Kevin Maney

Cable TV is ripe for getting ripped apart, and it looks like Google could be the one to do it. All media is just data. And that means the cable TV business as we know it makes no sense—a business essentially held in place by legal duct tape, not market forces. Where I live in New York, we have Time Warner Cable. It works like the cable service in most every town. One cable line comes into the house, but then you can buy three different services: a constant firehose of video content we call cable TV; a broadband Internet connection; and a voice service we call the telephone.

As Vivek Ranadivé, CEO of TIBCO Software, and his tech industry partners take over the NBA’s Sacramento Kings, they’ve made some comments about applying advanced technology to basketball. But they haven’t really elaborated. Well, I can provide some clues to the way Ranadivé will likely think about this, and it goes well beyond using Moneyball-style data analysis to find players who are overlooked gems. In Ranadivé’s predictive-technology vision, the team’s computers will use that data to learn—to gain experience—about not just the Kings, but also their opponents. Then it could start making predictions during games about what is likely to happen.

In 2004, while working for USA Today, then based in part of an Arlington, Va., office tower, I wanted to do a story about the CIA’s then-experimental venture capital unit called In-Q-Tel. I got the OK from In-Q-Tel to visit its office. But the CIA was so concerned about secrecy and terrorism, I had to agree to not reveal where the office was located. So I met a man on the ground floor of an office tower that had once housed USA Today, and he promptly took me back up the elevator. In-Q-Tel’s office was in the same building. I may be one of the only journalists to go there. In-Q-Tel has since moved down the street. You can find its address on the Web—though not on its own web site. And now that the National Security Agency’s PRISM data-collection system has been outed, In-Q-Tel is more visible than it's ever been.

When the tech industry talks about the Internet of Everything (IoE), it sounds so huge it’s almost intimidating. Executives toss around numbers like 50 billion connected devices by 2015 and hundred-billion-dollar opportunities. But at the recent Techonomy Labs IoE forum, an idea emerged that’s a little more embraceable on an intimate level. Listening to some of the presenters, it seemed clear that we’ll all soon have our private little versions of the IoE. No one, as far as I can tell, has named this yet, so I’ll call it the Internet of You ... or IoU.

A remarkable character in the history of technology died this week in Bangalore. Few in the West have even heard of him, yet every Indian technology company, every U.S. corporation that ever sent software development to India, and in fact the entire globalized world-is-flat economy owes him a debt of gratitude. Padma Bhushan N. Seshagiri was an unlikely tech industry hero. While doing a project in India over the past 18 months, I got to know him a little. He struck me as brash, brilliant, and nerdy. When he talked about all of the incredible behind-the-scenes roles he played in launching the Indian tech sector, I at first thought he had an overblown sense of himself. It turns out he didn’t.

The big challenge ahead for the Internet of Everything (IoE) is to bring it to the mainstream—and a couple of keys to that transition are the proliferation of smart phones and wearable devices, said a panel of technologists and investors at the Techonomy Lab: Man, Machines, and the Network conference on Thursday in Menlo Park, CA. “For generations, Hollywood taught us what mainstream was, and now Silicon Valley is showing what mainstrem will be,” said Frank Chen of Andreessen Horowitz. The IoE will do that by bringing computing and programming into everyday intimate life.

The big players in technology seem to agree that the Internet of Everything (IoE) is a huge transition that will have an impact on many aspects of life, though they still see the shift from their own points of view—not yet with a single coherent vision. That’s the takeaway from the opening panel at Thursday's Techonomy Lab conference on IoE. On stage were Rob Chandhok of Qualcomm, Dave Evans of Cisco, Paul Rogers of General Electric, and Vijay Sankaran of Ford.

Chris Dixon is a New York guy with a degree in philosophy from Columbia University. He’s also, as of last fall, a partner at hot Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (which shortens its name to A16Z—16 is the number of letters between the A and the Z). All in all, that gives him a pretty interesting point of view on the big technology shift that’s being labeled the Internet of Everything (IoE). Dixon already has quite a track record as an investor and entrepreneur. He co-founded Hunch, which eBay bought for $80 million in 2011, and then started Founder Collective, a seed-stage venture fund. Alone or with a fund, he’s been an early-stage investor in Kickstarter, Pinterest, Foursquare, Dropbox, and Warby Parker.

Dire predictions about the mushrooming number of cars jamming the world’s roads and clogging the world's air may never come true. Instead, a dawning era of super-optimized car sharing is poised to shrink demand for cars. Even General Motors and Ford Chairman Bill Ford have invested in technology that can help make it happen.

If you get lost, your sneakers could help find you. The coming age of the Internet of everything promises radical shifts in how we live, how we solve problems, and how we recover from difficulty. The technology industry is racing to instrument and connect a vast range of things and processes in the physical and digital worlds. Several big companies have identified it as a giant opportunity—Amazon, Cisco, Ericsson, GE, IBM, and Qualcomm among them. They all believe that what many call the Internet of everything (or IoE) could have an even bigger impact on the world than the Internet we had on the world that preceded it.

A standard trope these days is that we in the middle class have been slogging through a couple of decades of woe. Wages are stagnant. Our standard of living isn’t improving. The grand forces of our time—the Internet and globalization—are failing to better our lives, and may be making things worse. The numbers prove it. But here’s the problem: the traditional numbers used by the government and economists measure the wrong stuff for the twenty-first century.

When a company like Yahoo buys a web widget company for a few tens of millions, nobody usually pays much attention. This week, however, Yahoo’s purchase of Summly is making international headlines, but for all the wrong reasons—reasons that entirely miss why Summly is exciting. Most of the stories focus on the fact that Summly’s CEO, Nick D'Aloisio, is 17 years old, and sold the company for as much as $30 million. Other than stirring feelings of tremendous inadequacy in most of us, that story will get boring in a few days.

In the echo chamber of discussion since Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer ordered her employees to end telecommuting and move back into the office, there’s been a general consensus that telecommuting may make employees happier, but it’s not always good for the company or—especially—innovation at a company.

A 94-second Walter Cronkite video from 1967 has been making its way around Facebook and Twitter. Cronkite stands by a desk bristling with a half-dozen computer-ish devices and talks about the “home office of the twenty-first century.” We’ll be connected by video. It will almost match being in the office. “We may not have to go to work—work will come to us,” the newsman tells us. Well—here we are, still waiting. The home office experience doesn’t replicate the actual office experience. Like flying cars and refrigerators that order more milk on their own, the technology has so far failed to meet the vision.

Does proximity matter for innovation? Marissa Mayer thinks it does, and has been getting chastised for it. The Yahoo CEO recently ordered her fellow Yahooligans to stop working from home and come into the office. She believes that proximity creates a better atmosphere for innovation. Yahoo’s human resources chief Jackie Reses explained in a memo: “Some of the best decisions and insights come from hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people, and impromptu team meetings.” But that’s not where we’re supposed to be heading in the age of the Internet.