Story Archives of 'technology'

For urban dwellers, the question of how well you know your city is quickly being replaced with the question of how well does your city know you? Transportation systems can track your comings and goings, utility companies know your usage patterns and banks know what you spend and when. Does that make for a city of dreams, or a nightmare?

At 22, Ben Kaufman has already created and sold a company and started two more. In high school, he launched mophie, which developed iPod accessories. At MacWorld 2007, mophie experimented with real time group decision making by inviting people to collaborate on product development and marketing.

Not long ago, I was trying to explain RSS feeds to my mother. She’s quite tech savvy for someone who grew up in the pre-Internet age, but my explanation wasn’t very clear, because like most people, I don’t really know how some of the technologies I rely on actually work. Luckily, Newsweek pointed me to a great resource, Common Craft.

Thursday on Word of Mouth, religion goes digital. You can now listen to the Bible or Qur’an on your iPod, get text messages from the pope, and visit the Wailing Wall or a Buddhist monastery in Second Life. There's a Facebook-like site for Catholic youth, a clickable prayer wheel you can put on your computer desktop, and even video games like Waco Resurrection and Noah's Ark.