Bill Gates

Bill Gates has been taking online classes for years. Now, he thinks it's time to make sure a whole lot more students do the same.

Today, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is announcing a new multiyear grant program that will give millions of dollars to those with novel ideas on how to use technology, and in particular online courses, to improve education. The Next Generation Learning Challenges are aimed at both funding new ideas and getting various groups to partner and expand on some of the good ideas that are being tried out, but only at small scale. … Read more

Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen has started tweeting, following in the footsteps of fellow co-founder Bill Gates, who became active on Twitter earlier this year.

Allen has quietly become more active on the microblogging site in recent days, having posted several updates to his account, including a post on September 22 that he was in Hawaii working on a book and more recent updates talking about his NFL team--the Seattle Seahawks--and a brain research summit he recently attended.

David Postman, a spokesman for Allen, said the @paulgallen account has been registered for a while, but was formerly private and not really … Read more

The tough economic conditions of the last few years have strained efforts to achieve global goals such as reducing poverty, improving health, and addressing environmental concerns, says Melinda Gates, co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

"Realistically in a recessionary time people do pull inward and I think it does become more difficult for certain," Gates said in a telephone call with reporters last week, held as the world marks 10 years since it set the Millennium Development Goals.

Gates said the goals she and the Gates Foundation are focused on--the ones related to reducing poverty and … Read more

TRUCKEE, Calif.--The exponential growth in chip performance, known as Moore's Law, is great, but can't be applied to all areas of technology, Bill Gates warned last week.

"We've all been spoiled and deeply confused by the IT model," Gates said, answering an audience question at last week's Techonomy conference. "Exponential improvement--that is rare."

Gates said that there are isolated segments of technology that do produce that rate of improvement.

"We do see it," Gates said. "We see it in hard disk storage, fiber capacity, gene-sequencing rates, biological databases, … Read more

NEAR LAKE TAHOE, Calif.--Bill Gates says it's gratifying to see the computer industry that he helped start turn some of its attention to broader societal challenges.

"I think there's increased awareness of using innovation to help in more than just profit making," Gates told CNET in an interview on Friday, following his speech at the Techonomy conference. "When I think back to the conferences I went to earlier in the industry, we were pretty darn focused on popularizing software and personal computing. Nothing wrong with that, but it's nice to see the evolution.&… Read more

TRUCKEE, Calif.--Bill Gates is a glass three-quarters-full kind of guy, but watching the U.S. political system fail to tackle big problems like health care is enough to get even him down.

"You can actually get depressed," he said, wrapping up a talk at the Techonomy conference here. Earlier, Gates talked about a variety of issues including how online courses will reshape higher education and the need for better software modeling for diseases and other complex systems.

Gates said that the political process hasn't shown itself to be very good at handling issues that "are … Read more

TRUCKEE, Calif.--A key to many hard problems, from using nuclear power to combating diseases, is better software modeling, Bill Gates said on Friday.

While it's not surprising that he's a fan of using software to help solve hard problems, it is somewhat surprising that there aren't already good models for some diseases.

"There's no disease-modeling software," he said, speaking at the end of the three-day Techonomy conference here. "There is none. Why is flu seasonal? We don't know."

Gates said he aims to make sure that gap is filled, supporting … Read more

TRUCKEE, Calif.--For those concerned with privacy, Google CEO Eric Schmidt gave them a few more things to start worrying about.

At a conference here Wednesday, Schmidt noted that using artificial intelligence, computers can take 14 pictures of anyone on the Internet and stand a good chance of identifying that person. Similarly, the data collected by location-based services can be used not only to show where someone is at, but to also predict with a lot of accuracy where they might be headed next.

"Pretty interesting," Schmidt said. "Good idea, Bad idea?...The technology of course is … Read more

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison is among dozens of billionaires who have signed on to give away the bulk of their wealth to charity.

Bill Gates and Warren Buffett have been lobbying the world's megarich to sign a "Giving Pledge" to eventually donate at least half of their fortunes. The Wall Street Journal noted on Wednesday that there are now about 40 signatories to the pledge, including Ellison, filmmaker George Lucas, IAC chief Barry Diller, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, oil tycoon (and onetime Yahoo investor) T. Boone Pickens, and more.

"We've really just started, but already … Read more