Engineers Voice

At the heart of the sprawling corporate campus, in a hilltop building overlooking the immaculately shorn lawns, the sports fields and the modern theater complex, young engineers crowd into a classroom. They are India’s best and brightest, with stellar grades that propelled them into a high-tech industry growing at more than 25 percent annually. And their topic of the day? Basic telephone skills. Read more »

When it comes to overnight success stories, Michael Dell’s is certainly one for the books. After all, how many 19-year-old college kids manage to rack up nearly $6 million in first-year sales by storming the walls of an industry giant like IBM? The answer is not many. Add to the story that he started with a mere $1,000 and was working from his college dorm room, and the story becomes one of legend. Not bad for a college dropout. Read more »

In the world of the Google Guys, generating huge news is something of a foregone conclusion. If it’s not a rocketing market cap or a billion-dollar buyout, then it’s a gigantic party plane that grabs them the headlines.

But for all of their jaw-dropping ways, Tuesday’s headlines were ones that they easily could have done without. A massive $1 billion lawsuit filed against them by Viacom Inc. landed the boys a date with a judge for what the plaintiff called “massive intentional copyright infringement” by their latest addition–YouTube. Read more »

Today’s hottest Internet businesses are all about the power of social networks. Companies like MySpace, Facebook, and YouTube have become worth billions because businesses have realized that these social networks are generating huge advertising and marketing opportunities. As these social networks grow, the economic potential for its owners – and the advertisers who target the site’s users – is remarkable. Read more »

The battle between processor powerhouses Intel and Advanced Micro Devices is one of the fiercest in the tech industry. After Intel dominated for many years with its x86 line of PC and server chips, AMD upped the stakes in the server market in 2003 with its Opteron line. It caught Intel off guard by overhauling its memory design, pushing out combo 32-bit/64-bit processors when Intel was advocating a 64-bit approach with Itanium that required rewriting applications. Then AMD hit its stride with a powerful dual-core processor. It also undercut the industry leader on price. The result: AMD’s server and workstation market share rose from 2.8% in 2003 to 27% in 2006, according to the company. Read more »