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

There's a green card . Then there's silver, gold, and platinum

I'm not a born networker. I go to a lot of events and conferences, but I'm not great at walking up to strangers, unless I have a specific goal in mind. Even when I do go home with a fistful of business cards, there's a good chance they'll wind up crammed in the back of a drawer

A new iPhone app from insurance giant State Farm uses the device's accelerometers and other sensors to work out how well you're driving. Perfect timing, as it's just emerged that Apple is the world's second-biggest buyer of these sorts of tiny sensors.

Consumer Reports, not necessarily a fan of the iPhone 4, has reacted to news it's slightly thicker than its older black sibling. Spoiler: It's really not

Machine readable congressional transcripts will bring the power to find political gaffes to everyone. Forget leaked cables: there's enough juicy political nonsense lurking in the public record to satisfy the 24-hour news cycle until 2012

The ultra-pure water used to clean semiconductors and make microchips would suck vital minerals right out of your body.

Augmenting the millions of different types of data Google now searches, it's just added a new feature to its sidebar: The ability to search patents. It's a powerful tweak, especially given the huge number of patent lawsuits going on

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act poured $787 billion back into our economy. That spectacular price tag became a centerpiece of the right's campaign against the left leading up to the midterm elections, and prompted the Obama administration to justify the stimulus package's effectiveness as critics tried to paint it as yet another example of wasteful government spending. That's partly why the administration has spent $1 million on road signs touting federally funded projects and $18 million on revamping Recovery.org , a site dedicated to monitoring stimulus spending

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

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

Call it a comedy of laptop errors.

Each day, Inc.'s reporters scour the Web for the most important and interesting news to entrepreneurs. Here's what we found today. Entrepreneurs, defined

SimpleGeo has placed 20 million locations for "places" in the public domain to drive developers of location-based service apps. The thing is that data, combined with location-tracking smartphones, could spark unsavory uses too. In a direct challenge to Foursquare's effort to become the "Rosetta stone" for location-data on identifiable geo-located "places," SimpleGeo is trying to spark a revolution in location-based app writing by making the data for 20 million places available on its servers under the Creative Commons Zero license--essentially placing the data for free into the public domain.

1. After its extended cloud services failure, Amazon's Web Services system is cranking back to life , bringing some of the web's big-names with it.

In the last year or so, eBay has spent billions acquiring a slew of companies to expand its role in the ever-growing ecommerce space. Yesterday, the online-shopping giant added one more startup to its mix: mobile ad firm Where.com, in a deal that one unconfirmed source said was worth $135 million.