When you combine the common old school methods of grifting with the technological advancements of hacking and social research, you have social engineering. In essence, it’s the art of taking advantage of people’s hopes, dreams, secrets, and all of the information that’s available on their computers, their social media profiles, and even when they’re simply typing stuff on their computer at coffee shops and turning it all into a profile that the con men can attack. It’s human hacking. It’s brilliant and dangerous. The tools of the trade: ads, emails, phishing, shoulder surfing. The people:…

The office can be stressful. Many of our biggest pressures in life stem from activities at the office. Releasing anxiety, stress, and pressure is a best practice recommended by psychologists around the globe. Then again, there’s also the sheer fun associated with locating, targeting, and firing upon an unsuspecting coworker in as harmless of a way as possible. That’s where this USB rocket launcher comes in. On Windows or Mac, this USB connected device can spin a full 360 degrees around and rises up from the horizon up to 45 degrees. It has a six meter range, making it a non-deadly projectile perfect…

When it comes to advertising today, things have changed. In some ways it’s due to social media. Searching for “I Love Zappos” yields 2,000,000 results. Searching for “I Love Dow Chemical Company” yields 3, according to Bob Garfield and Doug Levy at the SXSW panel titled “Cant’ Buy Me Likes”. Thanks to their presentation, this number is sure to go way up as people discuss it (such as this blog). By contrast, searching for “I Love Satan” yields 293,000. It’s not a good thing to be loved less than the prince of darkness. What has happened? Why is it that billion dollar ad branding campaigns get usurped…

Facebook is redesigning their news feed again and this time it looks like a very positive set of changes. The social network has been notorious over the years for making changes that were initially hated by users universally, but this time they seem to be addressing concerns that users have been voicing for a while. The big problem they may face is with businesses that are struggling to use the platform to get exposure. There will be three primary changes: Bigger pictures, articles, maps, and events will be presented to users in their feeds. This is a good change for most, but those who rely on text…

LED lights are small, but integral components in our technology. From tiny blips of light that serve as electronics indicators, to large-scale LED clusters that form business signs, these diodes have played an impactful role in the history of electronics and computing. LEDs were a brainchild of the 1960s, an era marked by innovation and competition in the semiconductor field, as researchers strived to propel their companies to the forefront of technology. As several big players, including Texas Instruments, Bell Laboratories, RCA, and GE jumped into the race, LEDs have developed as increasingly…

Designing a startup logo is as important as an impactful mission statement. It embodies the identity of a company, conveys its purpose and soul. A well-defined logo should be a snapshot of what a startup is all about. From the typeface to the borders and color schemes, it all counts. Whether a startup is beginning from scratch or redesigning their logo, it should be with an eye toward future use. Will a graphic design work with custom neon signs in a storefront, as an online masthead, and in promotional emails? If not, get back to the drawing board. A logo should be memorable and versatile for company…

Today, we operate in a computer world where speed is graded by megabytes and gigabytes per second in data transfer alone. That doesn’t even go into the amazing computational speeds. Nearly 60 years ago, such speeds could not be comprehended, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t have fast machines of their own. Take the 705 Data Processing System by IBM. It helped business maintain a large number of records, perform arithmetic of numbers as large as 1 million at a rate of over 400 calculations per second, and make “logical operations decisions” at 240,000 per minute. Not too shabby without a Pentium…

If you would have asked any stock analyst in the world back in September when Apple shares were sitting at $705 if shares had a chance of falling below $400 within six months, they would have admonished you for being a moron. It wasn’t going to happen. It couldn’t. Now that we’re five months out from the peak of Apple’s value, it seems that $400 isn’t such an impossible number after all. The stock closed yesterday at $430.47, down $10.93 from the day before to reach its lowest point since the slide started last September. It seems that Apple may have fallen victim to their own hype machine in many ways….

A rose by any other name… Digital media. It didn’t really mean much outside of offering content to people for consumption. Technically speaking, that’s what Yahoo has always done outside of search and email. It’s for this reason that the popular web portal’s move to branding itself as a “technology company” marks the second strange move they made in less than two weeks. The first, shifting away from allowing people to work from home, will continue to receive more attention because of its impact on employees, but the branding and image shift is actually a more important (and illogical) move….

When Facebook announced last week that Insights, their page-level analytics platform, had been reporting the wrong numbers for several months, most took it as a growing pain of a company growing into its own. It was a minor negative, something that caused a handful of “Facebook advertising has a long way to go” blog posts but one that will be forgotten tomorrow (if it hasn’t been forgotten already). Put on your conspiracy theory hats, kids, as I tell you what may be really happening here. Since Monday, the numbers have gone up as expected. In some cases, they’ve gone way up. Some of the pages that we…