Media

The Philippines is the most emotional country in the world. No, this is not merely based on my own blissful, painful experience.

It has been proved by Gallup researchers who, no doubt, dedicated themselves fully to the local nuances of exalted love and frayed tempers.

The latest to feel the severe winds of the latter is Justin Bieber. Yes, the rapidly baritoning Canadian singer has attracted the gaping wrath of the Philippines. High-falutin' dignitaries want him banned from the country.

No, it is not for some racy song that mentions fondling, nor for gratuitous crotch-grabbing. It is for trying to … Read more

Yahoo has just injected its board with a whole lot of Silicon Valley firepower by adding PayPal cofounder Max Levchin.

Also serving as the chairman of boards at Kaggle and Yelp and as a director at Evernote, Levchin is a Silicon Valley all-star. He was PayPal's CTO until eBay bought the payment services company, after which he started the social media company Slide. Levchin sold Slide to Google in 2010, and is now leading HVF, a company that focuses on big data.

His appointment was coupled with the departure of two board members, Weather Channel CEO David Kenny and … Read more

With all the chatter about Apple upending the TV business as it did the music industry, you'd think the incumbent cable players were incapable of redefining the TV user experience. Comcast CEO Brian Roberts begs to differ. In an interview with Fortune, Roberts said he's taking lessons from Apple in how to "take really complicated things and make them simple, make them fun, make them beautiful and easy."

Read: CNET's Apple HDTV rumor roundup

He continued, "As I think about where I'd like to see us go, it is absolutely … Read more

I am currently on a psychiatrist-imposed company retreat in Miami.

I have been told not to engage strangers, nor those from or to whom I would like to become either estranged or engaged.

Sitting quietly at my beloved News Cafe this morning (yes, where Gianni Versace had his last coffee), I detected an increase in traffic but a block away.

There was the slamming of truck doors. There was a flurry of fetching TV presenters, pressing down their beige trousers by hand.

Not being an investigative reporter, I sidled over and asked a burly cameraman what was going on.

"It's John McAfee," he replied. "He's in there." … Read more

When you come down from on high and mix with us, les miserables, it can be a touch depressing.

For though you try to take us seriously, we may not feel the same way. And, well, social media allows us to express our feelings without fear of permanent damnation.

Pope Benedict XVI, famously a recent convert to Twitter, is discovering that mixing with us isn't always pretty.

His Holiness -- and his almost equally holy advisers -- surely believes that one has to speak to the faithful through every available channel.

And yet this entails encountering the unfaithful too: … Read more

Normally, when you hear screams outside an Apple store, it's because, oh, the doors have opened and there's a new gizmo for the insatiable.

However, at the Apple store in the Pheasant Lane Mall in Nashua, N.H. on Tuesday, the screams were those of a 44-year-old Chinese woman being Tasered by police.

As WMUR-TV reports, Xiaojie Li, of Newton, N.H. says -- through her 12-year-old daughter's translation -- that she isn't proficient in English.

"She's certainly capable of coming up here and purchasing these things from the Apple store here. Whether her … Read more

Do you talk to your fellow passengers on public transport or perhaps on your cell phone to your beloved?

Do you enjoy listening in to passengers' conversations? It's so much more interesting than watching them clip their toenails.

Do you even, as I do, talk to yourself on occasion, when there's nothing better to do?

How would you feel if you local police force could listen in? I merely ask this, because of the mundane fact that they might be.

It seems that video surveillance just isn't enough these days. Your local everyday busybody authorities apparently are feeling the need to listen in on buses, just in case someone is discussing yesterday's bank robbery or tomorrow's drug deal.… Read more

Last week, we left our protagonists on "Start-Ups: Silicon Valley" hanging on the end of a strap-on.

No, wait. It was Hermione (blonde, British, boozer) who was hanging on to a strap-on at the end.

Her brother Ben (short, pretty, pretty short) was livid with her, even though it was her birthday party. One doesn't play with sex toys in front of VCs.

Not unless those sex toys are social and can entice 100 million users within a week.

Ben reveals to Hermione something more important than whether they lost $500,000 to her dildo dancing: he … Read more

TweetDeck users can still view Instagram photos directly in tweets, despite a much-publicized move by the popular photo-sharing service to shut off its users' ability to tweet images.

Last week, Instagram announced it was ending Twitter Card integration, its most aggressive step to date in its ongoing turf war with Twitter. The upshot of the decision, which Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom announced at Le Web in Paris, was that Twitter users could no longer view Instagram photos directly in tweets.

But for some reason, those photos are still visible when viewing tweets in TweetDeck. Whether that's because of an … Read more