The dog days of summer are almost down to their last woof. But we realize there are still a good many of you still trickling in from your final seasonal travels.  For those of you who’ve been off the grid lately, this tech update is for you. Here’s what you missed last week:

The markets went whacko after the U.S. Treasury got downgraded from its AAA rating. So, how will this impact high tech?  Speculation ranges from “not much” to “everything,” depending on whom you ask.  Back in 2008 when the markets last had a major meltdown, IT spending came to a screeching halt. This time, most prognosticators are predicting current IT projects in the works will not be abandoned. However, in the long term, future IT projects may get shelved or downsized.  Of more immediate concern; the impact of a tighter borrowing market on smaller companies, less venture capital to spread around, fewer juicy contracts selling technology to the government and something not everyone remembers—manufacturers use all kinds of precious metals like gold to build the innards of computing devices. Have you noticed the trajectory of gold and silver prices lately?

The West has been getting a dose of its own civil unrest powered by social media this month. First, violent riots in England were sparked by a police officer fatally shooting a civilian. It quickly escalated into riots and looting all over London.  Texting and Tweeting clearly helped the disenfranchised organize and escalate.  Is this a good thing or a bad thing? To many, it seemed like a good thing when it happened in Egypt. Now? Ultimately, it depends on how comfortable you are with the notion of the right to protest.  On a smaller scale, the San Francisco Bay Area just had a similar situation. After a BART subway officer was involved in a controversial civilian shooting, protests broke out. BART got caught shutting down cell phone service in spots to limit the communication abilities of the protestors. One protest soon begat another protest. Over the weekend, BART’s website got hacked in what appears to be a retaliatory act over BART’s response to protestors.  Arab Spring, schming!

A strong platform has to have a user-friendly application programming interface for developers, right? Well, maybe not!  A new survey of app developers by Hacker News shows that the three platforms that come with the most programming headaches goes to Facebook, Google, and then Twitter. I’m guessing none of the above is losing sleep over this survey.  Sadly, the app developers are, which of course is their point.

So how much time did you kill at the airport playing “Angry Birds”? Well, while you were slingshotting red birds at pigs; the company behind it, Rovio Entertainment, just secured its next round of funding that will increase its value to more than one billion dollars ^[1]. And, yes, I’m shaking my head too.  I feel a little bit better knowing that during the same week, DropBox, has a new valuation of $5 billion.

Welcome back to the grid.