David Lidsky's Blog, page 4542

Jeannie Cho Lee Is the Asian Wine Market's Own Julia Child

Gary V.'s got nothing on Jeannie C.

The wine and Asian food pairings Jeannie Cho Lee dreams up are about as diverse as her background: Master of Wine from the Institute of Masters of Wine in London and a Master of Public Policy from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. Born in Seoul, raised in the U.S., and now residing in Hong Kong where she's raising four children, Lee is the first Asian Master of Wine, and at the heart of the explosion of the Asian wine market. (Christie's

Why Tech Nerds Love Flying Virgin America

This interview is part of our ongoing series related to The Influence Project.

Last month, Virgin America teamed up with the online influence measurement company Klout to promote their new routes between San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Toronto. The campaign offered free tickets to select influencers--with no strings attached. I spoke with Virgin America's social media manager Jill Fletcher about managing an airborne viral campaign, how Virgin became the airline of choice for...

Greenland's Bedrock Could Predict Our Climate Future

There is no shortage of prognostications about what climate change will do to our planet. In reality, there are few ways to tell for sure; human beings have never been around for this kind of world-shifting event before. But an international team of researchers led by University of Copenhagen Professor Dorthe Dahl-Jensen may have found a way to predict what will happen if Greenland's ice sheets melt.

Researchers involved in the project spent the past five years drilling through 1.6 miles of...

Copia's Cheap Slates Take on Apple, Sony Sails Serenely On

Amazon is credited with basically inventing the modern e-reader phenomenon, just as Apple is reinventing the entire slate PC genre--but Copia, who we wrote about yesterday with their color-screened $99 Kindle challenger, really plans on entering both markets with a huge splash.

CrunchGear has been speaking to the new pretender, and discovered that in addition to the super-cheap Wave5 e-reader there's a bunch of other slate-format devices en route. First up is the actual challenger to the...

7 Ways Real-Life Crime Fighting Mirrors "Minority Report"

From Facebook to facial recognition, the police state imagined in the Tom Cruise flick feels a bit more real every day.

Steven Spielberg's Minority Report wowed audiences with its futuristic tech: flashy hand-gesture computers, flex-screen

displays, holograms, and Lexus-designed auto-piloted vehicles. The sci-fi flick also showed the world a dystopian, draconian picture

of a crime-free society: "precogs" predicting murders, eye-scanners dotting the streets

and subways, a jet-pack-toting...

iFive: Missing Tony Hayward, Spotify Rethinks Label Policy, London Bike Hire Launch, Galapagos Out of Danger, Miramax Sold

While you were sleeping, innovation was swiping your credit card and giving you a ride through the streets of London on an inordinately hefty bicycle.

1. Now that Tony Hayward is gone from BP, are you missing him? (Anyone who wants to track him down should maybe go to Russia, as he's rumored to be visiting next week, alongside his successor, Bob Dudley.) The Telegraph wonders whether his muted reaction to the disaster, three months ago, was the right one. BP, meanwhile, is fighting to get the...

Why Facebook's IPO Could Stall Until 2012

Facebook's only just announced that it's achieved 500 million members--which is a meaningless number, if you think about it, but a huge mental sign that the company is achieving success: It means roughly one in 10 humans is on the service.

The about a delay to Facebook's plans to IPO comes via Bloomberg, which has heard from several sources close to the company. The change is apparently to give the company to further boost its member figures, and hone its business model (though making

iFive: Missing Tony Hayward, Spotify Rethinks Label Policy, London Bike Hire Launch, Galapagos out of Danger, Miramax Sold

While you were sleeping, innovation was swiping your credit card and giving you a ride through the streets of London on an inordinately hefty bicycle.

1.Now that Tony Hayward is gone from BP, are you missing him? (Anyone who wants to track him down should maybe go to Russia, as he's rumored to be visiting next week, alongside his successor, Bob Dudley.) The Telegraph wonders whether his muted reaction to the disaster, three months ago, was the right one. BP, meanwhile, is fighting to get the...

Google Earth Now Shows Rain and Snow in Real Time

Google Earth is one of the great "wow" applications in Google's stable, especially on touch devices like Android smartphones or the iPad, whether it's showing undersea formations or cities in 3D. It's also surprisingly useful, and Google's always adding elements to it to give it more utility and/or fun.

The newest is the clouds layer, which now shows rain and snow in real-time weather patterns, across the globe. After enabling the clouds layer, you can just zoom in to any location you want...

How Netflix Scores Top Movies and TV for Streaming

Streaming video is Netflix's future--it's no secret, not to their customers, not to the press, and not to their peers. But the company's difficulties in securing top-quality movies and TV shows from the studios to stream is well-documented. How is Netflix dealing with this problem?

Smartly, it turns out. CNET explains some of the ways Netflix is working to make sure their streaming video service moves as fast as their customers. First, it's a cyclical process. Mailing DVDs and Blu-ray discs...