Sonali Basak

Tableau Software might be the biggest big data company you’ve never heard of. The lovechild of a Pixar founder and a Stanford University-Department of Defense project, the 10-year-old Seattle-based company applies the computational tools of the gaming and movie industries to presenting business analytics in beautiful, accessible graphic images. Now worth more than $6 billion in market capitalization, Tableau competes with the likes of Oracle and IBM, serves a hefty share of Fortune 500s, and nearly doubled sales in 2013, the year it went public.

Technology has done much to build bridges globally, but it could do a lot more. Helping us speak other languages is one promising arena, expanding global business through cultural awareness. Mango Languages aims to teach the grammar, culture, and intuitiveness of languages in a fun, interesting, and engaging way. The company’s conversation-based learning products employ a technique it calls intuitive language construction. More than 2,700 libraries across the U.S. offer Mango Languages to expose learners to new languages, cultures, and opportunities. And corporate and government adopters are showing how bilingual training is good for business.

People who build technology want you to have the most simple—and emotionally satisfying—experience possible. That's why more and more students are studying UX, or user experience, design. There are many subtleties in how understanding how users interact with technology and how to create user-friendly products. The field of UX design is often described as how and why things work. And Chicago is becoming a hotbed for studying it.

I thought I would spend two weeks in Kolkata, India, sitting on my family’s patio backdropped by palm trees, leisurely writing away. But there was a fatal flaw to my plan: My family warned me upon my arrival that I would have to find an office building that provided public Wi-Fi access before I could get online. The inconvenient problem is city-wide. Annanya Roy, a college student in Kolkata, says she is starved of good Internet coverage on campus. “We are a community with the wants of Wi-Fi, settling for something far less contenting,” Roy says.

A smartphone screen can detect where it’s being touched. But the SynTouch sensor works the other way around: It detects what it is touching. SynTouch LLC, a Los Angeles-based startup that began in a University of Southern California lab, has developed what it says is the first sensor that enables robots to replicate human touch. The company has been named a 2014 World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer for its main product, the BioTac, a fingertip that can sense force, temperature, and vibration—in some cases more accurately than a human finger.

Developers, activists, and journalists gathered in a Washington startup incubator on a recent weekend for “FreedomHack,” to build digital products to aid citizen journalists in Mexico. Reporters Without Borders reports that a skyrocketing number of them have been killed, attacked, or threatened in Mexico since 2010.