It’s the traditional time for journalists to take a look at the past year, extend the trendlines forward, and make some predictions about how the coming year will play out. Unfortunately, journalists’ track record on that score is not so great. For instance, three years ago, I predicted five gadgets

CES 2015 What will be hot in consumer electronics and computing in 2015? Read VB’s full coverage of International CES 2015 to find out. Gary Shapiro is the chief executive of the Consumer Electronics Association, which hosts the annual electronics extravaganza in Las Vegas called International CES.

Update 12/29: We’ve added AdYen. Update 12/30: We’ve added IronSource. Update 1/6/2015: We’ve added Credit Karma. It is really, really difficult to create a company and grow it to the point where investors believe it is worth $1 billion or more. That milestone is so difficult to achieve, in fact, th

“In the pots warmed the bigos; mere words cannot tell Of its wondrous taste, colour and marvellous smell. One can hear the words buzz, and the rhymes ebb and flow, But its content no city digestion can know. To appreciate the Lithuanian folksong and folk food, You need health, [to] live on land, and

Let’s get one thing clear: No gadget will fix bad policing. There is no app to cure racism. But putting body cameras on police officers is one hell of a start. It is one of the few areas where a new technology offers a clear, unambiguous social benefit. Usually there are tradeoffs and unintended con

“It’s extremely dangerous to follow the advice of successful people. Those successful people often don’t even know why they are successful. Luck may have been part of it. And even if they did know, how do you know their recipe for success is applicable to you?” — Wise words from the founder of Finni

We know this much: Uber has a huge public relations problem on its hands. On Monday, Buzzfeed reported comments made by a senior vice president on Uber’s team, Emil Michael, at a private dinner. Michael’s comments suggested that he felt Uber would be justified in hiring an opposition research team t

Hundreds of people, including NYC’s former mayor, plan to protest the Met’s production of “Klinghoffer.” Protests! Against an opera — an art form that, for most Americans, is completely dead. I enjoy opera quite a bit, but I’m used to it trafficking in stories that — while offensively bloody (Lucia

Orchestras in the U.S. used to be 95% to 100% male. But after instituting blind auditions, with the applicants performing their music behind a screen so they can only be heard, not seen, that ratio changed dramatically. According to one study, the number of women in top orchestras rose from less tha

I was chatting via IM with science writer and Wired contributor Quinn Norton recently when a light bulb went on. We were talking about math and physics, a conversation spurred by Quinn’s reading of the remarkable Garrett Lisi‘s paper proposing a new unified theory of physics. 2:52:52 PM Dylan Tweney

If your product isn’t selling, who do you turn to? Those who help make your product? Or those who buy it? For newspaper publishers it’s a trick question, because they’re accustomed to thinking of their customers as their readers. That’s not true: Their readers are the product, and advertisers are th