Ryan Dillman

Mar. 20 - Ford unveils a taxi cab concept that’s short but tall, offering lots of storage space.

The cab is 30 percent more fuel efficient than current cabs.

Fred Katayama reports from the New York International Auto Show.

Mar. 25 - Fighting robots battle for supremacy in the latest of Japan’s Robo-One Championships.

More than 100 humanoid robots were entered for the two-day contest which, at the end, saw less than half still standing and divided between heavyweights and featherweights.

Social networking is all the rage these days and one of the latest and greatest sites on the national scene is myYearbook.com, which is sort of a combination of the viral widgets of Facebook and style and features of Myspace. The network already has over five million members and is growing rapidly.

On their “Our Story” page, they claim the site was created by a couple high school kids, which I find hard to believe, considering the venture capital funding and national advertising contracts the site had already attained at its inception.No, this was a website created by corporate America with the sole purpose of APPEARING to be a hip site created by and for kids. Their claims are about as believable as boy bands writing their own songs.

Despite this, they are situated nicely to become the new cool hangout now that even parents and grandparents are hanging out on Myspace by the tens of thousands. After all, once everyone knows about a site like Myspace, it’s no longer cool, so the in-crowd has to find somewhere else to hang out. Whether or not myYearbook is that new destination has yet to be determined.

Mar. 5 - Pleo the robotic dinosaur proves to be a star attraction at the CeBIT annual computer expo in Germany.

Pleo was designed by its creators, the Californian company Ugobe, to emulate the appearance and behaviour of a week-old infant Camerasaurus.

It’s being marketed as a household pet.

Helen Long reports.

Mar. 7 - A concept phone now on display at New York’s Museum of Modern Art demonstrates Nokia’s vision for how handsets might evolve.

The Morph concept is the result of a collaboration between the Nokia Research Centre and Cambridge University’s nanoscience centre.

Reuters Technology Correspondent Matt Cowan reports on the likelihood of it becoming a reality.

Stuff On My Cat is one of those silly, time wasting sites that I visit maybe once a year when I remember it exists.  It’s not quite as funny as its sister site, I Can Has Cheezeburger, but it’s worth the occasional visit.  The photos on the site feature, as you may have guessed, cats with stuff on them.  If you’re wondering why this is funny, well, you’re either the type of person who gets it or you’re not.

We all use search engines every day to make our lives a little easier, but Good Search allows us to improve the lives of others just by searching the Internet. Every time you do a search on Good Search, they donate a penny to the charity of your choice. This can be any legit charity in existence, so if your local charity of choice hasn’t signed up at Good Search yet, be sure to tell them about the site.

Good Search is powered by Yahoo, so it’s no different than searching at Yahoo.com, other than the fact that you’re helping out a charity in the process. It doesn’t take many searches to make a difference either. If you get 100 people to do 2 searches a day, you’d make an estimated $730 a year for your charity. With a thousand people doing 2 searches a day, you’d make $7,300 and with 10,000 people you’d make $73,000. As you can see, Good Search can benefit both large and small organizations.

Good Search also offers a site called Good Shop, which has links to several major Internet retailers. If you make a purchase at these retailers, they’ll donate a portion of your purchase price to your charity of choice.

So bookmark Good Search and start donating to your charity by doing searches today, and don’t forget to tell your local charities about the site as well. If you have any questions about the site, you can check out their FAQ by clicking here.

Arcades, a Japan staple for over 30 years with cutting-edge video and games, are under attack, hit by the success of Nintendo’s Wii console.

Once a testing center for next-generation games ranging from “Street Fighting” to dance, major industry players like Namco Bandai are closing arcades as potential patrons stay home.

America’s arcade industry was killed by the original Nintendo in the eighties but Japan’s arcades have been fairly healthly until now. This is depressing news for fans of arcade games, as the few new games that make it to the U.S. each year almost all originate in Japan. Less video arcades in the world mean less game developers making new games.

The ironic thing is that this ends up hurting the console makers like Nintendo as well, as many of the greatest console games over the years got their start in the arcades. It’s yet another testament to the domination of the Wii that the Japanese now prefer to stay at home and play Nintendo instead of going to their high-tech arcades, which have been a large part of youth culture for decades now.

One of the classic time wasting sites on the web can be found at Lunchtimers.  It’s a virtual refrigerator door covered in letter magnets.  The fun is trying to spell out words while other people around the world are also trying to spell out words of their own.  You can work together, disrupt their attempts, or try to post your own message on the fridge.  It’s a unique way to kill 5 minutes and it’s something that could only exist on the Internet.  Click here to check it out.