Wired - TechBiz

It might not make sense that you can make money by giving away services and concentrating on keeping users happy, but that's how Evernote is making millions, the CEO tells would-be entrepreneurs.

Andrew Keller, CEO of advertising company CP+B, off-handedly challenged even the premise of an early question at the Wired Business Conference: "I don’t know if we do edgy." But the product campaigns speak for themselves.

Mick Mountz runs a company that sets hundred of robots loose in warehouses. Kiva Systems uses a form of artificial intelligence technology to create distribution warehouses for customers like Walgreens and Staples.

In many ways, Martha Stewart, lifestyle mogul extraordinaire, is the original maker. 'We’ve made a business out of DIY,' Stewart told the Wired Business Conference.

Six months ago today, computer scientist Johnny Chung Lee secretly birthed a robust hacking community around the Kinect game controller by Microsoft. Lee today updated an audience on crowdsourced efforts to repurpose the Kinect at the Wired Business Conference — Disruptive by Design.

Is the tech industry getting bubblicious? The audience at the Wired Business Conference chose this answer: "Yes, but only the dumb money is going to get hurt."

NEW YORK — Bill Gates has a simple plan for the future of energy: Don’t rely on the cute stuff. Sure, attaching solar panels to roofs, building windmills in backyards or deploying other small-scale energy technologies is a fine idea, Microsoft’s co-founder told a packed auditorium at the Wired Business Conference: Disruptive by Design. Trouble is, they can’t significantly aide developing nations thirsty for cheap energy, he said.

Your Epicenter reporting team is at the Wired Business Conference today, in New York’s fabulous financial district. We’ll be covering the 11 breakout sessions and publishing pictures and video all day long.

Twitter had its CNN moment Sunday night as the "place" where the news of the commando raid which killed Osama bin Laden was first shared. From a Blackberry, no less. And there was even a real-time account of what was going on in the neighborhood by an unwitting witness who complained of helicopter noise. All hours before President Obama made it official, and as news presenters on TV ran out of things to say.

Canadian tweeters are set to flout an antiquated law which makes the dissemination of any election results illegal until all are in, punishable by a fine of up to $25,000. And they are being egged on by social media advocates like NYU professor Jay Rosen. Says one potential scofflaw: "I will tweet my results. And if I had to, yeah, I'd pay the fine."

In the hours after a team of U.S. Navy SEALs attacked Osama bin Laden's hideout in Pakistan -- and shot the world's most wanted man in the head -- the Facebook pages for the U.S. Navy, SEALs and Army saw a dramatic spike in activity as users flocked online to post their thoughts and comments about the event.

Time, the giant magazine publisher, has reached a deal with Apple to provide its magazine subscribers with access to the iPad versions of its publications, a spokesperson confirmed, in an important step toward detente between the publishing industry and the Cupertino, California, tech giant.

When I spoke at Facebook about In The Plex recently, rumors were swirling that the social networking giant was about to enter China, supposedly in a partnership with the search engine Baidu. So I made sure that my talk to a dining hall full of FB’ers included the cautionary tale of what happened when Google met China. Though similar in some ways — focus on engineering, full-on embrace of Internet values — Facebook and Google are quite different companies.

Google and Apple have both been in the news lately over details of how both companies’ mobile operating systems store and transmit geolocation data. Following a class-action suit brought by two Tampa men targeting Apple over alleged user tracking, Google is facing a similar class action lawsuit filed in Detroit on Wednesday.

With the acquisition of Fig Card PayPal is laying down a marker that the pioneer in disruptive payment won’t be left behind in the coming e-wallet revolution.

Groupon put out a statement Friday saying it's pulling the support it never gave Donald Trump -- adding that he's like guns and abortion. Call it a Daily Deal on putting your foot in your mouth.

AT&T's bandwidth caps go into effect Monday, putting half of U.S. broadband users to a limit on how much net they can use. We're all poorer for it.

In its first two weeks, the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame app for iPhone and iPad has done something remarkable in an industry where most news about music buying is about how people don't do it anymore: It convinced people to pay for music.

Netflix now has nearly as many subscribers as Comcast and in the evenings, accounts for more than 40 percent of U.S. bandwidth usage by some measurements. Those astounding numbers are leading some to wonder whether Netflix is reducing the amount of peer-to-peer file sharing, once the easiest way to find movies to watch. But what do the numbers say?

From an economic standpoint, improvements in ad-targeting technology seem pretty obviously Pareto-optimal: Everybody benefits. Advertisers waste fewer ad dollars on people they don't want to reach, publishers can charge more, and consumers see things more relevant to them. So why is it that many people hate ad targeting, and hate being served targeted ads?