Every hear of a calculator for color? For the past month or so I've been playing around with the Color Calculator, a tool my colleague Nathan Moroney created as a way of choosing colors without names.

The calculator has nine color "buttons" and a larger square. It works like sort of an electronic artist's palette, and the square is where the colors get mixed. You start out with grey and the calculator shows the RGB (red-green...

One of the great computing revolutions of our time has been the dramatic reduction in size of processing components and the power they consume, making mobile computing a reality. The term mobile computer spans many types of devices, from laptop or notebook computers—now central to much of our work—to the smallest cell phones, which can not only provide a mundane telephone connection but also serve as an electronic organizer. The PDA, also origin...

Robert Scoble, the well-known technology blogger, was here the other day and posted a trio of videos about what he saw.

• Datacenter of the future: Scoble visits the HP Labs data center and finds that, unlike most, it isn't freezing inside, thanks to HP Labs cooling and power-management technologies that dramatically reduce energy demands.  He also gets to meet our data center robot. interviews HP Fellow Chandrakant Patel, who is dire...

Chandrakant is a pioneer in what's now known as sustainable IT or "green computing". He founded HP Labs' thermal technology research program in the early 1990s, and has continued to push for (and develop) more energy-efficient IT solutions.

Environmental issues have long been important to me so Chandrakant's work is, in my opinion, some of the most exciting research we do at HP Labs.

One of his latest projects aims ...

All the major CPU manufacturers have thrown their lot in with multi-core designs. The (multi-billion dollar) question now is how to program these devices. I can tell you with some confidence that we don’t yet know what the answer will...

Imagine a day when a single device small enough to fit in your pocket has the power of a laptop and can deliver a rich computing, telephony, media, gaming, and Internet experience. Imagine a day when this device knows your tendencies and preferences and can adapt and optimize its interfaces to match what you are doing at any point any time. Imagine a day when this device is not constrained as a standalone unit, but can dynamically become a hyb...