David Lidsky's Blog, page 4776

Infographic of the Day: China's Growing Wealth Gap

A look at perhaps the biggest threat to China's future.

Okay, this chart by Visual Economics might might be one of the ugliest infographics we've ever featured. But there's an important set of messages here.

Maybe it seems like China's eventual global dominance is inevitable. It's not: China has some severe problems to solve, if its economy is to eventually surpass ours. For one, the environment there has already become disastrously polluted, threatening food production; for another, after...

Coming Soon: Portable Poop-Powered Nuclear Reactors?

DARPA is our favorite source for off-the-wall yet compelling technology. We've seen proposals for flying cars, handheld nuclear fusion devices, and now poop-powered nuclear reactors. It's not as crazy at seems.

Wired explains that there would be multiple benefits to sticking portable, poop-powered reactors at military bases. The reactors could eliminate human waste (and the need to dispose of it) at the same time as they reduce the need to scrounge up pricey fuel sources. And since people...

Report: Developers Love Mobile Apps, Dig iPad the Most

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We knew the iPad was going to be transformational mostly due to its app experiences and had heard opinions to that effect. Now Flurry finds developers flocking to the iPad at the expense of other platforms ... even the iPhone.

Flurry tracks what developers are up to through logins to its systems made as apps are being put together and tested. By tracking the operating systems are behind the logins, Flurry's built a picture of how many new app projects were kicked off on average in 2009 and...

Why Facebook Personality Tests Are Hot with Jung-sters

Started by Nottingham University student David Stillwell, the Facebook quiz is designed to not only provide entertainment for the person taking the quiz, but also to "generate professional-quality data for use by companies and other
researchers." The idea is that these personality tests, including the quite old Myers-Briggs test, might have business uses as well.

Central to "My Personality" is the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, which everyone probably remembers from high school psychology...

Taking Back Hotel Dining: Culina at Four Seasons Los Angeles

Recession? What recession? Some brave restaurateurs are defying the economic gloom and doom and opening new places. We're taking a look at the design behind a select few. Next up, Culina, reinventing the hotel restaurant at the Four Seasons in Los Angeles.

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Nothing serves up visions of powdered egg buffets and stuffy overpriced steaks faster than the phrase "hotel dining." But in recent years, the Four Seasons has been breaking with tradition, creating spaces within their hotels that feel like...

Hyundai's New $50k Owners Manual on an iPad Comes with a Car!

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Didn't we say it was only a matter of time before someone gave away a car with an iPad? Wednesday saw the start of the New York International Auto Show, and Hyundai unveiled a very tasty little crudité to go with the 2011 version of its Equus luxury sedan. The firm is to do away with the traditional printed paper manual that tells you how the car works and will replace it with an iPad. 

The CEO of Hyundai North America, John Krafjik, put it bluntly. "Who reads* a 300-page manual, anyway?" he...

Verizon Slashes Palm Phone Prices Absurdly Low, Could Be the Ideal iPad Companion

Pity Palm, and pity both the Pre and its operating system, WebOS. Palm can't compete against the likes of Google, Apple, and Microsoft, the monoliths slugging it out for smartphone supremacy: It doesn't have the bottomless pockets, the lucrative media content partners, nor the sheer size to pump out a new handset every six months.

Every Palm story of late has had the same theme: Palm is dying. And it might be true, but it's really not their fault. After all, Palm's WebOS, the operating...

Luxury Goes Digital: Fashion House Richemont Embraces E-Commerce

Luxury brands have been historically slow to embrace e-commerce. But in recent years, high-end retail sites like Net-a-Porter and Yoox and discount luxury flash sales like those on Gilt Groupe and Rue La La are forcing execs to rethink the benefits of online sales.

Bain & Co. estimates that the $4.9 billion online luxury market grew by 20% last year.Richemont, which owns luxury names like Cartier, Van Cleef & Arpels, Montblanc, and Jaeger-LeCoultre—and has a 33% stake in Net-a-Porter—

Proto-PC Inventor Henry Edward (Ed) Roberts, Inspiration for Microsoft, 1941-2010

The torch-passing symbolism is nearly impossible to ignore: The very day a revolutionary new device, the iPad, hit the media, the inventor of another revolutionary computer has died. 

Ed Roberts is perhaps best known as the developer of the MITS Altair 8800 in 1975, a device which is widely credited for having sparked the revolution in personal computing. The Altair 8800 was a build-it-yourself hobbyist kit consisting of switches, with no display, and MITS had little faith that they'd sell...

The iPad App Store Is Open, for All Twelve People Who Have iPads Right Now

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Though only a select few people actually have iPads at the moment, Apple went ahead and popped all of the available launch titles into iTunes anyway--and there are a couple thousand already. There are a ton of very impressive-looking apps in there, and they're also impressively expensive.

The apps range from video titles to newspapers and other periodicals to crazy new ebooks to games, and while a lot of them are merely ported iPhone apps, a lot of them are brand new. Gizmodo has a nice...