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Tech

Worldreader gives Kindles to students in sub-Saharan Africa. The nonprofit’s new report, funded by USAID, shows that access to e-readers improved primary school students’ reading skills significantly. But a lot of e-readers broke and results for older kids were mixed. Read More »

How ResearchGate plans to turn science upside down

The tools that have revolutionized the way we live are only just starting to have an impact on scientific research. Now ResearchGate — the “Facebook of science” — is hoping to speed up the change, with a new round of investment from Founders Fund to make … Read More »

 
 

A research study looking at over 60 billion connections between Facebook users found the degrees of separation between any two is closer to four than six. But what do we mean when we friend someone on Facebook, and how does that translate to the “real world”? Read More »

Peter Thiel (photo courtesy of The Thiel Foundation)

Peter Thiel, the tech industry magnate known for co-founding PayPal and being an early investor in Facebook, is launching a new program called Breakout Labs aimed at funding cutting edge technology research ideas. It’s a big effort, but Thiel himself is known for bold ideas. Read More »

Tech entrepreneurs bemoan academia-industry barrier

Several of the young entrepreneurs at this week’s MIT Emtech 2011 conference were executives from established companies but many more were academic researchers who said the divide between “pure research” and commercialization is bigger than ever as the lengthy recession persists. Read More »

Want to help stimulate the economy? You may not need to go any further than your web browser’s search box. Each online search engine adds about 50 cents to the worldwide economy, according to a new research report from consultancy giant McKinsey & Company. Read More »

It’s often said that the rise of mobile devices means that people are now “always on.” But it turns out there are still times when people are more “plugged in” than others. A new study about how — and when — people really use mobile apps. Read More »

It’s no secret that most college students aren’t crazy about textbooks. But will moving required reading materials to an e-book format really change all that? Recent market research indicates that it just might — and that college students are demanding to go digital more than ever … Read More »

A British study found that people who went without the internet for 24 hours were “upset” and experienced “withdrawal.” But is this really surprising? It’s become obvious that internet access is a core function of modern life — talking about it as “addiction” misses the point. Read More »

If you want to reach the Millennial generation, it’s probably a good idea to use the Internet. But according to new research from MTV, companies run the risk of alienating their target audience if they go about social media marketing in the wrong way. Read More »

Thanks to the rating systems in place on such popular websites as Yelp, Amazon and eBay, many people are comfortable evaluating things in absolute terms: a two-star restaurant, a B movie and so on. But new MIT research says this approach is fundamentally flawed. Read More »

It looks like rumors of display advertising’s death were greatly exaggerated. Nearly all the tech industry’s largest players are expected to report growth in their display ad businesses for 2011, with Facebook leading the pack. Why are display and banner ads on the upswing? Read More »

More Must Reads

A new report from the Pew Center shows that not only are users of social networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter more socially and politically engaged both online and offline, but there are few signs of any “echo chamber” effects from online social activity. Read More »

The “uncanny valley”– the quality of an animation or robot looking close to, but not exactly like, real life — may be set to get even smaller. MIT researchers have developed new computing techniques for reproducing the slight natural blur of moving objects in animation. Read More »

Long before there was a Y Combinator or a 500 Startups, there was SRI International — an old school, non-profit research and development organization that’s been incubating since before incubating was cool. Read More »

It’s not exactly news that the Millennial Generation (loosely defined as people born between 1980 and 2000) spend a lot of time on websites like Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter. But according to recent research findings, the constant social networking isn’t all fun and games. Read More »

As a publishing medium, Twitter’s strength is that it is inherently democratic, but a new study looking at how information is propagated through the network shows that a relatively small group of celebrities, organizations and media influencers is still responsible for a majority of the content. Read More »

A new study being released in Britain today says that access to the Internet, and especially to social networks such as Facebook, can improve people’s level of happiness — particularly the well-being of women, those from a lower-income background and those with lower levels of education. Read More »

The benefits of the long tail may go beyond selling large quantities of niche items. Having a comprehensive inventory makes your customers more satisfied and more likely to patronize you again, according to a new paper from Yahoo presented earlier this month. Read More »

Forrester Research touched off a bit of a brush fire this past weekend when it said it would limit its analysts to blogging about research-related topics on Forrester.com and decreed that any personal blogs maintained on other domains must be strictly about personal matters. Read More »

University researchers from around the country today received nearly $5 million from the National Science Foundation to help them run their high-performance projects on the Google-IBMCloud Computing University Initiative infrastructure. Among the 14 universities receiving funds are leading research institutions like Carnegie Mellon University … Read More »

Struggling to maintain relevancy in the shadows of web-giant brethren like Amazon and Google, Yahoo has expanded its cloud computing research initiative. Initially available only to researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, Yahoo’s 4,000-core, 1.5-petabytes-of-storage M45 cluster is now available to their counterparts at the … Read More »

The recent flurry of announcements regarding devices that can be used to play movies and other video-based content, delivered via the Internet, on the TV, has many in the industry believing that the tide is finally turning. The numbers, however, tell a somewhat different story. Read More »

Eucalyptus, an open-source infrastructure for cloud computing on clusters that duplicates the functionality of Amazon’s EC2, directly using the Amazon command-line tools, was released today. For the full story, and a way to download Eucalyptus, head over to OStatic . Read More »

Microsoft will hold its fourth Microsoft Research Silicon Valley Road Show at its campus in Mountain View, Calif., next Thursday, May 22. The event, which will showcase examples of all kinds of cool things the Redmond giant is working on, including an Xbox-based programming game for … Read More »

Registrars face hard times. Regulatory changes, price increases and free hosting offerings from Google mean the future looks rough. Read More »

This being the week of ad:tech, news of online advertising has dominated the conversation: from MySpace’s hyper- targeted ads to Facebook’s new ad system to broadband advertising systems introduced by companies such as AnchorFree. The advertising, of course, is becoming social, mobile, and … Read More »

One of India’s oldest PC companies, HCL has just launched a sub-$300 computer that is while skimpy is good starter machines for most Indians who want to get a computer for the home. The PC is called EzeeBee Pride, and will be available on a … Read More »

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