Rafe's Radar

After more than 30 years, Grid Beam modular construction system comes to market

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. more

Meet Ark, the social friend-finder that should stay independent

Nobody should own Ark. TechCrunch reported today that the well-seeded people search startup rebuffed a probe from Facebook to acquire the company. Thank goodness.

Ark is yet another stab at an old unsolved need: A site that searches all the social networks to find the people you're looking for. This is most notably not something that Google can do, as Google cannot search within the structured and closed databases of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and so on. (It should have better luck with Google+, assuming you're logged in.)

Previously I have covered companies like Spock (now iSearch), which aimed to do a similar thing. more

Should you buy Facebook stock? Roundtable panelists discuss

As Facebook was trading as a public company for the first time today, we assembled a group of tech and finance experts to talk about the new stock. Is it worth buying? What will it do for technology overall? Can Facebook compete on mobile? Our panelists to debate these and related topics:

Jill Schlesinger from CBS MoneyWatch.com. Jill can help us sort out the pros and cons for investors interested in buying into this mega IPO.
Andy Rachleff, CEO of Wealthfront, an Internet-era investment advice service. Andy's a venture capitalist at Benchmark Capital. He also teaches entrepreneurship at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He wrote about Facebook's IPO on CNET News in February.
Tom Merritt, host of Tech News Today on the TWiT network. Tom takes the pulse of the tech world every day on his show.
Paul Sloan, the main guy covering the Facebook IPO at CNET News.

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Facebook acquires social gifting company Karma

When I wrote in my review of Karma in February, "you'll be using this soon," perhaps I should have said, "Facebook will be buying this soon." Because that's what the company just did. As the Nadaq public market closed on Facebook's first day of public trading, the social network bought the small social gifting company.

Karma announced the acquisition in a blog post that doesn't say much other than revealing the acquisition. But we like Karma. CEO Leo Linden gave us a walk-through recently:

A gift-giving service like Karma might look like a good acquisition for more

Google Knowledge Graph hands-on: The Web's tail is long indeed

I got the magic cookie to turn on the new Google Search Knowledge Graph feature yesterday.

My searches now ping Google's 500-million-strong database of "things." So in addition to standard list-of-links search results, I get sweet data, beautifully packaged -- when there's a Knowledge Graph hit -- in place of an empty sidebar or one filled with ads.

Except for when I don't get the Knowledge Graph, which is most of the time.

It turns out that searching for "things" isn't something I do a lot of the time. If I were busy writing an essay

Bing gets social, but it's too quiet in here

Want some social in your search? But not too much? The Bing-Facebook integration announced two weeks ago went live for everyone last night. The new Bing incorporates social signals into search results in both subtle and overt ways. Overall, the design works very well. The content? Not quite there.

The big advantage of the Bing approach to socially enabled search is that the fundamental search experience appears little changed. Social is mostly in a sidebar. You still get your search results in the main column. Google Plus Your World, in contrast, puts social search results in the main column, but more

No Terminator-style overlays in first batch of Google Glasses

You know what sucks about visiting Google? Seeing the Google Glasses but not being able to try them yourself. Thanks a lot, Vic.

But we are, slowly, learning more about this project. In particular, the prototypes that are appearing in the field, on TV, and in tantalizing interviews with online journalists are not capable of displaying the full-on, in-your-face type of augmented reality that 15 million people have seen in Google's demo video (and all the spoofs).

While Google+ chief Vic Gundotra didn't say much about the Glasses during an interview this morning, a later discussion with another spokesperson confirmed that the popular prototype model, as seen on Gundotra as well as Google X Lab founder Sebastian Thrun in a Charlie Rose interview, shows information above the wearer's usual line of sight, "about where the edge of an umbrella might be."

Facebook App Center: More showcase than store, actually

The app store model is winning the evolutionary battle for software businesses. It's how operating system manufacturers are making ongoing money, especially on mobile devices. But now Facebook, which has a social networking platform and not an operating system of its own, has figured a way to take advantage of the model.

The challenge, for a platform like Facebook, is that it has to build a store on top of these other existing stores. It is especially tricky to build on top of the Apple App store, which remains the only legitimate channel for users to get apps onto more

The problem with augmented reality: Tablets and targets

Is augmented reality for real? At the annual Augmented Reality Event conference in Santa Clara, Calif., this week, marketers, entrepreneurs, lawyers, and science-fiction authors (Daniel Suarez and Bruce Sterling) were all looking for ways to leverage a technology that could change the way we use computers and access data and media. Or not.

The challenge for many of the AR projects being shown and discussed at conferences like this is that to use them, you have to contort yourself around a tablet or smartphone, which becomes the window through which you see the augmented world. You might also have to more

The curse of the two-faced interface

When I got my Panasonic cordless home phone system about two years ago, I was amused to discover that its voice-announce features used two different voices. The voice that reads the caller ID is female. The one that talks me through the voice-mail options is male. It's pretty clear that this is not the result of an intentional design decision, nor an homage to "Airplane," but rather, because these two systems were built separately and grafted together at the last minute. Look close enough at this phone and you can almost see the duct tape.

I thought the Panasonic more