Kurt D. Lynn

Major recovery organizations have been using the Internet to help individuals recovering from drug and alcohol addiction. An increasing number of support groups are springing up all over the web with one goal: to provide online, 24/7 assistance to ... people recovering from some form of substance abuse. According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, almost 2 million people this year will find themselves entering some kind of rehabilitation for abuse of various drugs or alcohol. In the past 70 years or so, these alcoholics and addicts would have left various rehabilitation ... (view more)

Apple they'll soon be turning the tech world upside down by introducing a new level of computer performance by focusing their energies on something called 'parallel computing'. There's a certain irony in this. Supercomputers are stacking up PCs to ... get their performance while PCs are using supercomputing methods to get boost theirs. Just this week, IBM and Los Alamos National Laboratory announced the first "petaflop" computer (named 'Roadrunner') that is, essentially, an armada of PCs working in parallel. The new machine is capable of performing more than 1,000 trillion operations per second. ... (view more)

As the population gets older, new applications begin to reflect that shift. Many are assistive devices to help older persons cope with their aging; in fact, there is such a plethora of new technology applications that it deserves a category of its ... own: call it: "geron-technology". It's no surprise this type of technology is emerging. The market is growing. The CDC estimates that the number of persons older than 65 will increase from 35 million in the year 2000 to more than 70 million by 2030. In Europe by 2030, the largest single age group will be over age 65 and the average age is expected ... (view more)

Watch out. As industry marketers and publishers turn their attention to providing mobile content, spam and the web's unscrupulous are following suit. Ferris Research, based in San Francisco, estimates that 1.5 billion unsolicited text messages will ... be received by American consumers. That doesn't sound like much when you take into account that 48 billion text messages were sent in December of 2007 alone, but if you are a cell phone consumer that pays 20 cents a message, that can add up to big bucks! (Source: nytimes.com ) According to Juniper Research, $1.7 billion of "mobile adult content" ... (view more)

We're accustomed to battles between technology companies, many bitter. But there's a new phenomenon emerging, one where companies previously uninterested in the tech market begin to challenge the industry's most powerful players. One example is ... Amazon's Kindle, which has by all accounts trumped Sony's text Reader. Now, Netflix may just have trumped Apple TV. Netflix, best known for renting DVD movies through the mail, now offers a $99 device that will give any of its 8 million subscribers access to movies and shows on their TV sets. The new device is approximately one half the price of Apple ... (view more)

For more than half a century, digital electronic devices have been based on a binary paradigm -- that is, electronic switching of a signal either 'on' (1) or 'off' (0). Everything we know about computing is based on this simple concept. Now that's ... about to change. As first reported this week by our own John Lister , scientists at Hewlett-Packard's Information and Quantum Systems Lab have discovered a new type of electrical resistor: one that has memory properties. The so-called "memristor" exploits the curious memory-like properties of a thin coat of titanium dioxide when a current is passed ... (view more)

If you want a quick peek into the future of Internet marketing, go to an Ad:Tech show. I went to the 'Ad:Tech Spring' held in San Francisco last week and the future of the Internet appears very bright. First, let me explain Ad:Tech. For 10 years, ... Ad:Tech has been the place to go for brand advertisers, agencies, online publishers, and, well, nerds, if they wanted to find out about who's doing what in the digital marketing arena. This year approximately 10,000 Internet marketers (or would-be Internet marketers) congregated at SFO's Moscone Center to hear papers like "Marketing with Downloadable ... (view more)

Is "racial profiling" the best way to compete with Google? It would seem that InterActive Corp (Nasdaq: IACI), the owner of Ask.com, thinks so. The company has introduced a new search engine site called Rushmoredrive.com to provide more relevant ... search information for the African-American searcher. The new search engine was created using behavioral targeting techniques. Researchers analyzed the results of the most popular search terms used in geographic areas that have large black populations. The site then catalogues the 'click-throughs' from those results to determine the sites of most ... (view more)

There was a time in 1948 when Polaroid Corporation was the cocky, swaggering, technological king of the hill. In that year it introduced "instant" film development and in one terrible industrial instant, began a process that would result in the ... near-obsolescence of conventional film. However, just over 50 years later, Polaroid faced bankruptcy thanks to the digital camera. Now, it seems, Polaroid wants to recapture those golden days by introducing instant digital image printing. A Polaroid printer about the size of a PDA will produce dry-to-the-touch, business-card-sized color photographs ... (view more)

Remember those annoying TV interruptions testing the Emergency Broadcast System? Well, now federal regulators have approved a plan that would make your cell phone part of the emergency alert system by allowing blanket text messages to be sent to all ... cell subscribers within a given geographic area. Although cellular customers would be allowed to "opt-out" of the plan, the Warning Alert and Response Network Act of 2006 required the FCC to upgrade the ways the public can be alerted about emergencies. With more than 200 million cell phones in use in the U.S., and with texting becoming more ... (view more)