Tech News

Why Do We Use The Term Cellular Phone Instead of Mobile Phone?

If I asked you about your phone, would you call it a cell phone or a mobile phone? Does it really matter what you say or is one term more appropriate than the other? The world cellular, as it describes phone technology, was used by engineers Douglas H. Ring and W. Rae Young at Bell…

WhatWasHere Creates Historical Maps Using Crowd Sourced Photographs

WhatWasHere is a project that uploads historic photographs to Google Maps so you can see what a location looked like in the past. Photos can be uploaded through the WhatWasHere website or via an iPhone app. The success of this online project depends on people’s willingness to prepare and upload photos. The site tries to…

The Original Homepages of Facebook, Twitter and Google Were Fugly

The old web was like the wild west, you just chopped some wood, threw it together and hoped it stood up. Kind of like what Google, Twitter and Facebook did, they just slapped a logo and some text together and called it a day. Kottke showed off these ridiculous website origins of the multibazilliongillionzillion dollar…

Sleepbox Is A Tiny Hotel Room For Airport Layovers

Sleepbox is a self-contained hotel room for airports and other public places. Designed by Russian architects at the Arch Group, each Sleepbox has all the amenities you need to catch some shut eye while you wait for your next flight. Inside each Sleepbox are up to three beds with self-changing sheets, an LED reading lamp,…

You Are About to Start Shopping with Gestures Thanks to Kinect

It’s about time someone did something cool with Kinect that wasn’t an art project or a glorified Dance Dance Revolution. A new Mastercard prototype makes it scary easy to buy stuff off your TV with the flick of an arm. If you’re prepared to swipe, snap, and gesture your way into colossal credit card debt,…

All Boarding Passes Should Look Like This

Airlines no longer have excuses. They need to get off their asses. They need Flight Card. What’s Flight Card? It’s an iPhone app that simply and beautifully tracks flights. It also should be the future of boarding passes. Flight Card displays all the pertinent flight info, the flight number, airports, flight status, etc. in an…

Some Nigerians Think That a Phone Call Can Kill

For a country technologically advanced enough to clog my inbox with offers of untold wealth as long as I reply with my Social Security number, a surprising number of Nigerians actually think that they can receive a demonic phone call that will kill them instantly upon answering. According to the BBC, a series of widely-circulating…

I Bet Batman Really Hates Notification Badges Too

Badges. So convenient. So stressful. A permanent reminder that you have pending stuff to read, to do, to write, to go to. I remember when I didn’t know the number of mails waiting. I was happier. [Fuck Yeah Alburquerque]

How to Live Like James Bond For a Weekend

Steve Kamb found out how to fly 35,000 miles and visit four continents for $418. He’s now going round the world in that trip and managed to score a weekend in Monte Carlo, Monaco, living like James Bond. https://gizmodo.com/how-to-travel-around-the-world-for-418-5710654 Fantastic hotel room, Martinis, tuxedo and food for just $138. This is how he did it:…

Propeller May Be A Social News Reader From Google

Google is finally make strides in the world of social. Google + is gaining traction and the company is supposedly working on several new apps including a social news reader known as Propeller. https://gizmodo.com/this-is-google-changing-all-of-information-sharing-5816311 Propeller is supposedly a tablet application that’ll run on Android or iOS. A few people have seen the app in action…

VideoSurf for iPhone and Android: Like Shazam for TV

Sometimes you’re watching a random TV show on a random channel and you wonder, who was she again? What show was she in? And then you forget about it and those questions are left unanswered, your brain untapped. With VideoSurf, the app can identify the show you’re watching and give you info about everybody in…

Transformers Cupcakes, Penile Eels, and Other Stories We Didn’t Post

So much news passes before our collective eyes every day that we couldn’t possibly cover it all. Mostly because much of it isn’t worth covering! But here are a some borderline tidbits we passed on, just in case. Transformers-Themed Cupcakes: Exactly What Meets the Eye Not a gadget. Barely food. But the puns, my god,…

Watch and Smile As Thirteen Dogs Jump Rope At The Same Time

Uchida Geinousha and his 13 dogs now hold the world record for the dog handler with the most dogs skipping on a rope. Geinousha runs the Super Wan Wan Circus and discovered the dog’s ability to jump rope when a curious poodle started to jump along with Geinousha and handler Kaoru. The pair trained the…

A 5-Year-Old Girl Dug Up a 160 Million Year Old Fossil

Emily Baldry, an adorable 5-year-old girl from the UK, was doing what a normal kid her age would be doing: Hanging out at with her family and digging. Unlike other normal kids though, she found a 160 million year old fossil. She called it Spike. It’s an absolutely amazing and rare discovery that happened by…

VideoSurf App Gallery

Why Are Some Celebrities Still Using AOL Email?

Despite the stigma, there are many people still using AOL email. Some are stuck in a technology timewarp; but not everyone is that backwards. Some notable and presumably intelligent celebrities are reportedly still using their AOL email addresses. The short list supposedly includes Tina Fey, Paul Rudd, Steve Carell, David Arquette and Sarah Silverman. With…

Bose Tells AirPlay to Eat It with Its SoundLink Mobile Bluetooth Speaker

The tiny Bose bluetooth speaker system we caught a whiff of last week went official today with a considerably less goofy name than “Chihuahua.” The Soundlink Mobile, as it’s actually called, is a portable Bluetooth speaker in an AirPlay world, but it looks like it might be pretty good anyway. https://gizmodo.com/the-bose-chihuahua-is-supposed-to-be-a-super-small-spea-5838695 It’s also got an…

This Is the Binary Star Planet We Were Looking For

have confirmed what it seemed inevitable: a planet orbiting a binary star. It’s no Tatooine but a Saturn-sized gas planet twisting around two stars about 1.5 and 4.5 smaller than our Sun. The stars orbit around each other every 41 days, while the planet—boringly called Kepler-16b—completes one orbit every 229 Earth days. According to the…

How RIM Could Save Itself

RIM just reported earnings that were even more miserable than expected. We’ve already said why the company is cooked. But is there any way it can be salvaged? Well, just maybe there is. https://gizmodo.com/ten-reasons-why-blackberry-is-screwed-5812832 You ready, RIM? It’s time we had a talk. Stop Leaning on Enterprise You know who made BlackBerry popular? Companies, who…

A Caveman’s Swiss Army Knife

I love everything about this. I just like to pretend that George the Neanderthal carried a Stone Aged Swiss Army Knife everywhere with him. It was so convenient! Of course, there was no Swiss or Army or Knives back then but, um, you get the idea! They should make Swiss Army Knives for every era,…