Hi, I'm Molly Wood, and welcome to the Buzz Report � the show about the tech news that
everybody�s talking about. This week, it�s Google on coffee, astronomical MPGs, and yeah.
Twitter. But first, it�s the Gadget of the Week.
The Gadget of the Week is the Logitech Harmony 900, which our normally reserved New York
reviews team called �the best universal remote control we�ve ever tested.� Yeah. What that
means is that it�s easy to set up, it looks pretty, and it actually WORKS with all your home
theater components, no matter how many you have, and doesn�t like, fail to turn on the TV
when it turns on everything else. It can do this because it now includes RF. Ahhh. And it�s
awesome. And I love that part of my job is to get this excited about a remote control. Fired up!
(I don�t mean to be a buzzkill, but it does cost 400 dollars. Just a little side note. We love it,
though! Woo!)
Google is testing out a new version of Google. They�re calling it Google Caffeine, and inviting
people to try out its �next-generation infrastructure� on a special sandboxed page. Now, I tried
it, and I found that the search results weren�t significantly different from regular Google. So,
congrats, Google, you�re already perfect. Sorry, Bing.
In other news, GM announced this week that its electric car, the 2011 Chevy Volt,
could get an EPA fuel efficiency rating of 230 miles per gallon. And then Nissan
IMMEDIATELY came out with the trash-talking, saying that its electric vehicle, the
Leaf, will actually get 367 miles per gallon, and you are PATHETIC, Chevy Volt, you
should be ASHAMED for trying to kill the environment like that!
See, because, I personally think that since my car gets 25 miles to the gallon? Once
you�re up to like, 200 miles per gallon? It�s a slightly academic argument. I�ll take
one of each.
Here�s the latest on the ill-fated Large Hadron Collider. Plagued by helium leaks, the LHC is now
set to re-start in November, but at only half the energy it was designed for. Or, as the Silicon
Valley.com blog cleverly put it � it�ll restart as the Midsize Hadron Collider. And at this rate, by
2010, it�ll be the extremely sorry, forget we were ever here, never mind about us, just a big hole
in the ground really, Hadron Collider. Poor thing. At least it won�t kill us all.
And now for the big buzz of the week: Nonstop freakin� Twitter news.
Twitter seems to be on some sort of rampage of popularity and pop-coverage. This
week, it was that the wife of Twitter co-founder Evan Williams was twittering her
childbirth. And, the UK�s Royal Opera House has pledged to perform an opera that
will be written entirely by Twitter users. Oh, god. Government documents show that
the military is monitoring Twitter to see how people react to high-profile events and
try to engage in damage control where necessary.
And the world struggled to recover from last week�s Twitter outage, which appears to
have been a malicious attack launched by some people in Russia trying to take down
a single Georgian blogger who was stirring up political tensions on Twitter and
Facebook. But the relief was short-lived, as more attacks hit the service Tuesday. Is
Twitter just TOO BIG OF A DEAL right now? Do we all need to just TAKE A BREAK!?
Yes. Yes, it is. But it�s ok. Friendster, MySpace, Facebook, Google, blogs, YouTube, newsgroups,
and the World Wide Web have also all been, at some point, TOO BIG OF A DEAL.
All of this has happened before, and will happen again.
And that�s the Buzz Report for this week, everyone. I�m Molly Wood! Thanks for watching.
