Apple's iPhone (as shown at apple.com) has plenty of new competition.

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Cell phones blanket the world. Billions of them. But the next phone in your hand — if it’s not there already, on the road, on the move — really isn’t a phone. It’s a computer.

Mobile computing — with powerful smart phones like the iPhone or the new Droid — is exploding in popularity. Big sales. Zillions of “apps.” Lots of power in your pocket.

New users call it a revelation. Industry watchers have long predicted a revolution. Is it here? Is it on?

This hour, On Point: What does it mean for our lives, work and economy when mobile computing goes to critical mass?

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Joining us from Austin, Texas, is Omar Gallaga. He writes on technology culture for the Austin American-Statesman and is regular contributor to NPR’s All Tech Considered.

From New York we’re joined by John Abell, New York bureau chief for Wired.com. He directs coverage of business and disruptive media and writes for Wired.com’s Epicenter blog.

And from Los Angeles we’re joined by Jason Calacanis. He’s an Internet entrepreneur who has founded many companies, including Silicon Alley Reporter and Weblogs, Inc. He’s founder and CEO of Mahalo.com, a “human-powered” search engine.

The Tesla Model S, slated for 2011. (teslamotors.com)

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The all-electric, hot and sexy Tesla Roadster goes zero to sixty in 3.9 seconds and sits in the garages of George Clooney, Matt Damon, Leonardo DiCaprio, David Letterman, and the founders of Google.

There are six hundred of them in the world, put together not in Detroit but in Silicon Valley. In 2011, backed by almost half a billion dollars in government loans, Tesla plans to roll out a high-performance sedan, the Model S.

In a decade, claims Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla Motors, there could be a million new Teslas a year. They could revolutionize the U.S. auto industry, he says. And save the world.

Elon Musk dreams big. Is he just dreaming?

This hour, On Point: Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk, on the future of electric cars -- and the planet.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Joining us from Los Angeles is Elon Musk, chairman, CEO and product architect of Tesla Motors. A Silicon Valley entrepeneur, he’s also CEO of Space X, a space technologies company that resupplies the Space Station and aims to colonize Mars; chairman of SolarCity, a solar power provider; and co-founder of PayPal. 

From Detroit, we’re joined by Bill Vlasic, Detroit bureau chief for The New York Times.

More links:

You can see a photo gallery of Tesla’s cars at their website.

In a skeptical piece last June, BusinessWeek’s David Welch asked “Can Tesla Become a Real Automaker?”  And on The New York Times’ Wheels blog, Jim Motavalli looked at some of the challenges facing Tesla’s Model S.

Here’s the Edmunds.com video review of the forthcoming Model S:

Watch a video about the forthcoming Tesla sedan, the Model S:

Human memory is a famously tricky thing. We remember some things. We forget a lot more. And we shape and sculpt the memories we do have with a vengeance.

But more and more, the actual events of our lives are being recorded electronically. In Facebook albums and Twitter posts and smartphone files, yes, but also in thousands of digital transactions we don’t even think about.

Now, two top Microsoft computer scientists are talking about an era of e-memory — “total recall” — as a revolution in what it means to be human.

This hour, On Point: E-memory, total recall, and human nature.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Joining us from San Francisco are Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell, co-authors of “Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything.” Bell has been a principal researcher at Microsoft Research since 1995.  Prior to that, he was vice president of research and devlopment for Digital Equipment Corporation from 1960 to 1983. He is the first user of “MyLifeBits,” a project funded by Microsoft to experiment with “lifeblogging.” He has been called “the Frank Lloyd Wright of computers.” Jim Gemmell is a senior researcher at Microsoft Research. His work has led to features in Windows XP, Bing.com, and more, and he has worked with Gordon Bell on the MyLifeBits project.

Joining us from New York is Douglas Rushkoff, professor of media studies at the New School University, technology columnist for The Daily Beast, and author of “Life Inc: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back,” “Get Back in the Box: Innovation from the Inside Out,” and numerous other books.

Detail from "The Beatles: Rock Band" video game (thebeatlesrockband.com)

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Aerosmith did it. And Metallica. And the Red Hot Chili Peppers. And Spinal Tap. They’ve all seen their music take the plunge into the world of Guitar Hero, Rock Band, and video games.

But the Beatles? Not until now.

Out from the mists of time, the Fab Four are making the leap. “The Beatles: Rock Band” hits the shelves tomorrow. The marketing din is deafening. Soon, you too can grab a plastic guitar and rock out like the Beatles at Shea Stadium.

Is this a revolution? Evolution? Or just fun and games?

This hour, On Point: music, video games, and Beatlemania all over again.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Joining us in our studio is Alex Rigopulos, cofounder and CEO of Harmonix Music Systems, developers of “The Beatles: Rock Band.” Harmonix developed the first Guitar Hero game in 2005, and in 2006 the company was acquired by MTV Games for $175 million. Harmonix now makes the Rock Band games, the first of which came out in 2007.

Joining us from New York is Heather Chaplin, video game critic and journalist who’s written for Salon, Fortune, and The New York Times. She’s co-author of “Smartbomb: The Quest for Art, Entertainment, and Big Bucks in the Videogame Revolution.”

Also from New York, we’re joined by Lisa Robinson, contributing editor at Vanity Fair, where she covers music and the music industry. She has interviewed all four of the Beatles.

A jet fly-by kicks off the aerial festivities celebrating the launch of the new T-Mobile myTouch 3G phone with Google's Android operating system, in San Francisco on Wednesday, August 5, 2009. (AP)

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“Cloud computing” sounds exotic, but it’s becoming absolutely commonplace.

All kinds of computer activity that used to happen in your home or office, on your PC’s local software, is instead happening online. On the Web. In the “cloud.”

Your digital address book is probably there. Your calendar. Your digital photos. And soon, much more — maybe all — of the computing you do will happen far from your desktop. On Internet server farms. In the cloud.

Google and Microsoft are battling there. And a lot more than money may be at stake.

This hour, On Point: Cloud computing and you.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Joining us from Cambridge, Mass., is Jonathan Zittrain, professor at Harvard Law School, co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, and author of “The Future of the Internet — and How to Stop It.” In a recent op-ed piece for The New York Times, titled “Lost in the Cloud,” he argued that cloud computing “comes with real dangers.”

And joining us from San Francisco is Kara Swisher, technology columnist for The Wall Street Journal and co-executive editor of All Things Digital, a website owned by Dow Jones covering technology, the Internet and media.

More:

In a guest post on the On Point blog, Jonathan Zittrain explains why he’s still worried — despite Kara Swisher’s and others’ “utterly reasonable optimism.”

A rendering of Masdar City from the Masdar Initiative website (masdarcity.ae).

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In Arabic, the word Masdar means “the source.” And right now, the desert outside Abu Dhabi, capital of the United Arab Emirates, is the source of a budding green revolution.

Construction is underway for Masdar City, a high-tech metropolis that will be home to 50,000 residents -- and be the world’s first city with no carbon footprint. No cars. Zero waste. A truly green metropolis.

The plans on the drawing board are very big. The challenges are big, too. Can it even work? We’re going direct to Abu Dhabi for answers, and a tour.

This hour, On Point: Masdar and the green city of the future.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Jane Clayson, guest host

Tom Ashbrook is on vacation.

Guests:

Khaled Awad, director of property development for the Masdar project. He joins us from Masdar City, on the outskirts of Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates.

In our studio we’re joined by Kevin Bullis, energy editor at Technology Review. His article on Masdar, “A Zero-Emissions City in the Desert,” appeared in the March/April 2009 issue.

More links:

The Masdar City website offers an extensive overview of the project, along with videos and an image gallery.

Watch a video “fly through” of Masdar City as rendered by the firm Foster & Partners:

From iRobot.com

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In 1973, the now nearly-sainted Michael Jackson first popularized the dance “The Robot” with the Jackson Five’s hit “Dancing Machine.” In 1984, the first Terminator movie hit theaters, with humans pitted against robots from the future.

In 2009 — right now — robots are, in fact, moving into more and more facets of life, from cleaning gutters to making war.

My guest today, iRobot CEO Colin Angle, says robots won’t take over the world, but they will merge with us. In fact, he says, they already are.

This hour, On Point: iRobot’s co-founder, and the future of the robotic world.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guest:

We’re joined in our studio by Colin Angle, co-founder, chairman, and CEO of iRobot. iRobot produces – among other products – the popular floor-vacuuming “Roomba” robot, and the military “PackBot” robot, in wide use by the U.S. Armed Forces. Colin is one of the world’s leading experts on mobile robots, and formerly worked at MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

More:

You can watch a number of videos of iRobot products on the company’s YouTube channel. Here are a couple we liked: a prototype of the iRobot Warrior and a “flying” iRobot PackBot.

(Image from Facebook.com)

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Facebook just keeps growing. The online social network where people connect and reconnect, post their thoughts, their snapshots, their Facebook friends and latest fancies, had 100 million users last August. 150 million in January.

And yesterday, Facebook confirmed that it had signed up its 200 millionth user.

Broad swaths of young Americans now simply assume they can catch up with anyone, anytime on Facebook. Now older users are pouring in, too. And users around the world.

But as Facebook grows and evolves, so do the questions about where it’s going, where it’s taking us.

This hour, On Point: The age of Facebook, and where the online social network goes next.

You can join the conversation. Is half your life on Facebook? All your life? None of it? Where does Facebook take us?

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Vanessa Grigoriadis, contributing editor at New York Magazine, Rolling Stone, and Vanity Fair. Her new article, on the cover of New York this week, is “Do You Own Facebook? Or Does Facebook Own You?”

BJ Fogg, director of the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford University. His forthcoming book is “The Psychology of Facebook.”

More links:

You can now find On Point on Facebook.

And keep up-to-date with Facebook news at insidefacebook.com.

Slate’s Farhad Manjoo has been writing enthusiastically about Facebook and social networking. In January he wrote “Everyone else is on Facebook. Why aren’t you?”

Less enthusiastic — in fact, downright hostile – is The Weekly Standard’s Matt Labash in his hilarious rant last month, “Down With Facebook!”

Final editions of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer at First & Pike News in downtown Seattle on Tuesday, March 17, 2009. The Tuesday edition ended a heritage stretching back nearly 146 years, when the Seattle Gazette, the P-I's predecessor, began publishing in December 1863. (AP)

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American newspapers are going down fast now. Denver and Seattle are just the latest cities to lose a paper. More presses, almost everyone says, are sure to be shuttered. Maybe many more.

At this week’s South by Southwest Interactive Festival in Austin, Texas, tech thinker Steven Johnson made the “don’t worry, be happy” case. The transition may be rough, he says, but a new “news ecosystem” will emerge on the web, richer than what we’ve known.

Will it? This hour, On Point: Steven Johnson, and New York Times media maven David Carr, on the “news ecosystem” beyond newspapers.

You can join the conversation. If your newspaper goes, how will you get your news? Will a new ecosystem thick with bloggers fill the breach? Could it be better? Tell us what you think.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Steven Johnson joins us from New York. A tech entrepreneur and best-selling author, he co-founded the pioneering online magazine FEED in 1995 and the community site Plastic in 2001. His latest venture is the hyperlocal news site outside.in. In Austin on Friday, at the big South by Southwest Interactive Festival, his speech “Old Growth Media and the Future of News” got a lot of attention. His latest book is “The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America.”

Joining us from Austin is David Carr, columnist for The New York Times covering media, business, and pop culture. He’s currently reporting from the South by Southwest Festival. You can keep up with him at the Times’ ArtsBeat blog.

And from Seattle, we’re joined by Monica Guzman, a reporter at SeattlePI.com covering the culture of technology and the main writer of The Big Blog. She was the first online reporter for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which published its last print edition this week.

The world loves its iPods, iPhones, TiVo, OnStar, XBox and Blackberries. They all run off the Internet. But the Internet was built — and built out — in the age of the personal computer, when anyone could climb on and tinker from their keyboard.

That openness — almost anarchy — made the Net a wide-open realm for innovation. Its dream was liberating everything from data to democracy.

Now, web guru Jonathan Zittrain worries that hyper-convenient but closed products like the iPhone are shutting down the party.

This hour, On Point: The gadgets we love, and the future of the Internet.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Jonathan Zittrain, author of “The Future of the Internet — and How to Stop It,” professor of Internet Governance and Regulation at Oxford University, and co-founder of Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

Adam Thierer, Director of the Progress and Freedom Foundation’s Center for Digital Media Freedom.

Jay Greene, Seattle bureau chief for BusinessWeek magazine and author of this week’s cover story, “Inside Microsoft’s War Against Google.”

Grand Theft Auto IV, out this week in its millions of red hot copies, is a vast sensation in the video gaming world. It’s a blockbuster — bigger than movies or music and way bigger than books.

It is – as usual – bloody, brutal, grim, dark, wild — a no-holds-barred video crime spree set in Liberty City, a huge digital approximation of New York. But is it art?

Some say that the richest video games are growing a new narrative richness. Moral dilemmas. Nuance. Truth and consequences.

This hour, On Point: Grand Theft Auto IV, and the evolution of the video game.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Chris Baker, senior editor at Wired, his review of GTA IV, “It’s Not Just About Killing Hookers Anymore,” appeared this week on Slate.com.

Steven Johnson, co-founder and CEO of outside.in, and Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University, he’s the author of several books, including “Everything Bad Is Good For You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter.”

Stuart Andrews, self-professed game nut and videogame reviewer for the online journal Trusted Reviews and the London Sunday Times.

For a long time in life, Alzheimer’s seems like somebody else’s problem. An issue for the unfortunate old. A misty, separate continent of life.

And then, it can hit you. Your own parents, needing help. Losing their grip. Your own odds of following them into Alzheimer’s — higher than you’d ever wish.

One in 10 people get Alzheimer’s. New research suggests that if both your parents had it, your odds may be one in five. Now the Baby Boom generation and its children are lining up to learn their fate. And science is racing to intervene.

This hour, On Point: going after Alzheimer’s.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Reisa Sperling, neurologist and Alzheimer’s researcher at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston

Thomas Bird, Professor of Neurology, Medicine and Psychiatry at the University of Washington

Pierre Tariot, director of the Memory Disorders Clinic at the Banner Alzheimer’s Institute in Phoenix

Last week, in the frozen north of Norway, the seeds began to pour into the Global Seed Vault — the “doomsday vault,” some have called it. Five hundred feet of a super-secure cave in an Arctic mountainside is filling now with millions of seeds from all over the world.

As climate change and genetic engineering put new pressures on the traditional spectrum of natural seed, scientists want to preserve an archive, a bank, that could pull us out of a pinch.

This hour, On Point: our food, our options, our genetics, and the global debate over the future of the seed of life.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Claire Hope Cummings, environmental journalist, lawyer, and author of “Uncertain Peril: Genetic Engineering and the Future of Seeds.”

Michael Fromm, professor and director for the Center of Biotechnology at the University of Nebraska.

Ola Westengen, operations manager of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault and a scientist with the Nordic Genetic Resource Center.

First there was Microsoft, and a colossus made from software for the personal computer. Then those PCs got tied together on the web, and there was Yahoo, a giant hub for e-mail and chat rooms and all the web brought.

Then there was Google, the uber search engine and high-minded master of the Internet universe, with a mountain of web advertising and a vision of Microsoft going the way of the Model T.

Now it’s war. Microsoft is trying to gobble up Yahoo for $44 billion dollars and take on Google.

This hour, On Point: search engine wars, and the battle over the digital future.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Kevin Delaney, reporter for The Wall Street Journal, covers Silicon Valley and the technology sector.

Nicholas Carr, former executive editor of the Harvard Business Review, is author of “The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, From Edison to Google.”

Dylan Tweney, senior editor at Wired and Wired.com.

As stock markets around Asia and the world headed south today, India’s finance minister tried to calm the selling: “Look,” he said, “India’s economy is headed for a booming 9 percent growth this year.” So he hopes.

And what will Indians spend that plenty on? India’s industrial giant Tata hopes they will soon be spending it on a new car: the Nano. The cheapest car in the world. $2500 to get your family off the scooter and into a four-door five-seater.

The world’s near-poor may say “hooray.” Environmentalists are shouting “calamity.”

This hour, On Point: a car for the global masses, and what it means for the world.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

John Paul MacDuffie, co-director of the International Motor Vehicle Program at MIT and associate professor of management at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.

Lee Schipper, director of research for the World Resources Institute Center for Transport and the Environment and visiting scholar at the University of California Transportation Center.

If you hadn’t noticed, you’re not looking. We live in the era of pervasive cosmetic surgery. Everybody nipped and tucked and botoxed and lipo-sucked to a fare-the-well.

Look around at the “trout pout” lips and “wind tunnel” facelifts, the Kabuki zone of expressionless brows, the gravity-defying fronts and rears and rows of paint-white teeth — and you know it’s a full-body job site out there.

Alex Kuczynski started when she was twenty-eight, and didn’t stop nipping and pumping for ten years. Couldn’t stop. Now she’s telling her story, and much of the country’s.

Hear about addicted to the next “procedure” — tales of a cosmetic surgery junkie.

_tom Ashbrook

“The way that health insurance and doctors manage their business have partially led to our obsession with cosmetic surgery.” Alex Kuczynski

“A lot of doctors offer botox as a prophylactic.” Alex Kuczynski

“Doctors weed out the patients they think will come back complaining about the results.” Alex Kuczynski

“My problem was a mania for maintaining youth.” Alex Kuczynski

“We live in an era of image. Our image is our calling card.” Alex Kuczynski

Guest:

Alex Kuczynski, columnist for the Styles section of the New York Times. Her new book is “Beauty Junkies: Inside our $15 Billion Obsession with Cosmetic Surgery.”

Climate change is on the table this week at the world conference in Bali, Indonesia, and on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C.

But as the politicians haggle over much-needed climate policy, scientists and venture capitalists, students and inventors, are looking to give us an extreme energy makeover: pursuing breakthroughs in everything from biofuels to green buildings, solar energy to smart grids.

It’s said that technology alone can’t get us out of our climate mess. But neither, they say, can politicians. It’s going to take both.

This hour, On Point: climate change politics and the race to innovate.

-Jacki Lyden

Guests:

Juliet Eilperin, environment and national politics reporter for The Washington Post.

Ron Pernick, co-founder of Clean Edge, a research and consulting firm, and co-author of “The Clean Tech Revolution.”

Daniel Enderton, a Ph.D. candidate in climate physics and chemistry at M.I.T. and co-president of the M.I.T. Energy Club.

John O’Donnell, executive vice president for Ausra, a clean technology company based in Palo Alto, Calif., that focuses on solar power.

Bill Green, managing director at Vantage Point Venture Partners, a venture capital firm with a portfolio of 16 clean tech companies.

It sounds like a sci-fi nightmare: scientists bring back to life ancient deadly viruses that once wiped out vast numbers of the human race for research purposes only, of course. And where do they go to find those extinct diseases? Deep within our own genome.

Long ago, some of the viruses that didn’t kill us got absorbed into our genes and sit there to this day. Most are silent fossils. But some work with our bodies to make us better, stronger.

It’s wild stuff. And it’s not science fiction.

This hour, On Point: The new science of paleovirology and the long evolutionary embrace of man and virus.

-Jane Clayson

Guests:

Michael Specter, staff writer for the New Yorker. His story in this week’s issue is titled “Darwin’s Surprize.”

John Coffin, Professor of Molecular Biology and Microbiology at Tufts University.

Tom Perkins, and the legendary venture capital firm he co-founded, has been a driving force in Silicon Valley for over thirty-five years. Netscape, Amazon, Google — some would say his firm built the Valley as we know it today.

When Al Gore wanted to help spark a green technology revolution, he joined up with Perkins’ and company.

Now, with Wall Street wobbling and the economy uncertain, Perkins still has confidence in America’s tech sector, and he’s here to tell us why.

This hour, On Point: inside Silicon Valley, and the tech economy, with Tom Perkins.

-Tom Perkins

Guest:

Tom Perkins, co-founder of the leading venture capital firm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers, which has backed companies such as Netscape, Amazon, and Google. He is out with a new memoir called, “Valley Boy: The Education of Tom Perkins.”

E-read all about it. On Monday, Amazon debuted its much-anticipated e-book reader — the Kindle — and set the book world abuzz.

The goals of the electronic reading device are simple: to replace bound paper, and to change the way we read and buy books. Lofty, but maybe not impossible goals, for our wired, jacked up, on-demand world.

Purists warn against putting books in electronic garb: Beware of the effects on our culture. Read between the lines. We’ll do just that, with a concerned critic and a top technology writer.

This hour, On Point: Reading 2.0 and the future of books.

-Sheilah Kast 

Guests:

Steven Levy, senior editor at Newsweek, he wrote this week’s cover story “The Future of Reading.” He’s the author of several books, including “The Perfect Thing: How the iPod Shuffles Commerce, Culture, and Coolness.”

Sven Birkerts, essayist and literary critic, he’s the editor of AGNI magazine and author of several books, including “The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age.”