The buzz at Pivot25, a conference for mobile-phone software developers and investors held this June, is all about the future of money. Ben Lyon, the 24-year-old business-development VP of Kopo Kopo, wants $250,000 to produce his app for shops to process payments made by text message. Paul Okwalinga, 28, describes his money app — called M-Shop, it allows you to buy travel tickets and takeout via mobile phone — as "not reinventing the wheel but pimping it." Kamal Budhabhatti, 35, ...

Tech pundits have a bizarre habit of declaring products dead long before they're actually goners. Me, I do my darndest to avoid the temptation to play premature coroner. I will say this, though: If the PC does end up mortally wounded someday, we may look back at early June of 2011 as the moment when its death warrant was signed. In the past eight days, Microsoft and Apple have shown off upcoming versions of their respective ...

The ballroom on the third floor of San Francisco's Moscone West convention center doesn't look like special. But in recent years this nondescript hall has become the epicenter of major news about smartphones, tablets, and other cutting-edge mobile gizmos. Both Apple and Google use it for the keynote addresses that are the signature events at their developer conferences. As the two most significant companies in the mobile software business, they're doing much of the heavy lifting of ...

It was the lawyers of ancient Rome who came up with the modern definition of fatherhood: Mater semper certa est; pater est quem nuptiae demonstrant . The Romans, however, didn't have access to genetic testing. Dylan Davis did. A few months after his divorce in 2000, Davis, 36, a software engineer in Denver, took a DNA test to confirm a nagging suspicion that he was not the biological father of his 6-year-old twins. The negative test results led him to give ...

Brian Ward lost his job on a Friday afternoon. Eleven days later he had a new one. With nearly 1 in 10 people out of work and the typical job search lasting 12 weeks, how did the Cleveland-based software architect pull it off? In a phrase: online social networking. Welcome to the new rules of the job hunt. Gone are the days of simply posting your rsum on CareerBuilder, e-mailing former colleagues and trolling company websites for open ...

Nokia's Stephen Elop certainly has a way with words. In February, in what might have been the most brutally honest corporate memo in decades, the recently installed CEO compared his company to an oil worker trapped on a burning drilling rig, facing a terrible choice. "He was surrounded by flames," Elop wrote. "Through the smoke and heat, he barely made his way out of the chaos to the platform's edge. When he looked down ... all he could see were ...

At the Kiev offices of Innovative Marketing Ukraine, hundreds of programmers, translators and database engineers created a software product that made the company a world leader — an exceptional achievement in the impoverished former Soviet republic. But the way the company made its multimillion-dollar profits is nothing to celebrate, according to the criminal charges its owners now face in a district court in Chicago. Innovative Marketing, say investigators and Internet-security researchers, was one of the biggest and cleverest ...

The celebrities and the superrich who live in Isleworth, including Tiger Woods, would like to project a common touch. Every Halloween, residents of the gated golf community near Orlando, Fla., decorate their golf carts and drive trick-or-treaters door-to-door. They share lunches and dinners at the country club, play pickup basketball games and hold community events. "It's pretty normal," says Rav Mehta, CEO of a software-development firm who lives just outside Isleworth's vine-covered walls but has many friends inside. Normal ...

Get ready for a closeup: your next job interview might be on webcam. Looking to save time and money, companies are turning to video-chat software as a cheap, low-hassle way to vet job candidates. That means a growing number of people looking for work are meeting their prospective new bosses not at the office but in the comfort of their own home. Naturally, the transition from in-person to online isn't without its hiccups. Fuzzy transmissions, dropped calls ...

Plagiarism-detection software was created with lazy, sneaky college students in mind — not the likes of William Shakespeare. Yet the software may have settled a centuries-old mystery over the authorship of an unattributed play from the late 1500s called The Reign of Edward III. Literature scholars have long debated whether the play was written by Shakespeare — some bits are incredibly Bard-like, but others don't resemble his style at all. The verdict, according to one expert: the play is ...