techonomy

TRUCKEE, Calif.--The exponential growth in chip performance, known as Moore's Law, is great, but can't be applied to all areas of technology, Bill Gates warned last week.

"We've all been spoiled and deeply confused by the IT model," Gates said, answering an audience question at last week's Techonomy conference. "Exponential improvement--that is rare."

Gates said that there are isolated segments of technology that do produce that rate of improvement.

"We do see it," Gates said. "We see it in hard disk storage, fiber capacity, gene-sequencing rates, biological databases, … Read more

NEAR LAKE TAHOE, Calif.--Bill Gates says it's gratifying to see the computer industry that he helped start turn some of its attention to broader societal challenges.

"I think there's increased awareness of using innovation to help in more than just profit making," Gates told CNET in an interview on Friday, following his speech at the Techonomy conference. "When I think back to the conferences I went to earlier in the industry, we were pretty darn focused on popularizing software and personal computing. Nothing wrong with that, but it's nice to see the evolution.&… Read more

TRUCKEE, Calif.--Bill Gates is a glass three-quarters-full kind of guy, but watching the U.S. political system fail to tackle big problems like health care is enough to get even him down.

"You can actually get depressed," he said, wrapping up a talk at the Techonomy conference here. Earlier, Gates talked about a variety of issues including how online courses will reshape higher education and the need for better software modeling for diseases and other complex systems.

Gates said that the political process hasn't shown itself to be very good at handling issues that "are … Read more

TRUCKEE, Calif.--A key to many hard problems, from using nuclear power to combating diseases, is better software modeling, Bill Gates said on Friday.

While it's not surprising that he's a fan of using software to help solve hard problems, it is somewhat surprising that there aren't already good models for some diseases.

"There's no disease-modeling software," he said, speaking at the end of the three-day Techonomy conference here. "There is none. Why is flu seasonal? We don't know."

Gates said he aims to make sure that gap is filled, supporting … Read more

TRUCKEE, Calif.--One Laptop Per Child founder Nicholas Negroponte said that in two years the company has managed to rebuff one of the biggest critiques of his effort--the idea that you can't just give a kid a laptop connected to the Internet and walk away.

"You can, you actually can," Negroponte said, speaking on a panel at the Techonomy conference here. "Kids in the remotest places," he said, "not only teach themselves how to read and write, but most importantly--and we found this in Peru--teach their parents to read or write."

Negroponte … Read more

TRUCKEE, Calif.--Privacy concerns need to be further addressed if Europe is to lure the 30 percent of its population that remain "digital virgins" onto the Internet.

"There are still digital virgins as I am always saying," European Commissioner Neelie Kroes said, speaking Friday at the Techonomy conference here. One of the big hurdles, she said, is trust. And while the elderly are the least likely to be online, she said that it is not strictly an age issue.

Kroes was blunt when asked if there were any downsides to Europe's comparatively stricter policies regarding … Read more

TRUCKEE, Calif.--Imagine your own PC watching your every click and reporting back every song you listen to, every movie you watch, or every book you read.

That may sound like a nightmare scenario to some, but that is exactly the reality that HP Labs director Prith Banerjee is preparing for.

In an interview Thursday, Banerjee told CNET that gathering that information--with a device owner's consent--has the potential to tailor devices to be much more useful.

"When you think about it, HP sells 75 million PCs per year," he said. "That is an incredible place through … Read more

TRUCKEE, Calif.--So what makes someone on Twitter influential?

My two cents is that it starts with not posting your every Foursquare check-in, obliquely mentioning meetings you can't talk about, or sharing your latest bodily function.

But a team at Hewlett-Packard Labs tried to find a more scientific answer by analyzing 22 million tweets published in a short span. It found that it's not the visible metrics that truly define the influentials.

Rather, influence is better measured by those whose tweets spread far and wide--something that is not so correlated as one might think to the number of followers that a particular person has.

"Most content goes very few hops," said HP Labs social-computing director Bernardo Huberman, in a meeting over lunch at the Techonomy conference here. It's the latest report from Huberman and team, who have also studied the best time to post on Digg and demonstrated how Twitter can be used to predict a film's box office success.

Huberman also has bad news for folks who think posting a lot is boosting their influence.

"I wouldn't call you influential, I would call you energetic," he said.

So, it seems the key is not just having followers, but having active ones that like to share your thoughts as opposed to those who just read. Having something worth saying probably helps, too, but that was not the subject of HP's study.

Why it matters, beyond perhaps helping me in my vain quest to crack 10,000 Twitter followers, is that the deluge of information means that there is fierce competition for issues seeking attention.

"We only talk about things that bubble to the top," he said.

Of course, identifying influential people also has other uses, such as telling companies which bloggers and tweeters to target or governments and nonprofits where their key audiences are.

The full research, conducted by Huberman and colleagues Daniel Romero, Wojciech Galuba, and Sitaram Asur is published on Scribd. You can read the whole thing after the break.

… Read more

TRUCKEE, Calif.--HP Chief Technology Officer Shane Robison said that the company's acquisition of Palm will influence a range of products including slates and other computers, smartphones, as well as next-generation printers.

"What Palm gives us is a modern, Web-oriented, connected operating system," Robison said, speaking at the Techonomy conference here.

While HP has said that before, Robison suggested the degree to which WebOS will affect the product line is perhaps greater than some people think. For example, Robison said that most of the company's printers will soon be Web-connected and able to print without a … Read more