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Boston -- I just saw a new company that lets you listen to podcasts on your phone: Foneshow. It's a two-person company, but I'm impressed by how well the small team has thought through the mechanics of taking audio shows and porting them to a phone.

It works like this: you subscribe to a podcast either from the Foneshow site or from the podcast's home page (if the publisher has put a Foneshow sign-up on the page). Then, whenever there's a new episode of your podcast, the system sends you an SMS message with a unique … Read more

Boston -- Expo TV is a relatively new video-sharing site devoted to product reviews. Users videotape their rants or raves about products, and post them for all to see. Videos earn their creators money: 1 cent per view.

The site is great fun. As a rule, people don't tend to post videos about products they are ambivalent about, although the bounty on content means you do get some oddball reviews in there (glue sticks? OK). You'll also find reviews on tech products, toys, luggage, and more. Unfortunately, some categories have cheesy infomercials in them, a legacy of ExpoTV'… Read more

Boston -- I'm at the MIT Enterprise Forum's Brave New Web event today, and later I'll be moderating a panel about starting Web 2.0 businesses. But this morning we're all listening to Brightcove CEO (and local hero) Jeremy Allaire talk about how to start a technology business today.

He said that unlike a lot of current Web 2.0 businesses, he started a business that "we knew would require a lot of capital." He raised $6M early on, far more than most current Web start-ups have in the bank when they get going. … Read more

The MIT Media Lab is ground zero for all things awesome, and Leonardo Bonanni's DishMaker is no exception.

Bonanni's dishwasher-sized machine uses recyclable discs of acrylic to create plates, bowls, and cups right in your home. Once you're done with the plates, you put them back into the DishMaker, where they're recycled and remolded into the dishware of your choice.

The DishMaker does not clean your dishes just yet, but Bonanni's working on it for a next-gen prototype.

According to his Web site, the DishMaker is the same size and consumes the same amount of … Read more

Researchers at the Lincoln Lab at MIT have come up with something that can be described as a sound flashlight. It emits powerful, but tightly focused acoustic beams that can penetrate underground.

When the beams hit a mine, the vibrations from the collision push up dirt around the area. That movement of dirt is then registered by a radar device.

"It turns out that mines will vibrate quite differently from anything else," said MIT's Robert Haupt in a prepared statement. "You can determine what types of mines there are--and which countries made them--by their unique signatures.&… Read more

Do you remember the old-fashioned college days when a friend would call you by cell phone to let you know when "he" turned up at the library? Or maybe you figured out someone's class schedule, so you could just happen to be walking by when "she" got out. Technology, once again, is changing the game.

The Senseable City Lab at MIT released a free desktop application on Wednesday with real-time mapping and instant-messaging features. iFind, as it's called, works by detecting which Wi-Fi access point a person is near. Because MIT has over 2,… Read more

As if the kids in developing nations didn't have to work hard enough to survive, they now have to keep up with all the name changes of the so-called $100 laptop.

MIT's Nicholas Negroponte is now calling the device the "XO," according to Fortune. For a while, it was called the 2B1 (the name that still appears on its official Web site) and before that it was the $100 laptop from the One Laptop Per Child organization.

The name, of course, isn't the only thing that's changed--it will probably cost $130 initially and only … Read more

Can you measure the quality of a piece of art? According to a post over at We Make Money Not Art, Marcelo Coelho at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology thinks so. He's created a contraption called the "Art-o-Meter," which claims to measure the quality of a piece of art by using a motion detector to gauge how much time people stand around staring at it. That clock is then compared to the total length of the exhibition in question, and voila!--you have a definitive answer to the question, "Is there such thing as bad art?&… Read more