U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu’s path from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to Washington—where he and the Obama administration have been forced to retreat on many of their alternative energy plans: On a cold morning in mid-November, Chu was hauled into a committee room on Capitol Hill. The hearing was the spectacle of the week, […]
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Khalid Shaikh helped create the file-uploading company YouSendIt. After battling with the CEO, he was fired—and he soon launched a series of cyberattacks: In Shaikh’s absence, YouSendIt had continued to grow. It had raised an additional $14 million in VC funding and had 100,000 paying subscribers. Still, Shaikh marveled at how often YouSendIt’s site went […]
What does it take to get a tech startup funded? Inside the competitive selection process for one incubator in New York City: The date is January 24, one day after applications were due for TechStars, a three-month mentorship program that is part boot camp, part investment fund. Some 1,480 young companies have filled out a […]
Coming Monday, May 14th: Bloomberg Businessweek and Longreads present “Behind the Tech Longreads”: A night of storytelling featuring Felix Gillette, Sheelah Kolhatkar, Brad Stone, Ashlee Vance and editor Josh Tyrangiel. Housing Works Bookstore Cafe, Manhattan, 7 p.m., Free admission RSVP on our Facebook Page
Featured: Tech/Science site BBC Future’s #longreads page. Story picks about Olympic doping, the Titanic’s anniversary, plus more.
The complicated relationship between founders of a startup. Billy Chasen and Seth Goldstein lead Turntable.fm, but with very different viewpoints on how to succeed: Then traffic started falling. By autumn, it dwindled to less than half its peak, and the very same tech watchers started wondering whether it was all over. Goldstein says he can […]
Inside the boardroom battles that led to the hiring (and firing) of CEO Léo Apotheker, formerly of SAP. Meg Whitman is now in charge of finding ways to fix the legendary tech company: A few months after she took over as the CEO of Hewlett-Packard last September, Meg Whitman held one in a series of […]
Meet The New Boss, Worse Than The Old Boss?
The Internet was supposed to liberate artists and replace the traditional businesses that had been disrupted by digital distribution. Musician David Lowery (Camper Van Beethoven, Cracker) says the math still isn’t working: I was like all of you. I believed in the promise of the Internet to liberate, empower and even enrich artists. I still […]
The Graphing Calculator Story
In the early 1990s, a contractor for Apple had his project cancelled. He then decided to “uncancel” it, and began sneaking into corporate headquarters to finish the job: I asked my friend Greg Robbins to help me. His contract in another division at Apple had just ended, so he told his manager that he would […]
A writer loses everything on his iPhone, his iPad and his Mac—including all of the photos from the first year and a half of his daughter’s life—after a hacker infiltrates his Amazon, Apple, Gmail and Twitter accounts: Had I been regularly backing up the data on my MacBook, I wouldn’t have had to worry about […]
