In February, Google announced a fiber optic experiment: What can people do with a gig of bandwidth?
 
As other ISPs trial ways to choke the great American bandwidth swallow, Google offers a populist counterpoint: Too much bandwidth is good for us all, because innovation often occurs in the fringes of computing power.
 
Putting their money where their mouse is (did I just write that?), Google called for applications from communities with populations 50,000 to 500,000. The prize? A gigabit connection likely to provide speeds at 100x what the average citizen gets today.

That’s a fat prize, so one applicant decided to do some overachieving.  More...

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Hybrid and electric vehicles are all about compromise. You get less go for more green — in both cost and fuel efficiency. Vehicle manufacturers have faced tremendous legislative pressure in the past two decades to bring hybrid and electric cars to market, and our roads are slowly filling up with them.

While this may have environmentalists cheering, automotive enthusiasts fear for the future of high-performance sports cars. Thankfully, a ray of hope just started shining in Zuffenhausen: the unveiling of the new Porsche 918 Spyder simultaneously restored our heartbeat and took our breath away.

Porsche doesn't do slow. Few vehicle manufacturers have remained as dedicated to the pursuit of speed (although the Italians have always been a bit crazier than the Germans). Calculated, Teutonic precision is brought to bear on a hybrid electric supercar that can accelerate to 60 MPH in 3.2 seconds, achieve a top speed of 198 MPH, and return 78 MPG — although perhaps not all at the same time.

How'd they do it? In short, extraordinary feats of engineering. True enthusiasts will want to check out these videos, where Porsche's VP of Research & Development calmly explains how they pulled a fast one to such amazing effect. This is no laughing matter.

From a naming perspective, the 918 Spyder is derived from the hallowed 917 race car. Porschephiles may bristle at such blasphemy, but once they get behind the wheel will likely agree that this is the best use of electricity since the light bulb.

No word yet on when the 918 Spyder actually hits the streets or how much it will cost, but it would be crass to discuss such unpleasantries in the presence of something so beautiful.

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The start of the Oscars began, for me, with a little song lyric running through my brain: I’m everywoman. This is after spotting the ad spot for Poise.

But I doubt Whoopi Goldberg’s latest comedic turn in advertising (and rewriting history) was what Chaka Kahn (or Whitney Houston) had in mind when she belted the anthem. Nor did the artists behind iconic female figures like the Mona Lisa and the Statue of Liberty, or historic women like Joan of Arc and Lady Godiva.

Yet the campaign took a lighthearted and unexpected approach for a product that targets a more sensitive issue for women. Particularly for a product brand with a name that’s a fine example of a well-intentioned, euphemism that for a time marked most “feminine” products–and has been a trademark of Kimberly-Clark since 1945. More...

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The first .COM, "Symbolics," was registered on March 15th 1985. Two years later, its total number was barely one hundred.

Even though some of today's best global brands were among the first to secure their .COM back then (kudos to Xerox, HP, IBM, Intel, AT&T, GE), it wasn't until well into the Internet boom that the one million mark was reached, in 1997.

Today, the number of domain names that exist hovers around 200,000,000 (likely surpassed by the time you've finished reading this... sentence).

But, at over 80 million, .COM is still the biggest and best. It remains an integral part of our lives, globally recognized, and easily the strongest "brand" out of the 260+ gTLDs and ccTLDs that followed it. It's the extension of choice, from a user perspective- automatically assumed, and no matter what your web browser, the default extension. Let's be frank, "Amazon.Org," "eBay.Biz," "Match.Name" or "Monster.Jobs" just doesn't quite roll off the tongue as nicely. More...

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Tired of associating toilet paper with quilting ladies and layers? Or the warm-and-fuzzies of bears and puppies?

Well, Cottonelle has seen to that by bringing the popular vote to a very familiar idiosyncrasy. Cottonelle’s The Great Debate asks: do you roll over or under? More...

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