Technology

Green tech investors want to put their money behind firms with the potential to disrupt their industries and bring both positive environmental impacts and financial success. But what’s disruptive is by its nature unprecedented and unpredictable. How do investors assess the potential of a green technology company?

The theoretical possibilities for big data are limitless, but putting so much information to good use requires big thinking. Unilever’s Gina Boswell explains the principles that the global company uses to effectively mine its data troves.

The internet has already prompted large shifts in how many of us live our lives. What will happen when all of us are connected to the internet all the time? Eric Schmidt, executive chairman at Google, talks about the company's vision of the future.

Technology and globalization have radically changed the way many people do business, but do such concrete considerations also drive creative undertakings? Economist Tyler Cowen discusses the brave new world of cultural production and the increasingly demanding consumer on the receiving end.

In its early days Google didn’t have a marketing team. Now with many brands to support, the company has brought its data-driven approach to its relationship with users and advertisers. Qn magazine spoke with Claire Hughes Johnson, VP of new products, media, and platforms, about the role of marketing in launching new products.

On December 2, 2011, a panel of Yale SOM alumni from the venture capital and technology fields discussed their own experiences and reflected on the current state of venture capital; disruptive new models for raising financing, such as social media; and the outlook for the industry.

The future is not only the domain of economic projections. Writers have long imagined future worlds where life is a totalitarian nightmare, or hubris has led to nuclear or environmental catastrophe. While each dystopia contains unique horrors, the stories often spring from the same well — a feeling that the way we're living now is unsustainable.

Global commerce would be impossible without the movement of information — contracts, arrangements, plans, blueprints. Before the digital revolution transformed many of these things into bits and pixels, there was a postal revolution that improved the speed of information flow around the world.

A recurring theme in discussions of how to improve the U.S. healthcare system is the hope that technological innovation will provoke leaps in the quality and efficiency of care. Thomas Enders is a managing director for the $1.2 billion Global Health Solutions group of CSC. He provides an insider's perspective on what technological change can accomplish.

The airwaves are a precious commodity. More than 200 million cell phone subscribers in the U.S. alone chat and bat text messages across the wireless spectrum. When Reed Hundt was chairman of the FCC, he implemented the first auctions of this resource, opening the way for industry development and raising revenue for the government. Hundt recently talked with Professor Barry Nalebuff, describing what he learned about auction markets and how he might use an auction to save the environment. Of course, they spoke via cell phone.