Tech Talk At Work Start-ups It’s launch season in Silicon Valley; birdies leave their nests and nascent companies leave their incubators, accelerators, or classrooms and announce their products to the world. Until recently, software, particularly apps, dominated launch season; credit cards and parental funding can’t take a hardware product from idea to manufacturing. But in [...]

The $133 million gift announced this week by Qualcomm Founder Irwin Jacobs to Cornell Tech in New York City was certainly good news to the educational institution, but was likely not much of a surprise. That’s because IEEE 2013 Medal of Honor recipient Jacobs, profiled in the May issue of Spectrum, has long supported engineering [...]

Steven Cherry: Hi, this is Steven Cherry for IEEE Spectrum’s “Techwise Conversations.” Proxy marriages are nothing new, but like most things not invented in the Internet era, the Internet is reinventing proxy marriages. The New York Times recently reported on a couple that reconnected on the Internet after many years and got married via a [...]

Steven Cherry: The weapons that wreaked havoc at the Boston Marathon this month, killing three and maiming scores more, were improvised explosive devices, or IEDs. As it happens, the U.S. Army has a lot of experience with IEDs—a lot of unhappy experience. In an article about them in 2008, my colleague Glenn Zorpette wrote, “IEDs [...]