Author: Navneet Alang

Yesterday, among the challenges and inspiring messages in President Obama’s commencement address at Hampton University, was something a bit unexpected: a dig at modern technology. It was surprising because most things we’ve heard so far from this administration has been pretty pro-technology. But this is what Obama said: [Y]ou’re coming of age in a 24/7 media environment that bombards us with all kinds of content and exposes us to all kinds of arguments, some of which don’t always rank that high on the truth meter. And with iPods and iPads; and Xboxes and PlayStations — none of which I know how…

The news that Google will be launching their own Google Editions cloud bookstore this summer promises a welcome shake-up for the world of ebooks. Because, while it’s true the nascent technology has gotten a lot of attention recently, especially with the launch of the iPad, it’s not exactly setting the world on fire either. In fact, even diehard readers are yawning at it a bit. Sure, Google’s new service that will allow you to read a book from anywhere you can log into your account sounds promising – but more needs to be done. Here are 5 things that the ebook world needs if it wants to really excite people…

Apple’s recent behavior may seem strange – but we forget that they’re fighting to own the future of the computer industry. Perhaps even more than usual, Apple have dominated the world of tech news in the last little while.  With the saga of the lost iPhone, a very public battle with Adobe and half of ‘the ‘sphere’ up in arms about Apple’s more-closed-than-normal business practices, everyone is talking about the folks at Cupertino. But lost in the shuffle of endless discussion, outrage and impassioned defense is a simple point: Apple aren’t defending what they have now. They’re preparing for…

Ah, the interwebs: the technology that brings us all together so that people of all stripes and shades can share photographs of cats. But holed-up in our comfortable North American lives, we can sometimes forget that some web technology still caters to the countries in which it was first developed. Case in point: web addresses have historically always been written in latin script – ya’ know, the letters you’re reading right now. But not anymore! Today ICANN, the body that regulates top-level domains like .com or .org, switched on a system that allows countries to create web addresses in non-latin…

It is, in many ways, a grand time to be a nerd or geek who is a fan of movies. The last decade has not only seen comic book heroes be the star of movies like Spider Man 1 and 2 and The Dark Knight which were actually good, we’ve also gotten grand fantasy epics like Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter – and even a few great Sci-Fi flicks like District 9 and Star Trek. But with the release of Iron Man 2 this week – and the news that the next Batman film hits in 2012 -  I can’t be the only what wants to say “Yeesh! Enough with the comic book movies already!”. You can only milk a certain type of source material for so long until…

You know how medical advances always sound really obscure and weird? As in: “this new combination of tetrahydrozolene benzoate wrapped up with cow RNA and caterpillar mitochondria may make you itch less in the evenings”? Well, how about we keep it real and simple with something like “Pixie Dust”. Because apparently, that’s the name informally given to a substance that helps to save limbs from amputation. No-one is quite sure how it works yet, but it’s made from pig bladder, and something about the material in pig bladder encourages large sections of human tissue to regrow – very quickly, too….

These days, we hear a lot about the future of books and reading and how technology is changing the written word. A lot of people, it seems, are worried about what’s coming for reading, especially when it comes to kids. Well, the fine folks at McSweeny’s are looking to do something about that with a very cool new project. On the surface, A Clock Without a Face seems like a normal storybook: it’s about a clock that has jeweled numbers that get stolen, and the story contains clues as to where those emerald-studded numbers are buried. The twist? Those numbers are actually buried in places around the United…

With Apple and Microsoft committed to one side, and Mozilla and Google committed to another, are consumers stuck in the middle again? A few years ago, in the battle between two standards for high-def video, one format seemed superior and more consumer-friendly: it could be manufactured in the same plants as DVDs; it used the better ‘VC-1′ compression; all its technical standards were in place; and it was a little cheaper. That format, of course, was HD-DVD. But because of some backroom deals and the fact Blu-Ray was put into the Playstation 3, HD-DVD lost. Though we were glad to have the battle over,…

I still remember the early days of Twitter. Well, sorta’. I got on in 2007, after the SXSWi hype-storm that year introduced it the tech world. And it was a different place then: replies were invented by users, and you could see all of them; a 100 followers seemed like a lot!;  and no-one outside of the geek world knew what it was. But times have changed. And now, the fine folks at Edison Research have just released a report showing how much. Their “Twitter Usage in America 2010″ contains some some pretty fascinating facts about everyone’s favorite microblogging service. Here are some of the highlights:…

Jobs’ reasons for barring Flash sound reasonable enough. But what does it say about Apple’s values? As you will have likely heard by now, today Steve Jobs wrote a long post on why Apple refuses to integrate Adobe’s Flash into its mobile products. For people who have heard the incessant chatter about Adobe and Apple’s feud, it was nice to get an explanation straight from the horse’s mouth. Jobs, in his carefully worded note, outlined six reasons Apple chooses not to implement Flash, and would rather stick with standards like HTML5, CSS and Javascript. They were as follows: Flash is proprietary….