Author: Lorie Wimble

There was an exchange between James T. Kirk and Spock regarding a proposed bailout of the beleaguered Klingon Empire. Kirk: Don’t believe them. Don’t trust them. Spock: They are dying. Kirk: Let them die. Today, the Klingons in question do not have boney ridges on their foreheads. They have no cloaking devices or batleths in their arsenal. The only real similarity between Research In Motion (RIM) and the Klingon Empire is the thought that, “perhaps today is a good day to die.” For the 5th consecutive quarter, RIM missed their earnings estimate. This prompted chopping at the top with former co-CEO…

Finding love online has been big business since there was such a thing as “online”. The internet has empowered people to tear down whatever walls had prevented them in the past from finding the right person and has expanded the possibilities of dating for millions. Unfortunately, the industry is loaded with problems. One of the biggest ones is lying. A good majority of people who utilize online dating will lie about at least one of three major attributes: height, weight, and age. In the old world of hanging out at singles bars, the only question that couldn’t be answered in a glance was age. Otherwise,…

To those of us who have been watching social media grow over the past few years, there are certain sites that succeed that didn’t quite make sense when they were rising. Looking at Facebook or YouTube, it’s easy to see the appeal, but in the early days many questioned the success potential for other social networks like Twitter (yes, there were actually major doubts just 4 years ago), Foursquare (I remember a discussion about how “nobody would want to take part in getting themselves stalked”), and now Pinterest. It’s just a photo sharing site, right? Flickr has that market in check for the most part…

While stuck in his New Zealand mansion, Megaupload mogul Kim Dotcom will have to make it on $60,000 a month and a Mercedes along with his wife’s $20,000 a month and Toyota van while they await his extradition hearing set for August. Before assuming that they’ll have plenty of cash available, consider that the rent and maintenance of his mansion total around $1.6 million per year. Dotcom was arrested in January and his accounts, assets, and properties were held with restraining orders. The charges include copyright infringement and wire fraud associated with his file sharing website business….

As business models go, the file-sharing business model has proven to be precarious at best in the last few months. With MegaUpload being shut down in January and other file-sharing services under heavy fire from governments and copyright advocacy groups around the world, the ruling by a higher regional court in Germany that orders RapidShare to filter user uploads has many questioning whether the industry can survive. The glimmer of hope comes in the contradictions. The highest court in the EU banned anti-piracy filters just last month because it would violate user privacy and hinder freedom…

It took Wikipedia less than a decade to take down its traditional predecessor, the Encyclopædia Britannica, a series that has helped scholars and students for nearly two and a half decades. While most consider this to be a natural transition with the rise of the digital age, some will always question whether crowdsourcing human knowledge is preferable to leaving it up to the experts. Regardless, it’s here and it’s the best resource available for the majority of subjects. With nearly 4 million articles written in English alone, it has a tremendous advantage in size. Many say that the scrutiny…

If looking ahead 25 years were easy, we’d have flying cars and hoverboards. Unfortunately, it’s pretty challenging to predict the weather sometimes, let alone the future in a scale of a quarter century. That didn’t stop Popular Science Monthly from taking a stab at it in 1925 with their vision of a metropolis setting in 1950. Many of the ideas in the drawing are strong, including a clever multi-level transportation concept that separated slow and fast cars from pedestrians, trains, and each other. Self-sufficient buildings would keep people centralized with their day-to-day activities,…

The digital age is loaded with activities that we can perform any second of any day. As long as there’s an internet connection available, we have access at nearly all times to devices that keep us connected to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and the like. As a result, the things we do on social media have expanded at a frantic pace to the point where it’s nearly unfathomable. Take YouTube, for instance. In a social media minute, over 2 million videos are viewed. Just a couple of years ago social media was an occasional activity for the tech-savvy youths of the world. Today, it’s an every-moment-of-every…

Space may or may not be the final frontier, but the television and movie series Star Trek and its subsequent incantations have sparked the imagination of sci-fi fans across the ages. From Kirk and Spock to Picard and Data, then back to a new Kirk and Spock, Star Trek has become one of the most influential fictional concepts of the modern era. From nerds to geeks to hipsters and beyond, the dreams of millions have been guided by the ideas of particle transporters, warp engines, and photon torpedoes. It is an icon of pop culture and road map towards a better distant future. This graphic takes us through…

Microsoft may be trying (and failing) to slow Google’s emergence into business productivity with their Google Apps for Business, but Google is heading in the other direction by demonstrating that they may just have the technology end of it figured out. That’s been the complaint of Microsoft, but Google insists that their products can be just as slick. Their latest marketing video for business apps highlights the reason that some (not many yet, but some) are switching from traditional Microsoft products to the more-collaborative Google variations. Whether they can be robust enough for business…