Eric Schmidt, the former chief executive officer of Google, will head a new Pentagon advisory board aimed at bringing Silicon Valley innovation and best practices to the U.S. military, Defense Secretary Ash Carter said on Wednesday.
"The White House intellectual property adviser Colleen V. Chien noted in 2012 that Google and Apple were spending more money acquiring patents (not to mention litigating them) than on doing research and development."
The Hindu 20 Sept 2015
"As cars increasingly become rolling software platforms, Apple and Google have depths of tech expertise that the carmakers would have trouble duplicating. And those Silicon Valley companies have financial resources that dwarf those of even behemoth companies like Daimler and Volkswagen. Google, which began working on self-driving cars in 2009, is valued by the stock market at more than five times the worth of either of those carmakers. Apple is worth eight times as much. That gives them an advantage in a business that requires huge investment in research and development."
"“Starting from sustainability, going over to digitalisation, and ending up at autonomous driving — these three big things are really something that is a game changer for the automotive industry,” Mr. Winkelmann said in an interview. “Everybody has to tackle these challenges.” — New York Times"
Brad Burnham Jun 10, 2010 "Once you start thinking about large web platforms as governments, the logical question is what kind of government are they. One thing is for sure - none of these platforms are democracies. They are oligarchies controlled by founders, investors or shareholders. That may not be at all bad. As long as citizens (users) can move freely from one government to another with little switching cost, there is no reason to burden these polities with the inherent inefficiencies of popular democracy. But that does put a special premium on emigration policies and property rights. Do I own my data, can I export it freely? It also suggests that large networks that have strong network effects may someday need other incentives to act in the best interests of their citizens."
"In the end, the big networks on the web will all have to find a balance between state power and private initiative."
Of course, a republic can’t run without authorities who follow the rule of law. Civil disobedience by citizens can be an important challenge to corrupt or immoral politicians, but when corporate leaders themselves start breaking the law in their own narrow interests, societal order breaks down. Polishing their left-libertarian veneer, the on-demand economy firms now flouting basic employment and anti-discrimination laws would like us to believe that they follow in the footsteps of Gandhi’s passive resistance, rather than segregationists’ massive resistance. But their wealthy, powerful, nearly-all-white-and-male cast of chief executives come far closer to embodying, rather than fighting, “the man”.
Google’s ambitious book-scanning program is foundering in the courts. Now a Harvard-led group is launching its own sweeping effort to put our literary heritage online. Will the Ivy League succeed where Silicon Valley failed?
The internet giant is growing so fast that if the EU fails to tackle its monopoly status now, in a decade or so Google might be too big to be held to account
In France, the upper house of parliament yesterday voted to support an amendment to a draft economy bill that would require search engines to display at least..
Vivek Wadhwa: "My prediction is that 2015 will be the year in which tech takes baby steps in transforming medicine. The technologies that make this possible are advancing at exponential rates; their power and performance are increasing dramatically even as their prices fall and footprints shrink. The big leaps will start to happen at around the end of this decade."
"Vivek Wadhwa is a Fellow at Arthur & Toni Rembe Rock Center for Corporate Governance, Stanford University; Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at the Pratt School of Engineering, Duke University; and Distinguished Fellow at Singularity University. "
Google on Google and Mashable on Mashable. Wikipedia: "Mashable is an Internet news blog. With a reported 5+ million monthly pageviews[ and an Alexa ranking around 1200, it ranks among the largest blogs on the Internet. Mashable regularly writes about MyS