Author: Rocco Penn

As populations grow and continue to migrate into cities, transportation has become an issue within congested cities. Less than half of the inhabitants of New York City, for example, even own a car. It just doesn’t make sense to own one when the distances traveled is short while traffic and parking are impossible. The folks at MIT Media Lab demonstrated this half-scale vehicle to TheNextWeb at the Media Evolution’s The Conference. As you’ll see, this solves two of the three major problems with intra-city travel – ownership (they can be shared) and parking (they fold). Traffic is still a challenge,…

Arguably the most anticipated first person shooter of 2011 is Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. Sledgehammer Games and Activision prepare for the launch on November 8th. Today, Call of Duty XP in LA gets started, offering players the first full experience of the game and a tournament to start the buzz and bragging rights. If you’re not one of the 6000 people who forked over $150 for the tickets, you’ll have to settle for this interview with the Sledgehammer Games team about what they put into building the game. …

Cleverbot is a novelty AI program designed to mimic human interaction and allow people to “talk” to it conversationally. It is often clever, sometimes funny, but mostly random. Here, Igor Labutov, Jason Yosinski, and Hod Lipson of the Cornell Creative Machines Lab put two cleverbots head-to-head to and let them converse. They argued. They went random. It worked nicely. As HotHardware said, “When Two Chatbots Talk Hilarity Ensues.” Yes. Yes it does. …

The drive towards domination of the smartphone market continues for Apple and Google as they approach a combined 70% choke hold. Symbian is all but non-existent, holding on to just under 2%. Microsoft has been unable to break the 6% barrier but hopes that they will be able to do so with the release of Windows 8. RIM is still in the race, though hope is growing dim. Still, they are over 20%, a mark that most expected them to sink below in the most recent report. Blackberry has lost 4% since April….

With all of the hype building up around first-person shooters COD: Modern Warfare 3 and Battlefield 3, it’s easy to forget that Valve will be releasing CS:GO early in 2012. Just to remind us, they released an official trailer to whet our appetite. From the Valve camp, we’ve learned that they have kept with the same “feel” as the franchise has held for over 8 years. There will be major graphi improvements and additional features, but the “soul” of the game stays intact. One of the new features will be to have casual and competitive servers to allow new players to enter the franchise while experienced…

In the latest viral video to come out of Argentina, Doc Brown, the beloved character from Back to the Future played by Christopher Lloyd, was filmed in the famous DeLorean “appearing” on the streets and captured by well-staged “amateur” video. What it all means, nobody knows yet. While fanboys are up in arms speculating on a 4th installment of the franchise, most agree that it is some sort of set up for a commercial or publicity. Regardless of the intentions, the delivery of the video and the security camera footage below it are fun to watch. …

Never has a single man had a greater impact on a tech company than Steve Jobs. Many would say that his influence stretches well beyond Apple, Disney, and his other contributions, that his style and leadership abilities have impacted hundreds, even thousands of successful companies and millions of individuals. His resignation as CEO of Apple was felt around the world, yet nobody felt it more than his successor, Tim Cook. It’s the big chair. There are few tech firms whose CEO has as much power. Beyond the power, there is an expectation to be met. The bar is as high as it can possibly be. The world will…

Every day, new uses are thought up surrounding current technologies. The gadgets and gizmos that populate western culture have begun to make expand upon themselves and grow in functionality without improvements in software or hardware. It’s humanity that can take these devices and make more out of them than what we originally expected. It’s innovation and creation that drives these non-technical technology advances. Magic, for instance, is something inherent to the devices themselves. Once you add a creative mind to the equation, such as in the case of TEDTalk’s Marco Tempest, something…

That didn’t take long. After testing the waters that Groupon and LivingSocial dominate, Facebook has pulled the plug on Deals. “We think there is a lot of power in a social approach to driving people into local businesses,” Facebook said in the statement. “We’ve learned a lot from our test and we’ll continue to evaluate how to best serve local businesses.” In April, Facebook put everyone on notice that they were “testing the waters” of the daily deals phenomenon. Groupon and LivingSocial have had tremendous success offering social-media-only bargains that require a certain threshold of buyers…

They are the keys we use to get to some of the most important parts of our online lives. Email, bank accounts, social networks, work applications – there are so many things that are password protected an a lot of people simply do not pay proper attention to making them secure. This infographic by ZoneAlarm breaks down some tips on how to make a secure password for daily use. Click to enlarge. …