production

If you can't say anything nice, my grandmother always cautioned me, you should consider being a journalist. (Naw, she didn't, really. She was a much nicer lady than I am.)

We do enjoy a good bit of snark--if only to set off the cheerleading of which we're sometimes accused. After touting all the great things technology can do for you, 'tis the season to dish dirt on paltry products. Along with sister site CNET Reviews, Popular Mechanics just published their picks for the least convincing tech products of 2007.

See the full catastrophe on CNET Reviews: "… Read more

Business social network LinkedIn has given itself a New Year's makeover a few weeks early: the site has announced a home page redesign and new features, and has simultaneously launched a developer program that it calls "InApps."

For LinkedIn, which says that it recently passed 17 million user accounts, this move comes at a time when some observers are saying that business social networks are about to take off in a big way. The redesigned home page has not gone fully live, but is now accessible to logged-in LinkedIn members on a beta page. Included among the … Read more

Although hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe, it's a royal pain to make.

Most industrial hydrogen producers currently make the gas by heating methane and water to 815 degrees Celsius and causing a reaction. Unfortunately, this process generates 9.3 kilograms of carbon dioxide for every kilo of hydrogen, so it's not environmentally friendly or cheap.

Other companies like Signa Chemistry have come out with chemical catalysts that can strip hydrogen from water.

Then there is electrolysis, which involves cracking water molecules with electricity. Electrolysis doesn't produce any greenhouse gases or chemical residues so … Read more

From the "Zaky Pillow" to the "WhyCry Baby Crying Analyzer" to "Pee Pee Teepee," Baby Gizmo has published the results of its annual "Most Ridiculous Baby Products" survey.

Enjoy!

Here's the deal:

You (the beloved Download user, the reason we're here) are out there somewhere, while I (Greg Penhaligon, product manager of Download) am way up here, sequestered in the crystalline fortress that makes up the Download Control Center. My job is to make Download into the best site of it's kind for you, but what is that exactly? What do you want? I converse with some of you in the forums, read your occasionally expletive-laden emails to customer service, but we've never had a proper way to keep you up-to-date with what we're … Read more

The Putting People First blog by Experientia has pointed me toward the excellent essay "The Long Wow" by Adaptive Path's Brandon Schauer. Schauer outlines a vision of creating lasting customer loyalty and brand value that runs counter to the fixation on quick wins and instant gratification, which many companies, under the pressure of shorter product life cycles and CMO tenures, seem to pursue these days. He defines "The Long Wow" as "a means to achieving long-term customer loyalty through systematically impressing your customers again and again."

This goes far beyond adding new features … Read more

Monday morning, Zoho, the online productivity suite, announced full offline functionality for its Zoho Writer product. Zoho had previously released partial offline functionality for Writer earlier this year, but you could only read the documents and not edit them. What good is that? Luckily, as a little post-Thanksgiving gift, we now have full offline editing, utilizing Google Gears (download Google Gears for Windows or Mac from CNET Download.com).

The offline functionality here couldn't be any easier. If you need to go offline, just hit the "Go Offline" button at the top, give Zoho permission to use … Read more

Firefox has Flock and Songbird, but it's not the only open-source app with some nifty spin-offs. OxygenOffice Pro is developed from OpenOffice.org, but don't let the name fool you: It's completely free, and like a Thanksgiving turkey it's stuffed with even more features. (Anybody else up for a list of Turkey 2.0 features?) Anyway, it's very much like its parent, and you can opt out of whatever features you dislike during the installation.

… Read more

Finally, a USB gadget that's actually useful. We had pretty much given up on the one-time novel plug-and-play desktop devices until they became so common that practically anything that required electricity was being turned into a USB product. Thanko's recently released aromatherapy treatment was probably a new all-time low.

The "USB Hoops Basketball Game" is a undeniable exception to that trend, the first USB-worthy item in recent memory. Our only quibble is the obvious missed opportunity: The game keeps score on its own digital display, but the USB connection could have been used to create all … Read more