Marketing, research and development efforts

Influx: For sometime, there’s been something of a gap between the technical nature of skateboarding and the sophistication of skate shoes; most skate shoes have incredibly simple designs, they are almost anti-science and technology. With the recent success of Nike in the category, a company who put the science into footwear, other manufacturers have been forced to adapt to the […]

Video Magazines?

Adrants: Acknowledging the decline of people’s intelligence by saying, “People don’t read anymore, and kids in particular don’t read. This gives them content in a 5- to 7-minute package that matches their attention span,” NEWgame Communications CEO Kathleen Hessert describes her company’s online video magazine creation product, Vmag. That said, NEWgame is heading in the right direction as online video […]

Video Game Ads

PCWorld: You’re deep in an online game, storming through a gritty urban landscape. The enemy? A gang of brawling thugs armed with baseball bats. You battle furiously, take out the last villain, and look up in triumph. And the first thing your eyes light upon is a billboard hawking Starbucks. Take note if your favorite online game has billboards, banners, […]

New Solar Cell

PhysicsWeb: Scientists in Japan have made the first device that can convert solar energy into electricity and then store the resulting electric charge. The “photocapacitor” designed by Tsutomu Miyasaka and Takurou Murakami at Toin University in Yokohama could be used to power mobile phones and other hand-held devices. A new type of solar cell [PhysicsWeb]

How Sony Could Win the DVD Wars

business2.blogs.com: Few are willing to make the bet that’s Sony’s format for high-capacity DVDs, Blu-Ray, will win against HD-DVD. After all, when has Sony last won a standards war? Betamax, Minidiscs, Memory Stick, etc. Paul Boutin at Slate, though, posits an interesting argument: Blu-Ray could end up holding more data, even though they will cost manufacturers more to make. The […]

Business Plans — The Inside Scoop

smallbusinesses.blogspot.com: “Entrepreneurs can be tempted to “push” the financials to show more value than can be supported. That’s especially true in service and technology businesses. For example, Internet entrepreneurs have a hard time valuing Internet traffic in a business plan. During the days of the dotcom boom, traffic tended to be overvalued. Today at least the overvaluation is gone. But […]

The Rise of Cellphones-toting Children

Forbes.com: In the past, telecom for kids didn’t get much more complex than two tin cans connected by a length of string. But times have changed. Children have become voracious consumers of cellular communication and today are the fastest-growing and most profitable segment of the mobile telephone world. As the overall cellular marketplace nears saturation, young consumers are bringing new […]

Sin to Win

Virgin Mobile has revealed that the days of visiting church to confess your sins are becoming a thing of the past, as mobile users are now turning to their phones to own up to their worst sins. Virgin Mobile Bites features a service called ‘Sin to Win’, in which customers are invited to send in their sins in order to […]

Your Tour Guide – In A Cell Phone

Wired News: Celebrity sightings may be a dime a dozen in New York City, but now visitors can extend that glimpse to almost an hour, with stars Sigourney Weaver and Jerry Stiller talking their ears off. Weaver’s and Stiller’s voices pop up as narrators for Talking Street, a series of cell-phone tours that guide visitors through the Lower East Side, […]

New Touch Sensor Technology

Yenra: Touch sensor technology from TRW may transform human-machine interfaces for control systems. The company is working with two major vehicle manufacturers to bring the technology to market in 2007. The technology uses a control surface, much like that of a laptop computer, in place of mechanical switches. The technology replaces traditional mechanical control functions from simple on and off […]