Greg Adler, Narasu Rebbapragada, Paul Jasper, Tracey Capen

Depending on the neighborhood, the fire-engine red “People Love Us on Yelp” sticker outnumbers sedate-looking “Zagat Rated” emblems or fading newspaper reviews on restaurant doors. There’s no mistaking the power--and, let’s face it, the sheer entertainment value--of candid reviews written by regular diners rather than food-industry elite.

And recently, a report written by Harvard Business School assistant professor Michael Luca showed just how powerful a Yelp rating can be: Luca found that a one-star increase in the rating of an independent restaurant leads to a 5 to 9 percent increase in revenue.

UPDATE [March 8, 2012]: The Department of Justice said yesterday it plans to sue Apple and five of the largest e-book publishers in the US on charges that they acted together to push up the price of electronic books, the Wall Street Journal reports.

As discussed in this PCWorld investigative feature from last May, e-book publishers deeply resented large retailers like Amazon selling their e-books at deeply discounted rates under a "wholesale model." Apple introduced a new model--called the "agency" model--where the publisher sets the price of the e-book and the retailer sells it for that price, taking a 30 percent fee.

Hangman has taken a far leap from the chalkboards in my elementary school classroom to a digital version on your PC. The program is very colorful with sound to enhance the graphics. There are many categories of words to choose from, and thousands of words in total. Some words have additional information associated with it. For example, if the word is from the States or Countries category, you will be given information such as the capital of the State or Country.

The program is very easy to use. Users can customize the game content changing the amount of guesses, the category of the word, and even the colors within the program. Towards the top of the screen, the program keeps track of the total number of games played, total wins and losses, and your current streak. Hangman Pro supports many languages, including Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, Flemish, French, German, Italian, Norwegian, Spanish and Swedish.

This program is shareware, however, if you want to create your own categories and words to add to the game, you need to purchase the full version for $25. Also, in the demo version, randomly, you will get an annoying box that encourages you to register the game. That box goes away once you register.

--Greg Adler

Like a lot of people, Kenny Thompson had trouble balancing a 40-plus-hour job with a fitness regimen. The 34-year-old food-market manager, a resident of Morristown, New Jersey, used to work out regularly when he was younger, but over the past couple of years he had become more inactive. Recently that all changed, thanks to his Xbox 360 Kinect add-on and a game called Your Shape: Fitness Evolved.

An avid gamer who realized the need for a lifestyle change, Thompson entered Ubisoft's Your Shape: Fitness Evolved Bootcamp contest for a chance to be among the first to play the game. Since then the game has become part of a regular commitment to diet and exercise, and Thompson has lost more than 15 pounds. His favorite feature in Your Shape: Fitness Evolved is cardio kickboxing, but he can also try one of the many programs designed by experts from Men's Health and Women's Health magazines. Through Kinect's motion sensors, which track more than 50,000 points on his body, the game gives him feedback on how he's moving through the exercises.

On many mornings, Ji Kim loads his backpack with three Apple devices--an iPhone, an iPad, and a MacBook Pro--before he taking the bus to his downtown San Francisco office. When giving presentations from his laptop, he uses his iPhone to access data from the Internet so as not to mess with the PowerPoint slides. Sometimes towards the end of the day, he'll carry those same devices to the quiet solitude of a café near his house so he can finish off some work uninterrupted.

When he returns to the San Francisco apartment that he shares with his girlfriend, those devices join an Amazon Kindle e-book reader, a Sony PlayStation 3 game console, an Apple Mac Mini (turned into an entertainment center), and a PC that also live there.

Imagine if you could learn to fly a helicopter by downloading software directly to your brain. Imagine if your eyes could see an object, overlaid with data, miles away in the dark. These science-fiction scenes from The Matrix and Terminator movies may be less fictional in the future, thanks to the fascinating science behind medical implants.

The gargantuan amount of high-quality user data on Facebook is causing everyone--from marketers to hackers--to salivate like dogs gazing at a steak. They all want a piece of you.

Thanks to Facebook's Open Graph API (which simplifies the development of third-party applications that interoperate with the social networking site) and social plug-ins (which essentially splash Facebook's "Like" button all over the Internet), people who are interested in your data are getting a chance at a much choicer cut of it. (For more, read "How Facebook Plans to Dominate the Web.")

With personal trainers producing YouTube fitness videos, iPod Nanos sporting pedometers, and yogis practicing tree pose using the Wii Fit--technology has become one of the best ways to set and maintain fitness goals. We consulted sports professionals, fitness enthusiasts, and tech companies to find the latest and most interesting hardware, software, and Websites that you can use to get in shape and stay the course.

General Fitness Gadgetry

A portable music player is still as important to workouts today as it was when the first wave of yellow Sony Walkmans hit gyms in the early 1980s. (For more tech oldies, see "The 50 Greatest Gadgets of the Past 50 Years.") One new fitness-focused model is the Philips Activa ($130), which adds workout software to a combination portable media player and FM radio. Enter your age, weight, and height, and the Activa will count calories, time, or distance as you engage in an activity such as running, cycling, or rowing. Use the TempoMusic feature in conjunction with the up and down arrows to find songs that match your speed, so you won't find yourself listening to speed metal during your cooldown. Need a little encouragement? Program a male or female voice to update you (whenever you hit the Boost button) on calories burned, distance covered, or simply the virtues of staying the course. Plus, you can download all of this information to your PC and track it over time.

If your budget for a new camera tops out at $200, you could do a lot worse than Pentax's Optio P70. This 12-megapixel point-and-shoot is easy to use and takes decent snaps. It squeezes in several neat features, including HD video capture, but achieving the low price did necessitate making a few compromises.

The silvery aluminum body of the version I reviewed appears a little cheap, but the white and red models are quite attractive--and alluringly slim. Despite being only 0.8 inch thick, the Optio P70 carries a 4X zoom lens with a 27.5mm wide-angle extreme that's great for shooting expansive panoramas. Unfortunately, the camera's shake reduction mode uses software to compensate for shaky hands, rather than shifting the lens or sensor mechanically.

If your budget for a new camera tops out at $200, you could do a lot worse than the Pentax Optio P70. This 12-megapixel point-and-shoot is easy to use and takes decent snaps. It squeezes in several neat features, including HD video capture, but achieving the low price did necessitate making a few compromises.

The silvery aluminum body of the version I reviewed appears a little cheap, but the white and red models are quite attractive--and alluringly slim. Despite being only 0.8 inch thick, the Optio P70 carries a 4X zoom lens with a 27.5mm wide-angle extreme that's great for shooting expansive panoramas. Unfortunately, the camera's shake reduction mode uses software to compensate for shaky hands, rather than shifting the lens or sensor mechanically.

If you often find that your friends wander off, birds take flight, or the sun dips below the horizon before you can press the shutter or adjust settings accordingly, the Samsung TL34HD ($300 as of 3/16/09) might be a good point-and-shoot camera option for you. The TL34HD eliminates a lot of the menu-diving that other feature-heavy digital cameras require.

The TL34HD's 3-inch touchscreen makes the camera a cinch to operate, and the icons that border the screen give an instant view of all your settings. Tapping each icon with your finger pops up a menu of alternatives. If you can't remember what each icon means, holding your finger on it for a moment brings up a written description.