archive

The history of technology

Betsy Masiello and Derek Slater (Google): Embracing an Innovation Stimulus Package. Benoit Dupont (Montreal): Skills and Trust: A Tour Inside the Hard Drives of Computer Hackers. Silicon Valley’s sought-after Y Combinator is where kids with start-up dreams can vie to become the next Dropbox, Airbnb, or OMGPOP. The internet has created a new industrial revolution: An excerpt from Makers: The New Industrial Revolution by Chris Anderson. Justin Fox on why data will never replace thinking. Interstellar Hard Drive: Giles Turnbull on the search for storage beyond the cloud. The myth of technological progress: The history of technology holds some salutary lessons for anyone who blithely believes there is a high-tech fix for all our 21st-century problems. Failure is a feature: Ben Popper on how Google stays sharp gobbling up startups. Roberto Baldwin on 12 of the world’s most annoying technologies. Could the Internet ever “wake up”? Dan Falk wonders. Empowering “things” for our Internet of things: In much the same way that we now expect every child’s toy to talk, in the future, we will expect virtually everything we own to be connected to the Internet.