Blog Profile / Tradigital
| URL : | http://blogs.forbes.com/bruceupbin/ | |
|---|---|---|
| Filed Under: | Technology | |
| Posts on Regator: | 243 | |
| Posts / Week: | 2 | |
| Archived Since: | February 24, 2011 | |
Blog Post Archive
Debunking The Narrative Of Silicon Valley’s Innovation Might
This is going to sound completely heretical to everything Forbes has stood for over 96 years (and The Economist for a few decades longer than that) but here goes: The real innovation engine in the global economy is not the entrepreneurial class blazing capitalist trails through the thicket of government red tape and taxation. No. [...]
Science! Democracy! RoboRoaches!
If Greg Gage and Tim Marzullo have their way, the raindrop-like sound of neural spikes will someday be as familiar to millions of high school and college science students as the sounds of a heartbeat or pulse. The pair are the founders of Backyard Brains, a startup in Ann Arbor, Mich. that is making cheap, [...]
How To Stop Three Billion New Ikea Customers From Wrecking The Planet
Healing Mother Earth is the last thing you think of when you ponder a cavernous, bustling Ikea store filled with shoppers hauling out flat-packed Faktums by the SUV load. Steve Howard is out to change that perception. He’s been Ikea’s chief sustainability officer for two years and gave a talk yesterday at TEDGlobal in Edinburgh to [...]
Drones Can Save The World, Drones Can Destroy Us All
People told Andreas Raptopoulos it was a crazy idea when he and a few of his colleagues at Matternet started talking a couple of years ago about creating invisible highways for drones to deliver critical goods such as medicine in the developing world. First off, drones do not have the best reputation in certain parts of [...]
IBM Buys Privately Held Softlayer For $2 Billion
It’s cloudy with a chance of $2 billion in tech today. First Salesforce shells out $2.5 billion for, a seller of cloud-delivered email and digital marketing tools. Then announces it is buying Dallas firm SoftLayer for $2 billion, according to sources close to the deal. SoftLayer hasn’t released recent financial results but reported revenue of [...]
Salesforce To Buy ExactTarget for $2.5 Billion
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has been very acquisitive in the past but today he topped himself with the decision to spend $2.5 billion in cash to acquire all the outstanding shares of ExactTarget, an Indianapolis seller of marketing software. Salesforce is paying $33.75 in cash for each share of ExactTarget, a 50% premium above yesterday’s [...]
You Can Tell The Economy’s Okay Because You’re Stuck In Traffic
In a bumper to bumper jam while reading this? For the 33% of our readers who are on smartphones, you’re breaking the law if you’re driving. The rest of you can rest assured that your city is in recovery. According to the most recent numbers from the Inrix Gridlock Index, U.S. road congestion jumped 9.4% [...]
Tesla’s Carbon Footprint Is No Better Than A Honda Civic’s
The beautiful Tesla Model S electric sports sedan has been an object of desire, rapture and ignominy to driving enthusiasts, eco-champions and eco-skeptics, respectively. It’s also outselling some Mercedes, BMW and Audis. But does Tesla merit this much attention for being green? Short answer: no, or at least, not yet. For one thing, its sales are [...]
IBM’s Watson Now A Customer Service Agent, Coming To Smartphones Soon
IBM’s question-answering Watson supercomputer is building quite the résumé. First it won a much-publicized showdown against the two greatest Jeopardy! champions of all time, then it went to medical school and emerged as a budding oncologist. Now Watson has a new job–as a customer-service agent with the mostest. The help desk is a bit of [...]
Qualtrics’ Ryan Smith On Turning Data Into Action
I recently had a chance to catch up with Ryan Smith, the CEO of Qualtrics, the fast-growing online survey platform we wrote about a year ago. (see “Tech’s Hidden Gem In Utah“). Surveys and research have traditionally been expensive and mundane corners of the big data movement, a task companies have outsourced to third-party firms, [...]
Learn To Read Chinese In Eight Minutes
To a non-Chinese speaker (like me), and especially to a Westerner (like me), Chinese is the most impenetrable family of languages on Earth. While there may be only an eighth as many syllables as in English, the tonal variations for each syllable in Standard Chinese impute vastly different meanings. The word “ma” can mean linen, [...]
VCs Adopting Unexpected Strategy: Trust
Jerry Neumann is a veteran investor in early stage Internet firms. He cares about the health of the venture capital industry. One of the foundations of a healthy market is the free flow of information about who’s doing what deals. Some VC firms rush to publicize their every deal. More don’t. What are we market-watchers [...]
The Surest Way To Build A Billion-Dollar Internet Company
Written by James Slavet, a partner at venture capital firm Greylock. His current investments include Coupons.com, One Kings Lane and Redfin. You can follow him on Twitter @jslavet. As a venture capital investor, I’m focused on identifying and backing high potential consumer technology startups. It’s the small number of hits that drive the investment returns [...]
The Art of the Email Introduction: 10 Rules for Emailing Busy People
By Chris Fralic, Partner at First Round Capital in New York. Email is broken. Do you know anyone who loves email? I don’t – it can be frustrating and it doesn’t scale well, and there aren’t enough hours in the day to process it all. But for many executives it’s the reality of how a [...]
Meet Frederik Paulsen, The Swedish Pharma Billionaire Without Fear
At Forbes, we talk to a lot of billionaires about how they make, spend and give away their money. There’s a particular species of billionaire who uses a chunk of their fortune seeking adventure and exploration. Think of Richard Branson and his record-setting Morocco-to-Hawaii hot-air balloon ride, or Amazon’s Jeff Bezos‘ deep-sea expedition to recover [...]
Five Reasons Bold-Faced Names Should Be Using Path
Written by Eric Kuhn, Social Media Agent at United Talent in Los Angeles. Kuhn was one of Forbes’ 30 Under 30 in media in 2012. When a New York startup executive wanted to announce he was moving to San Francisco, he first posted the news on an app called Path, where he only connects to [...]
Yogurt Is Probiotic, Why Not Your Steering Wheel?
The hotel I’ve been staying at this week at the TED Conference in Long Beach, Calif., markets its beds as being hypo-allergenic. As if that were possible. But let’s not fear microbes any longer. It is time to start embracing them. Resistance is futile anyway. They own us. The cells that make up our [...]
How PatientsLikeMe Is Building A Self-Learning Healthcare System
When we get sick, doctors capture all kinds of data about us in their office or at the hospital: bloodwork, scans, interviews, probes. Then there’s a follow-up appointment to see how we’re doing. Maybe if it’s serious, you get a follow-up call from a nurse. That leaves the other 99.9% of our time spent not [...]
Hate Trying On Glasses? A New App Ends The Misery
This will come as a relief to the bespectacled hordes who have ever spent time in an eyeglasses store futilely trying on pair after pair of glasses looking for one that fits your face. Glasses.com, a new venture from 1-800 Contacts, which in turn is a subsidiary of the big insurer Wellpoint, is set to unveil [...]
Sergey Brin On The Motivation Behind Glass
Clad in black t-shirt and black pants, Google cofounder Sergey Brin made a surprise onstage appearance at TED for a quick, shambling, funny talk about his Project Glass, the eyewear computer-camera that every early-adopter nerd wants. He started out distracted, looking at his smartphone, and then appeared to realize the audience was watching. “Oh, I [...]