Spotlight Features

Work is not only spilling into our leisure time at home, but also taking over our downtime on the road. Work has always eaten into road downtime somewhat, often because of communications inefficiencies. Today overwork is demanded by bosses, globalization, general competitiveness and tight budgets. I...

Disaster communications tech has become a hot topic, spurred in part by last fall's Hurricane Sandy, where major swaths of New York City were rendered without some business-level communications such as those provided by cell networks. Images of civilians roaming ravaged streets looking for a socket ...

When we think of traditional news gatherers, we might conjure up the image of an obstreperous character brazenly hassling a slimy official for the real story -- or hovering paparazzi harassing a poor celebrity innocently shopping for handbags in Beverly Hills. However, there have been some technolog...

Two-way social-media channels, like Twitter and Facebook, have changed forever the methods businesses use to communicate with their customers. Fading into the distance are the days of the one-sided official dispatch. Social media marketing has been welcomed with open arms into the fold, with corpora...

The video game industry has been suffering one of its most notable slumps in recent years. Sales in February were down compared with the same period a year ago. March's numbers have yet to be released, but they will likely reflect some improvement, as a handful of high-profile titles have arrived. T...

Looking for an Internet connection when out and about may soon become a lot easier. There's been an uptick in public WiFi availability. Recent public WiFi launches include Google's free WiFi project in New York City, starting with parts of Chelsea. London's tube network went hot in 2012 with 92 und...

If you've been in the market for almost anything recently, you've probably noticed price fluctuations. You place a bicycle on your Amazon wish list at one price, only to see it shoot up a hundred dollars more a few days later, then drop to a hundred less a week or so after that. Everything from airp...

Hurricane Sandy, which struck the U.S.' Eastern seaboard last October, exemplified the use of social networks in disaster communications. Millions of residents were affected. For many, real-time information was provided through independent, citizen-generated Facebook pages like Jersey Shore Hurrican...

When Richard Rygg, the cofounder of HipGeo, sailed with his family last year through the islands of French Polynesia, he used his company's app to document the experience. The result is a multimedia blog complete with a GPS track of his adventure, and a collection of dozens of geo-tagged photos of s...

There's a little-known electronic gadget -- one that's generally not available alongside the colorful big-screen TVs and bass-pounding sound systems in seductive, sparkly urban consumer-electronics mega-stores -- that can be a life-changing device, nonetheless. For some people, it's much more import...