Spotlight Features

Someone in the mood for a steak can always go down to the grocery store or head out to a restaurant to get one. However, some shoppers prefer to stay home, go online, place an order, and wait for a couple of days for a frozen steak to appear on their doorstep, packed tightly in a Styrofoam container...

Cookbooks have always been about sharing recipes, connecting with others and figuring out what to make for dinner. Now, however, digital cookbooks, apps and other new formats are bringing these activities into the 21st century. Chefs and cookbook authors are starting to recognize that cookbooks -- a...

A special congressional panel is facing a deadline of Nov. 23 to propose more than a trillion dollars in federal budget reductions over 10 years. If the panel fails, an automatic budget-cutting mechanism will take effect. Either way, the U.S. government will be launching a major austerity program th...

A new wave of really cool devices will soon do more than simply integrate your mobile gadgets with your automobile. Pairing your smartphone with your car's sound system and on-board navigation platform is already old hat. Car makers are now looking at how to expand that concept to enhance the notion...

What's the future for Flash devs now that Adobe has turned its back on Flash Player for mobile devices and has shifted focus to HTML 5? Will Flash for the desktop survive or will it die out too? Adobe has pledged to enable Flash devs to package native apps with Adobe AIR for all the major mobile app...

The big number always seems to be there. The big number is the amount of money the U.S. federal government invests in information technology. In constant dollars, that number has hovered slightly above or slightly below $80 billion per year since 2007, according to TechAmerica. That funding level is...

Turkey hotlines revolutionized the way home cooks dealt with kitchen emergencies during Thanksgiving. Now, hotlines are being joined by social media, videos, apps and other twenty-first century ways of solving bird problems. The Butterball Turkey Talk-Line women -- and they are all women -- have bee...

Managing personal finances once involved lots of paper. Then computer programs came along that helped simplify the process. Now a multitude of mobile apps are available to help people attend to money matters on the go. "It's very convenient to have it in your pocket on your phone," said Garth Scrivn...

At universities and companies around the globe, there are people plugging away trying to solve the myriad technological challenges of quantum computers. But that doesn't mean practical applications of quantum computing are some futuristic fantasy. Already, quantum technology is trickling into the re...

Comparing an atom to a coin is like comparing a human heart to a repeatedly clinching fist. The analogy is woefully simplistic in relation to what is actually going on. But someone with a layman's understanding of the human body is unlikely to grasp the nuances of the human heart. Similarly, someone...