Trailblazers

News that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is acquiring The Washington Post, one of the top newspapers in the U.S., shook the publishing world on Monday. He is buying the paper for $250 million in cash. Bezos is making the acquisition as an individual -- the Post is not to be part of Amazon's vast array of pro...

Yahoo plans to breathe some new life into its research and development lab by hiring 50 new PhDs by the end of the year. Spearheaded by CEO Marissa Mayer, the initiative already has resulted in 30 researchers joining the lab, with an additional 20 anticipated by the end of 2013. Yahoo is looking for...

One of the most fundamental keys to garnering interest in a democratically funded project is to propose something that people are going to seriously want. Wishy-washy concepts won't cut it -- it's got to be seductive. The svelte Pebble smartwatch is a good example of this funding technique, and it r...

Here's a charging method that could make a lot of sense. It's one that isn't reliant on the sun to convert solar radiation into power; it also isn't reliant on heavy batteries for its mojo. Instead, SolePower uses the same principle as a hand-crank flashlight. SolePower's shoe insert includes a wate...

If you've been anywhere near Mid-City or central parts of baked-concrete urban Los Angeles in the last few years, you may have noticed the Midnight Ridazz, a large social bike group who generally ride in the evening and at night -- often en masse. This group of bicycle enthusiasts have been whizzin...

It was once virtually unthinkable for a company to operate on a global scale, but if a recent move by PayPal is any indication, this small planet of ours may soon be just the beginning. In fact, PayPal on Thursday announced the launch of PayPal Galactic, an initiative that's designed to address the ...

Former Palm CEO and webOS creator Jon Rubinstein is apparently still brooding over Palm's acquisition by HP. Two years later, he looks back at what HP did with webOS -- or rather what it didn't do -- and he is very disappointed, he said in a recent interview. When HP acquired Palm for $1.2 billion i...

I've been focused on and off on turnarounds since I covered IBM's from the inside out in the 1990s, so I don't know how I missed this, but EMC2's turnaround was clearly a success, and its unique resulting organizational structure is incredibly subtle. The company is actually far more similar in brea...

Intel announced Thursday that COO Brian Krzanich will take the helm on May 16, replacing current CEO Paul Otellini, who will retire this month after 38 years with the company, eight of them as its chief. Krzanich has his own long history at Intel. The 52-year-old joined the company 31 years ago as a...

BlackBerry CEO Thorstein Heins made some bold claims on Monday. For one, he predicted a big turnaround for the company, suggesting that BlackBerry could once again become the absolute leader in mobile computing. What raised more eyebrows, though, was Heins' prediction that in five years, tablets mig...