Stories about: Stanford University

Late last year, the mobile phone industry passed a remarkable milestone, one that not so many years ago it didn't even expect to reach. Media sites and blogs around the world buzzed as the news was announced with equal measures of excitement, amazement and, in some cases, guarded jealousy. We'll never know who it was, or where it was, but on that day someone, somewhere bought a mobile phone and tipped global sales past the three billion mark. "More than half the world's population now own a phone" was a typical headline.

Patrick Gelsinger is an electrical engineer. He joined Intel in 1979, worked on the design of the 80286 and 80386 microprocessors, and was the chief architect for the 80486 chip.

Microsoft plans to shutter its book-scanning operation this week, the company said on Friday.

It's not often you read a book and find that, 10 years on, it remains central to your thinking. Ideas come and go, paradigms shift and many books -- particularly in the rapidly evolving "ICT for Development" space -- become dated and surpassed by new innovation, new models and new ways of thinking. Many earlier studies gather dust, becoming windows to a history of amazing success, glorious failure or a series of what-might-have-been's. Hindsight is a wonderful thing.

MMORPGs -- massively multiplayer online role-playing games -- like World of Warcraft, Eve and EverQuest may be the best simulators of tomorrow's business environment. So say Byron Reeves, Thomas W. Malone and Tony O'Driscoll in this month's Harvard Business Review. The authors found that these games closely mirror the evolving world of business: distributed decision-making, rapid response, ad hoc teams, and leadership through collaboration rather than authority.

The late science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke famously said that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

Google and IBM are testing a cloud computing infrastructure that could become an important avenue for them to deliver software and services to consumer and business users.

Name a department at Wells Fargo & Company, and it's likely that Avid Modjtabai has held a senior position in it. From online personal finance services to human resources and consumer deposits, Modjtabai has been there, done that in her 14-year tenure at the company. Her experience has not gone unnoticed; in addition to being named one of the "most powerful women in banking" by U.S. Banker, she also received accolades from the San Francisco Business Times as of one of the "100 most influential women in Bay Area business." Elizabeth Garone spoke to Modjtabai about her career and the benefit of moving across functions. Edited excerpts follow.

Fighting insomnia one night, all Robert Topolski wanted to do was send digital recordings of 19th-century barbershop quartet music to some friends.

A search company founded by ex-Google and IBM employees landed US$25 million in new venture funding this week, but remains in stealth mode with no indication of when its technology will be publicly available.

The desktop virtualization field is getting more crowded with two new vendors introducing products: one that lets users carry their desktops around on a USB flash drive, and another that delivers desktops through a Web browser.