According to a report by Nielsen Online, social-networking and microblogging service Twitter grew 343% since September of 2007, making it the fastest growing of these sites. Twitter is being used by individuals, myself!, companies, and even NASA’s robotic spacecraft the Mars Phoenix lander to make short instantaneous updates or “tweets” as they’re called via website or mobile phone. Sarah Milstein, former Chief Publishing Evangelist for O’Reilly Media talks about Twitter best practices for businesses.

Mario shares his list of top techy gift choices with an emphasis on gifts that are portable, useable, and affordable.

Obama hasn’t appointed a Chief Technology Officer just yet, but has recently announced his team of leaders for a technology, innovation, and government reform policy group. But what specifically will be on the priority list for this CTO?

A non-official Obama site, ObamaCTO.org allows users to vote on issues in order of priority. So far the top 3 policies listed on the site include:

1) ensuring net neutrality

2) ensuring the privacy of citizens and revising the patriot act and

3) repealing the digital millennium copyright act (THE DMCA).

The problem with this list is that these are issues that the new CTO will not be able to directly address, as altering this policy is up to Congress.

Buildings in the US are responsible for 37% of all green house gas emotions worldwide and consume 70% of the electricity in the US. Mario discusses hybrid buildings with Jay Bhatt, Senior VP of AutoDesk. Find out more info from the US Green Building Council.

This year, as many as a third of all voters nationwide will be casting their ballot for the presidential election early, which is up twenty percent from 2000. Mario speaks with Brian Moore, the Creative Director of GoVoteAbsentee.org which is a website that streamlines the process of absentee voting.

Five minutes, 20 slides. What would you say? Ignite is an event where 16 artists, technologists, thinkers, and personalities take the stage to answer this challenge. Mario speaks with two of the presenters, Brian Liles and Patti Chan from www.600block.com.

According to a market report from Futuresource Consulting, over 600,000 interactive whiteboards were installed worldwide in 2008, valued in excess of one billion dollars. By 2012, one in six classrooms worldwide are forecast to be using the technology. Mario speaks with Colin Messenger, a Senior Consultant with Futuresource Consulting.

In September, Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s personal Yahoo email account was hacked. The hacker posted screenshots and the details of how he did it online. It took less than an hour of online searching to find the answers to Palin’s security questions to exploit Yahoo’s “forgot my password” service. Mario discusses what can you do to safeguard your personal online accounts.

The browser market has long been dominated by Microsoft’s Internet Explorer which makes up roughly seventy-five percent of global web users, trailed by Mozilla’s Firefox which has consistently grown in usage to nearly twenty percent. But Google has just entered the market with their Chrome browser, which was released in Beta form at the beginning of September. It’s based on WebKit, the framework that is used in Surfari and the iPhone.

 

Why do we need another browser?

Is the era of the celebrity Architect over? Mario speaks with Phil Bernstein, Professor at the Yale School of Architecture and Vice President of Autodesk about two decades of architecture and how digital fabrication has redefined how the generation of architects work and think.