Author: Sal McCloskey

Sal is a tech blogger in Silicon Valley who (sadly) falls into the stereotype associated with nerds. Yes, he's a Star Trek fan. His glasses are thick and his allergies are thicker. Despite all that, he's (somehow) married to a beautiful woman and has 4 kids.

Crunching the numbers: iPads vs texbooks

Some day in the (very) near future, we may no longer need a traditional backpack at school. Rather than carrying around a laptop and textbooks, we will be consolidating the various components of school gear down to a single device that fits nicely within our hands: an iPad. Many schools are already more »

The really quick evolution of Apple product designs

For the last three of decades, Apple has separated itself from the various competitors through company culture, innovative technologies, and stellar marketing efforts. They have built a passionate community around their products based upon a lifestyle-promise – owning an Apple makes the more »

Amazon Irony: The chain store "killer" to launch a chain of physical stores

The company that many blame in part for the downfall of many large and small retail stores around the world is going to try its hand at the very thing they helped to weaken: retail store chains. Within the next few months, Amazon plans to launch retail store in their home town of Seattle that will focus on their emerging Amazon more »

Favo.rs brings accountability to business relationships

LinkedIn and Facebook may have the market cornered for building relationships between business professionals, many startups are starting to pop up that take it to the next level. One such startup is Favo.rs. I was first turnedonto Favo’rs a couple of months ago from an article on Wired. A “good ol’ boy” network, as they more »

SOPA and PIPA: Everything you need to know

Today is SOPA Blackout Day to oppose the bills currently being proposed in Congress, Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect-IP Act (PIPA). You may have noticed that there are several major websites that are down today, including Wikipedia, Reddit, and Mozilla. You may have noticed that you more »

Website owners, here's how to protest SOPA on January 18th

Social news aggregator Reddit.com took the lead and announced that they were “going black” on January 18th to protest SOPA and PIPA. Despite backpedaling in Congress, the need is greater than ever for people to learn what the bills will mean if passed. Other websites need to follow Reddit’s lead. Several more »

Samsung Galaxy Note starts the tablet/smartphone hybrid race

Those of us at CES know have seen a million gadgets and gizmos in the last few hours. We’ve seen cool booths, inventive advertisements, and enough touchscreens to make our fingers bleed. There are many standouts at the show, one of which being the Samsung Galaxy Note. Is it a small tablet or a large smartphone? more »

Ericsson's vision of a "Networked Society" is beautiful, terrifying

There’s a fine line between technology that enables a better world and technology that makes us head in the wrong direction. Movies like The Matrix, Terminator, and iRobot have given us a fiction view of what could happen if technology connected us all and eventually had the ability to take over. more »

Fun and frightful UFO video for the skeptic in all of us

Most people fall in the “maybe” category. There are others who are absolutely certain there are no extra-terrestrial UFOs, that they’re just government experiments, fabrications of modern video editing, or misunderstood phenomenon. Others are positive that there are visitors from other more »