To upgrade its Android keyboard, TouchType Ltd. drew on the combined linguistic intelligence of the entire online universe. “We made a copy of the internet,” chief marketing officer Joe Braidwood told VentureBeat. SwiftKey X, the latest version of the company’s keyboard for Android handsets and tabl

The new nation of South Sudan celebrated its birth with flag-waving, street celebrations and an official liveblog. “FREE at last!” proclaims the website, goss.org, which states it is the official website of the South Sudanese government. Scroll down, and you find regular updates from the streets of

The last American space shuttle, STS-135, lifted off this morning, bringing to a close a remarkable era in U.S. technological dominance. I stayed home and watched the launch on TV, just as I watched the very first shuttle launch on TV in 1981. Both events were deeply tied into the computer era. In 1

If you’re old enough to remember the energy policies of the Carter administration, green enough to have donated to the Nature Conservancy and young enough to get a rush of testosterone from dusting that polo-shirt-wearing jerk in his BMW, Nissan has the car for you. And though its styling walks a fi

I bought a Nook Simple Touch a couple weeks ago, just in time for a vacation reading binge. I can’t improve much on John Abell’s review for Wired, The Nook Nails It, as I agree with everything he says there. This is the best reading machine I’ve come across so far: It’s light, easy to […]

For Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com, the clock is not just the ultimate prestige timepiece. It’s a symbol of the power of long-term thinking. His hope is that building it will change the way humanity thinks about time, encouraging our distant descendants to take a longer view than we have.

When the final space shuttle mission launches later this year, two iPhone 4s will be on board. The iPhones will be running an experimental app called SpaceLab for iOS, designed by Odyssey Space Research. Once the space shuttle Atlantis docks with the International Space Station, crew members will us

When you have a bunch of smart people with a broad enough charter, you will always get something good out of it. It’s one of the best investments you could possibly make—but only if you chose to value it in terms of successes. If you chose to evaluate it in terms of how many times […]

1945: Arthur C. Clarke begins privately circulating copies of a paper that proposes using space satellites for global communications. It was a bold suggestion for 1945, as the war was just winding down and most people were undoubtedly more concerned about the necessities of life than they were with

Decades after its birth, the laser is still irresistibly cool. How many other fifty-somethings can you say that about? Even though lasers are as common as dirt now, appearing in everything from DVD players to supermarket scanners to computer mice, there’s still a certain appeal to a beam of coherent

SEATTLE — Rusty Oliver sets things on fire. During our visit to his workspace, the aptly-named Hazardfactory, he demonstrated how two long propane-filled tubes can act as a kind of fiery audio EQ meter. He created a fierce ball of flame in the middle of a hoop-shaped sculpture he calls “The Singular

SAN FRANCISCO — Trust us. We’re not going to screw up Skype. That was the message Microsoft delivered Tuesday, hours after formally announcing that it was buying the internet telephony pioneer for a staggering $8.5 billion — staggering because it’s more than the Redmond giant has ever paid for anyth