Techonomy's David Kirkpatrick appeared yesterday on Bloomberg TV to comment on Mark Zuckerberg's reaction to angry investors at Facebook's first shareholder meeting. Kirkpatrick asserts that Facebook's formidable reach will ultimately bolster its long-term outlook, citing the use of Facebook by organizers of protests in Turkey as an example of the social network's pervasiveness. Zuckerberg's involvement in the FWD.us campaign for immigration reform, says Kirkpatrick, reinforces how Facebook "has put itself at the center of global developments." But can the company turn around its Wall Street fortunes by figuring out a way to monetize mobile ads? More
Global Tech Government Security & Privacy
NSA Surveillance a Setback for U.S. Cloud Services Overseas
Long before the National Security Agency’s PRISM program was exposed, technology industry executives had warned Congress that the Patriot Act and other laws that “give U.S. government authorities unfettered access to data stored with U.S. companies” are hampering global sales for American cloud services providers.
Genes Can’t Be Patented, Supreme Court Tells Myriad
"A naturally occurring DNA segment is a product of nature and not patent eligible merely because it has been isolated," the Supreme Court has ruled today unanimously. The 20-page decision written by Justice Thomas added that synthetic DNA, also known as complementary DNA or cDNA, "is patent eligible because it is not naturally occurring." More
Security & Privacy Startup Culture
How Startups Helped the NSA Build PRISM
In 2004, while working for USA Today, then based in part of an Arlington, Va., office tower, I wanted to do a story about the CIA’s then-experimental venture capital unit called In-Q-Tel. I got the OK from In-Q-Tel to visit its office. But the CIA was so concerned about secrecy and terrorism, I had to agree to not reveal where the office was located. So I met a man on the ground floor of an office tower that had once housed USA Today, and he promptly took me back up the elevator. In-Q-Tel’s office was in the same building. I may be one of the only journalists to go there. In-Q-Tel has since moved down the street. You can find its address on the Web—though not on its own web site. And now that the National Security Agency’s PRISM data-collection system has been outed, In-Q-Tel is more visible than it's ever been. More
What Would You Do If Hackers Downloaded Your DNA?
Hacked customer accounts are a bane of modern existence. LivingSocial might have been the latest major hack victim, but by now, most people with any kind of online life know what to do when notified by a vendor, bank, or e-commerce site that "unauthorized access to some customer data" has occurred: reset your passwords, check your bank accounts, monitor your credit report, perhaps freeze your credit or cancel your credit cards. But what if hackers access your DNA? There's no resetting that code. More
Could We Lose Control of Drones?
Is any technology inherently “good” or “evil”? The deciding factor would be how it's used (or misused), right? Consider drones. Drones—unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) or aircrafts without human pilots on board—have been around since the early 1900s, and the U.S. Air Force was developing them in earnest as early as 1959. Today, the use of drones has grown dramatically. National Geographic reported this past March that at least 50 countries now use drones, and several—Iran, Israel, and China, for example—make their own. More
Reputation.com’s Fertik: Put Humans Back at the Center of the Internet
Alongside Techonomy's recent mini-conference on the Internet of Everything in Menlo Park in May, we interviewed Michael Fertik, CEO of Reputation.com. Fertik is one of the world's most successful innovators focusing on a topic of great concern globally—privacy on the Internet. Reputation.com can sanitize and improve the way one is viewed in Google searches and other online contexts, and Fertik has given more thought than most to what we are doing as the Net evolves and more and more info about us is exposed in disparate contexts. In this video interview he talks about his hopes and fears, and waxes surprisingly philosophical about the relative importance and value of being human, and being a machine. More
The Next Manufacturing Revolution Is Not 3D. It’s Software
A major challenge to creating and filling manufacturing jobs in the U.S. is the ever-increasing skills gap. There is a widespread misconception that these jobs are low-skill. To the contrary, a large portion of U.S. manufacturing is complex, requiring a high level of expertise that is hard to find. Investment in improved education and training is surely needed to fill more jobs. But the long-term solution is to lower the barriers of entry to manufacturing work through technology—specifically by using widely accessible, easy-to-use automation software that grows revenues, increases efficiencies, and reduces costs for manufacturers and their customers. More
China: Baidu-Qihoo Search War Returns With Lawsuit
After disappearing from the headlines for a few months, the ongoing search war between industry leader Baidu and challenger Qihoo 360 has jumped back into the news with reports that the former has sued the latter. This new lawsuit is most likely just the first phase in a new stage of the battle between these two companies, and I fully expect Qihoo to file a countersuit within the next few weeks. More
Are Flash Sales Coming to Consumer Genomics?
Could consumers be persuaded to snatch up DNA sequences as must-have accessories? With former Gilt Groupe President Andy Page in a new leadership role, 23andMe might be able to swing that. The personal genetics company began late last year offering its Personal Genome service for $99 and set a goal to serve 1 million customers in 2013. More
Did Obama Just Destroy the U.S. Internet Industry?
News about the National Security Agency's PRISM program and its privileged access to internal user data at nine U.S. Internet companies has unleashed a torrent of justified anger and hand-wringing. But the worries do not go far enough. Almost everybody is still looking at this through a narrow domestic lens. Our values and goals may be more challenged than you think. More
