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Fast Forward - FORTUNE Magazine
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Fast Forward - FORTUNE Magazine
  • Farewell to Fast Forward
    This is my farewell column. Fast Forward has been a weekly labor of love, mostly, since early 2002. Now I'm taking an extended leave from Fortune to write my book, The Facebook Effect.

  • From Brainstorm: Our new $1 million prize, and more
    Fortune this week announced the Legatum Fortune Technology Prize, an annual $1 million award intended to reward for-profit efforts to provide products and services to the poor through the use of technology.

  • HP's grand vision: measure everything
    Imagine walking down the supermarket aisle with a cheap device you could hold up to a tomato. If the sensor detects a pesticide residue, you'd know the "organic" label is a lie. Similar tools could track the chemical content of water in a stream, telling you if there was lead contamination and when it got there, or keep constant watch on a bridge and tell if a structural steel beam was at risk of collapse.

  • Brainstorm survey: What tech leaders want
    As the iPhone 3G emerges, Apple's mobile device has captivated the leaders of the tech industry. That's the most certain conclusion Fortune reached after surveying 325 industry leaders who will be attending our Brainstorm Tech conference July 21-23.

  • Why Microsoft will win Yahoo
    In the end, Microsoft is almost surely going to end up owning Yahoo's search business. That's the only conclusion I can come up with, having spent months talking to Microsoft's senior leadership for a recent story on the company. And even what does seem like erratic behavior on the part of Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer et al points toward that inevitable conclusion.

  • We want Brainstorm Tech to rock!
    In just three short weeks, we launch the next phase in Fortune's Brainstorm conference series, Brainstorm Tech. The original Brainstorm ran in Aspen from 2001 until 2006, and this one will retain the unique spirit of multidisciplinary inquiry that won it so many plaudits and fans, while digging even deeper into tech. Brainstorm Tech remains a wide-ranging convergence of people and ideas, with a deep cognizance of the impact of technology on what is happening in the world. I serve as program director and conference host. (The conference runs July 21-23 in Half Moon Bay, just south of San Francisco. For full details go here.)

  • How one CEO Facebooked his company
    When Jeremy Burton arrived as CEO at private-equity-owned Serena Software last year, he found a respectable but boring 25-year-old firm still profitably churning out mainframe-oriented products. But he also discovered some underplayed non-mainframe products as well as new technologies in R&D that could be killer in a mashup Web 2.0 world. Of course the company's owners at Silver Lake, wanted him to find ways to make the place grow. So he turned R&D loose to develop the new products, and then turned to Facebook to change Serena.

  • Computer games as liberal arts?
    Though many adults imagine the frightening Grand Theft Auto when they think of video games, kids appear to be subtler thinkers on the subject. Not only do many of them intuitively realize that games can embody any values and be on any subject, many want to make games themselves.

  • With Microsoft, OLPC may finally succeed
    Microsoft and the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative announced Thursday that the Windows operating system would soon be available on the so-called XO, also known as the "$100 laptop." In interviews, executives made it clear that this could be a catalytic shift in perception and market success for the innovative but up-to-now aberrant laptop intended for the poor children of the world.

  • Big tech: A shelter in the storm
    Technology is different. Despite pervasive economic uncertainty, that's the message that many of the industry's big firms are sending in their latest earnings reports. We may be buying fewer Starbucks mocha lattes and shipping fewer packages through UPS. But tech sales - from gadgets to high-end services - are thriving.