Neil Gershenfeld on Fab Labs

The Top 20 iPhone And iPad Apps of 2011 Editor’s note: Contributor Brad Spirrison is the managing editor of mobile app discovery services Appolicious, AndroidApps.com and AppVee. With this post, he continues an annual tradition of picking the best iOS apps of the year. It’s telling that Apple chose an app that debuted more than 14 months ago, Instagram, as its “iPhone App of the Year” for 2011. This should not imply that there was a shortage of quality and groundbreaking apps released this year. Far from it.

The Trivialities and Transcendence of Kickstarter Tom Schierlitz for The New York Times The dipr, left, for dunking cookies in milk, and Edible Cups, right, exceeded their Kickstarter goals. But this time something occurred to me: What about that Kickstarter thing? Kickstarter has been around online for just over two years, and various artists, filmmakers, musicians, writers and designers have used the site to raise more than $75 million for 10,626 “creative projects,” to use Kickstarter’s preferred term. Mitch Altman Talks About The Hackerspace Movement Noisebridge founder and TV-B-Gone inventor Mitch Altman was interviewed at CCC Camp. Just four years ago, Mitch and other American nerds traveled to CCC Camp via Hackers on a Plane and learned about Europe’s second-wave hackerspaces, and vowed to bring that energy back to the U.S. The resulting wave of hundreds of hackerspaces has swept the world.

Best and worst stereoscopic 3D console games It sometimes seems that the only time people talk about 3D TV lately is to knock it . The much-hyped 3D revolution hasn't exactly set the world on fire after it kicked off at CES 2010, and even though plenty of new television sets are 3D compatible, the actual amount of 3D content available remains slim (and with 3D losing its luster at the box office, it may become slimmer still). One possible exception is stereoscopic 3D video games , currently supported by both the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.

Blogging Innovation » Does your Structure help or hinder Innovation? The traditional top-down structure in organizations can be a powerful inhibitor to innovation. It is a reflection of a command and control style of leadership where orders are issued at the top and followed by the ranks. People lower down the organization who have great ideas can feel inhibited about promoting them. They feel it is disrespectful to challenge the command chain. Most modern businesses try to overcome this with open communication and employee empowerment. But there is a more radical alternative – destroy the hierarchy altogether. 11 Technologies in Danger of Going Extinct Intro <p></p><p>It's a common story: The hottest technologies on the market are often upstaged by the next big thing. As new advancements are made, products that once changed our lives are left in the dust and swapped for the new, the shiny and the updated. Here are 11 devices — some you'd expect and some you might not — that are still roaming the streets but facing rapid extinction.</p><p></p> <strong>Fax Machines</strong>

How to bend time to your will and destroy barriers to productivity Okay, that title's a bit dramatic, but I've had a lot of coffee this morning, and that's just what popped out. On topic: I’ve been meaning to write a little about the Pomodoro technique, and a post by Dave Caolo motivated me to finally do it. I agree with Dave: it’s gimmicky, but It works because I can concentrate for 25 minutes easily, and enjoy the regular permission to goof off. It’s effective for me and that’s what counts. I see the Pomodoro technique as a kind of “plug in” for GTD.

In Which We Reveal The Top CES 2012 Trends Without Breaking Embargoes CES 2012 is going to be a crapshoot of predictable products. How do we know? Meetings, lots and lots of pre-show meetings.