Technology & Innovation

The report from the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission has been assailed as a confusing mishmash—poorly organized and weakened by obvious and unsatisfying conclusions.

Nobody should be surprised to see unauthorized movie downloads booming when the authorized kind remain so difficult to find. Movie studios should seek to satisfy demand.

The American economy isn’t back, says Robert Reich. While Wall Street’s bull market is making America’s rich even richer, most Americans continue to be mired in the housing crisis.

On February 2nd Apple and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation launched the Daily, a digital-only newspaper available by subscription. Does the move set a worrying precedent?

The least interesting fact about the Egyptian protests is that some of the protesters may have employed some of the tools of the new media to communicate with each other.

Tempers ran high at Big Think’s Farsight 2011 conference in San Francisco this week when Matt Cutts, Principal Engineer at Google, accused Microsoft’s Bing of using Google data to improve its search results.

All Americans, not just those in senior governmental positions, could benefit from having the option to watch Al Jazeera English—or at least having the option not to watch it.

Arguably, the U.S. now has a corporate tax code that’s the worst of all worlds. The official rate is higher than in most countries, so enormous time and effort are devoted to finding loopholes.

Two management consultants identify four guiding principles successful companies have followed to prepare for a world of constant Internet connectivity.

In a special presentation at Big Think’s Farsight 2011, Ilya Segalovich, co-founder and CTO of Russian search engine Yandex spoke about why his company has been dominant in that country’s […]

The fourth part of Big Think’s Farsight 2011 event discussed what future search experiences might be like. People instinctively want to interact with technology in ways that feel natural to […]

Facebook and other social media are becoming permanently woven into our society’s fabric, says NYU telecommunications professor Clay Shirky. Privacy is a 20th century notion.  

Any actions associated with zero costs tend to become debased over time, says technologist Jaron Lanier. Search is no different.

Do anti-prostitution laws discriminate against women near the bottom of the income distribution while ignoring similar behavior by women near the top?

Accusations that Microsoft’s search engine Bing has been copying Google’s search algorithm came on the same day that Bing and Google execs are set to meet at a Big Think event in San Francisco on the future of search. Watch the event streaming on our homepage from 1pm-5pm EST. 

While it’s clear that media drives politics, “there’s a more complicated and symbiotic relationship” between social media technologies and popular revolts.

Social media sites have been credited with helping protesters in Egypt organize and spread news before the government blackout. But is the importance of communications technology to modern revolutions overblown?

The main issues related to judging inequality and its changes over time come down to deciding whether the inequality is of the good or bad kind, says Nobel Laureate Gary Becker.

Statistics from the U.S. government suggest that our energy choices and level of consumption will not change much over the next few decades.

Is Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, a puppet master of the news media? He would like you to think so. But The Times’s dealings with him reveal a different story.

Pundits aren’t solely to blame for the vitriol. They’re just giving us what we want. To change our discourse we have to be masters, not slaves, to the cycle.

According to Hurricane Electric, an internet backbone and services provider based in Fremont, California, the internet will run out of bulk I.P. addresses sometime next week.

Critics question whether microfinance is truly helping the poor or driving them further into poverty with aggressive client recruiting and high-interest lending.

“Community building is hard work,” says Bough. It’s one thing to get people to engage with your company, and wholly another thing to get them to continue that engagement.

China and India will always train more scientists and engineers. But at least America’s still got the best environment for ideas to grow.

The aim of the WikiLeaks revelations was not just to embarrass those in power but to lead us to mobilise ourselves to bring about a different functioning of power.