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

What's a concerned citizen to do? In an effort to reduce the amount of water the state imports, it's now producing an incredibly powerful greenhouse gas while it cleans its wastewater. Here’s a conundrum

Organizing a group-bought gift for someone special can be a gigantic hassle. Enter Shareagift--which leverages social networking, online payments, and gift-suggestion algorithms--to sweeten the whole deal. "It's your friend's birthday and you know she really wants an iPad, but you only have enough for the classic annual scented candle," teases the press release for Shareagift , a new London startup that brings online payments and social networking to collborative gift-buying

Erly is founded by Hulu’s former technical and product leads. Collections is one of three applications the team plans to launch in the coming months

Hey Chicagoans! On Tuesday, October 11, Fast Company will host a Creativity Summit at Chicago Ideas Week .

A new machine lets first responders find people trapped at disaster sites by detecting individual molecules of breath, sweat, and urine that float up through the concrete. Firefighters and other first responders rushing to collapsing buildings and disaster situations will soon have a new weapon in their arsenal, replacing dogs, cameras, and robots: a series of sensors that find individual molecules of sweat and spit coming from victims trapped under concrete, locating them by their emissions. The high-tech emergency solution, which was unveiled in a research paper for the actually existing Journal of Breath Research, was created by a joint European team that reconfigured a series of commercially available detectors to hunt for unique human emanations.

AT&T is making it drop-dead easy for developers to use the company's internal infrastructure to build mobile apps--including some that could be used by customers of other carriers or networks. Here's why. Amazon Web Services was a game-changer for application developers.

Just a couple of apps dominate the mobile photo-sharing landscape. That's because they either have massive reach (à la Facebook and Flickr), or offer unique, proprietary tools to attract users (à la Instagram, which boasts a dozen or so one-click filters that have helped rocket the startup to 10 million-plus users). But today, Aviary is evening the playing field

A newspaper publisher in Philadelphia is giving a $99 tablet to customers who sign up for two-year subscriptions to its papers, and GameStop is planning a dedicated gaming tablet based on older hardware running Android--meanwhile it's confidently and cheekily offering cash back for traded-in iPads, iPhones, and iPods. Tablets as marketing gimmicks: This, ladies and gents, is the side effect of the iPad's continuing success in dominating the new portable computing genre.

Freshlist--one of the most exciting projects to come out of the 24-hour Cleanweb Hackathon--connects sellers and buyers of local produce so nothing goes to waste.

Instead of focusing on how much investment they get, startups should make something that solves problems. If they do, they'll get loyal customers, and that's more important than investors

When environmentalists think about what our future might look like, the predictions are often grim and hopeless; even under the best circumstances, they seem to say, we're still screwed. But what if, by some miracle of human ingenuity, the dire predictions don't pan out and we learn how to efficiently manage our resources?

No longer content to let the U.S. and Europe dictate the pace and direction of innovation, countries around the world are funding their own R&D to solve their own problems. The United States and Europe have long been the center of scientific and technological innovation, and the story of the day is how China may be usurping their place.

The wristwatch was nearly killed off by the cell phone revolution, but with the rise of the smartphone it's about to evolve into something more powerful than it's ever been. Investors, and a number of industry heavies, have just acquired the smartwatch business of Meta Watch , as well as all its IP

The links have been a frequent target of environmentalists, due to how much it takes to maintain them, often in places where manicured lawns aren't supposed to grow. But a new generation of courses is making major headway fairway. Golf is a game that environmentalists love to hate--and not without reason.

First, Google moved to acquire Motorola Mobility. Yesterday, it bought the crown jewel of restaurant guides, Zagat