stanford

PALO ALTO, Calif.--There are nearly 30 start-ups promoting their wares today as part of AlwaysOn's Stanford Summit--and that's just before lunch. Many have been profiled by Webware in the past, but I wanted to take some time to dig into two of my personal favorites from this morning's CEO presentations.

MyTrybe. This is a behind-the-scenes service for site owners who want to add recommendation features to their content. It uses a sliding scale happy face that you can drag on tagged pieces of content like stories, videos, and pictures to establish a ranking. MyTrybe will … Read more

If Jerry Yang does lose his job as the result of a deal between Yahoo and Microsoft, the Stanford connection may prove its worth.

"Jerry is very talented and if he wants to work at Google we'd be very excited to have him, but I don't think that's going to happen," the BBC quoted Google co-founder (and fellow Stanford alum) Sergey Brin. He was responding to a question whether Google would ever consider employing Yang if Yahoo's chief executive lost his job.

Brin is huddling this week with the other two-thirds of Google's … Read more

He's one of the fathers of the new economic growth theory, and he's been on the short list for a Nobel price in economics. He's founded companies, including online teaching firm Aplia.

Now, Professor Paul Romer of Stanford University's Graduate School of Business is leaving the campus to pursue a new, somewhat startling private endeavor. Using Western know-how and bureaucracies, he wants to build modern metropolises in one of the most challenging areas of the world: Africa.

"I am embarking on a whole new direction in my career," Romer said during a recent meeting … Read more

I'm in Silicon Valley on Friday for the annual economic summit organized by Stanford University. Earlier in the morning, the government reported that the nonfarm payrolls registered the fastest rate of decline since 2003 and the markets predictably tanked. Good thing the Wall Street crowd didn't have a video link to the presentation by Havard professor (and ex-Harvard president and former Treasury Secretary) Lawrence Summers. Then they'd really bolt for the nearest bar.

"I believe we are facing the most serious combination of macroeconomic and financial stresses that the U.S. has faced in a generation--and … Read more

It's one of the oldest, most common problems in photography: that picture you thought would be the prize shot is out of focus.

Refocus Imaging, a Silicon Valley start-up, thinks its technology can be used to make cameras that can fix that problem--after you take the photo.

By fitting a camera's image sensor with a special lens and then processing the resulting data with new methods, Refocus Imaging's technology will let photographers fix their photos and exercise new creative control after the shutter is released, founder and Chief Executive Ren Ng said.

"There's a lot … Read more

The three guys today talk about Street Fighter being the best game ever...We wax reminiscent over old video games. Plus, Stanford drops tuition, XNA gets more open, Gears of War 2, and three actors replace Heath Ledger.

Listen now: Download today's podcast

Most folks think of a photo as a two-dimensional representation of a scene. Stanford University researchers, however, have created an image sensor that also can judge the distance of subjects within a snapshot.

To accomplish the feat, Keith Fife and his colleagues have developed technology called a multi-aperture image sensor that sees things differently than the light detectors used in ordinary digital cameras.

Instead of devoting the entire sensor for one big representation of the image, Fife's 3-megapixel sensor prototype breaks the scene up into many small, slightly overlapping 16x16-pixel patches called subarrays. Each subarray has its own lens … Read more

As promised, I've posted a pretty complete transcript of my interview on Tuesday with Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates.

As noted earlier, some of his most interesting comments dealt with Yahoo as well as the natural interface options that are planned for Windows 7.

But I was also intrigued by some of his other answers, including something that hits close to home--the future of journalism.

"I hope that readers will be willing to pay subscriptions or watch ads or things that will keep the high quality and breadth of journalism alive and (make it) even better than it is … Read more

PALO ALTO, Calif.--I still don't know much about what Windows 7 will do or what it will look like, but I can tell you that you won't have to rely on a keyboard and mouse to use it.

After decades of investing in things like speech technology and handwriting recognition, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates said that users appear ready for new ways of interacting with machines. And, he said, advances in those areas and in touch-based gestures will find their way into the next version of Windows, known as Windows 7.

"The version after Vista is … Read more