for the iPhone's photo app, at least if new discoveries in Apple's code prove true. Could Apple have even pre-empted Instagram and Color ?

Next year, U.S. electronics companies will be required by law to disclose and trace their use of conflict minerals (gold, tungsten, tantalum, and tin deposits that fund war in Central Africa). Instead of waiting to be attacked by human rights groups, Apple and Intel, and other companies involved in the Conflict-Free Smelter program opted to avoid embarrassment and ditch the minerals altogether--and the decision is causing some problems.

1. Google's presence in China, always in the balance after its very public spat with the Chinese government over censorship, seems to be at a critical juncture .

Apple 's filed a bumper crop of patents recently, and some of them hint at pretty neat features in future iDevices.

Imagine if Apple tried to charge you every time you accidentally glanced at an iPhone on the street. That's basically the policy that Monsanto, an agriculture giant whose patented genes are in 95% of all soybeans and 80% of all corn grown in the U.S, enforces. The company is notorious for suing farmers that the company suspects of violating patents in even inadvertent manners

Tablet computers are becoming more popular for Web browsing on the couch, watching Netflix movies in bed, or reading books on the train. But can a tablet replace a laptop for business travel? To find out, I grabbed an Apple iPad and the Lenovo IdeaPad U260, a new ultra-portable notebook with a 12.5-inch screen, and headed from Minneapolis to Los Angeles

%excerpt% Read the original post: The Man Behind Quirky

Today, BMW announced the planned creation of a tech incubator in New York City to seed innovations in mobile and location-based services. The announcement follows the automaker's establishment in February of a venture capital company, BMW i Ventures, with an investment fund of as much as $100 million, and serves as yet another indication that BMW is turning its eye toward the mobile startup scene

Microsoft has revealed some statistics to buff up the PR image of its Windows Phone 7 platform--and some of them are fairly impressive. But MS has been economical with the data it's willing to share. In a post on its Windows Team blog , Microsoft is setting out the "numbers that matter" after a year of Windows Phone 7's existence.

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.

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

With oddly simultaneous timing, a number of Apple's competitors have made bold statements alleging the iPad is poor in certain ways, not suited for particular uses, or even doomed to fail. You could be forgiven for thinking they're running interference because of fear. We marshall the evidence here.