Author Archives: Chris Mejia

When it first came out, the original iPod conquered the music industry and became the standard by which any other media player was measured. By today’s standards, however, the original iPod seems quite unwieldy; and now, the iPod nano has become the flagship non-touchscreen iPod in Apple’s lineup, making the iPod classic an afterthought for »

Back in the early days of the World Wide Web, before the Internet became virtually omnipresent in businesses and households, the idea of an “Information Superhighway” — a term coined by Al Gore — that connected every household and allowed them both to consume and provide information was a distant possibility. And although the term »

Wikipedia has been hailed as one of the most successful collaborative Web projects of all time. Hosting over 3 million articles in English alone, the site is one of the largest repositories of freely available information. It would take about 1,000 volumes to translate the contents of Wikipedia into print. The philosophy of the Wikimedia »

When you open its tiny box, the first thing you notice about Apple’s newest generation of the iPod Shuffle isn’t its miniscule dimensions — that it’s almost the same size as a stick of gum, or that it weighs less than two quarters. You notice that it has no buttons. Only a headphone jack and »

Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader has much in common with Apple’s iPod: a sleek, white design, a huge content library and a compact form. But while the iPod has become the behemoth of portable music players — to the point where some people call any digital music player an iPod — the Kindle doesn’t seem poised »

This article has been corrected. You may view this article’s correction here. Step aside, bloggers: Your days as the go-to reporters of the Internet are numbered. Twitter has shown itself to be a worthy, albeit unlikely, competitor to more traditional blog style news reporting. The power of blogs and other social news outlets has become »

All eyes are on President Obama as he embarks on the process of reversing America’s struggling economy while dealing with international turmoil. So much so, in fact, that people are watching every move he makes — down to his phone of choice. A search for “Obama” and “BlackBerry” produces close to 12.5 million results — »

Digital media and television are on a collision course. Convergence between online content and consumer electronics has been a recent buzzword among the tech community. The recent Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas was full of consumer electronics companies touting Web-connected appliances. Howard Stringer, corporate executive officer of Sony, predicted that in two years, nearly »

Since YouTube was founded in early 2005, it has hosted over 80 million videos. In 2006, Time Magazine declared “you” the Person of the Year. The recent presidential campaign attests to the influence of blogs and other forms of social media. Indeed, user-generated content has become incredibly prominent in today’s technological environment. But it remains »

If I told you the next big thing in tech was going to be cloud computing, you might be a little confused. After all, clouds and computers don’t usually go together. “Cloud,” in this case, refers to the Internet: a “cloud” of interconnected computers holding huge amounts of information. But cloud computing, a departure from »

Green is in. Everywhere you look, you see efforts to reduce the environmental footprint humans create. But it seems technology has yet to catch onto the green movement. Sure, recycling programs from computer manufacturers exist and LCDs are more power-efficient than old-fashioned tube televisions and computer monitors. But the increasingly “always-on” mode of modern-day electronics »

In late September of 1960, millions of Americans turned their televisions on to watch the first nationally televised presidential debate between Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy. These first televised debates had a large impact on the election of 1960, helping Kennedy, who embraced the new media, to overtake Nixon. From that point on, television »