Trailblazers

Brothers Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss -- famed for their dispute with Mark Zuckerberg over the formation of Facebook -- are trying their hand at the social media space again. They have invested $1 million in SumZero, founded in 2008 by fellow Harvard alum Divya Narendra, who also had a hand in bring...

With Salesforce.com's Dreamforce 2012 conference ready to kick off next week, there is little doubt the company has several new products ready to debut. Just in case, though, CEO Marc Benioff made sure the CRM world would be primed for the news. In a wide-ranging interview with TechCrunch founder M...

Yahoo's Q2 earnings, which were publicly released Tuesday, underscore the challenges that new CEO Marissa Mayer will face as she takes over the struggling Internet company. Yahoo brought in $227 million in its second quarter, down from the $237 million it reported for the same time a year ago. Earni...

Forced Employee Ranking, a process that ensures incompetence in companies, has been sourced, as a failure, to Jack Welch -- the guy credited with turning around GE. I began to wonder if much of what he was credited with actually created what now appears to be a cancer in that company, and in Microso...

Web entrepreneurs Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning, best known for propelling music into the digital-download age with Napster more than 10 years ago, have launched a new endeavor, Airtime, with much fanfare. It is a browser-based video chat service that connects people via their Facebook login directl...

I've been up to my armpits talking about Facebook for most of this month, and maybe because I'm unusually dense, just realized that Facebook is a new kind of dot-com. By this I mean its revenue and profit are based on a series of false beliefs. Unlike the first dot-coms, which failed, Facebook does...

Last week was rather quiet except for the increasing drama surrounding Facebook and what was to be their $100B IPO. It could still be, but thanks to its young, inexperienced, and clearly still-maturing CEO, it found itself digging out of an avoidable hole. Its experienced executive team was by all r...

The Facebook IPO roadshow -- a crucial time for the company -- is well under way, and the company's CEO has been in the spotlight. It was no doubt expected that Mark Zuckerberg would ditch his trademark hoodie for attire more befitting the circumstances, but no. At the few events Zuckerberg has atte...

The Next Web, a network of online technology outlets, continued its annual conference Friday in Amsterdam. Heeding to Amsterdam's night life, The Next Web waited until 10 a.m. to get things started, which was probably just about as early as the sleep-deprived attendees could have hacked it. First u...

When the Europeans set out to explore and colonize the world, they did so as much to bring riches back to their native lands as to build empires. A similar quest is driving a new breed of intrepid explorers to look to space. This time it may also be in pursuit of riches -- but it will take riches to...