Razor

When I first saw the video pitch for Dollar Shave Club, I thought it was a joke. The fact that the site was down for a long period didn't help.

But as we know now, this thing is for real. The YouTube video now has more than 1.6 million views. A backer I spoke with said it's all part of the strategy.

At Launch, I talked with Peter Pham, from Science Inc., the accelerator that's been working with Dollar Shave Club. Science has been working on other similar plays, like the underwear company MeUndies and the … Read more

commentary While the Kindle Fire's dramatically low price may seem revolutionary, Amazon is actually taking its cues from a well-worn playbook.

Industry analysts, blogs, and even our own site cooed at the $199 price point of Amazon's freshly unveiled tablet. The company is using price as the hook, even if it loses money on each unit.

But before you sing Amazon's praises for breaking new ground, you should realize that undercutting the competition to drive adoption is far from a new strategy. In reality, Amazon and the Kindle Fire is only the latest example of a company … Read more

The arms race among shaving razor manufacturers has been a lengthy and dramatic affair. Two blades. Aloe strips. Three blades. Batteries. Four blades. Thinner edges. Five blades!

Will the madness ever end? Nope. Upstart manufacturer Zafirro's Titanium razor is making all of those other razors cower with inadequacy.

Yes, it is made with actual titanium alloy. This is not just any titanium. It's the Grade 38 good stuff, used in demanding military applications. You can rest easy knowing your razor could hold up to the harsh conditions of combat.… Read more

If human progress can be measured by the number of blades we've managed to fit on a single razor, it's clear we have arrived on a massive scale. Both Gillette and Schick will shortly have a five-blade razor on the market.

Certainly it's progress of some kind, but whether its utility outweighs its cost is another question (and one that Wall Street Journal columnist Neal Templin answers in the negative). It also leaves plenty of room for a one-bladed, disruptive innovator to steal a march on the Gillette/Schick arms race, as Jeff Stibel argues in Harvard … Read more

Next to all the 09/09/09 product announcement hoopla this week, this little USB device probably won't even rate a blip on the tech radar. But we've always had a soft spot for USB accessories, particularly of the wacky encounter. And anything out of Thanko's USB stable merits just that as the Japanese vendor is known for putting a USB port on just about anything, from USB tie fans to USB-powered lunch boxes. Its latest target, the Electric Razor, clearly hasn't escaped that enthusiastic treatment.

That said, even geeks and gamers who are permanently tethered … Read more

Occam's Razor essentially says that all things being equal, the simplest solution is the best. The principle has implications in virtually every field of science, not to mention philosophy, aesthetics, marketing, business, you name it.

If for some reason you don't buy the word of a 14th-century Franciscan friar, it might interest you to know that Albert Einstein also believed the universe loves simplicity. I don't know about you, but I'm in no position to argue with that guy.

You'd think that keeping things simple would be the easiest path, but that's not necessarily the case. Sometimes it's downright impossible. Look at the personal computer, for example. The need for backwards compatibility with legacy programs and interfaces has forever rendered the PC more complex than any of us would like.… Read more

To the chagrin of home-entertainment aficionados, there will always be people who want all their media functions in a single box. We're not talking about a high-end convergence phenom like the $10,000 "Q," by the way, but something more like a TV/DVD/VCR combo that can be found behind the counter at Walgreens. But with TVs getting thinner all the time, the design and manufacturing may get increasingly tricky.

There is, however, an alternative. The "Razor Home Entertainment Theater" is a combo unit that can be mounted below a flat panel on the … Read more

The question of why you opened the hand-addressed, over-stamped envelope in the first place can wait; let's deal with the white powder that spilled out on your desk.

And for that we turn to an 8-pound, battery powered polymerase chain reaction (PCR) device called the Razor. New from Idaho Technology, the Razor can analyze up to 12 samples of suspected biohazard material, including anthrax, in less than half an hour.

Described as the "gold standard" of infectious disease diagnoses, the PCR process works by exponentially amplifying DNA via enzymatic replication. The Razor streamlines that process by eliminating … Read more