In technology, the odds of making something truly new and popular have always tilted toward failure. That was why Mervin Kelly, the president of Bell Labs, let many members of his research department roam free, sometimes without …
Technology & Media
Some Awfully Good Companies Competing for ‘Worst Company in America’ Title
Google and Apple? They’ve been squared off in an annual March Madness-style tournament in which the nation’s worst company “wins.” What complicates matters is that Apple, Google, and several other companies entered in the contest …
The Top 10 Biggest Money-Losing Movies of All Time
How Bell Labs Invented the World We Live in Today
In the decades before the country’s best minds began migrating west to California’s Silicon Valley, many of them came east to New Jersey, where they worked in enormous brick-and-glass buildings located on grassy campuses …
Apple Sells Three Million New iPads on Opening Weekend
Apple’s new iPad boasts relatively modest incremental improvements from the previous version — most notably a sharper screen as well as faster computing and wireless speeds — but consumers proved over the weekend that demand …
Why Text Mining May Be The Next Big Thing
“Big Data” is a hot topic in the business world these days. But there’s a subset of this broad field that has yet to take a turn in the spotlight. It’s called “text mining,” and you’re probably going to be hearing a lot more …
Should Apple Pay For The Bad Deeds Of Its App Makers?
A sprawling lawsuit filed in Texas this week targets Path, Instagram, Facebook and others for instructing their apps to suck up user address book data without permission. But the most interesting part of the case may be
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Apple Will Use Cash Hoard for Dividend, $10B Stock Buyback
When Apple reported its most recent financial results, the tech giant disclosed it was sitting on $100 billion — leading many observers to wonder what the company might do with its cash hoard. On Monday, Apple provided an …
Can a Small Start-Up Still Make a Splash at SXSW? Not If Jay-Z Is In Town
I’ll never know what Jay-Z has against me or my new Internet venture. All I know is that after months (okay, weeks) of planning a SxSW launch party for our triple-awesome new journal of food, war and travel called Roads & …
How Many iPads Can Apple Sell?
Apple’s new iPad went on sale Friday morning, and as usual consumers lined up outside the tech giant’s retail stores to get their hands on the company’s latest gadget. Although Apple made only incremental improvements to the …
PayPal Makes a Play for Small Businesses With ‘Here’
PayPal, a division of EBay, is making a play at small merchants with the introduction of its new “Here” device, which enables small businesses to accept both PayPal account numbers and major credit cards using nothing more …
How Apple Made ‘Vertical Integration’ Hot Again — Too Hot, Maybe
Google recently acquired mobile-device maker Motorola Mobility and will soon manufacture smart phones and television set-top boxes. Amazon’s Kindle Fire tablet represents its bridge between hardware and e-commerce. Oracle bought …