Wired Enterprise

When you’re starting off as an anthropologist, you aim is to explore a subculture your peers have yet to uncover, spending years living with the locals and learning their ways.

That’s what Gabriella Coleman did. She went to San Francisco and …

In most of corporate America, the last thing you do is write the press release. But at Amazon, it’s one of the first.

Much like the engineering team that created it, Google Spanner is something that stretches across the globe while behaving as if it’s all in one place. Unveiled this fall after years of hints and rumors, it’s the first worldwide database …

There’s no underestimating the importance of facial hair in the world of technology. Look no further than the research of a man named Tamir Kahson, who in 2004 discovered the inseparable link between beards and programming languages. As Kahson so …

In the winter of 1969, the Neiman Marcus Christmas catalog offered to computerize your kitchen. Cooking up a gourmet holiday meal will be a snap, the department store promised. Push a few buttons, and — presto! — a shiny orange-red, …

It runs using gas-filled tubes, mechanical relays, and paper tape. It’s a giant, and it’s slow. But it runs, dammit. On Tuesday, volunteers at Britain’s National Museum of Computing rebooted the Harwell Dekatron — a 2.5-metric-ton monster from the early …

These days Hewlett Packard can’t do anything right. But, in particular, it really can’t do software. One year after paying $11 billion for Big Data search outfit Autonomy, HP is taking a $8.8 billion write off on the deal, saying …

Hell must have frozen over: Oracle CEO Larry Ellison is actually in agreement with HP.

Facebook designed its new-age data center for the Oregon high desert, taking advantage of the low temperatures and humidity and cooling its computing hardware with the outside air. But the design works nearly as well in the woodlands of North …

After years of careful research, Microsoft has uncovered the data center’s long-lost cousin: the sewage treatment plant.

Apple’s data-center empire has yet expand oversees, but it seems this is about to change.

Linus Torvalds created Linux, which now runs vast swathes of the internet, including Google and Facebook. And he invented Git, software that’s now used by developers across the net to build new applications of all kinds. But that’s not all …

Google has spent years scanning books, recreating the world’s leading libraries as digital files we can read and search on PCs and smartphones. The project has faced a fair amount of opposition — including a lawsuit from authors and …

Last month, a lot of radio listeners started tuning into This American Life on the iPhone. So many, in fact, that the traffic started to look suspicious.

When the folks at Bitch Magazine decided to take off into Google’s cloud, they were quickly brought down to Earth.

As companies such as Google and Twitter complain that the patent system is horribly broken — bemoaning the quality of patents being issued, the “trolls” that do nothing but try and squeeze money from their patents, and the high cost …

Abusive customers. Low pay. Tuberculosis infections. Customer support can be a miserable job. Software makers have long promised to improve the life of customer support reps, and now they’re at it again. This time, they want to turn customer support …

One big problem with renewable energy projects is that they have to go somewhere. They have to occupy a part of the very environment that their proponents are often trying to save. Photographer Jamey Stillings beautifully captures this tension in …

Google was looking for a new way to cool its servers — and it ended up with a 4-foot alligator.