seth porges

The Futurist: Technology and Toys — Sometimes Low-Tech is High-Fun

Back when our country was new, kids were given big wooden wheels and rolling sticks and expected to have a good time. More than likely, our little Ezekiels and Wilberforces probably had a ball rolling

The Futurist: Where All These Cell Phone Names Are Taking Us

Mark this down in the “Obvious” bin: more and more cell phones are using real names in recent years. It was only a few years ago that virtually every cell phone was identified by a serial number-e

The Futurist: Simple Ways To Make Common Gadgets Better

If your house is anything like the CrunchGear Mansion, it’s filled to the brim with gadgetry and electronica. And with all this newfangled convenience comes an equal dose of frustration. Like wh

The Futurist: How The PS3 Could Sink Blu-ray, And Blu-ray Could Sink the PS3

If Sony is to be believed, the verdict is already in: HD-DVD is a non-starter, and their cross-Japanese Toshibian rivals are toast. They may very well be right: Blu-ray is certainly outperforming HD-D

The Futurist: Hands-On With The Neatest New Nanotech

So I’m here in Scotland with Audiofile Mike. It turns out that this home of The Highlander and hooliganism not only takes credit for bringing the world television, penicillin, and cloned sheep,

The Futurist: Why Digg Is Bad For The World

Being a sometimes-media critic (in years past, I wrote for the media magazine Editor & Publisher), the effects of news aggregation sites like Digg on news organizations is a topic of constant inte

The Futurist: What Women Want In Gadgets (Hint: It's Not Just Pink Paint)

For the most part, the attention gadget designers give to women doesn’t go much deeper than a thin coat of pink paint. Dip it in fuchsia, slap a label like “Rose” on it, and CE companies tak

The Futurist: What An XM-Sirius Merger Means For You

Woah. So XM and Sirius are looking to form a more perfect union. And, at long last, Howard Stern and Oprah fans will have something in common other than being married to each other. Of course, there a

The Futurist: Making Products Better or… CrunchGear Original Concept Designs

We live in an ergonomically-challenged world. It really is amazing how much our appliances and gadgets rely on archaic designs that are almost senselessly stress-inducing So we got to thinking—what

The Futurist: From Lucky-Goldstar to LG, or… Brands That Change With The Times

Biggs and I were talking shop awhile back and I mentioned that it was as if, sometime in the past decade, LG and RCA had a Freaky Friday-like switcheroo. As anybody over the age of 10 likely recalls,

The Futurist: Your Friendar is Broken… or How MVNOs Can Succeed

It’s nigh impossible to open a magazine these days without finding a four-page ad spread telling you that Helio is not just a phone. Nope, its a “Friendar” too! And, even better, it gives yo

The Futurist: The Beginning of Truly Seamless Live Concert Albums

It wasn’t too long ago that officially sanctioned concert recordings were a rarity, with most fans being forced to trade shoddily recorded bootlegs pulled from hand held recorders or sub par sou

The Futurist: Can The Mobile TV Industry Survive The Slingbox?

After years of infrastructure building and billions of dollars of investment, the United States is finally ready to join the ranks of our Eastern neighbors who have long had watchable streaming TV ser

The Futurist: Reading The Apple Tea Leaves or… What the iPhone Tells Us About The Future

From my absentee perch, the best I can gather is that CES this year seems a bit… underwhelming, shall we say? Chock-full of evolutions, this year´s gala seems notably free of true revolutions.

The Futurist: What We Will See At CES

In just a few short clock rotations, the entire tech industry (short of myself — I’m taking a much-needed vacation) will be rolling into Vegas for CES, and CrunchGear’s crack team wi

The Futurist: MacWorld's-A-Comin' or… The Perfect Musicphone

MacWorld is just around the corner, and with it endless speculation that 2007 will not only be the year Apple finally throws its hat into the mobile phone ring, but also the year that the promise of a