Christopher Mims

Hewlett-Packard, the once-great technology giant that practically invented Silicon Valley startup culture, is just about done making disastrous decisions that threaten its entire business. (Decisions like its ill-starred acquisition of software company Autonomy, whose value HP then had to write down by $8.8 billion.) And Wall Street likes that: The stock is up about 80% since its nadir in November of 2012.

Samsung and Apple may be duking it out for title of smartphone king, but in emerging markets Nokia still reigns supreme by selling huge number of mobile phones—the “dumb” kind. In India, at least, that dominance has just come to an end.

After assertions by ex-Googlers that 20% time is effectively dead, and rejoinders by Google employees that the situation is a bit more nuanced, a spokesperson from Google has finally weighed in: 20% time at Google is “alive and well.”

Amid all the head-scratching about the apparently confirmed (but not by Apple) rumor of a forthcoming gold iPhone, one observation has come up again and again: It’s likely to be quite popular in China and India.

A lively debate among current and former Google engineers is raging on Hacker News about Quartz’s piece on the death of 20% time at Google—that formerly hallowed portion of an engineer’s week set aside for his or her own projects, which brought us innovations such as Gmail and Adsense.

An anonymous senior engineer at Boeing has told the Seattle Times that the newest version of Boeing’s 777 jet, the 777X, will be built in a new way—with a “whole lot of automation.”

Google’s “20% time,” which allows employees to take one day a week to work on side projects, effectively no longer exists. That’s according to former Google employees, one who spoke to Quartz on the condition of anonymity and others who have said it publicly.

Just two weeks ago we wrote about the Fuel3D, a device for scanning 3D objects so you can replicate them on a 3D printer, with a proposed price tag of around $1,000. Now MakerBot, the leading maker of desktop 3D printers, is launching its own 3D scanner next week, and Signe Brewster at GigaOM is betting it will cost just $500.

The spread of computing to every corner of our physical world doesn’t just mean a proliferation of screens large and small—it also means we’ll soon come to rely on mobile computers with no screens at all. “It’s now so inexpensive to have a powerful computing device in my car or lapel, that if you think about form factors, they won’t all have keyboards or screens,” says Scott Huffman, head of the Conversation Search group at Google.

Samsung has been teasing some new product releases for a September 4 event called Samsung Unpacked, and the fan site SamMobile, citing an anonymous source, reports that one of the things Samsung will unveil is a “Galaxy Gear” smart watch that will act as a companion to Samsung’s Galaxy phones. Samsung has previously confirmed that it is working on a smart watch, but has not announced a date for its launch.

If you’re up on trends in high tech startups, and you’re a budding entrepreneur, you should open your first office in Silicon Valley, right? Not so fast: A new report from the Kauffman Foundation, in collaboration with Engine, a policy coalition for startups, used data from the US Census to show that startup-heavy cities are actually all over the place.

You’d be forgiven for not recognizing the name InterDigital, despite the fact that it has been around since 1972 and developed many of the technologies that are critical to our increasingly mobile, wireless world. As a result, per employee, InterDigital is the most profitable company in the US, with a net income of $937,255 per worker, according to Bloomberg’s just-released visual compendium of data. And the only thing InterDigital produces is designs for new technology—and the occasional lawsuit.

In 2012, venture capitalist Robin Chan called up a few of his richest friends and—unbeknownst to anyone outside that group, until now—secured commitments of $1 billion to buy BlackBerry and turn the company around by killing its hardware division. Unfortunately, he was $5 billion short, so BlackBerry limped along for another year, and now has little choice but to sell.

BlackBerry has been under pressure to sell before, but this time, as the board officially announces the that the company is for sale, it’s different. BlackBerry’s attempt to reinvent itself with a totally new operating system and high-end hardware has, as predicted, failed to reverse the company’s fortunes. The most recent data on the company’s market share show a seemingly inexorable slide into irrelevance in BlackBerry’s most important market, the US, and investors know it: the company’s share price is down 38% in the past three months. June saw a surprise quarterly loss, and globally BlackBerry is down to a subscriber base of 72 million, from 83 million subscribers just six months ago, as smartphones running Google’s Android operating system pummel Blackberry in emerging economies.

At the intersection of wearable electronics and heart-rate monitors are results that tell us not just where humans do and do not like to be touched, but also how our bodies betray the fact that some of the touches we find “uncomfortable” can in fact calm us down.

Well this is unexpected.

We’re at one of those inflection points in the history of technology. Things that have been bouncing around academia and corporate R&D labs for decades have finally become inexpensive enough to bring experiences to consumers that were previously inaccessible. What’s more, a combination of these technologies has the potential to upgrade an experience all of us have every day. It’s something that hasn’t changed since the advent of the Macintosh and the debut of Windows: the mundane business of getting things done on our computers.

Should a business invest in growth, or save money for the next economic crisis? In any given economic environment, is there one best strategy or is it ok to be doing something different than your competitors? And just how much power do business leaders have to predict the consequences of making one choice over another, especially as conditions change?

Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Quake—these are the foundational titles that first enabled all subsequent first-person 3D video games, and the 3D rendering engines behind all of them were built principally by John Carmack. And as of this morning, Carmack is now the chief technology officer of Oculus Rift, the company that seems best positioned to bring virtual reality into the mainstream.

When Amazon unveiled the unique display panel of its Paperwhite Kindle e-reader, it revealed two impressive facts: The first is that Amazon’s internal hardware engineering team is more sophisticated than Amazon’s line of decent but not so revolutionary tablets and e-readers would suggest. The second is that the company had been incubating the display tech in the Paperwhite for almost a decade. This second fact is right there in the promotional video for the Paperwhite display, in which Jay Marine, vice president of Kindle at Amazon, says “in many ways, we’ve been working on this for 8 years.” (Update: It’s possible Marine was implying that Amazon was working on the Paperwhite as a whole for 8 years, and not this display technology.)

Jeff Bezos just bought the Washington Post. His open letter to the employees of the Post says that change is coming to the paper, the sort that “would have happened with or without new ownership,” because “The Internet is transforming almost every element of the news business: shortening news cycles, eroding long-reliable revenue sources, and enabling new kinds of competition, some of which bear little or no news-gathering costs.”

Recent work by security researchers indicates that one of the problems with having a “smart” home is that some day, it might be smart enough to attack you. The essence of the forthcoming “internet of things” is that everything we own, from our refrigerators and egg cartons to our cars and thermostats, will some day be outfitted with internet-connected sensors and control systems, allowing all our possessions, and ultimately all of our civic infrastructure, to communicate with each other and be controlled remotely.

“Tell me what kinds of toxins are in your body, and I’ll tell you how much you’re worth,” could be the new motto of doctors everywhere. In a finding that surprised even the researchers conducting the study, it turns out that both rich and poor Americans are walking toxic waste dumps for chemicals like mercury, arsenic, lead, cadmium and bisphenol A, which could be a cause of infertility. And while a buildup of environmental toxins in the body afflicts rich and poor alike, the type of toxin varies by wealth.

The primary defense of the necessity of the US National Security Agency’s broad spying powers—including, apparently, recording pretty much everything anyone anywhere is doing on the internet—is that its activities are necessary to protect against terrorists and violent criminals. But a report published Saturday in the New York Times indicates that federal agencies with far more mundane mandates are unable to resist the lure of the NSA’s vast trove of data.