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

Last week, I spent a pleasant hour over lunch talking to my 60-year-old aunt and her 80-something husband about "this Twitter thing" and how one defines a blog. They had heard that social media had played a role in the protests in Egypt and wanted to learn more. Good students, they nodded and asked questions as I showed them the screens and tools on my computer in a restaurant chosen mostly because it had wi-fi

Last year’s South By Southwest (SXSW) festival was a tipping point for location-based check-in services. I wrote about companies like FourSquare and GoWalla and the idea of "check-ins" in the article "Mobile Location, Location, Location at SXSW ." This concept, then popular, has grown exponentially

I was at lunch at Japango with some of my Foundry Group gang yesterday. When I went to my house in Alaska last July, I took a Mac with me but left my PC at home. Ross bet me $100 that before the month was out I'd beg him to fedex my PC to me.

The iPad 2 is getting all sorts of praise, but something interesting is emerging: Are its light weight, large screen and twin cameras perfectly positioned to make the iPad an Augmented Reality giant? Augmented Reality apps have slowly proliferated on smartphones, bringing a novelty and genuine usefulness to some data streams that are overlaid on reality through the device's rear cameras, but now there are tablet computers with rear cameras, too.

The 8.9-magnitude earthquake in Japan shortened Earth's day by 1.8 millionths of a second. While this might sound striking, perhaps even scary, don't panic: Earth is shifting slightly all the time, owing mostly to atmospheric and ocean currents. The 8.9-magnitude earthquake in Japan on March 11 shortened Earth's day by 1.8 millionths of a second, according to NASA scientists

Could the expansion of Foursquare's API allow it to become a universal look-up list for venue and location data for all location based services online?

In this excerpt from their new book Come Together: The Business Wisdom of the Beatles, authors Richard Courtney and George Cassidy discuss how Paul did what every good leader tries do with a failing enterprise, change the strategy to save the business. When the company begins a downward spiral, someone must take control. That person must have the best interests of the company as top priority, and the welfare of the members as a secondary focus

What better way to remember Brutus backstabbing Caesar than by watching movies like The Informant! and The Social Network? Here are four more corporate-betrayal films primed for the Hollywood treatment. #ides_of_march_wrapper { width:605px; height:940px; margin:0 auto; text-align:center; font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; padding-top:30px; } #ides_of_march_wrapper p{ font-size:11.5px !important; height:180px; line-height:14px !important; } #ides_of_march_wrapper h2{ font-size:13px !important; clear:both; } #ides_of_march_wrapper em{ font-family:"Times New Roman",Georgia,Serif; } #ides_of_march_wrapper #left_column{ width:200px; float:left; border-right:dotted 2px rgb(147,149,152); margin-right:20px; padding-right:20px; } #ides_of_march_wrapper #right_column{ width:220px; float:left; text-align:center; } .blueTitleText{ color:rgb(0,173,220); font-size:14px; font-weight:bold; } .grayTitleText{ color:rgb(147,149,152); font-size:14px; } PUMA vs

The sustainability movement is stuck in a slump, a stall, a "trough," as moderator Scott Henderson of CauseShift called it on the PepsiCo Plugged-In Stage at SXSW yesterday. He wanted to give it a kick-start, he said. "How to we get past the idea that someone else is going to take care of it, and start taking action?" Henderson asked his three panelist to present big ideas for how to inspire Americans into action--and these weren't your typical green-is-good approaches

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

"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

Early adopters of the iPad 2 have only had the weekend to play with their new toy. That was enough time for the first reports of possible defects to come to the surface

%excerpt% See the original post: 7 Tips for Networking at SXSW

IBM announced the first batch of cities this week awarded grants as part of the company's three-year, $50 million Smarter Cities Challenge . The recipients --including New Orleans, Newark, Rio de Janeiro, and Jakarta--are diverse, to say the least. So how did they end up with IBM's attention, and what happens now?

The United Nations' Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs has teamed up with a coalition of Google Maps-savvy computer security, journalism, NGO and humanitarian experts to find out exactly what's happening in Libya. The challenge: stopping the map from being used for military intelligence purposes.