Amid the profusion of job cuts at big tech firms, with the latest including Microsoft’s announcement on Tuesday that it would forge ahead with a second round of layoffs, a new executive survey sparks a glimmer of optimism about future hiring in the technology industry.
In the wake of the outbreak of swine flu, a debate is emerging as to whether social-networking sites and technology are just creating panic rather than helping the populace stay informed.
On Twitter, the terms “swine flu,” “#swineflu,” “CDC” and “Mexico” were among the top phrases used on the social messaging service on Monday, after the U.S. declared a public health emergency.
It may not be the Cabinet-level post that some were hoping for, but President Obama finally named the U.S.’s first chief technology officer on Saturday morning during his weekly radio and Internet address.
Aneesh Chopra, currently Virginia’s secretary of technology, got the nod and will soon join his former colleague, Vivek Kundra, the national chief information officer, on a team tasked with using technology to make government more efficient.
First, a bit of a prelude. Probably 15 years ago, I was talking to someone who did marketing for a high end bike manufacturer. He was telling me about the amount of money the company was spending to really understand what their core customers (and their competitors’ core customers) were looking for in a bike…what did they really, really want?
Hey, we can’t all have careers at Google. Sometimes when you work in IT, you have to hold your nose and hope for the best.
Shifting U.S. jobs overseas is nothing new for technology giant International Business Machines Corp.–or the tech sector in general–but a brave new employee relocation strategy at Big Blue is raising some eyebrows.
Old computer products, like old soldiers, never die. They stay on the market–even though they haven’t been updated in eons. Or their names get slapped on new products–available only outside the U.S. Or obsessive fans refuse to accept that they’re obsolete–long after the rest of the world has moved on.
One might think that the recession would compel people to file their tax returns earlier. Who couldn’t use the extra cash? But it turns out that Americans have never filed later.
That’s according to a man who knows something about taxes: Brad Smith, CEO of Intuit, which makes the popular TurboTax software. “Technology makes it easier to wait later,” Smith said in a recent interview.
There’s an old debate in the Valley about whether Google is really a media company or a technology company. In a sense, it is a silly debate, which is mostly a matter of semantics. A better question is this: Now that Google has become one of the world’s largest media companies, at least as measured by advertising dollars, what does it do next?
No corner of modern American life is untouched by technology. And no technology is more transformative than the Internet. The simple reason for this is that the Internet is, at bottom, a communications network, and communication is the foundation of society, business and government. When you scale up communications, you change the world.
It is puzzling why a particular technology does not spread everywhere throughout the world once invented. Instead the spread of technology has always been uneven, even among places with similar resources, geography, climate and culture. It is almost as if technology had an ethnic dimension.
Now that President Obama has signed the $787 billion economic stimulus package into law, the real hard work begins: using that money to create jobs. To accomplish its many goals, the country needs the infrastructure to support them. That’s why the funding for broadband was so vital.
During a long career as a television and technology executive, Mitch Berman has tried to sell several different iterations of TV, often in their formative stages. Now, Berman is onto the next new thing, delivering TV through the Internet.
You will, along with many millions of others, likely make an emergency appointment with your psychologist this week. After all, the words of Lady Greenfield, professor of synaptic pharmacology at Lincoln College in Oxford, England, have probably slapped their syllables against your very core. Social-networking sites, she said, like Facebook (it’s interesting how Facebook seems to have come to symbolize all social networking), are infantilizing the human mind.
While traveling in China, Genevieve Bell figured she’d have no trouble getting a cellphone, but she was in for a surprise. The shopkeeper refused to sell her one on the basis of the phone numbers being unlucky. The encounter illustrates how technology and culture blend in new ways in a global society powered by cellphones and PCs.
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