Author: Scarlett Madison

Call this a #protip for social media use. If you’re helping your grandmother count her life savings, don’t try to impress your friends by snapping a picture of it and posting it on Facebook, particularly when your home address is on your Facebook profile. That’s exactly what a 17-year-old Australian girl did while helping her 72-year-old grandmother. Thankfully, the masked robbers armed with knives and a club broke into her own house and robbed her 47-year-old mother instead. It was her mom’s house that was on her Facebook page. As Jolie O’Dell at Venture Beat put it, “Use the sense God gave a horse…

In Aladdin, when Jafar was pulled into the lamp after making a monumental mistake of going for too much power, he grabbed his untrusty sidekick on his way down to be stuck in lamp limbo together. The same things seems to be happening with Facebook and Zynga; as Facebook’s IPO crumbles, Zynga’s shares continue to sag. In this Chart of the Day by Statista, it’s easy to see how the fate of the larger company is dramatically affecting the future of the smaller, dependent company. Click to enlarge. Related articles An Inside Look at Zynga’s Bribable Approach to Customer Loyalty (dailyfinance.com) Zynga,…

Under 7 seconds. That’s how long an SSD-equipped Windows 8 PC takes to boot. It’s something that is unheard of in most light-weight mobile operating systems, let alone a full PC OS. The new-found speed has a comical drawback: one would need gamer reflexes to interrupt the boot process and enter setup or BIOS mode, so the features have been removed. There is currently a 200ms window in which to let the PC know you want to interrupt and enter boot setup. It’s not enough time to flash, so trying to enter these modes means doing so after it’s already booted. Here’s a video that shows the intense speed. Related…

Now that the company is public, the employees are rich, and the CEO is married, Facebook is ready for some serious business. They’ve slayed most of the dragons they’ve needed to face up to this point, but the game has changed. They can’t just sit back and make money as a side effort. They have to generate more revenue and profits for their numbers to stay strong on the NASDAQ. For the first time in their history, they really have to try from a business perspective. Up until now, making money was a side-effect of their efforts to make the most popular and addictive social network on the planet. They are approaching…

They say you can tell a lot about a company by the type of people that work for it. Are they young or old? Conservative or liberal? Creative or analytical? These and other data points about employees can help to create a profile of a company, which is exactly what Kiss Metrics did with Google and Microsoft. By examining some of the habits, preferences, and demographics between the two competitive companies, a clearer comparison profile can be established. We learned that Google employees are less likely to be married or have children while Microsoft employees were less likely to buy Doritos or make…

There were those who were skeptical about whether Ashton Kutcher had the right look to be able to play a young Steve Jobs in the upcoming biopic title “Jobs: Get Inspired” about the Apple co-founder. In the latest images captured by TMZ, the actor/investor dons the trademark black turtleneck and jeans that Jobs wore to public events for 20 years. What do you think? Is he going to pull it off? Can the man who has played many dumb characters over the years such as Jesse Montgomery III in “Dude, Where’s My Car” and Micheal Kelso in “That ’70s Show” play one of the greatest entrepreneurs of all time? Related…

High definition videos have been a hot topic for years. With plasma televisions and HD video recorders filling our houses and hands, we often crave the better quality associated with HD. The challenge is understanding that not all HD is created equal. This great video by the Technology Evangelist breaks down the differences in the formats and shows why 720p is better than 1080i. Related articles Video: Why 720p is better than 1080i (thetechblock.com) HD Video Explained: Why 720p is Better than 1080i (petapixel.com) How to get the best possible picture out of your HDTV (gadgetbox.msnbc.msn.com)…

While Google takes on the role of trailblazer in Nevada, there are questions that surround the technology behind their driverless car. The questions aren’t about whether or not the technology will work but rather around who will actually allow themselves to be driven around. There’s an obvious demographic, of course. Those with disabilities such as Steve Mahan can be empowered by the mobility and freedom that a driverless car has to offer him. Will anyone who isn’t needing the use of driverless cars actually buy these in the future? Yes. In fact, there’s a very strong contingent particularly…

It could be a play to increase the number of Internet Explorer users. It could be a differentiator between them and Playstation. It could be both. Either way, Xbox 360 users may soon have a Kinect-driven full version of Internet Explorer available to them for full web browsing in between games of Call of Duty. By applying voice and gesture control, Kinect integration may have people surfing the web while waving wildly and screaming madly. There is no time frame laid out at this point, but expect to hear something before E3 in June. Related articles Rumor: Kinect-enabled Internet Explorer browser…

When a product becomes synonymous with the general term for the item itself, it can own the market. To paraphrase Ra’s Al Ghul from Batman Begins, “If you make yourself more than just a tablet, if you devote your circuits to an ideal and if they can’t stop you, you become something else entirely – a legend.” Such is the case with the Apple iPad as it now accounts for 94.64% of all tablet web traffic. It accounted for 2/3rds of the tablets sold in 2011 despite a surge by the Kindle Fire around Christmas. Just like Starbucks, people often interchange the word “iPad” with “tablet” when discussing the mobile…