“Mm? What’s that, my boy?”
A trick often used by wily senior citizens when they need a second to gather their thoughts, or just to ignore the fooling thing someone has just said. The First Doctor never skimped on being brash or rude when he could help it, so possibly he really was a little hard of hearing, or slow to work out what to do. Either … Read More → "‘Doctor Who’: 10 of the doctor’s most memorable catchphrases"

As an early investor in social gaming, I’m often speaking on panels to audiences of gamers, investors, and game company execs. At one such event —  the Future of Media conference hosted by Stanford’s Graduate School of Business — the opening question was why gaming is relevant to people who are not gamers. The panelists — folks from IGN, Activision, GaiKai, and Riot Games as well as myself — gave some interesting reasons for why non-gamers should care about the game market:
via Read More → "Non-gamers, here’s why you should care about games"

The most exciting piece of technology without an “i” in its name this year is undoubtedly Google’s funky Project Glass AR glasses. Previously spotted on Google co-founder Sergey Brin, Sebastian Thrun, head of Google X sat down with Charlie Rose to give us common folk a look at the future.

In his interview with Rose, Thrun answers a few questions concerning why Google is so excited about Project Glass. For one thing, Project Glass is aimed at “getting [computers] out of your life and not into your life.”

< … Read More → "Google’s Project Glass demoed in real life on Charlie Rose"

The most successful companies are ones that are never satisfied with the status quo. They are too busy looking for ways to improve their products, personnel, and experience for their customers.

There are many approaches a company can take to improve itself. For us, it meant trying something revolutionary that would arm our employees with a new skill set, bring our technical and non-technical teams closer together, and provide the entire company with a deeper understanding and appreciation of what we do.

To accomplish this, we set an ambitious goal of having all of … Read More → "Why one company is making all its employees learn how to code"

The Boeing CST-100 will act as a kind of space taxi designed to carry crew to and from the International Space Station. Each capsule, which can transport up to 7 people, can be re-used for space travel and return up to ten times. Now that the vehicle has successfully executed a parachute drop test, Boeing hopes to meet a commercial launch window of 2015.
via Read More → "Boeing Space Taxi passes re-entry test, ready for 2015 flight"

Two talks at the TED conference this year formed, back to back, a sort of debate about the future of our planet. First, Paul Gilding gave a talk entitled “The Earth Is Full,” about how we are using up all Earth’s resources, with possibly devastating consequences. Next, X Prize creator Peter Diamandis gave a presentation entitled “Abundance,” about how we will invent innovative ways to solve the challenges that loom before us.

I believe that we will need great ingenuity to enable our planet to provide successfully for more than seven billion human … Read More → "The intersection of information and energy technologies"

Intel paid $140 million on Tuesday to buy the interconnect business of Cray, the original manufacturer of supercomputers. From here it looks like there’s little left of Cray moving forward, but the interesting bit about this deal isn’t what it means for Cray (and maybe supercomputing) but what it could mean for webscale and the next iteration of servers. Because this deal and AMD’s buy of SeaMicro last month is all about the fabrics.

Chipmakers have been busily adding cores to their servers, but getting those cores to communicate … Read More → "Did webscale computing force Intel’s Cray buy?"

The technology at the core of the Descriptive Camera is Amazon’s Mechanical Turk API. It allows a developer to submit Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs) for workers on the internet to complete. The developer sets the guidelines for each task and designs the interface for the worker to submit their results. The developer also sets the price they’re willing to pay for the successful completion of each task. An approval … Read More → "Descriptive Camera prints out descriptions of pictures, not pictures themselves"

Felix Baumgartner, the adventurer planning to skydive from an altitude of 120,000 feet (36.7 km) this summer, has spoken about the prospect of reaching the speed of sound while falling.

Mr Baumgartner told the Today programme “the biggest unknown… is what happens to the human body if it flies supersonic speeds”, saying there is no way to simulate the experience before his jump.
via BBC

Click here for … Read More → "Skydiver plans to skydive from an altitude of 120,000 feet"