Words matter. These are the best Steven Levy Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
No company has embraced the liberating aspects of the Internet as a ‘new marketplace of ideas’ more than the search giant Google.
Since the iPhone, the most transformative products have not been gadgets but services. Facebook, Twitter, and Snapchat have changed lives, but they didn’t launch to massive fanfare.
As technology tries to maintain its dizzying ascent, one dead weight has kept its altitude in check: the battery.
Inevitably, we will spend a multiple of the amount we used to drop on a new router once the old one petered out. The New Wifi is the $5 latte to the standard cup of coffee.
The vast majority of Americans perform sophisticated digital tasks on a daily basis. Grandmas and grandpas e-mail digital photos of their cruise trip and IM their kids in school. So a politician admitting that he or she can’t bother to learn those things indicates a horse-and-buggy mentality.
The myth of the peachfuzz billionaire has emerged. This new Horatio Alger typically launches his first start-up in middle school, and somewhere between the campus computer-science lab and a move to Palo Alto hacks up a Web site where users provide fun or useful content.
I think that the most beautiful thing lately hasn’t been in hardware or software per se but collaboration – the idea behind Napster, which uses the distributed power of the Internet as its engine.
For many years, when people described how the Internet worked – whether they were talking about shopping, communicating, or starting a business there – they inevitably invoked a single metaphor. The Internet, said just about everybody, was a contemporary incarnation of the wild, wild West.
Is it possible for Apple or anyone else to rule in the mobile realm the way Microsoft did on the desktop? The way to do this is to go mass-market with a device that can do anything the others can do.
How do you show off the most anticipated product in years? That was my dilemma with the iPhone X. Since my unit was one of the first few released into the wild, it naturally drew a lot of curiosity when I pulled it out of my pocket and gave it a dewy-eyed glance to wake it from slumber.
Facebook has never been shy about its ambitions.
Fast, cheap, abundant broadband is a fantastic economic accelerator, enabling breakout businesses and kick-starting new industries.
There has never been an unexpectedly short debugging period in the history of computers.
The iPod Shuffle was something unique for Apple: a device stripped down to a single function.
Generally, TED speakers are believers in the scientific method.
Google serves all of humanity with information within milliseconds.
Because Facebook can’t exist without AI, it needs all its engineers to build with it.
Facebook takes it as a core truth that sharing and connecting is a force that will improve the world.
Technology writers are seldom subject to frenzied, Beatlemania-esque paroxysms of public attention. June 29, 2007, was the exception. I was in the wrong place – Apple’s Fifth Avenue store in Manhattan – with the right device. The iPhone.
To political technocrats, 2008 marks the maturation of ‘microtargeting’ – a technique that, if things are as close in November as expected, may well affect who takes the White House.
There’s plenty to admire in the iPhone X straight from the unboxing. The biggest change stares you in the face: that screen, that screen.
Every great device, gadget, electric car, and robot would be even greater if batteries didn’t suck so badly.
Wifi was never supposed to be a big thing and certainly not a thing that would become as vital to a home as indoor plumbing.
Implanting a microchip inside the brain to augment its mental powers has long been a science fiction trope.
In the history of U.S. elections, the fall of 2000 is notorious for the debacle that occurred in the country’s attempt to elect a president that year.
When superpower countries like the United States and the former Soviet Union contemplated moving their conflicts to outer space, there was justifiable fear and dread.
What made the days leading up to the iPhone launch even crazier was that Apple had pulled off the greatest disappearing act in tech promotion history. In January 2007, Jobs announced the long-awaited iPhone. But somewhere that winter, the iPhone vanished.
No one in Silicon Valley loves virtual reality or believes in its future as much as Clay Bavor.
All through the 1980s, Apple kept its prices high. There were many reasons Microsoft’s much bigger user base managed to resist moving to the GUI – but price was high among them.
Just as the cable revolution overturned broadcast, the net is destined to become the dominant mode of video, both in terms of transit and programming.
Twitter provides a platform that allows anyone on the planet – from a political activist in the Middle East to an intemperate golfer in the White House – to broadcast his or her thoughts.
The rush into scripted video by tech giants is going to accelerate an evolution of entertainment that’s already underway. We’re already moving away from the idea that drama is a 60-minute exercise with four bathroom breaks.
With the iPod – Apple’s first successful stab at market dominance – Apple had begun with a high price but quickly dropped it.
This paradox of vision – the genius of youthful ignorance – is nothing new. Had Bill Gates not been in diapers in the early days of computer software, he might have understood that there could never be a market for consumer software – but the 19-year-old Gates went ahead and cofounded Microsoft.
Apple’s iPod success led them to believe an even bigger breakthrough was possible with the iPhone. In some respects, the iPhone hype overwhelmed even Apple.
I am old enough to have grown up glued to a screen offering only three alternatives, each of which was an all-powerful national network that seemed permanently ensconced in the entertainment stratosphere.
After a few days with the iPhone X, I can begin to make out its themes. It’s a step towards fading the actual physical manifestation of technology into a mist where it’s just there – a phone that’s ‘all screen,’ one that turns on simply by seeing you, one that removes the mechanics of buttons and charging cables.
Computer technology is so built into our lives that it’s part of the surround of every artist.
The fact that biological, or ‘natural’ rules might help in the creation of a computer generated work of art is interesting, but even a wonderful work of art made in this fashion isn’t the same as a person, with all his or her experiences and emotions involved, making art.
Steve Ballmer never used to be someone who let facts speak for themselves. In the 1990s, he was the hyper-energetic Microsoft exec yelling ‘Developers! Developers! Developers!’ at an all-hands meeting in Safeco field.
