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 Facebook Fallacy
Facebook is not only on course to go bust, but will take the rest of the ad-supported Web with it.
From ACM Opinion
How a Private Data Market Could Ruin Facebook
To justify its sky-high valuation, Facebook will have to increase its profit per user at rates that seem unlikely, even by the most generous predictions.
From ACM Opinion
Neal Stephenson on Science Fiction, Building Towers 20 Kilometers High ... and Insurance
Speaking before a packed lecture theater at MIT earlier this week, Neal Stephenson worried that the gloomy outlook prevalent in modern science fiction may be undermining...
From ACM Opinion
Facebook's Telescope on Human Behavior
Cameron Marlow, the leader of Facebook's efforts to mine its piles of data, says the effort can help explain why people act as they do.
From ACM Opinion
Review: Bad Apple
Apple's 1997 "Think Different" marketing campaign was one of its most memorable ever.
From ACM Opinion
Was Cameron's Deep Dive as seless as Manned Space Flight?
Ninety-nine percent of what we know about the solar system came to us from unmanned probes.
From ACM Opinion
Why Only Designers Can Create New Programming Languages
Compared to the versions that are hacked together late at night under insane deadline pressure, the programming languages to come out of academia are failures.
From ACM Opinion
How Young Is Too Young to Learn to Code?
When the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that children under 2 spend exactly zero time in front of screens, what its members are concerned about is substitution—all...
From ACM TechNews
Microsoft Reinvents Wi-Fi For White Spaces
Microsoft researchers have developed WiFi-NC, a type of Wi-Fi network that runs at peak performance even when interference is present.
From ACM Opinion
The Year in Computing
2011 saw the personal computer continue to be marginalized. Although PCs are still the workhorse computing device in homes and offices, the most exciting innovations...
From ACM Opinion
The Year on the Web
We've been living in the age of social media for a long time, but 2011 was the year that all the information we share online began to accrete into something greater...
From ACM Opinion
Nokia's Stephen Elop Speaks
A little more than a year ago, Microsoft veteran Stephen Elop agreed to become CEO of Nokia, the world's largest maker of mobile handsets. Elop's job at the Finnish...
From ACM Opinion
Why Transparent Tracking Needs Its Own App
Amid widespread concern over an obscure piece of smart-phone diagnostic software that some experts say could be used to collect and transmit sensitive information...
From ACM Opinion
The Personal Computer Is Dead
Power is fast shifting from end users and software developers to operating system vendors.
From ACM Opinion
Is Personal Data the New Currency?
What if Facebook paid you? Several startups envision an era in which we are all the brokers, and beneficiaries, of our own personal data.
From ACM Opinion
Google and Microsoft Talk Artificial Intelligence
Google and Microsoft don't share a stage often, being increasingly fierce competitors in areas such as Web search, mobile, and cloud computing. But the rivals...
From ACM TechNews
In Love With Android: Q&a With Matias Duarte
Google Android user experience director Matias Duarte notes that games influenced the new design for Android version 4.0, which includes new features such as Face...
From ACM Opinion
Why Microsoft Embraced Gaming
When the original Xbox video-game console went on sale in 2001, it wasn't clear why Microsoft, known for staid workplace software, was branching out into fast...
From ACM Opinion
Don't nderestimate the Singularity
Although Paul Allen paraphrases my 2005 book, The Singularity Is Near, in the title of his essay (cowritten with his colleague Mark Greaves), it appears that he...
From ACM Opinion