technology Archives - Page 3 of 7

Powerocks: How to get charged up

A portable charger for your digital lifestyle Over the years, I’ve done product reviews for companies like Nokia, small camcorder companies and gadget startups in my role as a columnist for Engadget, all the while offering this disclosure statement that spelled out my affiliations. Well, let’s toss another one into the mix, because the good folks at Powerocks recently sent me the Powerocks Extended Battery Pak Super Magicstick (2800mAh) to test out, and within a week I began adding it to my road warrior arsenal. Powerocks is a lightweight portable charger that takes the worry out of heading out of the house with a less than fully charged array of mobile gadgets, including the iPad, iPhone, Android phones, digital cameras,

Book review: ‘Age of Context’ captures pulse of new tech

New book, out today, identifies ‘five forces’ animating modern culture Title: “The Age of Context” Pages: 248 Publisher: CreateSpace Release date: Sept. 25, 2013 Every few years someone comes along and pulls the camera back to reveal a wider view of the technological changes coursing through the business world and larger culture. Robert Scoble and Shel Israel have done just that with their new book, “The Age of Context: Mobile, Sensors, Data and the Future of Privacy” (paperback, self-published). The authors nicely contextualize what they call the “five forces” in what amounts to a technology megatrend: mobile, sensor devices, social media, big data and location-based technologies. These forces add up to a formidable package, one that deserves scrutiny far beyond the boundaries of

Interview with the CEO/founder of Foursquare

During the Where 2.0 conference on March 31, 2010, I grabbed Dennis Crowley, CEO and co-founder of Foursquare, after his eye-opening keynote talk. If you haven’t heard of Foursquare, you will — they’re on track to hit a million registered users around May 1. People in their 20s and 30s obsess over checking in at various locations to win digital badges.

Girls in Tech: Bringing women into tech world

For years I’ve bemoaned the lack of women on stage at the scores of tech conferences and events I attend. Girls in Tech is out to change that. I caught up with founder Adriana Gascoigne and executive managing director Robyn Cohen at Web 2.0 Expo earlier this month.

Rip and watch movies & TV shows

How to rip DVDs and record TV for on-the-go video entertainment There are several ways to watch DVD movies and TV shows on the road. Sling Media sells a commercial product, the Slingbox ($250), that lets you stream television shows over the Internet to wherever you’re located. Macintosh users can buy Elgato’s EyeTV ($330), which works like a computer-based TiVo and records shows in MPEG-2 or MPEG-4 format. The Linux-based MythTV captures over-the-air unencrypted television signals (for more, see the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s HDTV-PVR Cookbook). A few mobile devices, such as various Archos players, make it easy to transfer TV shows from a TV set to a handheld device. If you’d like to rip (or copy) copy-protected DVD movies that

Digital footsteps

If you’ve ventured onto the Net, your past may follow you in ways you’d never imagine ur past now follows us as never before. For centuries, refugees sailed the Atlantic to start new lives. Easterners pulled up stakes and moved west to California. Today, reinvention and second chances come less easily. You may leave town, but your electronic shadow stays behind, as anyone who has ventured onto the Internet well knows. We often view the Internet as a communication medium or an information-retrieval tool, but it’s also a powerful archiving medium that takes snapshots of our digital lives — and can store those fleeting images forever.

The Engadget Interview: Paul Griffin, CEO/founder of Griffin Technology

For this week’s Engadget Interview, veteran journalist J.D. Lasica bumped into Paul Griffin, CEO of Griffin Technology, at the Portable Media Expo and Podcasting Conference in Ontario, Calif., on Friday. The self-effacing Griffin discusses the panoply of products his company puts out for gadget lovers, Apple’s dominance in the portable music market, and what’s ahead for Griffin in the peripherals space. How long ago did you found your company? We started 13 years ago. What products did you start out focusing on? We started off making video adapters and later on started making serial adapters. We’ve been focused since the early days on making connectivity products, and later on we began making stand-alone products or peripherals that didn’t rely on

The Engadget Interview: Christian Bubenheim, general manager, Magellan Consumer Products

For this week’s Engadget Interview, veteran journalist J.D. Lasica spoke with Christian Bubenheim, vice president and general manager, Thales’ Magellan Consumer Products Business about portable GPS systems, how you use them in the wild, and how to find your car in Shea Stadium’s parking lot. Why don’t you give us the nickel tour of Thales and Magellan? Thales Navigation is the result of four GPS companies that came together over the past few years. The business really comprises three business units: Magellan on the consumer side, which includes outdoor handheld products and vehicle navigation; on the professional side we service survey and GIS or mapping customers, and on the OEM side selling into the automotive industry, avionics, lots of consumer

The Engadget Interview: Blake Krikorian, CEO of Sling Media

For this week’s Engadget Interview, veteran journalist J.D. Lasica spoke with Sling Media CEO Blake Krikorian about the rollout of the Slingbox, its disruptive effects on Hollywood business models, the notions of place-shifting and personal broadcasting, and an announcement he’s making right here on Engadget about support for a new operating system. This week I’ll be combining my questions with a few that our readers have posted on the site. I saw those, and I was like, “Wow! Pretty impressive.” Let’s start with the basics. How many employees do you have, where are you located, and when did Sling Media get started? We have 30 to 40 folks. We’re headquartered in San Mateo in the Bay Area, as well as

The Engadget Interview: Jim Behrens, CEO of Orb Networks

For this week’s Engadget Interview, veteran journalist J.D. Lasica spoke with Orb Networks CEO Jim Behrens about the growing importance of personal media, catching television on the road on nearly any device, and our networked, always-on, access-your-stuff-from-anywhere future. Tell us about the background of Orb Networks. How did Orb get started? We actually got started as a company called Bravo Brava! in 2000, primarily centered around technology-based education products. We began using interactive television as a solution, and we took a different approach than others were taking. We wanted to allow people to use any device that connects with the Internet to be the interactive portion of the experience. The content creators could continue to give you a unidirectional signal,