Two worlds collided at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival this week. Online media of all sorts is coming of age, and the festival was one of its biggest defining moments. The event aims to bring together new technologies and their practitioners to spur innovation. While the mainstream press was barely present, the conference-cum-weeklong-party was […]

A new breed of worker, fueled by caffeine and using the tools of modern technology, is flourishing in the coffeehouses of San Francisco. Roaming from cafe to cafe and borrowing a name from the nomadic Arabs who wandered freely in the desert, they’ve come to be known as “bedouins.” San Francisco’s modern-day bedouins are typically […]

9:14 a.m. James Brown’s “I feel good” wraps up and Jobs takes the stage, to huge applause, declaring, “We’re gonna make history today.” He’s talking now about the “heart transplant” with Intel processors. 9:18 a.m. He’s almost uncharacteristically spreading credit around for the seven-month turnaround to Intel, thanking Intel, third party developers “and our users.” […]

Michael Arrington’s influential blog TechCrunch — where startups get pimped and big news sometimes breaks first — has vaulted him into the post of “Mr. Web 2.0,” a kingmaker among Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and a figure of controversy in the media world he is disrupting. Arrington, 36, is a lawyer, an adviser to companies, an […]

Behind the random silliness of YouTube videos and the juvenile frivolity of MySpace Web sites lies a powerful idea: Everyday people are using technology to gain control of the media and change the world. At least that’s what a new breed of Internet technologists and entrepreneurs want us to believe. The new Internet boom commonly […]

He’s tall, has wispy red hair and is given to wisecracks. She’s shorter and more serious, with dark hair and a dark complexion. But don’t mistake Herb and Marion Sandler for a study in opposites. Instead, this couple, now in their 70s and making headlines for selling Golden West Financial Corp. to Wachovia Corp. for […]

Steve Ballmer, the excitable and often combative chief executive officer of Microsoft Corp., came to Silicon Valley in a somewhat conciliatory mood Thursday, tipping his hat to archrival Google Inc. for building a powerful lead in the Internet advertising business. But in an interview at Microsoft’s Mountain View campus, and in a lunch talk at […]

In the wake of Disney’s blockbuster acquisition of Pixar, Steve Jobs brings his quest for perfection to an even grander stage. He is the largest individual shareholder in the storied Walt Disney Co. And he remains the head of Apple Computer, the revolutionary computing company he founded and later reinvented as a digital music powerhouse. […]