Spotlight Features

Augmented reality and other interactive technologies are changing what it means to play, read and interact. "For decades we have aspired to the holodeck as featured in Star Trek, whereby we can fully immerse ourselves in simulated surroundings," said toy consultant Steven Reece. "There are numerous ...

Marine liability insurer The Shipowners' Club has signed up to get IT service management from Axios Systems on a SaaS basis. It wanted to remove the cost and complexity of security, backups, implementation and upgrades while retaining full ownership of its data. That, in a nutshell, is why companies...

Why buy when you can lease? That's a question businesses are asking both externally, as they offer products ranging from software to food, and internally, as they look at billing, ERP and other operations. The upshot is that corporations are moving toward a subscription-based business model both ins...

Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs, are served up by a variety of companies, organizations and educational institutions, including Coursera, Udemy, Iversity, EdX and many others. Together, they're garnering millions of students from around the world. People involved in the MOOC business tend to b...

"Growing crops is only half the job. The other half is marketing -- and if you don't do that right, you will probably go out of business," said AG Kawamura, founding member of Orange County Produce and head of the 114-acre Orange County Great Park Farm. Taking a crop directly to farmers' markets, gr...

From programmable robots to robotic family pets, toy robots are pushing the limits of interactive technologies. "Robotics is definitely influencing toys, and there are plenty of robots to talk about," said The Toy Insider's Laurie Schacht. With its Mindstorms robot sets, LEGO is one of the leaders ...

What are the three objects that you're most likely to grab as you leave the house today? They are likely to be your keys, your smartphone and your wallet, complete with cash and plastic bank cards. Well, if some forward-thinkers have their way, within a short time you'll just be grabbing the keys an...

Few earthly ag tech environments -- at least in the United States -- come more controlled than the Houweling's Tomatoes Ultra-Clima greenhouse facility in Camarillo, Calif., where the company produces a broad range of tomatoes and cucumbers grown hydroponically under glass across 125 acres. Houwelin...

Most of us have a hard enough time keeping track of the security implications of the services we've signed up for, but recently an assertion was made that should send chills down the spine of virtually anyone who ever uses the Web. Namely, Google can scan and use the electronic communications not ju...

Famine... or feast? Soil... or hydroponics, aquaponics, aquaculture or aeroponics? Nine billion hungry human beings will be living on planet Earth by 2050. "We will need to produce more food in the first half of this century than we did in the previous 100 centuries combined," declared Tony Kajews...