innovator

You'll never find a comparably equipped 1980 Corvette outperforming a 2011 'Vette, or a 1980 TV or computer blowing away a '11 model. Audio is a different matter; a lot of decades-old gear really does sound better than its 2011 equivalents. That's especially true when comparing 1970s and 1980s receivers with today's models. I covered why that is so in last weekend's "How can 30-year-old receivers sound better than new ones?" blog.

I chatted with Innovative Audio's Gordon Sauck to learn more about buying old hi-fi. Sauck started designing home theater installations in … Read more

Hewlett-Packard's former CEOs did not invest enough, gutting innovation at the world's largest PC maker, according to a Reuters interview with chairman Ray Lane.

HP's current CEO Leo Apotheker is paying for those mistakes, said Lane in the interview published yesterday.

"Mark Hurd did not invest," said Lane. "He burned the furniture to please Wall Street." The "serial cost-cutting" began with former CEO Carly Fiorina and continued with Mark Hurd, who succeeded Fiorina. This should change under Apotheker, according to Lane. "Leo is not that," Lane said, adding that … Read more

HTC today confirmed its chief innovation officer, instrumental in helping build the company into the consumer brand it is today, left the company for "personal reasons."

Horace Luke, who HTC said "nurtured a culture of innovation," left in April. Scott Croyle, vice president of design, took over his responsibilities.

BGR.com first reported the departure earlier today.

A company representative declined to specify what personal reasons meant.

Luke, based in Taiwan, helped push designs that were focused on the consumer, according to a company statement. The innovation culture helped foster the development of the Sense user … Read more

REDMOND, Wash.--It's typical for Microsoft to show off its latest wares at its annual Worldwide Partner Conference, if only to amp up partners' enthusiasm for hawking the software giant's goods. Some of the biggest gasps from the partisan crowd of 15,000 partners at the Staples Center in Los Angeles last week came for a nifty little program, the Lync Conversation Translator.

The application, part of Microsoft's enterprise communications software package, lets two people who speak different languages have an instant messaging conversation in their native tongue. An English speaker wanting to chat with a German … Read more

Hewlett-Packard is strong in areas Apple isn't. And doesn't aspire to be Apple. That's the essence of some of the feedback that I got in the wake of a critique I wrote of Hewlett-Packard last week.

To quickly summarize, I wrote that HP doesn't innovate in a way that creates products like the iPhone or iPad, despite being one of the original--if not the original--Silicon Valley start-up. And despite declarations made by former CEOs about reclaiming some of that start-up spirit.

Needless to say, I do read the comments attached to my posts. And because my … Read more

While the rest of the world is rapt by news of international terrorists and stealth special ops missions, perhaps we should offer a little thought to kissing.

Our new Web-oriented world has brought people together in ways never before possible, but we're still missing some elements of human connection. You know, like the physical kind.

The Kajimoto Research Laboratory at the University of Electro-Communications, however, believes it can bring us that nirvana.

It has create a device that looks like a straw, which doesn't seem entirely sensual. Still, you mimic your kissing motion (everyone's is different, naturally). … Read more

BERMUDA TRIANGLE--Last Saturday morning, about three dozen people, most in their twenties and thirties, packed into a small meeting room on board the Celebrity Century, a cruise ship floating somewhere between Miami and the western islands of the Bahamas.

They were eagerly listening to a talk by Scott Parazynski, the former NASA astronaut who is, at present, the only person on the planet who can claim to have both reached the top of Mount Everest and flown in space.

Parazynski flipped through a breathtaking slideshow of photos from, literally, the edges of the world with a combination of war-story nostalgia, … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--The Web 2.0 Expo this week was missing something. It might've been Tim O'Reilly, the founder of conference co-producer O'Reilly Media and a well-regarded, if slightly granola-inclined, industry sage. He was out of town; gone from the program was his traditional opening keynote, a quick but poignant take on the state of the industry.

Or it might have been the hype missing from the rather quiet halls of the Moscone Convention Center. A few years ago, it was a must-attend event for industry insiders and a launch pad for new start-ups looking to get onto … Read more

In my last post, I gave you an outline of what I see as the three biggest "killer apps" of cloud computing. There is, however, another facet to the cloud story that I think is very exciting right now: innovation on the core technical and operational models that form the basis of distributed computing.

What I mean by that is this: cloud has made new ways of acquiring and consuming infrastructure, platforms, and applications readily available to an increasingly broad market of potential users. The financial model--pay-as-you-go--makes failure much, much cheaper than it was with models in which … Read more