This is my farewell column. Fast Forward has been a weekly labor of love, mostly, since early 2002. Now I’m taking an extended leave from Fortune to write my book, The Facebook Effect.
Fortune this week announced the Legatum Fortune Technology Prize, an annual $1 million award intended to reward for-profit efforts to provide products and services to the poor through the use of technology.
Imagine walking down the supermarket aisle with a cheap device you could hold up to a tomato. If the sensor detects a pesticide residue, you’d know the “organic” label is a lie. Similar tools could track the chemical content of water in a stream, telli…
As the iPhone 3G emerges, Apple’s mobile device has captivated the leaders of the tech industry. That’s the most certain conclusion Fortune reached after surveying 325 industry leaders who will be attending our Brainstorm Tech conference July 21-23.
In the end, Microsoft is almost surely going to end up owning Yahoo’s search business. That’s the only conclusion I can come up with, having spent months talking to Microsoft’s senior leadership for a recent story on the company. And even what does see…
In just three short weeks, we launch the next phase in Fortune’s Brainstorm conference series, Brainstorm Tech. The original Brainstorm ran in Aspen from 2001 until 2006, and this one will retain the unique spirit of multidisciplinary inquiry that won …
When Jeremy Burton arrived as CEO at private-equity-owned Serena Software last year, he found a respectable but boring 25-year-old firm still profitably churning out mainframe-oriented products. But he also discovered some underplayed non-mainframe pro…
Though many adults imagine the frightening Grand Theft Auto when they think of video games, kids appear to be subtler thinkers on the subject. Not only do many of them intuitively realize that games can embody any values and be on any subject, many wan…
Microsoft and the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative announced Thursday that the Windows operating system would soon be available on the so-called XO, also known as the “$100 laptop.” In interviews, executives made it clear that this could be a cat…
Technology is different. Despite pervasive economic uncertainty, that’s the message that many of the industry’s big firms are sending in their latest earnings reports. We may be buying fewer Starbucks mocha lattes and shipping fewer packages through UP…
When Microsoft walked away from its blockbuster bid for Yahoo, the media sought desperately to keep the news coming even when there wasn’t much left to say. That seems to be how The Wall Street Journal came up with the notion that Microsoft had approac…
Oh how frustrating when the mighty haven’t fallen.
I’m sitting at a dinner table at Fortune’s just-completed Brainstorm Green conference in Pasadena. Janine Benyus, the high priest of a new field called biomimicry, has drawn a little sketch of a car on a napkin. “Abalone,” she writes, and draws an arro…
Facebook, the 71-million-member social network, has attracted lots of adults during the last year as it became a global technology cause celebre. But I’m hearing more and more of these grown-up newbies questioning whether the service is really worth th…
Advanced Micro Devices, the little PC chipmaker that couldn’t, then could, then couldn’t, is struggling again. What has it tried repeatedly to do? To compete both successfully on product with its giant and potent competitor Intel and still make money.
“Technology is making more changes in our way of life than ever in human history,” says Muhammad Yunus. “The way the Internet and the mobile phone are spreading, you cannot compare with any technology of the past.” Yunus is known for his visionary lead…
Something remarkable happened on Thursday – an Internet service provider and a peer-to-peer software company announced a collaboration and agreed to work together.
As a financial writer, I spend a lot of time looking at numbers. Right now, the numbers say that the world has a huge and unremitting hunger for technology, communication, Internet access, and information.
It’s already hooked America’s youth, and now Facebook is set on winning the hearts of two potentially lucrative demographics: Adults and the rest of the world.
Roy Singham wants you to know that ThoughtWorks, the Chicago-based software company he founded 15 years ago, and where he is now chairman of the board, is a growing and profitable enterprise and not a socialist collective.
