As a country, we’ve made a historical commitment to ensuring that virtually every American has access to reasonably priced, standard, high-quality communications. Our national phone system was the envy of the world when it was first built. Now we’re moving to a time of deep communications inequality.
Users and developers may be howling over Twitter’s crackdown on third-party apps, but the intent is clear: Twitter wants to gain more Apple-like control over the Twitter user experience.
The cognitive perils of having lots of open windows have been somewhat overblown. It’s not always bad for us—and sometimes it can be very good.
Einstein may have worked in the patent office, but Switzerland at the turn of the 20th century didn’t have Google, Facebook and and other Silicon Valley giants stalking the earth in search of top science and engineering talent.
Women tell Google its social network is too clunky and nerdy.
Barack Obama may have come out as a BlackBerry addict, but it hasn’t been just Tea Partiers who have defected from the president’s preferred mobile platform in the years since he took office. The Waterloo, Canada-based smartphone maker has lost customers across the political spectrum, erecting multiple milestones of failure along its path toward disintegration.
Before Nancy Hafkin came along, Internet in Africa hardly existed. The Internet Hall of Fame inductee helped build the internet infrastructure across Africa, and just as critical helped change beliefs about who should have access to information and the internet.
The circus of fun at Google I/O — skydivers wearing Google Glass, tons of fancy swag, free food and booze — isn’t meant for all the big company representatives, the eager students, or the press.
YouTube will overhaul its comment system to better control its notorious peanut gallery.
Bowing to exasperated women, Google promises to dress geeks better.
Google’s Nexus Q is not just a gleaming, consumer electronics device. It’s also Google’s best shot at controlling the future of media, and building the most dominant software platform in a winner-take-all contest.
At Tuesday’s “Zynga Unleashed” event, the gaming company was out to prove that its mobile business has legs.
What Airbnb did for renting out extra bedrooms and couches in homes, Sidecar wants to do for vacant passenger and back seats in cars.
The $1.2 billion purchase of Yammer by Microsoft is only the latest acquisition in a string of similar deals. Earlier this month, Salesforce.com spent $689 million to buy Buddy Media, which makes Facebook tools for interacting with customers. Oracle last month bought Virtue, which helps companies coordinate social network posts, for $300 million. And analysts expect acquisitions of “Facebook for business” plays to continue.
Education non-profit Khan Academy has become a hot destination for top programmers in Silicon Valley, despite a complete lack of stock options or IPO prospects.
Amid the cardboard tube fighting at its annual developer conference, Google I/O, the Mountain View company faces the challenge of topping two major rivals to see who owns June.
With Twitter, Jack Dorsey changed the way the world communicates. His latest startup, Square, aims to transform how we spend money.
For startups like car service Uber, downtime and idle resources are fuel for profits.
Behavioral economist and psychologist Dan Ariely’s new book, The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty, explores some of the surprising reasons we lie to each other, and ourselves.
To ensure that money keeps flowing, Twitter needs to inspire confidence in advertisers that it can deliver what they’ve paid for. Thursday’s outage doesn’t help.
YouTube’s co-founders are the latest tech moguls to be inexplicably drawn to old media.
In Finland, Nokia is apparently not too big to fail. Finland’s prime minister, Jyrki Katainen, says the government won’t prop up the ailing cell phone maker by buying its shares.
After a month-long IPO drought, four companies, including three tech companies, set IPO terms in recent days.
Microsoft’s core business remains licensing software to partners who make the machines that run it. Which raises the question: Does Microsoft even care if the Surface sells? Some analysts don’t think so.
The online jukebox Spotify announced Tuesday it will offer customized internet radio stations, putting the upstart into competition with longtime netcaster Pandora. Spotify might lack Pandora’s deep experience in online radio, but it offers listeners fully 16 times more songs to choose from. That’s a discrepency of 15 million songs, which will be tricky for Pandora to explain away.
Microsoft took the wraps off its best effort to take on Apple’s iPad, dubbed Surface. Can Windows 8 and Windows RT models plus slick accessories like these keyboard/covers make a dent in Apple’s total dominance of the market?
Launching in Hollywood — as opposed to Silicon Valley or Redmond — hints that Microsoft might be working closely with the entertainment industry on its rumored tablet.
Microsoft may be more than two years late to the tablet fight, but Windows and Office still spew so many billions every year that the world’s third-largest company can still afford not to be great.
Aerospace has long been an American bulwark. In most years Boeing is the nation’s leading exporter. America has more airports, builds more airplanes, trains more pilots, and arranges more of its economy around aviation than any other country, by far. China would very much like a piece of this—to have Boeings, NASAs, Cessnas, and fully fledged GPS systems of its own.
Ten questions with Clay Shirky, the startup guru, NYU professor and author, touching on the rise of GitHub, Facebook’s weak spot, the regression of online politics, his mistaken trust in large tech companies, and his all-time favorite email service.
