fortunes

Owners of Barnes & Noble's Nook Color have even more reading material to choose from with more than 200 interactive magazines now available through the Nook Newstand.

Starting today, users of the 7-inch color e-book reader will be able to access special editions of Time, Fortune, People, Sports Illustrated, and Parents & Fitness, all designed specifically for the Nook Color. Two more publications--Entertainment Weekly and Cooking Light--promise to hit the newsstand before the end of the year.

Beyond offering the regular content found in the magazines, the Nook editions provide bonus features, such as video and audio podcasts, animations, … Read more

LAGUNA NIGUEL, Calif.--In the absence of leadership from the federal government, businesses are the best vehicle for slowly transitioning society away from fossil fuels.

That's one of the themes from the Fortune Brainstorm Green this week, a conference to explore environmental sustainability at corporations.

Innovation is the only way to address the "technology gap" that exists between the price of fossil fuels and clean-energy technologies, such as solar, wind, and electric vehicles, said Michael Shellenberger, the president of the Breakthrough Institute.

"This huge gulf that still exists between fossil fuels and clean tech has got … Read more

LAGUNA NIGUEL, Calif.--Six years into green-tech venture investing, Kleiner Perkins continues to see the potential for green technologies to leapfrog incumbent energy systems, according to tech luminary Bill Joy.

In an onstage interview today at the Fortune Brainstorm Green conference here, Joy said Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, where he is a partner, seeks out disruptive technologies that could change energy much the way that technologies, such as PCs and mobile devices, shook up the IT industry.

The famed Silicon Valley venture capital company, which funded Amazon, Google, and many other IT companies, has made about 60 green-tech investments, … Read more

LAGUNA NIGUEL, Calif.--The key to avoiding the worst effects of global warming is to make money while doing so, says iconic entrepreneur Richard Branson.

The chairman of the Virgin Group, which oversees 350 businesses, is involved in dozens of efforts to reduce carbon emissions linked to global warming, both in Virgin's business operations and through spin-off efforts.

Branson was interviewed at the Fortune Brainstorm Green business conference here yesterday, where he argued that entrepreneurs, investors, and corporations need to take the lead on addressing global warming. Government policies should set ground rules, such as taxing dirty fuels, but … Read more

LAGUNA NIGUEL, Calif.-- Waste Management wants your waste for more reasons that you might think.

The company, which hauls garbage from 22 million customers, is in the midst of a strategy to invest in technology start-ups in an effort to get electricity, chemicals, or liquid fuels from municipal solid waste. Already, the company generates two to three times more energy than the entire solar industry.

"We took the venture capital route. We make lots of small investments because you don't know what technology will ultimately will win. We need to spread out bets," Waste Management CEO … Read more

Earlier this month, an octopus named Paul living in a tank in Oberhausen, Germany, proved capable of successfully "predicting" the results of his home nation's World Cup soccer matches--and then went a step further and correctly selected Spain as the winner of the final.

Of course, there's now an app for that.

An iPhone app development company called uTouchLabs just released an app called "Ask the Octopus," which lets users input two options for any query and then has a cartoon "octopus oracle" choose one much in the way that Paul would … Read more

Leaving a big publication to launch one's own conference and Web site isn't exactly newfangled.

But three former Fortune staffers hope that what distinguishes their event will be the scale of the problems that it attempts to address.

David Kirkpatrick, Brent Schlender, and Peter Petre are teaming up to launch Techonomy, a conference and Web site devoted to the role that technology can and must play in transforming all aspects of business and society--not just those that the Internet has already transformed.

"The idea is that technology is really the only way we are going to solve … Read more

We've wondered, with Atom Netbooks having been basically in pause mode technology-wise for the better part of two years, whether the popular bottom-priced product might eventually be threatened by larger, smarter smartphones and sleeker hybrid computing devices and tablets such as the iPad.

It makes sense, especially with the iPad having sold a million units through its first 28 days, and we've mused on it before. A new study from Morgan Stanley, discussed in Fortune's Apple 2.0 blog, concludes that tablets in general will be a big threat to the area. Netbook sales growth, according to … Read more

It can be tempting to dismiss talk of sustainability in business as greenwash. But after spending a few days moving among the green-business elite, I feel like people are proving that concern for the planet is a source of innovation every day.

I spent the earlier part of the week at the Fortune Brainstorm Green conference in Laguna Niguel, Calif., where representatives from leading-edge companies shared stories of how they profit from green technologies or products. This group is hardly representative of the business world as a whole and people well-versed in corporate sustainability probably didn't walk away with … Read more