Author: JD Rucker

The vultures are circling the failed webOS-powered hardware victims, particularly the developers who have been making their money around building apps on the platform. Brandon Watson, the man responsible for apps and developers for Windows Phones, sent out a tweet on Friday to attract a response. The response has been huge. Currently, nearly 1000 webOS developers have attempted to take him up on his offer. To qualify, developers must have at least one application published on the webOS App Catalog. With Android and iOS exploding with apps and being hit up by tens of thousands of developers…

With over 300 million reported PC gamers in the world, many dismiss the notion that it is dead or losing the battle against console gaming. Accessories and peripherals creator Razer built a website today that doesn’t tell us much other than that something big is coming on August 26th, 2011. Otherwise, there’s not much information. You can sign up for updates on the website. Upon verification, you receive this message: The ominous-sounding message ends by saying, “Stand with us on the 26th of August and together we shall remind the world that PC gaming is not dead.” We’ll just have to wait and see….

As Google and Apple continue to grow in the mobile market, Android and iOS are quickly becoming the predominant operating systems for phones and tablets. There are many statistics to look at and comparisons to be made. Here, we present a visualization tackling the debate. Thanks to our friends at Hunch, we now know that Android users are 10% more likely to be men. We know that iOS users are 50% more likely to have been on the internet before 1992. We know who is more likely to prefer General Tso’s Chicken over Pad Thai. It may not be the most important demographic data, but it’s definitely interesting….

The dream of making the perfect robot that can do a lot of our human activities may have found a simple solution in Swarmanoid, an open scientific project whose goal is  the design, implementation and control of a novel distributed robotic system. Rather than build robots that can do many things, they build many robots that can do one thing and have them work together to accomplish their objectives. The video below has the robots working together to retrieve a single book. It may sound simple, but when was the last time you saw a robot that could retrieve a book? That’s what I thought. …

When Astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson was on Bill Maher last week, he laid into the plans to slash NASA’s budget. When the topic of the James Webb Space Telescope came up, he broke in and said, “Don’t get me started.” Maher had him. “No, I want to get you started…” What followed was intelligent, eloquent, passionate, and truthful – all of the qualities of a rant worth watching. We posted the video he had produced about it last month, but this one is even better because it came off the cuff, from the heart. Today, he continued the attacks with a little humor in the tweet above. Go ahead, click through and…

As it does with most trends in marketing, the automotive industry has gone from way behind just a year and a half ago to shaping the venues and carving the path today. There have been some missteps to say the least, many in the business from car dealers to manufacturers are fully embracing social media as a venue to get their brand and message out to the masses. Earlier this year we wrote about how the industry is embracing new media. Now, we’ve compiled a breakdown of the major manufacturers and how their current social media presence ranks in this competitive world. By the numbers There’s an old saying:…

When Mark Dean, CTO of IBM Middle East and Africa, declared this morning that we are in the “Post-PC Era”, a tinge of frustration and anger popped up in me. Items that are used daily in millions of households across the world don’t simply die. I was annoyed when IBM CEO Lou Gerstner declared that “The PC is dead” in 1999. I was annoyed when they made the same claim in 2005 when they sold their personal computing division to Lenova. I was annoyed this morning when I read it again. Then, I realized something: they may be right this time. The younger generations Y and Z – 10-30 years old or whatever those boundaries…

Trolls. We all love them. We all hate them. They are entertaining when we aren’t the victim, but when they focus on us, they can make us want to cry. There are things that you can do to fight them. We’re here to help. First, you must identify them. Getting into a conversation with one can lead to a trap if you don’t know what you’re getting into. Once identified, you have to take control of the situation and lead the direction of the conversation. Finally, you need to know when to fight back and when to walk away. This graphic breaks it down for us and shows how to keep it all under “con-troll”. Click to enlarge….

The concept of robots that learn may seem relatively simply. We see robots and machines that are able to perform complex tasks flawlessly and many believe that this type of technology means that artificially intelligent robots are right around the corner (or here already). The biggest challenge has been in programming robots with the ability to adjust to changing environments and circumstances, applying what they know and extrapolating what they do not know to make a proper choice in new situations. Sounds easy, but it’s not. Not yet, at least. Researchers in Japan have developed a “Self-Replicating…

This could also be titled, “How Larry Page is starting to run Google more like Steve Jobs would.” Google has operated in many ways like Microsoft and other tech companies that are going after a bunch of things at once. It worked for them better than most, but there were still too many failures and distractions to keep the company from achieving its goals. Things have changed with Larry Page at the helm and as a result, the company seems more focused. It seems more like Apple. The latest addition to the Google feature list is Instant Pages for Chrome. The concept is very simple – when a user does a search…