There are tons of tips out there for stretching your batteries to the limit. The New York Times ran yet another collection of such suggestions and a lot of it should sound quite familiar. Most of you by now know to dim your screen, turn off 3G , Wi-Fi , Bluetooth , and GPS , and check your mail manually rather than using battery killing push. But did you know also that your choice of provider can play a role? The GSM technology used by AT&T... 

Thanks to Google, finding products in local stores will soon be much more convenient for on-the-go shoppers. According to the Official Google Blog , iPhone , Android and Palm WebOS owners can use a new feature on the site’s Product Search that shows whether or not an item is in stock at nearby retail stores. You’ll see a small blue dot next to the listing. So far, national chains like Best Buy , Sears, Williams-Sonoma, Pottery Barn,... 

Yesterday at SXSW’s “Bigg Digg Shindigg” event at Stubb’s BBQ, Digg announced that it had been working on a complete redesign of its popular social recommendation site. Digg CEO Jay Adelson told attendees that the project (involving more customizable and relevant home pages, faster site, and new user features) has been five years in the making. The next version of Digg promises a significantly streamlined one-click story…  Read More →

Filed under: Cell Phones , Visionaries We can’t ask George Washington Carver if he prefers crunchy or smooth peanut butter. We can’t seek the consultation of the Wright Brothers on how to go about saving the airline industry. We can , though, pick the brain of the very much alive Marty Cooper, the man who invented the cell phone — which is exactly what C-Span recently did. Over the course of a half hour interview, Cooper revealed... 

It’s an accepted fact of life in the Internet age that companies like Google will collect (supposedly) anonymous information about your browsing habits and serve up targeted ads relevant to your interests. Though, there is a problem with this model (beyond the privacy concerns): What good does showing you 50 ads for laptops in 30 minutes do? Newer systems are coming into favor that let advertisers buy ads as their target audience is loading... 

In terms of procrastination, the Web (sometimes dangerously) offers unlimited possibilities. When discussing such methods of slack, two of the most entertaining avenues would arguably be (for the porn lovers and Facebook junkies, at least) tripping out with optical illusions and killing time with flash games . While free flash games have helped tech-based slacking evolve from simple pursuits like solitaire, they’re still somewhat  Read More →

“We thought that it would generated some big interest among a couple hundred machine learning experts. It became a news-making machine.” That’s what Netflix spokesman, Steve Swasey, told Forbes following the announcement that the Netflix Prize II had been canceled and that the company had settled a lawsuit relating to the first Netflix Prize . The first contest awarded $1 million to the person, or persons, who could improve... 

There’s a load of great tech news happening out there every day, and, unfortunately, we just can’t cover it all. Here are a few of the other noteworthy things we saw today on our never-ending journey through the wild, wild Web. Lady Gaga’s hotly anticipated ‘Telephone’ video with Beyonc  Read More →

According to an AFP report on Yahoo! News , a team of British scientists claim they can read our memories and thoughts by simply studying patterns in brain scans. Eleanor Maguire, who led the research at University College London, told AFP that her team could differentiate between memories and thoughts by using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). During the study, the scientists showed 10 participants three short films about daily... 

Your mini pedometer will tell you how many steps you’ve taken today. Your BodyMedia Fit will keep close tabs on your heart rate. And the Zeo sleep system can let you know just how well you’re really sleeping. Everywhere you look, there seems to be another gadget that can keep track of one of your vital signs. But has this mass mechanization of our anatomy turned …  Read More →

Wi-Fi has been available on planes for sometime now . In fact, on our way to this year’s CES , in-flight Wi-Fi ruined what should have been a few hours dedicated to catching up on some reading and getting a little extra shut eye. Instead, Team Switched spent the better part of the six hour flight to Vegas blogging and hanging out in our team chat room…which might have landed us in hot water had …  Read More →

There’s a load of great tech news happening out there every day, and, unfortunately, we just can’t cover it all. Here are a few of the other noteworthy things we saw today on our never-ending journey through the wild, wild Web. Illustrator Christopher Niemann, uses imagery from Google Maps as a medium to illustrate life lessons, the stock market, and Casablanca. [ NYTimes , via: Urlesque ] Growing up blowing on…  Read More →

Highlights form this morning’s other big tech headlines…. Forbes has released its Croesus rankings of the world’s wealthiest billionaires, and the list includes an impressive team of nerd all-stars, including Mark Zuckerberg , Eric Schmidt and Steve Ballmer . He may not own the overall top billionaire spot anymore (that honor going to Carlos Slim), but Bill Gates still leads the tech rankings with a total net worth of $53 billion.... 

There’s a load of great tech news happening out there every day, and, unfortunately, we just can’t cover it all. Here are a few of the other noteworthy things we saw today on our never-ending journey through the wild, wild Web. YouTube’s automatic closed captioning, like most automated systems, is serving up hilarious misinterpretations to the collective joy of Web users. Exhibit number…  Read More →

According to the BBC News , the personal answers of security questions allowing access to e-mail accounts are more common and easily guessed than previously expected. In a joint study, a group of researchers from the University of Cambridge and the University of Edinburgh found that hackers could access one out of every 80 accounts when given three tries to answer a security question, even if they knew nothing about the owner …  Read More →