Author: Scarlett Madison

There’s something epic about the power of old videos. They can bring us back in time and help us remember how things were in our lives if we were old enough to remember them. If we weren’t old enough (or if you weren’t even born yet in 1991) then they can give you a glimpse into a different era from which your parents existed. Such is the case with this simple training video from Nintendo. It highlights customer service in an era before Yelp and Google Local Reviews. It isn’t worried about the response from Twitter accounts. Customer service wasn’t being forced on companies back then. You did it because…

Are they alien eggs, fungal growths, or wet air freshener balls? Those are the questions being asked about thousands of purple balls that were found in the desert in Arizona outside of Tucson. Geradine Vargas and her husband were out taking pictures when they spotted the out of place pool of balls. They shot images of them and sent them to a botanist friend who could not identify them. That’s when they contacted the local news channel to investigate. “We checked out the mysterious spheres for ourselves, and learned they were still there,” said Liz Kotalik from KGUN9. “They’re like gooey marbles…

They may not have the high-end panache of the Wet Bandits from Home Alone, but after forty attacks on pedestrians in Stamford, CT, the “Apple Pickers Gang” has clearly made a name for themselves. It isn’t just the way they commit their crimes that makes them unique and apparently organized. It’s the fact that they’re somehow able to be extremely selective. You can keep your Androids and Windows phones. They only want iPhones. The team of at least two adorned in grey hoodies finds women (with one exception) walking alone in broad daylight talking on their iPhones. They then ride bikes up to them and…

Firing employees can be hard. There are emotions at play and emotions can lead to bad decisions. They can also lead to funny consequences when the people in charge aren’t cognizant of how the new world of social media works. Such is the case for embattled British music retailer HMV. The company, already embroiled in a form of bankruptcy protection (see image from their website below) due to the shift towards digital music downloads, fired 190 employees today. At least one of those employees had access to the company’s Twitter account and gave a blow by blow report of the events as they unfolded. The…

Remember the days when drivers did nothing but drive. Sure, they could talk, maybe listen to the radio, have a Big Mac in one hand, but today there are people texting, talking on their phone, surfing the web, or playing an instrument while driving. Now, Honda is going to have your car listening and talking to you with the familiar Apple Siri interface. The 2013 Honda Accord will join the Chevrolet Spark and Sonic as Siri-integrated vehicles. They will (thankfully) be in “eyes free” mode when the car is in motion, meaning that drivers won’t have to fumble with a touchscreen while blazing down the highway…

The Apple versus Google battle has been waging since well before anyone even knew there was a rift between the tech giants. Their relationship seemed fine to outsiders for years who saw no legal battles between them and integration of Google products as default on the iPhone, including Google Maps. What was brewing behind the scenes between the last two CEOs at each company was a heated enmity. Today, the smartphone market itself is the battleground but the individual battle that intrigues most is the battle between the voice-recognizing software that turns iOS and Android into virtual assistants…

GoDaddy has built a name for itself through elephant-shooting CEOs, SOPA support, and sexist television ads that depict women in ways that are supposed to make men salivate before running to their computer to register their domain. The first ad that has hit the web for this year’s batch of Super Bowl commercials is less sexist than normal. Yes, there are beautiful women, but much less skin than we’re accustomed to from the registrar. The initial idea of the ad is pretty clever. It shows several men from around the world who apparently have the same idea. One man ends up acting on the idea and is thus…

When Gizmodo posted the Entertainment Weekly video of the first released clip from the upcoming movie jOBS, they declared in their headline that it was “actually pretty good”. Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak disagreed in the comments. Not close…we never had such interaction and roles…I’m not even sure what it’s getting at…personalities are very wrong although mine is closer…don’t forget that my purpose was inspired by the values of the Homebrew Computer Club along with ideas of the value of such machines and Steve J. wasn’t around and didn’t attend the club so he was the one learning…

The co-founder of Apple squeezes a ton of opinions and information into a video that’s less than 5-minutes long, but that doesn’t mean it’s light on data. In this string of consciousness talk that he gave for UCTV, he makes some points and humorous quips, but he mentions on thing that was very profound. With the development of natural language recognition and faster internet and server technology, our phones are essentially becoming “human” in many ways. It has the sense of touch in the form of the touchscreens. It has the sense of the inner ear to be aware of its position within space. With GPS, it…

In the next two years there will be more mobile subscriptions than there will be people that within itself is an amazing statistic to know how much we have come to love our mobile friend, the cell phone. 50% of those beloved cell phones are smartphones and is continuing to grow. …