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

Los Angeles-based startup Styku is chasing the Holy Grail of the online apparel business: making a virtual fitting room that actually works. How they're overcoming the various challenges of apparel software, including the most vexing problem of all--outfitting virtual breasts

Something tech fans have been desperate for for years may actually be about to happen: Most of your computer wires may soon be replaced with a single, simple standard. It could change everything, right down to device design

Apple may be changing its usual iPhone update schedule to the fall, instead of a pre-summer launch in June/July--the news has popped up multiple times, and a source familiar with Apple's plans has also confirmed it with Fast Company. But Apple is a company that thrives on PR excitement...and the big hole in the update schedule before the iPhone 5 arrives could damage sales

(PhysOrg.com) -- Spintronics — also known as magnetoelectronics — may replace electronics as the medium of choice for computer memory. The discovery of a mechanism that produces permanent magnets at room temperature, without any external influence, may soon improve the design of spintronic devices. Takumi Ohtsuki from the RIKEN SPring-8 Center, Harima and his colleagues in Japan, made the discovery in a class of material called a dilute ferromagnetic oxide.

What do guns, burglar alarms, and condoms have in common?

1. Wal-Mart just handed over around $300 million for Kosmix, a topic-curated social media platform that's just six years old. The new firm will join the @WalmartLabs division, trying to build-out the retail giant's online shopping experience--which is now set to get a big injection of social media thinking, and will probably leverage Kosmix's smart semantic interpretation code to come up with purchase suggestions 2

Each day, Inc.'s reporters scour the Web for the most important and interesting news to entrepreneurs.

MoMa Design Store makes your mess of a desk into a garden of bad attitude with these flower-like paperweights. Crumple up that TPS report and go frolic! Here to remind you that you can indeed venture beyond your building for lunch, the MoMa Design Store's crumpled-up paper desk weight smack of bright spring flowers, screaming for you to break your hibernation. Better yet, they're made out of simulated work papers that you may have "simulated" finishing before leaving early to drink in the park.

You may not be a CEO, a billionaire philanthropist, a tech whiz kid or a saintly fighter for the rights of humanity, but you--yes, you--have a shot at the TED stage in 2012.

The recession has highlighted the need for affordable, efficient, quick-to-build structures in urban areas. Because while many of us want to live in pricey cities like Seattle and San Francisco, few people can afford the steel and concrete structures that are nice to live in (and hold up in earthquakes).

Design thinking is a process of empathizing with the end user. Its principal guru is David Kelley, founder of IDEO and the Stanford design school, who takes a similar approach to managing people. He believes leadership is a matter of empathizing with employees

Imagine Twitter had a dating service, where the only options were to propose dates, respond to dates, or directly message the person. A user could see the person's picture and basic information, and if interested, click a button to indicate that.

1. Late yesterday Facebook revealed a surprisingly green core to its computer operation--efficient server and infrastructure designs that consume less energy than comparable data centers, and are 38% more energy efficient and 24% more cost effective than its previous configuration. Better yet, for the ecologically minded, Facebook is making the design of its infrastructure open source to encourage other folks to use it--it's called the Open Compute Project

Today, Microsoft launched Bing for the iPad, an app that integrates the company's search experience with Apple's tablet. In essence, it's no different than Google's iPad app: You'll find all the features you'd expect from Bing (search, maps, etc.) optimized for the device's touch-screen interface.

Two intriguing rumors have popped up at almost the same time: A number of photos of an assumed iPod Touch that has no physical home button, hinting at the iPhone 5, and a keypad-less HP device that could be the webOS clone of Apple's invention. Website PreCentral , which secured early images of the Verizon Pre 3, has published images of what seems to be a keyboard-less Pre smartphone, with a screen slightly larger than earlier Pre devices and what seems to be a front-facing camera set off-center at the top of the phone. According to earlier leaked data, the device could be codenamed the Stingray (the Pre 3 was codenamed Mantaray).