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

Philadelphia residents have a new weapon for fighting municipal corruption: An iPhone app that lets them send photos and video of money-wasting city employees directly to the controller's office. One crusading Philadelphia politician is using iPhones to fight corruption and fraud. City Controller Alan Butkovitz announced the launch of Philly Watchdog , an anti-corruption iPhone application, on April 19

San Francisco, with a large population crammed into a very small footprint, can be notoriously hard to park in. But, as it's also one of the tech-savviest cities in the country, they've come up with a solution to make it easier to find a place to leave your car and to better value parking places

After dangling a reported $6 billion offer in front of daily deal site Groupon (which it ultimately rejected), Google is pressing on with its own service. Today Google unveiled Offers , a new feature that will allow local businesses to show off deep discounts to consumers. Seemingly a direct competitor to Groupon and Living Social, Offers boasts of discounts of 50% off or more

Ethonomic Indicator of the Day: $12 - The minimum wage Walmart could pay its workers without affecting prices. Walmart is plowing through its global responsibility goals , cutting down on plastic waste, improving energy efficiency in factories, and reshaping the crop diversity of entire U.S. regions.

Ford --which is about to release an all-electric version of the Focus--just put out the above map of the United States with the cities it feels are best suited to electric car ownership. And with a few exceptions, it looks like the flyover states aren't making preparations for the messianic arrival of the electric car. What do you want to bet that in the next presidential election, we'll add "electric-car" to the litany of liberal-associative words like arugula, lattes, and sushi

Turning bedbugs' own pheromones against them. Bed bugs are the scourge of New York, and of other cities as well. And yet, for a number of reasons, the long-awaited War on Bedbugs has yet to arrive

One key aspect of creating smarter, more liveable cities is to create more complete streets that are friendlier to bikers. A pretty good indicator of how well cities are doing at this is how many people are willing to brave a commute on their bikes.

BYD is an automotive company in name only for most Americans. That's because the Warren Buffett-backed Chinese company, named one of our Most Innovative Companies in China , has yet to sell any of its much-hyped electric vehicles--or any of its vehicles, for that matter--in North America (the company sells a gas-powered car in China).

When Podio's Chairman Thomas Madsen-Mygdal told me at South By SouthWest last week they were creating their own application store for their flexible software tool, I wasn't surprised.

Ontario, Canada is in the midst of a solar boom. The province contains the largest operational solar facility in the world--a 97 megawatt behemoth built by First Solar--and has contracts for over 1,400 more megawatts of solar power ready to be built.

IBM announced the first batch of cities this week awarded grants as part of the company's three-year, $50 million Smarter Cities Challenge . The recipients --including New Orleans, Newark, Rio de Janeiro, and Jakarta--are diverse, to say the least. So how did they end up with IBM's attention, and what happens now?

Hartford is considering joining other cities banning trans fats served in food establishments.