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

Kinect hacks are often impressive, revealing how powerful the Microsoft device actually is. A new one that combines 3-D modelling, data gloves, and gesture control, hints at how you may control your PC in the near future. Hacker Sebastian was trying to explore how a functional man-machine interface could be made with Kinect--a more "scientific" kind of hack than some of the fun and arty ones we've seen, and mirroring all sorts of million-dollar research that companies like Microsoft are themselves exploring (because more natural ways of interacting with PCs are definitely on the horizon)

Greetings from Austin, Texas. I’m at the annual South By SouthWest (SXSW) Interactive festival. I’m writing a follow up story about the Small Business Web which I described last March after SXSW 2010 as “a group of software companies whose programs are connected to each other via a set of communication channels

Rats are trying out the device, a 250-gram scanner-in-miniature. Scanning technology and behavioral observation can now work in tandem

Hard to believe, but Twitter is already five years old. To commemorate the occassion, the site's creator and Twitter's former CEO, Jack Dorsey has been retelling the company's founding story (through his Twitter page , natch). Here's an early exchange with Twitter co-founder Biz Stone: me: Biz! How goes

The Groupon competitor joins Apple, Zynga, and Lady Gaga, among others, in seeking cash for relief efforts. Not long ago, Groupon came under fire for Super Bowl ads that appeared to make light of serious situations abroad. And even if Groupon had offered support for the very causes it appeared to poke fun at, the damage was done.

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

Minimalist is the answer for Bare Escentuals. Fans completely drive the conversation on wall updates, discussion boards and with pictures.Bare Escentuals adopts a "hands-off" Facebook strategy, letting unsolicited testimonials from its nearly 200,000 fans drive traffic to Bare Escentuals boutiques and resellers. Customer feedback on Facebook even led to a redesign of the firm's product packaging, says chief marketing officer Simon Cowell: "We sell loose minerals, so customers wanted something more portable

The ongoing disaster in Japan is an unprecedented human tragedy.

Humorist and TED speaker Ze Frank tells FastCompany how his new startup can help save us from living our entire online lives in blue and white. Ze Frank, the performer and humorist who once won a Webby for his personal website, is a guy who is plainly awed at the oddity of human beings on the Internet. He says the blue-and-white sterility of our popular social networks--Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Foursquare--is threatening to choke out the messy, weird home-made kitsch once typified by MySpace pages and message boards

Team builders to the smartest companies in tech, the founders of the Go Game are letting everyone play their coveted "textured scavenger hunt." HR managers rejoice. You might say that the Go Game , an iPhone game launching this week at SXSW , is the best-researched project in the history of location games. Founders Ian Fraser and Finnegan Kelly have spent the last 10 years running a hacked-together version of the game at corporate team-building events for Google , Apple , EA Games, Zynga , Facebook , Microsoft , and Intuit .

Wildcat Discovery Technologies , a San Diego-based startup, thinks it has made a discovery that could, in one fell swoop, make your laptop battery, cell phone battery, and electric vehicle batteries all last between 25% and 65% longer. The key: a pair of new materials---a high-voltage electrolyte material and a high voltage cathode material--that provide vastly improved energy density compared to today's technologies (in technical terms, they have an energy density of over 675 Wh/kg while operating in fuel cells at five volts).

(PhysOrg.com) -- Currently, the data stored in classical digital memories such as CDs, DVDs, and barcodes is read by classical light. But as a new study shows, using quantum light to read these classical memories can bring surprising advantages. Quantum light can read digital data using very few photons, an ability that could lead to faster digital readers and optical memories with larger storage capacities than before.

"What's the short code for American Idol?" asks Joseph Gillespie, CEO of mobile marketing company Zoove, referring to the show's text-message voting system. "It's the largest use-case in history, but no one can remember it because the number doesn't make any sense." How brands connect to consumers is a huge headache for marketers--not just Idol fans--who've now tried almost every trick in the book to get your attention. SMS messages ("Text YES to 45938993"), QR codes, Facebook profiles, website addresses--you can't find an advertisement today that doesn't feature at least one of these marketing tactics

The founder of the Web message board 4Chan took the stage at SXSW to explain how his new project, Canvas, could far exceed 4Chan's 12-million-user popularity with Facebook-friendly appeal. Like your daughter bringing home an ex-convict for dinner and saying that he's actually a "really good guy," Christopher "moot" Poole explained how the virtue of 4Chan--instantaneous collaborative creativity--could overshadow its darker, dirtier proclivities by gaining new life in a project called Canvas .

Sunday's Groupon panel on the Fast Company and PepsiCo stage took an unexpected turn when Travis Kalanick , a longtime Silicon Valley entrepreneur who runs online car service Uber , spoke frankly about his negative experiences as a client of Groupon --and several Groupon staffers in the audience took issue with the story he told.