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Fast Forward - FORTUNE Magazine
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From CNN and Money magazine, CNNMoney.com combines business news and in-depth market analysis with practical advice and answers to personal finance questions.
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Farewell to Fast Forward
This is my farewell column. Fast Forward has been a weekly labor of love, mostly, since early 2002. Now I'm taking an extended leave from Fortune to write my book, The Facebook Effect.
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From Brainstorm: Our new $1 million prize, and more
Fortune this week announced the Legatum Fortune Technology Prize, an annual $1 million award intended to reward for-profit efforts to provide products and services to the poor through the use of technology.
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HP's grand vision: measure everything
Imagine walking down the supermarket aisle with a cheap device you could hold up to a tomato. If the sensor detects a pesticide residue, you'd know the "organic" label is a lie. Similar tools could track the chemical content of water in a stream, telling you if there was lead contamination and when it got there, or keep constant watch on a bridge and tell if a structural steel beam was at risk of collapse.
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Brainstorm survey: What tech leaders want
As the iPhone 3G emerges, Apple's mobile device has captivated the leaders of the tech industry. That's the most certain conclusion Fortune reached after surveying 325 industry leaders who will be attending our Brainstorm Tech conference July 21-23.
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Why Microsoft will win Yahoo
In the end, Microsoft is almost surely going to end up owning Yahoo's search business. That's the only conclusion I can come up with, having spent months talking to Microsoft's senior leadership for a recent story on the company. And even what does seem like erratic behavior on the part of Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer et al points toward that inevitable conclusion.
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We want Brainstorm Tech to rock!
In just three short weeks, we launch the next phase in Fortune's Brainstorm conference series, Brainstorm Tech. The original Brainstorm ran in Aspen from 2001 until 2006, and this one will retain the unique spirit of multidisciplinary inquiry that won it so many plaudits and fans, while digging even deeper into tech. Brainstorm Tech remains a wide-ranging convergence of people and ideas, with a deep cognizance of the impact of technology on what is happening in the world. I serve as program director and conference host. (The conference runs July 21-23 in Half Moon Bay, just south of San Francisco. For full details go here.)
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How one CEO Facebooked his company
When Jeremy Burton arrived as CEO at private-equity-owned Serena Software last year, he found a respectable but boring 25-year-old firm still profitably churning out mainframe-oriented products. But he also discovered some underplayed non-mainframe products as well as new technologies in R&D that could be killer in a mashup Web 2.0 world. Of course the company's owners at Silver Lake, wanted him to find ways to make the place grow. So he turned R&D loose to develop the new products, and then turned to Facebook to change Serena.
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Computer games as liberal arts?
Though many adults imagine the frightening Grand Theft Auto when they think of video games, kids appear to be subtler thinkers on the subject. Not only do many of them intuitively realize that games can embody any values and be on any subject, many want to make games themselves.
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With Microsoft, OLPC may finally succeed
Microsoft and the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative announced Thursday that the Windows operating system would soon be available on the so-called XO, also known as the "$100 laptop." In interviews, executives made it clear that this could be a catalytic shift in perception and market success for the innovative but up-to-now aberrant laptop intended for the poor children of the world.
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Big tech: A shelter in the storm
Technology is different. Despite pervasive economic uncertainty, that's the message that many of the industry's big firms are sending in their latest earnings reports. We may be buying fewer Starbucks mocha lattes and shipping fewer packages through UPS. But tech sales - from gadgets to high-end services - are thriving.
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Why Microsoft isn't buying Facebook
When Microsoft walked away from its blockbuster bid for Yahoo, the media sought desperately to keep the news coming even when there wasn't much left to say. That seems to be how The Wall Street Journal came up with the notion that Microsoft had approached Facebook about an acquisition. It's not true.
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Microsoft: Decidedly not R.I.P.
Oh how frustrating when the mighty haven't fallen.
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Mimic nature - invent faster
I'm sitting at a dinner table at Fortune's just-completed Brainstorm Green conference in Pasadena. Janine Benyus, the high priest of a new field called biomimicry, has drawn a little sketch of a car on a napkin. "Abalone," she writes, and draws an arrow to the windshield. "Tree frog" and an arrow toward the tires. "Lotus leaf" she connects to the side of the car. She's telling me about the many ways car designers are borrowing concepts from nature.
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Is Facebook worth your time?
Facebook, the 71-million-member social network, has attracted lots of adults during the last year as it became a global technology cause celebre. But I'm hearing more and more of these grown-up newbies questioning whether the service is really worth their time. Some find it more annoying than useful, and can't really figure out any benefit.
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Why contrarians should consider AMD
Advanced Micro Devices, the little PC chipmaker that couldn't, then could, then couldn't, is struggling again. What has it tried repeatedly to do? To compete both successfully on product with its giant and potent competitor Intel and still make money.
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Muhammad Yunus on tech, profit and the poor
"Technology is making more changes in our way of life than ever in human history," says Muhammad Yunus. "The way the Internet and the mobile phone are spreading, you cannot compare with any technology of the past." Yunus is known for his visionary leadership in microfinance and helping the poor. He and the Grameen Bank he founded won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006. Now he wants to see the tech industry work more explicitly to empower the poor.
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Comcast-BitTorrent: The Net's finally growing up
Something remarkable happened on Thursday - an Internet service provider and a peer-to-peer software company announced a collaboration and agreed to work together.
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Why tech stocks have a glorious future
As a financial writer, I spend a lot of time looking at numbers. Right now, the numbers say that the world has a huge and unremitting hunger for technology, communication, Internet access, and information.
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Help Wanted: Adults on Facebook
It's already hooked America's youth, and now Facebook is set on winning the hearts of two potentially lucrative demographics: Adults and the rest of the world.
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The socialist state of ThoughtWorks
Roy Singham wants you to know that ThoughtWorks, the Chicago-based software company he founded 15 years ago, and where he is now chairman of the board, is a growing and profitable enterprise and not a socialist collective.
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