Now that Planetary Resources has unveiled its plans to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new deposits of platinum and water, and to strip-mine them and shuttle them back to secure facilities back on our home planet, I think it’s time to take ask the question we’ve all been wondering: Just what

I recently spent a day at an event sponsored by Monocle magazine and GE, focused on “tech craftsmanship.” It started with an interesting statement from Tim O’Reilly: If you want to see what the future holds, look at what really smart people are doing in their spare time. For example, the PC revoluti

Frustration. That’s the dominant note sounded by commenters at this week’s Mobile Summit, an invitation-only conclave of mobile-industry executives and investors sponsored by VentureBeat. It’s polite frustration, to be sure. But again and again, I’ve heard on-stage speakers or members of the audienc

For someone who’s lived through one tech bubble, it’s hard not to see signs of another one every time the market starts edging upward. Besides, no one wants to be the rube who’s the last one to realize the party’s over and the cool kids have already left. That’s why so many people are quick […]

More than 6,000 hopefuls from around the world entered Facebook’s programming challenge, the Hacker Cup, in January. Three months later, just 25 finalists went head-to-head in a three-hour battle for supremacy today at Facebook’s new Menlo Park campus. The winner will have his name (all 25 finalists

Lloyd Reynolds | The Guild of Book Workers’ 100th Anniversary Exhibition – Retrospective Entries.

If the mobile market is a war, the battlefield is shifting. As VentureBeat’s Devindra Hardawar recently wrote, it’s no longer a contest between the Apple iOS and Google Android mobile operating systems. Microsoft is about to shake things up in the tablet arena with the introduction of the Windows 8

Last year’s big fashion trend was the color block, and this year’s tech trend follows suit: It’s the square. More precisely, it’s the big, colorful rectangle filled with a solid color (like Windows 8) or a photograph (like Pinterest). Mondrian would have been proud. via Dylan’s Desk: Design goes min

In Microsoft’s vision of the future, Kinect sensors are everywhere: In your living room, your kitchen, at school, and even in the supermarket, above the fruit display. And why not? The $150 motion-sensing device provides a cheap way to add gesture and voice controls to any application. Plus it’s got

For a startup, a lot is riding on the home page. You might be surprised, then, to learn that startups vary wildly in how quickly and reliably their website home pages load. That’s especially true when you look at load times on mobile devices. An increasing number of people use smartphones and tablet

I’ve been using Windows Phone for several weeks now, first on a Samsung I borrowed from VentureBeat’s CTO Chris Peri and lately on a Nokia Lumia 800 loaned to VentureBeat for review. I really like the operating system in many ways. The Metro interface is frankly charming, with its flipping tiles and

As everyone knows by now, iPhones and iPads are built in huge Chinese manufacturing plants where tens of thousands of people work 12-hour shifts for little money, have little privacy, and are exposed to toxic chemicals and unsafe conditions every day. We’ve been hearing similar stories across other