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

Now here's an incredible idea : A super-thin transparent screen coating for smartphones that could continuously top off your battery with solar power. The technology is coming out of a small company called Wysips , which has perfected a transparent coating less than 100 microns deep that captures enough energy from the sun to generate electrical power. It relies on the application of super-thin strips of photovoltaic cells laid down on a display screen, and then a precise layer of cylindrical lenticular lenses deposited on top

Last night, Zynga brought virtual reality to real life. At a press event in New York City, the social gaming giant erected highly detailed sets for its most popular games, including a pastoral landscape complete with watering cans and crates of actual FarmVille apples; a dusty old-western saloon for FrontierVille; and an upstairs speakeasy with bartenders serving 1920s-style cocktails in honor of Mafia Wars

Incorporating sustainability into any company's operations is a hefty issue. But it's also an increasingly popular shift to make. "It's an increasing liability to not do it," says Summer Rayne Oakes, co-founder and CEO of Source4Style , the online fabric marketplace, which is based in New York City

Forget sending huge, expensive remote-controlled robot probes to Mars--could a swarm of smaller, cheaper units that roam the surface using honeybee-like thinking actually do the job better? Just last week, NASA's next Martian rover Curiosity got its first taste of Mars-like conditions inside a pressure and atmospheric chamber designed to simulate the kind of environment it'll encounter when it actually lands on Mars's regolith several years from now. It's a huge, complex process to get this huge (9-foot long, 2,000 pound), complex vehicle ready for its scientific mission

Following its paywall (payfence?) announcement, Gray Lady readers across the web have discovered a number of loopholes. Now the Times has moved in to close them.

The first ever study of its kind by See Change Strategy takes a deep dive into medical pot, a growth industry. Here's a free sample of the data.

Google 's Musicians@Google production just released an exclusive interview between Lady Gaga and Marissa Mayer. How could we not pay attention? This is, after all, a perfect pop-culture-tech-innovation-creativity storm as far as we're concerned

1. Despite the fact that Verizon's CEO revealed his company wouldn't be appealing the union of AT&T and T-Mobile (and that he thought regulators would approve) Sprint has just revealed it will appeal to Congress to halt the telecoms deal.

In what may be a perfect "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" maneuver, Samsung has just revealed its answer to the iPad 2--a new set of Galaxy Tab tablets. In terms of specs, they're pretty much clones of Apple's offering.

Los Angeles, Houston, and Phoenix are three of the biggest cities in the U.S, and also the most water-constrained.

Carbon capture and storage (CCS), a technique that captures carbon emissions from industrial and coal-fired plants and buries them underground, is understandably controversial.

According to a study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, nearly half of all 12-year-olds in the U.S. are using social network sites, despite not meeting the minimum age requirements for sites like Facebook

A number of moves by different companies and organizations around the world seem to be confirming a long - held rumor is true: Wireless credit card payments using NFC (Near Field wireless Communications) are coming. And (although we ourselves have wavered a bit ) they're coming soon. Verifone We knew Verifone , one of the biggest players in the handheld credit card processing unit market, was going to be adding NFC to all its new handsets, but the company has just set out exactly how and why it's making this move.

As the ongoing nuclear saga in Japan plays out, a spotlight is being thrown on the reactor technology at the heart of it.

CEO Reed Hastings told investors he wasn't interested in "creative risks." But his company is betting a rumored $100 million for 26 episodes of a series no one has seen--based largely on "intuition" and the reputations of David Fincher and Kevin Spacey. On a Jan. 26 earnings call, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings told investors he was not interested in taking creative risks.