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Last but not least, the man's got a product you might be able to afford for your home. In the quest for an item for his FIRST young engineers to sell -- a la Girl Scout cookies -- he tapped LED manufacturer Cree to produce an 450 lumen light bulb that draws just 7 watts and will retail for about $25 door-to-door. In case you're wondering, that's cheaper and more efficient than most any lamp we've seen before. Dean says they've already produced several hundred thousand of the bulbs thanks to a surprise $3 million investment from Google, and plan to have them in the hands of every FIRST kid soon. Keep on fighting the good fight, Dean. Dean Kamen at T

As game developers and publishers look more and more to digital distribution as a way to bypass current brick-and-mortar game sellers -- in part to cut down on game reselling, a major loss to their bottom line -- we could be witnessing the beginning of a new model of game development. In the future, when you drop $60-$70 on a new game, you might just be buying the game engine and the background art, with the knowledge that the developers will be releasing content packs that provide entirely new, self-contained game experiences that build off the original title.

Last Thursday the search-engine giant blocked the sharing of its Gmail data to any firms who didn't reciprocate by sharing their own users' information--and highest-profile of the sinners is Facebook.

We will no longer allow websites to automate the import of users' Google Contacts (via our API) unless they allow similar export to other sites."

The search advertising market is still going strong. The latest report from Efficient Frontier shows that total spending on search-ads jumped 23 percent year-over-year during the most recent quarter, which the search engine marketing firm said was a sign of “larger budget appetite and competition among advertisers as well as increased consumer demand.” All sectors Efficient Frontier tracks showed double-digit gains in spending.