Business, Spoken

In retrospect, there was much more at stake than a mere $1 million when IBM’s Watson computer faced off against two Jeopardy! champions back in 2011. The bot’s victory gave Big Blue a shot at conjuring up a new line of business at the perfect possible moment. A series of advances in image and speech recognition was about to trigger a frenzy of investment and excitement about the money-making potential of artificial intelligence.

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Back in 2000, when Donald Trump was considering a presidential run on the Reform Party ticket, he told Fortune, "It's very possible that I could be the first presidential candidate to run and make money on it." And though it's hard to say whether Trump has actually managed to turn a profit (at least not without getting a look at his tax returns), according to his re-election campaign's FEC filings, Donald Trump is sure as hell trying his best.

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You'll find millions of apps in the Google Play store, many of them written using the powerful, stable, workhorse programming language Java. If it were a car, Java would feature a fast, reliable engine but not antilock brakes, power steering, or cup holders. Totally drivable. Not exactly a joy ride.

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In 1899, the world’s most powerful nations signed a treaty at The Hague that banned military use of aircraft, fearing the emerging technology’s destructive power. Five years later the moratorium was allowed to expire, and before long aircraft were helping to enable the slaughter of World War I. “Some technologies are so powerful as to be irresistible,” says Greg Allen, a fellow at the Center for New American Security, a non-partisan Washington DC think tank.

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If you believe their tweets, venture capitalists have never been more invested in making their industry hospitable to women. The flurry of good intentions did not come out of the blue. In the past few weeks, The Information and The New York Times have reported allegations of sexual harassment by well-connected tech VCs against female startup founders, many of them women of color.

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It’s the simple bargain that made companies like Google and Facebook into giants: in exchange for the convenience of running your life from a smartphone, you hand over gobs of data on your every activity. It zips up into the cloud where algorithms do…well it’s hard to be exactly sure, but everyone's at it. Oh, except Apple. Tim Cook has aggressively positioned the company as uninterested in collecting user data, and boasts that it sets Apple apart.

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Officially, the online search giant Google’s mission is to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” According to two new reports—one from the Wall Street Journal and one from the nonprofit, nonpartisan Campaign for Accountability’s Google Transparency Project, the company doesn’t just organize.

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You may not know how you know it, but you probably know today is Amazon Prime Day—a 30-hour-long, made-up shopping holiday from the online retail giant, where 85 million Prime subscribers get access to hundreds of thousands of discounts through Amazon’s site.

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You're probably used to pop-ups on websites begging you to sign-up for an email newsletter, enter a contest, or watch an ad. But tomorrow the web will be plastered in a different sort of pop-up as some the tech's biggest companies fight to maintain a free and open internet. Last May, the Federal Communications Commission began the process of dismantling the net neutrality rules it adopted in early 2015.

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Hello, and welcome to Who Extorted It Better? Time to meet our contestants! One is an avid user of Twitter, frequent golfer, and the leader of the most powerful nation on Earth: Donald Trump! The other is a major international news organization full of great journalists and run by bean-counting execs who helped put Donald Trump in office: CNN! Ready? Aaaaaaaannnd extort! Ooh, strong opening move from the president, hinting that if CNN continued its critical coverage of his administration, well, Trump might have his regulatory agencies withhold approval of a merger between...

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