Silicon Valley
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“United States of Secrets”: How The Government Came To Spy On Millions Of Americans
...Now, in United States of Secrets, FRONTLINE goes behind the headlines to reveal the dramatic inside story of how the U.S. government came to monitor and collect the communications of millions of people around the world—including ordinary Americans—and the lengths they went to trying to hide the massive surveillance program from the public...
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3 Big Lessons From The Top Techies Rebooting The Government
"We usually think of instigators as people who causes trouble," Patil says. And in some ways, this is exactly what the band of tech outsiders rebooting the government is doing. They've boldly entered the world's largest bureaucracy with the goal of shaking things up, making services run more efficiently for the American people and introducing fresh new ways of doing things. In many ways, their work threatens the status quo. But Patil believes that instigators have a valuable role to play...
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A Hardware Renaissance In Silicon Valley
In recent years, Silicon Valley seems to have forgotten about silicon. It’s been about dot-coms, Web advertising, social networking and apps for smartphones. But there are signs here that hardware is becoming the new software. Read More »
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All Eyes On Jeff Zients, Healthcare.gov's ER Surgeon
To lead a sort of tech worker surge and software code purge for Healthcare.gov, the Obama Administration has brought in a turnaround guy, Jeffrey Zients. Read More »
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An App Competition Is Fertile Testing Ground for Open Organization Principles
It was just a typical, mundane day at school, when I happened to bump into my friend, Sheng Liang, who asked me if I was interested in participating in a competition with his friend, Li Quan. Sheng Liang has an entrepreneurial and competitive mindset, someone we usually see busy with some sort of idea or competition. So I was intrigued by his proposal. He told me about the "SIA App Challenge"—an app development competition from Singapore Airlines (SIA)—with a grand prize trip to Silicon Valley...
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Beyond Apps: These Startups Are Tackling Real-World Problems
Startup incubator Y Combinator demos a refreshingly high volume of companies tackling real issues, from hearing loss and elderly care to immigrant hiring and sending money home. Read More »
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CMS To Invest $5+ Billion a Year in Open Source and Cloud-based IT Infrastructure for Medicaid
After more than 40 years of relying on monolithic mainframe platforms to administer its services, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has embraced a new modular, open and agile approach to Medicaid health information technology for the Federal government and States. In many ways, this is the best of what open source advocates and technology innovators could have hoped for when it comes to open source policy from a government agency. According to Andrew Slavitt, Acting Administrator of CMS, the agency will spend more than $5 billion a year to fund this transformation.
Doomsday Prep for the Super-Rich
Steve Huffman, the thirty-three-year-old co-founder and C.E.O. of Reddit, which is valued at six hundred million dollars, was nearsighted until November, 2015, when he arranged to have laser eye surgery. He underwent the procedure not for the sake of convenience or appearance but, rather, for a reason he doesn’t usually talk much about: he hopes that it will improve his odds of surviving a disaster, whether natural or man-made. “If the world ends—and not even if the world ends, but if we have trouble—getting contacts or glasses is going to be a huge pain in the ass,” he told me recently...
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FCC Eyes New Spectrum For Wi-Fi-Type Service
The Federal Communications Commission has kicked off a process to determine whether or not Globalstar Inc., which provides satellite phone service, can use a portion of its spectrum to offer terrestrial Wi-Fi-type service in the United States.
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Google’s Mind-Blowing Big-Data Tool Grows Open Source Twin
[Mike] Olson is the CEO of a Valley startup called Cloudera, and [John] Schroeder is the boss at MapR, a conspicuous Cloudera rival. Both outfits deal in Hadoop — a sweeping open source software platform based on data center technologies that underpinned the rise of Google’s web-dominating search engine — but in building their particular businesses, the two startups approached Hadoop from two very different directions... Read More »
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Hospital CEOs Behaving Badly And The Devastating Consequences On The Middle Class
When big health insurers propose mergers, it makes for good antitrust enforcement theater to try to block them. However, if government officials want to address anti-competitive activities that have a dramatically bigger impact, they should shift their focus to local market provider M&A activity that consistently show prices increase after the deal is done. However, the most rapacious, anti-competitive practices I’ve seen in my entire career have come from hospitals–frequently from tax-exempt “nonprofits” that would make John D. Rockefeller blush with their brutal actions. The combined impact has created a middle class economic depression that has driven populist presidential campaign success, which was highlighted in a recently released Brookings study.
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How Open Source Can Solve Silicon Valley's Engineering Crisis
Silicon Valley may think itself the center of the technology universe, but 76% of open-source development happens elsewhere, a rich talent pool for engineer-hungry startups...
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How The ‘Failure’ Culture Of Startups Is Killing Innovation
Far from being the measure of disgrace it once was, failure now seems to be a sort of badge of honor. But underlying many popular Silicon Valley failure clichés is entrepreneurs’ belief that “starting companies these days is akin to doing research in the past” — as if we don’t need research when the opportunity to fail is so readily available. Read More »
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Inside Obama's Stealth Startup
The new hub of Washington’s tech insurgency is something known as the U.S. Digital Service, which is headquartered in a stately brick townhouse half a block from the White House. USDS -employees tend to congregate with their laptops at a long table at the back half of the parlor floor. If there’s no room, they retreat downstairs to a low-ceilinged basement, sprawling on cushioned chairs. Apart from an air-hockey table, there aren’t many physical reminders of West Coast startup culture—a lot of the new techies are issued BlackBerrys, which seems to cause them near-physical pain...
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Is Comparison Shopping the Future of Health Care? Silicon Valley Says Yes.
Whether it’s looking up restaurants on Yelp! or scanning Craigslist for apartment listings, Americans comparison shop for nearly everything online — everything except for health care. A recent survey found that we spend more time comparing value of dishwashers than doctors. Castlight Health wants to change that. Read More »
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