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

In the past months, Skype's launched a massive upgrade on Android; a brand-spanking-new iPad app; unveiled a massive partnership with Facebook; and announced its acquisition to Microsoft for $8.5 billion. Is it enough to win against Google's and Apple's competitors? "When I started, we were on a pretty slow product release," says Neil Stevens, VP of products at Skype.

From space probes to royal weddings, Lego is inserting itself into all sorts of newsy events--and getting that instant exposure which few others have replicated. On Aug. 5, NASA's Juno spacecraft began its five-year journey to the planet Jupiter

(PhysOrg.com) -- It's been seven months since Italian physicists Andrea Rossi and Sergio Focardi publicly demonstrated a device that they claimed could generate large amounts of excess heat through some kind of low-energy nuclear reaction (LENR). (Previous descriptions of the process as “cold fusion” are incorrect; although the process is not completely understood, it is likely a weak interaction involving neutrons, without fusion.) The physicists call this device the Energy Catalyzer, or E-Cat.

Now that a major online role-playing company has effectively created a functioning market for in-game currencies, gold farming is going to become a viable part of the global economy.

Over the last decade the world of do-gooding has seemingly been taken over by MBAs. Social entrepreneurship, a field encompassing both mission-driven businesses and entrepreneurial nonprofits, professes to bring the efficiency, rigor, and cold, hard metrics of business to the most important causes on the planet.

Tackling the topic of neuromarketing for Fast Company magazine, our author finds himself talking to the CEO of top neuromarketing firm NeuroFocus, and wonders how much can Pradeep really tell from his brain scan. I'm in a ballroom inside New York's Marriot Marquis at the 75th annual Advertising Research Foundation conference, meeting with A.K. Pradeep, founder and CEO of NeuroFocus, a Berkeley, CA-based research firm that analyzes brain waves to reveal what consumers really want.

Economist Dean Karlan's new book looks at what works and what doesn't work in the fight against global poverty.

I will never forget the phone call I received from my colleague Mike on Dec. 26, 2005

Bluefin--the most prized of all tunas--are quickly going extinct. The tsunami may have set back plans to keep toro refrigerated for future sushi lovers, but fish farmers are close to a breakthrough.

More salmon, please! A new study shows how biomimicry can help generate energy. A new source of inspiration for wind farm engineers has come from an unlikely place: the sea. By imitating schools of fish, engineers can increase wind farm output--potentially getting up to 10 times more power from the same site compared to traditional wind farms

Schizophrenia, depression, addiction and other mental disorders cause suffering and cost billions of dollars every year in lost productivity. Neurological and psychiatric conditions account for 13 percent of the global burden of disease, a measure of years of life lost because of premature mortality and living in a state of less than full health, according to the World Health Organization

By Edwin Cartlidge of Nature magazine The Fukushima nuclear disaster, already casting a long shadow over the nuclear industry, has claimed another victim.

Rioters in North London have been using BBMs to rally, presuming RIM's phone-to-phone, encrypted messages won't land in the hands of authorities. But in an increasingly familiar move, RIM has now pledged to work with those authorities

Author John Warrillow proposes an alternative to setting your sights on building a $200 million business: Focus on building a $2 million company instead. The generally-accepted dogma among entrepreneurs is "bigger is beautiful." You're nothing until you have some brand name investors on your board and 50 employees at your command.

This morning the BBC launched a whole new version of its iPlayer app, destined for connected TVs that sport a Net connection. In essence this means the BBC has taken its TV content online, added on-demand features, advanced search powers, playability on multiple platforms both mobile and static, and then fed all of its lessons back into an app...for TVs.