2012

Facebook's Chief Operating Officer doesn't shy away from ongoing industry chatter about the role of women in technology and business. She fuels it.

Now famous for her success at Facebook and her ultimate ascent to the Facebook board (previously a dudes-only affair) in June, Sandberg's past successes are many, including stints as an economist with the World Bank, chief of staff for the U.S. Treasury Department in the Clinton administration, and as a top ad sales executive for Google.

Sandberg is not only one of the world's wealthiest women, her 2010 TED talk urging women … Read more

He's heard it before and he'll hear it again, so we might as well come out and say it: Elon Musk is real life's Tony Stark. With his high-end electric car company, Tesla, and its mainstream Model S sedan rolling out of its domestic manufacturing base in Fremont, Calif., Musk could take a long nap on his laurels. After all, Tesla could herald a new era for clean car manufacturing in the US.

But Musk's entrepreneurial zeal knows no bounds, driving him to found space-exploration company SpaceX, which sent its first operational flight of the Falcon 9 rocket … Read more

President Obama may have won the 2012 election, but it was FiveThirtyEight blogger Nate Silver who won the hearts of geeks everywhere -- at least those on the Democratic side of the aisle.

Even as most pundits predicted that the race between Obama and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney would be a photo-finish, Silver's algorithm-driven system of interpreting polls correctly predicted the winner in all 50 states, and narrowly missed being perfect in at the Senate level, not to mention having Obama comfortably ahead the whole way. Other poll aggregators correctly foresaw Obama's path to victory, but no … Read more

Hackers had a busy year. People identifying themselves with Anonymous launched a massive hacking campaign against Israel in protest of attacks against Gaza; conducted a DDoS attack against the U.K. Department of Justice in apparent protest over charges against Julian Assange; claimed to have stolen 1.7GB of data from the U.S. Justice Department; defaced hundreds of government and commercial Web sites in China; and targeted Syrian government Web sites -- just to name a few. AntiSec claimed to have stolen millions of Apple device IDs from the FBI, a claim the FBI disputed. And a group named … Read more

In his first full year as Google CEO, Larry Page had plenty to brag about. The company he cofounded with Sergey Brin in 1998 saw its stock hit record highs; its mobile operating system has 1.3 million activations a day; and its first Nexus-branded tablet debuted to strong reviews.

But even if he wanted to brag, for much of the year he wouldn't have been able to. In the summer, Page was hit with a still-unspecified illness that caused him to lose his voice. The bug caused him to sit out the Google I/O developer conference as … Read more

Steve Jobs described Jony Ive as his "spiritual partner" at Apple, as the person who had more operational power than anyone else at Apple except him. In the year following Jobs' death, the pipeline of Jobs-Ive creations launched, including the iPhone 5, iPad Mini, and new iMacs, and Ive gained additional powers under Apple's new leader, Tim Cook. He is not only in charge of Apple's award-winning hardware design, but also the look and feel of the software across all products, following the forced departure of iOS software chief Scott Forstall in October.

The British-born Ive … Read more

Kim DotCom is one of the most visible Internet personalities, yet he remains out of reach of U.S. law enforcement. DotCom generated more than $175 million from MegaUpload, the cloud-storage service he founded and a company accused by the U.S. Department of Justice of being an illegal enterprise. The DOJ alleges DotCom and six others encouraged millions from across the globe to pirate movies, TV shows, and other media and then store their booty in MegaUpload's digital lockers.

In January, the United States began trying to extradite him from his home in New Zealand. Since then, DotCom'… Read more

Every now and again, you have to rebuild the Internet from scratch. That's what began in earnest in 2012, as many Net powers powered up their sites on a next-gen network technology called IPv6 that's got vastly more room for individual devices than the current IPv4 that's been used since the Internet began.

With the world running out of IPv4 Internet addresses, network engineers have to use various tricks to accommodate all the new mobile phones, PCs, and servers joining the Net every day. IPv6 makes room for them and for all the Internet-enabled fire alarms, pet … Read more

It's rare to see a genuine surprise at a big event like Google I/O, but the Nexus Q was exactly that. There were virtually no hints of Google's mysterious, glowing orb until hours before the show, but its announcement raised more questions than answers. What does it actually do? Why does it cost $300? Can it double as a shot put?

Unfortunately for Google, the answer was the Nexus Q really didn't do much, except serve up a pretty LED light show. The device was such a flop, Google quickly discontinued it and sent pre-orderers a … Read more