Last week, I <a href="http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9220426/Elgan_How_to_automate_Google_">told you</a> about a great new service called <a href="http://ifttt.com/">"If This Then That"</a> (IFTTT), which lets you automate things online. I also gave instructions on how to post on <a href="http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9136345/Google_Update">Google+</a> via email.
Google+ is different things to different people. For some, it's a gallery for displaying artwork or photography. For others, it's a powerful way to promote my -- I mean their -- columns, books and blog posts. For most, it's a wordy <a href="http://twitter.com/">Twitter</a> replacement where posts are often followed by the highest quality conversations anywhere.
A few years ago, the Pentagon launched a program to create a fully functional HAL 9000 -- the intelligent software robot depicted in the 1968 sci-fi classic 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Intel this week promised a smartphone based on its Atom processor will hit the market in the first quarter of 2012, while Google announced plans to make future Android releases work on Intel's mobile chips.
The price of touch tablets used to make sense. Apple's iPad has cost between $499 and $829 since it first shipped a year and a half ago. And for a while, competitors all hovered around that price.
The mobile computing industry went crazy last week.
Google's only big blunder in the creation of its otherwise excellent Google+ social network has been a flawed policy on what users are allowed to call themselves. Everybody hates the policy. Even Google hates it.
The Planet of the Apes series of sci-fi thrillers in the late 1960s and early '70s depicted a world in which intelligent apes are the dominant species and humans have been subordinated.
I have a love-hate relationship with Google+. Because I love it and use it so much, I really hate its current limitations.
The microblogging service Twitter debuted five years ago, and by all accounts it's one of the great success stories of the social media era.
When the first iOS gadget shipped in 2007, The New York Times' David Pogue published a list of questions about the new iPhone. The last question on the list was: " <a href="http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/01/11/the-ultimate-iphone-frequently-asked-questions/">Who on earth would buy this thing</a> ?"
Everyone wants what Microsoft's got, namely control of the most widely used computing platform. Or, more accurately, everyone wants the billions and billions of dollars that flow in from the dominance of desktop computing.
Eric Schmidt is out at Google. Larry Page is in. I miss Eric already.
The digital revolution has created an unexpected challenge: How do you get work done when a world of amusements is always just a click away?
As Friday's earthquake in Japan demonstrates, natural disasters happen. And when they do, the first two things to go down are electricity and telephone services.
