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This year at the San Francisco Bay Area Maker Faire, trying to juggle my own interests (talk to cool people) and my 5-year-old son's (build or break stuff), we both hit paydirt at the same time when we stumbled across the Grid Beam exhibit.

My kid spent 45 minutes in the hot sun inventing and screwing together a life-size car-like contraption, and I got to dive into the minutiae of the product with its creators, Phil and Richard Jergenson.

Grid Beam is Erector Set meets IKEA. The hardware is standard 2x2 wood beams with holes drilled through every 1 1/2 inches (which is the actual width of a 2x2 beam), and standard furniture bolts that will be familiar to anyone who's ever assembled a futon frame.… Read more

Open Garden wants to help you share your Internet connection with every Wi-Fi-enabled device within 20 meters.

The San Francisco-based mobile startup, which launched today at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference, lets users create a large mesh network that allows all the Open Garden-enabled devices to automatically share Internet access and bandwidth, according to a TechCrunch report. Essentially, what Open Garden wants to do is create a crowdsourcing platform for mobile connectivity.

The mesh network currently only uses one Internet connection, but it will break down larger networks into smaller ones with about 10 nodes, TC reports. If the network detects … Read more

AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson recently made some public statements about Google that the Web giant says don't really pan out, according to 9to5Google.

During a panel discussion put on by the Milken Institute last week, an audience member asked Stephenson why there's such a delay in updating Google's operating system on devices carried by AT&T. Basically Stephenson blamed Google for delayed updates.

"Google determines what platform gets the newest releases and when," Stephenson replied. "Oftentimes, that's a negotiated arrangement and that's something we work at hard. We know … Read more

When it comes to the grill, procedure and setup are important aspects to consider. Aside from obvious safety concerns when dealing with hotter-than-hot objects, everything from grill placement to grill accessories need to be determined. And of course, when dealing with charcoal or natural wood, a means to light the fire would be necessary. All the better if that can be accomplished with no accelerant.

The Looftlighter Electric Firestarter requires no lighter fluid to get the fire going. Constructed with a 10-foot power cord, the grill gadget plugs into a standard outlet and supplies focused heat at a high temperature. … Read more

Apple has finally acknowledged the use of OpenStreetMap data in its iOS iPhoto app, the open-source mapping project said yesterday.

The iPhoto app, a photo-sorting tool for the iPad and iPhone, switched from Google Maps to OpenStreetMap (OSM) data back in March. The app uses mapping data so it can display the shoot location of geotagged photos.

However, the app did not credit the use of OSM data, leaving it up to the mapping project's team to point out the development in a blog post. That post was updated on Thursday with a screenshot of the credits in the … Read more

Facebook's new "Trending Articles" feature, which it's been testing for the last few weeks, is already finding critics complaining about clutter in their News Feeds.

The new feature, which adds links to articles that friends have read in their News Feed, is part of a broader effort by Facebook to create what it calls "frictionless" sharing. Media companies that have created apps using the feature include Yahoo and The Guardian, among others.

Mingled among posts from friends about their kids accomplishments or their latest vacation adventures, Facebook is adding links to articles that those … Read more

With patent litigation becoming an increasingly common part of the technology space, the last thing many folks want to see is another company have the sole goal of defending patents. If you're one of those folks, close your eyes.

Unwired Planet, formerly known as Openwave Systems, has completed the sale of its Mediation and Messaging product businesses to Marlin Equity Partners, the company announced today. Now that it has gotten those products out of the way, it plans to focus solely on its patent portfolio.

"Unwired Planet will now be focused exclusively on a multipronged Intellectual Property (IP) … Read more

Cloud computing seems to often get used as a catch-all term for the big trends happening in IT.

This has the unfortunate effect of adding additional ambiguities to a topic that's already laden with definitional overload. (For example, on a topic like security or compliance, it makes a lot of difference whether you're talking about public clouds like Amazon's, a private cloud within an enterprise, a social network, or some mashup of two or more of the above.)

However, I'm starting to see a certain consensus emerge about how best to think about the broad sense … Read more

A couple of months ago, most people had no idea what Viddy was. Since getting its start in April 2011, this app -- which is like Instagram but for video -- tallied 60,000 monthly active users. Then, in February, Viddy launched its Facebook Timeline app and it's been smooth sailing ever since.

Now Viddy has more than 1.7 million monthly active users and averages about 300,000 new registered users per day. Since its Timeline launch, there have been more than 15 million interactions with Viddy content on Facebook. Also, for the first time ever, it's … Read more