Yahoo plans to compete on mobile by way of partnerships, not hardware or operating systems, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer told Bloomberg at the annual World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland, where the subject of the talk was the future of Yahoo’s business. The talk also delved into other areas of focus, including Yahoo’s homepage, media properties, and where it could compete on search and… → Read More
You might have heard a few things about Ev Williams and crew’s new product, Medium. To some, it seems like “just another blogging platform,” but if you think about where Ev and Biz Stone come from, these folks are pretty hip to next-level publishing.
I don’t have to remind you that Williams’ company Pyra Labs sold a little product called Blogger to Google, which basically helped revolutionize… → Read More
Future, an international publisher whose titles include T3, Official Xbox Magazine and websites like GamesRadar, revealed in a new trading update today that it is building up a good incoming gross revenue stream from Apple Newsstand, which has driven over £5M (roughly $8M U.S) in total since Newsstand’s launch in October. Increases in digital revenues are offsetting the decline on the print… → Read More
During a visit to the Googleplex last week, I sat down with someone so passionate about search, it’s as if it’s his job or something. Well, it is, and Jack Menzel, Director, Product Management of Google Search, is as excitable as it gets when it comes to talking about his passion.
Who can blame him, though? A lot of people use Google as their default search engine, and that’s no mistake. For… → Read More
It’s impossible to predict the future, but the idea that our technology will soon collide with our biological sense of vision continues to pop up in the world. Minority Report is the best fictional example, while Google Glass is obviously the closest real-world iteration of this type of collision to date.
But a new video (below) posted by Sight Systems takes a stab at how this marriage of… → Read More
We got a great look at the new Makerbot Replicator and, more important, we sat down with founder Bre Pettis to talk about the future. His take? The future is here and 3D printing is one of the things that will change the world.
Pettis built the first Makerbot at NYC Resistor, a hackerspace in Brooklyn. He realized the potential was, in a sense, infinite and, thousands of sales later, Makerbot… → Read More
As we enter 2012, shouldn’t we all be traveling around in flying cars by now? That was the prediction in the Jetsons cartoon tv show. The futuristic series, first produced by Hanna-Barbera in 1962, was set in 2062, exactly 50 years from today. 2012 is the halfway point, so we’ve still got some time before we are all driving around in flying cars. But, many other technology advances from the… → Read More
We’ve already gotten a glimpse of what Microsoft hopes the future will look like, but how about a different take? PocketNow was able to dig up a pair of videos created by RIM that offers yet another glimpse at our device-driven tomorrow. → Read More
Conventional wisdom says that it’d be a better idea to build a ladder to the moon than it would be to start a magazine in 2010. Apparently Best Buy disagrees. The retailer announced, some months back, that it would be starting a new video game magazine called @Gamer. (Pronounced “gamer”—ignore the @.) It hooked up with the good folks at Future, the same people who publish the World of… → Read More
You’ll recall that, a few months ago, we mentioned that Blizzard, in collaboration with Future (the publisher responsible for Edge in the UK, among other magazines), would be creating a World of Warcraft-themed magazine. It’s called World of Warcraft: Official Magazine and I just received the very first issue, Winter 2009. From a visual standpoint, the magazine is gorgeous. It’s like looking at a… → Read More
The SmartFish aircraft is a concept vehicle created by an engineering firm in Germany, based on the aerodynamic shape of a fish. So far, they have only built a remote control version of the aircraft, however a prototype is in the works. The prototype will be built from kevlar and carbon fiber, however the designers expect the vehicle to be relatively inexpensive to build. → Read More
Hurry up, sports fans, for today’s the last day you can submit a message to the KEO space capsule. The idea is to have a bunch of people write an epic message, then in 50,000 years it’ll return and give future people the messages. I have no idea how any of this works, so please direct your WTFs somewhere else. → Read More
Man has long been on a quest for a better battery. This has resulted in some less then ideal solutions, such as the potato battery (it was half baked) and the onion battery (too smelly). Finally, researchers at the University of Missouri have developed a smaller, more efficient, and hopefully radiation free nuclear battery. → Read More
This is what the Airplane of the Future may look like. Well, this is what coach may look like; first class passengers will still have seats made out of diamonds and sporks made out of solid gold. The new layout resembles a subway car or military aircraft, with rows facing each other in order to pack more people inside a cabin. → Read More
A Utah company claims to have developed a DVD that will last 1,000 years under normal, everyday conditions. (You don’t have to be a professional archivist, in other words.) And while that’s an impressive achievement, if it is indeed true, there’s one small problem: what are the odds that, 1,000 years from now, Future People will derive any value at all from said discs? → Read More
This display, smaller than a dime, has 600×480 resolution, ensuring that when our species branches into the elfoid form we will be able to create an iPod Touch for our miniature brethren. You could also chain a number of these together to create a 1080p smaller than a postage stamp, potentially creating a 2048 x 2048 pixel display the size of a matchbook. → Read More
The future of media is algorithmic aggregation, at least that is the approach Future US is taking. The U.S. subsidiary of Future PLC, and publisher of such niche magazines as Nintendo Power, Guitar World, and Maximum PC, is adopting a different approach online than simply putting its print articles on the Web. Instead, it has launched dozens of news aggregation and discovery sites called “Blips”… → Read More
All I have to say to Hearst is “Good luck, bro.” The flatlining publisher, which produces magazines such as Popular Mechanics, Esquire and Cosmopolitan, has revealed that it’s working on an e-reader. The idea, of course, is to cut down the cost of creating a magazine—all that paper, ink, storage, delivery, gas, etc. adds up, especially in an environment when ad sales are way… → Read More
You’ve seen that commercial for Hulu, right? The one with Alec Baldwin sashaying around a futuristic office promising TV everywhere, TV that turns your brain into mush? Take that idea—TV everywhere—and apply it to your biology. That is, how does TV implanted into your contact lenses sound? Really great, or just great? Absolutely horrendous, or just horrendous? → Read More
Remember when they said we’d all have flying cars by now? Food would be in pill form, and we’d all have wristwatches that we could watch TV on? Well “they” also predicted that kitchens would be all fancy and technological too. Check it out. → Read More
Blast has a story about the cars of the future, a collection of kickass concept vehicles from all over the world – well, mostly Europe and Japan but there is one Buick. American makers are busy figuring out how to get a cup holder next to the gas pedal. One interesting little car is the Mini SUV with Center Globe. The Globe is a glowing orb that shows most of your GPS and read-out functions… → Read More
I’ve been stewing in this one all night. Programmable matter. Things that can morph and reshape into other things. Useful things. Imagine working on a connected netbook and then morphing the device into a handheld phone for an incoming call. That’s just the start. Imagine having enough of this matter to morph human size objects. Instead of actually being there, people could eventually remotely… → Read More
Hey everyone, Doug Aamoth here in Tokyo checking in on Panasonic’s “Eco Ideas” initiative. Here’s a video tour of a prototype house containing various environmentally-friendly and technologically advanced features that Panasonic is aiming to make into reality by 2010. Throughout the week, I’ll also be checking out some cool plasma TVs, fuel-cell batteries, smart appliances, and more. → Read More
The Kindle, she has grown into a beautiful woman. Yup, Amazon’s industry-destroying device appears to have been quite popular at last week’s book industry soirée, where execs complained that the Kindle is going to ruin their livelihood. That is, what happens when people finally realize that it’s easier to carry one Kindle, with X number of books on it, than to carry a bunch of… → Read More
Just the beginning… With all the talk of multi-touch, surface computing, and mobile technology, let’s think, for a moment, where we’re all headed. Given the fact that we are all gadget geeks and give the fact that most of us will use Windows until we’re old and gray, we need to start talking about future interfaces that might supplant the standard OS entirely, multi-touch… → Read More
[photopress:ghostsnin.jpg,full,center] Good ol’ Nine Inch Nails officially released its latest album on The Pirate Bay, What.cd and Waffles.fm. An account named “NIN” uploaded the 320kbps, LAME-encoded album on the private torrent trackers and “NINOfficial” on TPB. The band’s rep told TorrentFreak, which has quickly become the go-to source for all my BT news… → Read More
[photopress:peaceoneconsole.gif,full,center] Add one more vote to the “we’d be better off with a single video game console than with multiple ones.” Colin Campbell over at Next-Gen.biz (and who also hosts a video game podcast that treats its audience like adults… that’s rare) used up several column inches to defend the idea that a single, open video game platform… → Read More
This endorsement is by no means random. It is a direct challenge to one of the many well thought out theses put forward by Peter Ha in his terrific Kindle review: I’ll be the first to admit that e-books suck. They’re great in theory, but they’ll never catch on. There’s nothing that screams dork more than an e-book. I, like many others, enjoy the real thing. There’s just something… → Read More
http://progressive.playstream.com/playstream/progressive/flashplayers/FLVPlayer.swf A friend sent this to me and I’m not exactly sure what to think of it. Part of me enjoys watching old videos like this and seeing what’s come to fruition and what ideas are still being thrown around some 50 years later. Then the other part of me is just creeped out at how subservient the women in this video are… → Read More
If Al Gore has taught me anything, it’s that the Earth is going to explode any minute now (think Sephiroth’s Super Nova) because we burn too many fossil fuels. So let’s stop burning them. One man has just such a plan. Some guy from Silicon Valley, Shai Agassi, plans to launch a VC-backed system of battery-charging stations. This would encourage the development of battery-powered… → Read More
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