Communications of the ACM
Innovation Is Overrated: A Provocation
Digital innovation is not working in the interest of the whole of society. It is time to radically rethink its purpose without…
From ACM Opinion
The Rise and Fall of Blackberry: An Oral History
In 1984, Mike Lazaridis, an engineering student at the University of Waterloo, and Douglas Fregin, an engineering student at the University of Windsor, founded...
From ACM Opinion
Charlie Rose Talks to Nathan Myhrvold
You worked for years at Microsoft, where things now look uncertain.
From ACM Opinion
Why the Googlification of Obamacare Really Matters
The Internet is piling yet more vitriol on the shoddy Obamacare rollout in response to a report, by Bloomberg's Alex Wayne, that the administration has recruited...
From ACM Opinion
Nsa Surveillance Makes For Strange Bedfellows
The controversy over U.S. government surveillance has produced a king-size collection of strange bedfellows. Beneath the covers one finds both amusing ironies and...
From ACM Opinion
Craig Venter on the Hail Mary Genome and Synthetic Meat
Where are we in the hype cycle of synthetic biology?
From ACM Opinion
Will Facebook's Robot Censors Know Porn When They See It?
The old trope about pornography is that you’ll know it when you see it. Facebook is betting that not only will it know it, but that the social network will be able...
From ACM Opinion
Balancing Security and Liberty in the Age of Big Data
A very large Internet company once had the noble impulse to share some of its data with the research community.
From ACM Opinion
Charlie Rose Talks to Tumblr's David Karp
What made you decide that this was the right time to sell—and that Yahoo! was the right buyer?
From ACM Careers
Netflix, Reed Hastings Survive Missteps to Join Silicon Valley's Elite
On a normal weeknight, Netflix accounts for almost a third of all Internet traffic entering North American homes. That's more than YouTube, Hulu, Amazon.com, HBO...
From ACM Opinion
Microsoft's Steve Ballmer Does Not Fear Dropbox or an Office-Less Ipad
When Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer does his bounding these days, it's often in front of an 82-inch interactive display mounted on the wall of...
From ACM Opinion
Zoran Popovi?: Recruiting Gamers to Fight Disease
Proteins are the workhorses of our cells: They turn food into energy and determine our health. Each one is a chain of molecules—sometimes thousands of links long—that...
From ACM Opinion
Can Facebook 'monetize Eyeballs?'
In the days of the Internet bubble of the mid to late 1990s, companies received millions of dollars of venture capital to offer products that weren't especially...
From ACM Opinion
Siri Means You'll (almost) Never Have to Die
Some 80 years ago, philanthropist Spencer Penrose amassed a fortune in Western gold, silver, and copper mines. After building a zoo and hospital, he decided to...12