Case Study: A Content Company Weighs Becoming a Technology Company

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Case Study: A Content Company Weighs Becoming a Technology Company

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DealBook: Icahn Adds eBay to His Targets in Technology

The Times Hires a Technology Columnist

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Technology: At CES, Wired Cars Reach Out

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Pogue, Times Technology Columnist, Is Leaving for Yahoo

David Pogue, the technology writer for The New York Times, whose columns were among the most popular at the paper, said on Monday that he was leaving for Yahoo to start a consumer-focused technology site.

David Pogue, in 2009 at the Macworld Expo in San Francisco.

In addition to his “State of the Art” column, where he has reviewed new technology products for 13 years, Mr. Pogue created weekly videos for The Times and wrote a blog, Pogue’s Posts, that won a Gerald Loeb award for Distinguished Business Journalism in 2010.

In a statement on his Tumblr site this morning Mr. Pogue wrote: “Thirteen years is a long time to stay in one place; we all thrive on new experiences.”

He then elaborated on his new mission at Yahoo. “I’ll be writing columns and blog posts each week, of course, and making my goofy videos,'’ he wrote. “But my team and I have much bigger plans, too, for all kinds of online and real-world creations.'’

Mr. Pogue always worked for other organizations besides The Times, and while at Yahoo he will continue to keep his outside assignments, which include technology correspondent for “CBS News Sunday Morning,” columnist for Scientific American and the host of a series on technology on the PBS program “Nova.”

Mr. Pogue’s departure comes as technology coverage has become increasingly prized by media companies. Only weeks ago, Walter Mossberg, a leading reviewer of new devices, and his partner Kara Swisher at AllThingsD, said they would be leaving The Wall Street Journal to start a technology writing and conference business with the backing of new partners.

In a memo to the newsroom, Dean Murphy, The Times’s business editor, and Suzanne Spector, the technology editor, wrote that Mr. Pogue’s columns were “a delight to read'’ and wished him well in his new job.

Bits: Technology Workers Are Young (Really Young)

Peter Dasilva/European Pressphoto Agency An employee at Box, an online data storage company founded in 2005. Younger companies tend to have workers with less time at the firm, according to Payscale.

It’s well known that technology is a young man’s game. Still, it is surprising to see just how young (and how male).

PayScale, a company based in Seattle, has determined that the median age of workers at many of the most successful companies in the technology industry, along with information on gender and years of experience.

Just six of the 32 companies it looked at had a median age greater than 35 years old. Eight of the companies, the study said, had median employee age of 30 or younger. Women were generally less than 30 percent of the work force, and in fields like semiconductors, represented much less than that.

While the results may affirm a widely held hunch, they are nonetheless striking: According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the overall median age of American workers is 42.3 years old. The company with the oldest workers on the PayScale list, Hewlett – Packard, came in at 41 years.

The other five companies with older workers, in descending order of median age, were I.B.M. Global Services (38 years old), Oracle (38), Nokia (36), Dell (37) and Sony (36).

The seven companies with the youngest workers, ranked from youngest to highest in median age, were Epic Games (26); Facebook (28); Zynga (28); Google (29); and AOL, Blizzard Entertainment, InfoSys, and Monster.com (all 30). According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, only shoe stores and restaurants have workers with a median age less than 30.

Median age means that an equal number of workers are above and below the figure. In large populations, the number is considered representative. PayScale, which surveys many industries, says it covers 3 percent of the American work force, an amount that could yield meaningful results. In this survey, some 21,700 company employees submitted information.

Not surprisingly, the companies with older workers tend to be older companies, because some people still stay with one employer for many years, and over time a company may accumulate more of these people. Cisco Systems has a median worker age of 35, and both Samsung and Microsoft come in at 34. These companies also tend to have workers with a lot more experience.

Younger companies tend to have workers with less time at the firm, which is partly an effect of being new and hiring intensively in recent years. Facebook’s median worker has been with the company just 1.1 years, while Intel, I.B.M., Oracle and others come in around six years.

Other factors are also in play, however. “The firms that are growing or innovating around new areas tend to have younger workers,” said Katie Bardaro, the lead economist at PayScale. “Older companies that aren’t changing with the times get older workers.”

One reason for this, she said, was a function of skills. “Baby Boomers and Gen Xers tend to know C# and SQL,” she said. C# is a software language, while SQL is a database technology. She added, “Gen Y knows Python, social media, and Hadoop,” which are newer versions of those things.

Amazon.com, notably, has a median stay with the company of just one year, a figure Ms. Bardaro ascribed to the intense pace of work there. (The study did not include workers in Amazon’s warehouses, where skills and turnover are different.) “We’re based in Seattle, and know a lot of people at Amazon,” she said. “The consensus is that you are run through a gamut there, make money, burn out and leave.”

The survey was derived from information PayScale gets from individuals who come to PayScale seeking employment information, and volunteer their data to share information from others. PayScale, which works with LinkedIn, sells its data to human resources departments. Ms. Bardaro said her company had also backed up the information with third-party data, to confirm the numbers.

James Martin, Technology Consultant and Author, Dies at 79

James Martin, a British technology expert, author and prognosticator who viewed mankind’s onrushing future with alarm and excitement and used his considerable fortune to address his concerns, died on June 24 near his home in Bermuda. He was 79.

He drowned after having a heart attack while swimming off his private island, his stepdaughter Leila Larijani said.

Mr. Martin began his career working with first-generation computers at I.B.M. in the 1950s, became influential in the field of information technology through his prodigious writing, and established a school at Oxford to study the problems and opportunities confronting the 21st-century world.

His personal Web site lists more than 100 titles, ranging from 1960s primers on teleprocessing and designing and programming systems, to works of informed soothsaying, like “The Wired Society: A Challenge for Tomorrow,” (1978), which foresaw a world plugged into a computer network.

He was a widely known information technology consultant, whose London business became an international company known as Headstrong, which caters to the financial services industry. He conducted hundreds of five-day seminars for executives on the link between technology and business.

More recently his interest was in identifying global problems — climate change, overpopulation, environmental withering — that have been worsened by past technologies and that he asserted could be addressed by new ones.

In a book, “The Meaning of the 21st Century,” and a film he made in conjunction with it, Mr. Martin argued that the human race had only a short time to change its wasteful ways before the planet was irreparably harmed. The technology to solve the problems is either available or developing; what is missing is broad education and political will, he said.

“A naïve view of the past is that technology gives us mastery over nature,” he said in the film. “A more appropriate view is that advanced technology causes us to need even more advanced technology in order to survive.”

In 2005, Mr. Martin gave $100 million to the University of Oxford, his alma mater, to establish what was then called the James Martin 21st Century School, aimed at promoting interdisciplinary research on global issues. In 2009, Mr. Martin, the single most generous benefactor in the university’s history, agreed to give as much as $50 million more if the sum were matched by outside donations; by the next year, it was. The school, now known as the Oxford Martin School, focuses on four areas: health and medicine, energy and the environment, technology and society, and ethics and governance.

He also was a benefactor of the Monterey Institute of International Studies in California, which is affiliated with Middlebury College in Vermont. At his death, he had finished a book about weapons of mass destruction, “The War and Peace of the Nuclear Age,” which his wife, Lillian, said she would publish on the Internet and make accessible at no charge.

“He really, really wanted to make things better,” Ms. Martin said in an interview on Monday. “Going into a village and feeding people wasn’t his thing. He wanted to make an impact from the top.”

James Thomas Martin was born on Oct. 19, 1933, in Ashby-de-la-Zouch, England, northeast of Birmingham. His father was a Civil Service clerk. He earned a full scholarship to Oxford, where he studied physics and pursued his interests in writing and philosophy. He served in the British Army in Cyprus before beginning his business career at I.B.M., which sent him to New York. He worked on developing an airline reservations system and other computing projects.

Mr. Martin’s first two marriages, to Charity Anders and Carma McClure, ended in divorce. In addition to his wife, the former Lillian Casey, whom he met in the 1980s and married in 2004, and his stepdaughter Ms. Larijani, he is survived by a daughter he had with Ms. Anders, Corinthia Richards; three other stepchildren, David and Jayron Larijani and Sheida Matern; and two grandchildren.

Known for being shy, he studied public speaking while at I.B.M. and “became dynamic on stage,” his wife said. He loved Manhattan, where he had a home, but in the 1990s, seeking a quieter retreat, he bought Agar’s Island in Bermuda, she said. He also had a home in Waitsfield, Vt.

“I’d like it known that he had a good sense of humor; it was very British, but he loved slapstick,” Ms. Martin said. “And he loved having a big family around him, a lot of people talking around the dinner table. At first he didn’t; no one had ever interrupted him before. But he grew to love it.”

Riff: My Kids Are Obsessed With Technology, and It’s All My Fault

I happened to be sitting next to the teacher, and I asked her about the rumor I’d heard: that next year, every elementary-school kid in town would be provided his or her own iPad. She said this pilot program was being introduced only at the newly constructed school three blocks from our house, which Josie will attend next year. “You’re lucky,” she observed wistfully.

This seemed to be the consensus around the school-bus stop. The iPads are coming! Not only were our kids going to love learning, they were also going to do so on the cutting edge of innovation. Why, in the face of this giddy chatter, was I filled with dread?

It’s not because I’m a cranky Luddite. I swear. I recognize that iPads, if introduced with a clear plan, and properly supervised, can improve learning and allow students to work at their own pace. Those are big ifs in an era of overcrowded classrooms. But my hunch is that our school will do a fine job. We live in a town filled with talented educators and concerned parents.

Frankly, I find it more disturbing that a brand-name product is being elevated to the status of mandatory school supply. I also worry that iPads might transform the classroom from a social environment into an educational subway car, each student fixated on his or her personalized educational gadget.

But beneath this fretting is a more fundamental beef: the school system, without meaning to, is subverting my parenting, in particular my fitful efforts to regulate my children’s exposure to screens. These efforts arise directly from my own tortured history as a digital pioneer, and the war still raging within me between harnessing the dazzling gifts of technology versus fighting to preserve the slower, less convenient pleasures of the analog world.

What I’m experiencing is, in essence, a generational reckoning, that queasy moment when those of us whose impatient desires drove the tech revolution must face the inheritors of this enthusiasm: our children.

It will probably come as no surprise that I’m one of those annoying people fond of boasting that I don’t own a TV. It makes me feel noble to mention this — I am feeling noble right now! — as if I’m taking a brave stand against the vulgar superficiality of the age. What I mention less frequently is the reason I don’t own a TV: because I would watch it constantly.

My brothers and I were so devoted to television as kids that we created an entire lexicon around it. The brother who turned on the TV, and thus controlled the channel being watched, was said to “emanate.” I didn’t even know what “emanate” meant. It just sounded like the right verb.

This was back in the ’70s. We were latchkey kids living on the brink of a brave new world. In a few short years, we’d hurtled from the miraculous calculator (turn it over to spell out “boobs”!) to arcades filled with strobing amusements. I was one of those guys who spent every spare quarter mastering Asteroids and Defender, who found in video games a reliable short-term cure for the loneliness and competitive anxiety that plagued me. By the time I graduated from college, the era of personal computers had dawned. I used mine to become a closet Freecell Solitaire addict.

Midway through my 20s I underwent a reformation. I began reading, then writing, literary fiction. It quickly became apparent that the quality of my work rose in direct proportion to my ability filter out distractions. I’ve spent the past two decades struggling to resist the endless pixelated enticements intended to capture and monetize every spare second of human attention.

Has this campaign succeeded? Not really. I’ve just been a bit slower on the uptake than my contemporaries. But even without a TV or smartphones, our household can feel dominated by computers, especially because I and my wife (also a writer) work at home. We stare into our screens for hours at a stretch, working and just as often distracting ourselves from work.

Riff: My Kids Are Obsessed With Technology, and It’s All My Fault

I happened to be sitting next to the teacher, and I asked her about the rumor I’d heard: that next year, every elementary-school kid in town would be provided his or her own iPad. She said this pilot program was being introduced only at the newly constructed school three blocks from our house, which Josie will attend next year. “You’re lucky,” she observed wistfully.

This seemed to be the consensus around the school-bus stop. The iPads are coming! Not only were our kids going to love learning, they were also going to do so on the cutting edge of innovation. Why, in the face of this giddy chatter, was I filled with dread?

It’s not because I’m a cranky Luddite. I swear. I recognize that iPads, if introduced with a clear plan, and properly supervised, can improve learning and allow students to work at their own pace. Those are big ifs in an era of overcrowded classrooms. But my hunch is that our school will do a fine job. We live in a town filled with talented educators and concerned parents.

Frankly, I find it more disturbing that a brand-name product is being elevated to the status of mandatory school supply. I also worry that iPads might transform the classroom from a social environment into an educational subway car, each student fixated on his or her personalized educational gadget.

But beneath this fretting is a more fundamental beef: the school system, without meaning to, is subverting my parenting, in particular my fitful efforts to regulate my children’s exposure to screens. These efforts arise directly from my own tortured history as a digital pioneer, and the war still raging within me between harnessing the dazzling gifts of technology versus fighting to preserve the slower, less convenient pleasures of the analog world.

What I’m experiencing is, in essence, a generational reckoning, that queasy moment when those of us whose impatient desires drove the tech revolution must face the inheritors of this enthusiasm: our children.

It will probably come as no surprise that I’m one of those annoying people fond of boasting that I don’t own a TV. It makes me feel noble to mention this — I am feeling noble right now! — as if I’m taking a brave stand against the vulgar superficiality of the age. What I mention less frequently is the reason I don’t own a TV: because I would watch it constantly.

My brothers and I were so devoted to television as kids that we created an entire lexicon around it. The brother who turned on the TV, and thus controlled the channel being watched, was said to “emanate.” I didn’t even know what “emanate” meant. It just sounded like the right verb.

This was back in the ’70s. We were latchkey kids living on the brink of a brave new world. In a few short years, we’d hurtled from the miraculous calculator (turn it over to spell out “boobs”!) to arcades filled with strobing amusements. I was one of those guys who spent every spare quarter mastering Asteroids and Defender, who found in video games a reliable short-term cure for the loneliness and competitive anxiety that plagued me. By the time I graduated from college, the era of personal computers had dawned. I used mine to become a closet Freecell Solitaire addict.

Midway through my 20s I underwent a reformation. I began reading, then writing, literary fiction. It quickly became apparent that the quality of my work rose in direct proportion to my ability filter out distractions. I’ve spent the past two decades struggling to resist the endless pixelated enticements intended to capture and monetize every spare second of human attention.

Has this campaign succeeded? Not really. I’ve just been a bit slower on the uptake than my contemporaries. But even without a TV or smartphones, our household can feel dominated by computers, especially because I and my wife (also a writer) work at home. We stare into our screens for hours at a stretch, working and just as often distracting ourselves from work.

Study Gauges Value of Technology in Schools

With school districts rushing to buy computers, tablets, digital white boards and other technology, a new report questions whether the investment is worth it.

In a review of student survey data conducted in conjunction with the federal exams known as the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the nonprofit Center for American Progress found that middle school math students more commonly used computers for basic drills and practice than to develop sophisticated skills. The report also found that no state was collecting data to evaluate whether technology investments were actually improving student achievement.

“Schools frequently acquire digital devices without discrete learning goals and ultimately use these devices in ways that fail to adequately serve students, schools, or taxpayers,” wrote Ulrich Boser, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and the author of the report.

The analysis of the N.A.E.P. data found that 34 percent of eighth graders who took the math exams in 2011 used computers to “drill on math facts” while less than a quarter worked with spreadsheets or geometric figures on the computer. Only 17 percent used statistical programs.

The federal survey data showed striking differences among racial groups and income levels. More than half of the black students who took the eighth-grade math exam in 2011 said they used computers to work on math drills, while only 30 percent of white students said they did.

Similarly, 41 percent of students eligible for free and reduced lunches said they used computers for math drills, compared with 29 percent of students whose families earn too much for them to qualify for the lunches.

In high school science classrooms, the use of technology evidently has not advanced much past the 1980s. According to the report, 73 percent of students who took the 12th-grade National Assessment science exam said they regularly watched a movie or video in class.

Such data, Mr. Boser said, suggested that technology “doesn’t seem to have dramatically changed the nature of schooling.”

Experts who study the effectiveness of instructional technology say there is potential for some digital programs to improve teaching. John Pane, a senior scientist at the RAND Corporation, said good technology allowed students to work at their own pace and independently while teachers worked with smaller groups.

Mr. Pane conducted a study, financed by the federal Department of Education, of an algebra software program created by Carnegie Learning, a math curriculum developer. He found that high school students who used the program, which was designed to accompany a teacher-led curriculum, showed gains on their state-standardized math tests that were nearly double the gains of a typical year’s worth of growth using a more traditional high school math curriculum.

Whether those gains came from the use of technology or changes in the curriculum, he said, was hard to say. But Steve Ritter, chief scientist at Carnegie Learning, said one of the benefits of the technology was that it used the principles of cognitive science to help students gain a deeper understanding of concepts rather than simply drill math problems.

“We’re not just seeing whether they got the answer right or wrong,” Mr. Ritter said, “but why they got it right or wrong.”

Bits Blog: Secret Court Ruling in 2008 Put Technology Companies in Bind

In a secret court in Washington, Yahoo’s top lawyers made their case. The government had sought help in spying on certain foreign users, without a warrant, and Yahoo had refused, saying the broad requests were unconstitutional, Claire Cain Miller reports in The New York Times.

The judges disagreed. That left Yahoo two choices: Hand over the data or break the law.

So Yahoo became part of the National Security Agency’s secret Internet surveillance program, Prism, according to leaked N.S.A. documents, as did seven other Internet companies.

Like almost all the actions of the secret court, which operates under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the details of its disagreement with Yahoo were never made public beyond a heavily redacted court order, one of the few public documents ever to emerge from the court. The name of the company had not been revealed until now. Yahoo’s involvement was confirmed by two people with knowledge of the proceedings. Yahoo declined to comment.

But the decision has had lasting repercussions for the dozens of companies that store troves of their users’ personal information and receive these national security requests — it puts them on notice that they need not even try to test their legality. And despite the murky details, the case offers a glimpse of the push and pull among tech companies and the intelligence and law enforcement agencies that try to tap into the reams of personal data stored on their servers.

NYT > Technology

A screen shot of the Android version of Waze, a social mapping service used by millions of drivers around the world.

After weeks of talks, Google completed a deal to buy the Israeli social mapping start-up, which uses a combination of GPS tracking and contributions from its users about road conditions to help drivers navigate.

An I.B.M. computer made for the National Security Agency, delivered in 1962, shows how intelligence agencies have long been among the most demanding of customers for advanced computing, data collection and data analysis technology.

Cisco Rides Technology Trends to 14.5% Increase in Profit

The world’s largest maker of networking gear has stumbled in recent years as companies bought less and new competitors arose. In response, Cisco moved into technologies like online video, cloud computing and delivery of high-speed Internet over wireless networks.

Those investments appear to be paying off. On Wednesday, Cisco said its sales of switches and routers were basically flat in its third fiscal quarter, which ended April 27. Sales of equipment for big cloud-computing data centers, video and wireless systems, however, were substantially higher.

“This is where the action is,” said John Chambers, Cisco’s chief executive, in an interview after the earnings announcement. “We bet on some of these seven years ago, now they’re paying off.”

Mr. Chambers wants Cisco to diversify into building sophisticated networked systems with many parts. That could prompt growth of its main switching and routing businesses, because it would mean even more Internet traffic from sensors, consumer devices, and industrial products to and from the Internet.

Cisco needs something to revive those businesses, which still make up nearly half of its revenue. Sales of switching gear, Cisco’s biggest sector, fell 2 percent compared with a year ago, while router sales were flat. Video equipment sales grew 30 percent, wireless equipment rose 27 percent and data center gear was up 77 percent, but their total revenue was about half that of switches and routers.

Over all, Cisco’s net income rose 14.5 percent compared with a year earlier, to $2.5 billion, or 46 cents a share. Revenue was up 5.4 percent, to $12.2 billion. By the nonstandard accounting measures popular with many tech companies, Cisco had net income of 51 cents a share, up 6.3 percent from a year earlier. Wall Street analysts, based on a survey by Thomson Reuters, had projected net income of 49 cents a share and revenue of $12.18 billion.

“The new products got them out of what looked like a tough quarter,” said Eric Suppinger, an analyst with JMP Securities in San Francisco.

Results for Cisco, which is based in San Jose, Calif., are often taken as a barometer of overall business spending. Sales in North America rose 10.4 percent, to $7.1 billion, and Mr. Chambers described the business environment as “slow but steady.” Sales in Europe were lower, he said, primarily because of weakness in countries like Spain. “You’re beginning to see Europe bottom out, with the exception of the south,” he said.

Cisco shares were up more than 8 percent in after-hours trading, after closing down 0.28 percent at $21.21.

Economic Scene: Economic Statistics Miss the Benefits of Technology

I traveled to Japan with a TRS-80 portable computer, which ran on AA batteries and had plastic cups to put over the phone receiver. It transmitted copy at the blistering speed of 300 bits per second. And I wrote about Mexico’s tequila crisis of 1994 without the benefit of a full set of Mexican financial statistics a few clicks away.

From my perspective, the evolution of the tools of journalism between then and now has been nothing less than breathtaking.

Articles are more thorough — informed by complementary data and analysis, enriched with links to things like interactive charts, videos and slide shows. They get to readers much more quickly. Most important, they reach many more of them.

For all its financial troubles, never has The New York Times been read by more people: 44 million unique viewers online in the United States every month. Yet if you were to rummage through American economic statistics you would find little evidence of journalism’s technological leaps. Measured by its contribution to gross domestic product, the most prominent indicator of the nation’s economic well-being, much of this new journalistic value enabled by information technology is not worth much.

This is true not only of journalism. The failure of I.T. to deliver measurable value has been a popular meme among economists for years. Back in 1987 Nobel laureate Robert Solow posed a now famous paradox: “We can see the computers everywhere except in the productivity statistics.”

The meme is back. The burst of productivity during the dot-com revolution of the 1990s gave skeptics pause. But as productivity has slowed substantially in recent years, doubts have re-emerged about whether information technology can power economic growth like the steam engine and the internal combustion engine did in the past.

Last year, Robert J. Gordon of Northwestern University proposed that the I.T. revolution has pretty much exhausted its promise. He asked, provocatively: “Is U.S. economic growth over?” And he forecast stagnating living standards for the vast majority of Americans for decades to come.

Government statistics lend support to his skepticism: Value added by the information technology and communications industries — mostly hardware and software — has remained stuck at around 4 percent of the nation’s economic output for the last quarter century.

But these statistics do not tell the whole story. Because they miss much of what technology does for people’s well-being.

News organizations that take advantage of computers to let go of journalists, secretaries and research assistants will show up in the economic statistics as more productive, making more with less. But statisticians have no way to value more thorough, useful, fact-dense articles.

What’s more, gross domestic product only values the goods and services people pay for. It does not capture the value to consumers of economic improvements that are given away free. And until recently this is what news media organizations like The New York Times were doing online.

The Commerce Department is in the process of revising the way it measures G.D.P. to take better account of the contributions of investment in research and development and artistic creation. But even though the revisions to be announced this summer are expected to make the economy look bigger, they are not devised to capture the value that Americans get from digital technologies.

“G.D.P. is not a measure of how much value is produced for consumers,” said Erik Brynjolfsson of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “Everybody should recognize that G.D.P. is not a welfare metric.”

G.D.P. misses what Americans gain from sharing information on Facebook or finding information on Google or Wikipedia. It misses how dating sites reduce the cost and increase the odds of finding a mate. It misses the time saved by drivers who use Google Maps and the time gained by consumers from shopping online. Measured in money — what it contributes to G.D.P. — the recording industry is shrinking. Yet never before have Americans had access to so much music.

DealBook: Technology Start-Ups Take Root in Berlin

BERLIN — Near the Rosenthaler Platz subway station here, signs of the city’s high-tech future blend seamlessly with its communist past.

Decrepit breweries and stables have been converted to communal offices decked out in colorful Ikea furniture. Achingly cool coffee shops with names like Betahaus and St. Oberholz are packed with programmers in their 20s and 30s hunched over shiny new laptops. And even as the city’s unemployment broadly remains high, vintage clothing stores selling patent-leather Dr. Martens boots for 180 euros, or $235, entice technology transplants from across Europe with promotions in English.

“I got sucked into Berlin,” said Henrik Berggren, a Swedish college dropout who moved here in 2011 to work on his e-book venture, ReadMill. “It became clear that this was the place to be.”

More than two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the German capital has gone from a cold war relic to one of the fastest-growing start-up communities. Engineers and designers have flooded into Berlin in recent years, attracted by the underground music scene, cutting-edge art galleries, stylish bars and low rent.

Hours after landing at Tegel airport, Mr. Berggren, a bearded 33-year-old computer programmer, found an apartment with two 20-something Germans in one of the city’s trendiest neighborhoods for just 300 euros, or $390, a month. A few days later, he secured a cheap office for his four-person team, a space they shared with several other start-ups.

With the new wave of entrepreneurs, Berlin, once viewed as the poor relation to Germany’s main business centers, like Frankfurt and Hamburg, is improving its ranking in the country’s economic hierarchy.

In March, the country’s chancellor, Angela Merkel, toured several local technology firms in a show of support. The city’s politicians also are trying to make it easier for international workers to get visas by fast-tracking applications from technology professionals and other workers.

“The scene is very young,” said Alex Ljung, the co-founder of SoundCloud, a music Web site backed by the American venture capital giant Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. “Berlin isn’t proven yet. It’s much like a start-up in that way.”

By Silicon Valley standards, Berlin is still a backwater.

Entrepreneurs say high-quality programmers and engineers are hard to find, and a lack of early-stage funding from venture capital firms, particularly those in Europe, has hampered companies’ growth. After getting burned by the dot-com bust, German venture capitalists have largely shied away from making big investments, preferring to finance early-stage companies with checks of less than $2 million.

The city also is trying to overcome its reputation for copying American business models rather than developing innovative ideas.

The Samwer brothers, whose Berlin start-up incubator Rocket Internet has completed a series of successful deals, sold German versions of eBay and Groupon to their more famous competitors. The brothers — Alexander, Oliver and Marc — have used the proceeds to invest in companies like Facebook and Zynga. One of their latest projects, a German rival to the online retailer Zappos, is valued at $3.7 billion.

“Previous generations of Berlin start-ups were copycats,” said Matt Cohler, a partner at the venture firm Benchmark Capital, who was one of the first employees at both LinkedIn and Facebook, and has invested in a Berlin start-up. “It was the predominant playbook.”

More important, there have been few successful exits — sales to larger companies or lucrative initial public offerings — that could cement Berlin’s place in the global start-up community. Among those deals, few break the $1 billion mark.

In 2010, Groupon bought the European rival CityDeal for around $260 million. Google acquired DailyDeal, a similar daily deals Web site from Berlin, for a reported $200 million in 2011; earlier this year, the Internet giant sold the start-up back to its founders.

“Many funds got started at the wrong time,” said Christophe Maire, an angel investor in Berlin, whose nickname is the Conductor because he has mentored, and invested in, many of the city’s new generation of young entrepreneurs.

“There’s a reluctance to back innovation.”

But as local start-ups gain global audiences — and international backing — entrepreneurs and investors are betting on Berlin. While venture capital investment in the rest of Europe has remained flat since the financial crisis began, the city attracted 173 million euros ($226 million) in venture funding last year, a 164 percent increase compared with 2009.

Big technology companies are showing interest, too. Earlier this month, the Japanese technology giant Panasonic bought Aupeo, a local audio streaming service, for an undisclosed amount. Google has invested in a local start-up hub called the Factory that is being built at a site that once was part of the Berlin Wall.

“There are billion-dollar companies just waiting to happen,” said Ciaran O’Leary, a partner in the local venture firm Early Bird, in his minimalist office in the center of the city. “Something big is going to happen. It’s just a question of time.”

Ijad Madisch knows the limits of starting a technology company in Germany.

Mr. Madisch, a Harvard-educated medical doctor, also holds a Ph.D. in virology and has studied computer science. Yet when he started working on Research Gate, a social networking site that allows scientists to share work and collaborate on projects, he faced resistance.

Returning to Hanover to be closer to his family in 2008, Mr. Madisch’s college supervisor told him to give up his pet project after he asked to work part time to focus on the start-up.

The next day, Mr. Madisch, 32, quit his job. He soon transferred to Harvard where a former boss was happy to let him work fewer hours while he pursued his business idea. Friends also put him in contact with blue-chip American venture firms, including Benchmark Capital and Accel Partners.

After securing early-stage fund-raising from West Coast backers, Mr. Madisch moved Research Gate from Boston to Berlin in 2011, and has expanded his staff tenfold in less than two years, to 120 employees. The site now connects more than 2.6 million scientists worldwide, and Mr. Madisch plans to make money by selling advertisements for academic conferences and job openings.

In an ironic twist, Mr. Madisch’s former boss, who had warned him against starting the company, is now one of the site’s most active users.

“I had to leave Germany to get back to Germany,” Mr. Madisch said in his three-floor office in central Berlin that has a large game room and sleeping pods to keep programmers fresh.

“German venture capitalists had this idea in front of them, and they didn’t do anything about it.”

For entrepreneurs, Berlin offers the infrastructure, without the costly overhead of Northern California, New York or London. Commercial rents in the once-communist side of the city are about half of that in London, allowing entrepreneurs to stretch their start-up budgets.

Three years ago, the founders of EyeEm, a mobile photo app similar to Instagram, borrowed an art gallery in a chic part of Berlin to start a global online photography competition. The showcase received more than 2,000 entries from around the world and formed the basis of their business idea.

EyeEm later replicated the exhibition in SoHo. But costs quickly rose as the founders had to fork over high rent for a trendy gallery, submit multiple forms to receive licensing permits and pay high wages to waiters and security staff.

“The cheap rent Berlin buys you time, and time is everything,” said Lorenz Aschoff, a co-founder of EyeEm, in the company’s converted loft space. “If we hadn’t received the original gallery for free, it would have killed the idea before it took off.”

As start-ups in the German capital become more established, entrepreneurs and investors alike are hoping that one of the city’s companies will turn the growing interest in Berlin into cash.

Many eyes have focused on Wooga, an online game start-up founded in 2009 that competes with Zynga for users on mobile phones and social networking sites like Facebook.

At a converted bakery colorfully adorned with characters from Wooga’s games, the company’s 250 employees from more than 35 countries busily plan their next online game.

After raising money from both European and American venture firms, Jens Begemann, Wooga’s co-founder and chief executive, said investors are slowly reconsidering untested ideas. He is focused on beefing up its games for smartphones in an effort to diversify away from sites like Facebook.

“Gaming involves combining skilled engineering with a creative atmosphere,” said Mr. Begemann, 36, in the start-up’s five-story office where programmers share ideas in an open-plan kitchen that has been designed to look like a leafy forest. “Wooga couldn’t exist in any city other than Berlin.”

DealBook: Market Delay in Chicago Points Again to Technology

Scott Olson/Getty ImagesA trader at the Chicago Board Options Exchange in March. Traders said Thursday’s delay made the exchange unusually quiet.

9:24 p.m. | Updated

Trading on the nation’s largest options exchange was delayed for several hours on Thursday because of computer problems, the latest incident to highlight the vulnerability of markets to technological shocks.

The Chicago Board Options Exchange, which normally begins trading for most of its products at 9:30 a.m. Eastern time, returned to normal operations by early afternoon. But brokers who typically trade tens of thousands of options each day through the exchange sat on the sidelines for much of the morning.

The exchange trades options based on the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index and the VIX index, a popular barometer of investor sentiment about volatility in United States stock markets. The contracts are important tools among investors seeking ways to hedge their stock holdings.

The system failure was the second instance this week of technology intruding into the markets. Earlier this week, a message from The Associated Press’s Twitter account falsely reported explosions at the White House, causing the Dow Jones industrial average to plunge nearly 150 points in two minutes. The markets rebounded quickly after The A.P. said its account had been hacked.

Also, the market debut of Facebook was botched last May, and a blowup at Knight Capital rattled the markets and nearly toppled the firm.

In today’s rapid-speed electronic trading world, where high-frequency traders zip in and out of stocks and futures at speeds that are faster than the blink of an eye, the nation’s exchanges have sometimes struggled to keep up. Probably most famous is the “flash crash” of May 2010 that sent the Dow into a tailspin. It took regulators months to figure out how what caused the index, already down more than 300 points, to suddenly drop like a stone to a 1,000-point loss before recovering much of that within 20 minutes.

The malfunction in Chicago stoked fear again among regulators and reignited concerns about the market’s vulnerability to broader shocks.

“The recurrence of technology glitches in markets means we need not blindly accept that the whiz-bang machinery will always work as well as it should have,” said Bart Chilton, a regulator at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. “On the contrary, we need to open our eyes to that fact.”

A news release from the exchange said the cause of delay was “an internal systems issue and not the result of any outside influence.” The exchange has told authorities that the problem stemmed from a “bug” in its computer software, said a person briefed on the matter who was not authorized to speak publicly. Although the exchange is still searching for the source of the problem, the person said, it assured authorities that it did not expect a repeat of the problem on Friday.

Analysts said while investors could find alternatives to S.& P. 500 options, few good alternatives were available for the VIX index.

The first notice that something was awry at the exchange came soon after 8 a.m. Eastern time, when the exchange’s system said that some users were experiencing “issues” downloading certain products. The exchange delayed its opening, expecting to start trading about 10:15 a.m., according to notices sent to traders.

That opening never happened. For several hours the exchange could not provide an expected opening time. Finally, more than three and a half hours past its usual opening, the exchange said all trading would begin at 1 p.m. About a half-hour later, the exchange reported all systems were operating normally.

Justin Kaechele, a trader for BFL Trading, said he received news that the system was down minutes before trading was supposed to begin.

“A lot of companies had some trades planned at that time,” he said. “I don’t know what happened with those, but we had some unhappy customers.”

With nothing to do, traders said they made small talk about various things: sports, the headaches of buying a home, the rising cost of sending their children to private school.

Brian Gilbart, a trader for Belvedere Trading, said the absence of continuous action that normally filled the room could be strongly felt.

“It was eerily quiet,” he said. “The most quiet I’ve ever heard it.”

In an industry where every minute is an opportunity to make more money, the lost time was frustrating. “I think everybody’s mad,” Mr. Gilbart said when asked to describe the mood inside. “Brokers probably lost business.”

Observers said although the failure most likely idled investors trading the volatility index in the morning, it was fortunate that the equity markets were relatively quiet and stable.

“We would be having a very different conversation if the S.& P. 500 was down 50 points or more,” said Mark Sebastian, the chief operating officer of Option Pit, an educational and consulting firm. “It is kind of a slow day, so this wasn’t a big deal.”

As the problems in Chicago emerged on Thursday, the Securities and Exchange Commission mobilized its “market event response team” in Washington, a collection of experts at the agency who monitor trading mishaps in real time, according to officials briefed on the matter. Concerns grew at the agency as the exchange failed to get back online.

“The S.E.C. staff became aware of the situation just before the opening this morning and has monitored developments throughout the day, as is our practice,” John Nester, an agency spokesman, said Thursday. “The commission staff will continue to consult closely with the C.B.O.E. to understand the precise reason for the trading interruption and remediation measures.”

The commodities agency also spoke to exchange employees, the officials said. But the agency stepped aside upon learning that the problems did not affect the futures side of the business.

The incident comes at a difficult time for the Chicago platform, as the S.E.C. increases its scrutiny of the nation’s largest exchanges. The S.E.C. is already investigating the exchange for not properly policing the markets. By Thursday afternoon, the officials said, the agency’s enforcement unit had not opened an investigation into the system problems.

Steven Yaccino contributed reporting from Chicago.

This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: April 27, 2013

An article on Friday about a technical malfunction that halted trading at the Chicago Board Options Exchange for hours on Thursday misspelled the surname of a trader who commented on the uncustomary silence on the trading floor. He is Brian Gilbart, not Gilbert.

Gadgetwise Blog: Martian Watch Brings Wristphone Technology to Earthlings

The Martian Passport puts smartphone voice controls and a speakerphone on a wrist.

An outfit called Martian Watches has created one of the most advanced options yet to put smartphone technology on your wrist.

The three lines of Martian Watches control your Apple or Android phone through a Bluetooth connection, but with a difference — the device has a microphone so you can speak voice commands to your watch that your phone will carry out.

It also has a speaker, so your phone can read your texts and e-mails aloud to you through your watch.

The combination of speaker and microphone means you can also make phone calls and hear the responses through the watch, like a speakerphone.

The face of the watch has a lot going on. There is an analog clock face that runs on a watch battery, which will last an estimated two years. There is also an LED that blinks to let you know if you have a phone call or message, or if the battery is low. There is also a small OLED screen that shows you texts and e-mails in a ticker-style scroll of up to 40 characters.

The phone functions are powered by a separate rechargeable battery with an estimated two hours of talk time and seven days of standby. It is recharged through a Micro USB cable.

Toggling the two buttons on the left of the watch case lets you see the date or local weather or get to menus to change the watch’s settings.

Clever features include a “leash” that lets you know if your phone and watch are parted, so you won’t mistakenly leave one behind. A “do not disturb” feature lets you set the hours that your watch is active, so you don’t get alerts in the middle of the night or during meetings. And there is a remote shutter control for your phone’s camera.

In use, all of the features worked well, although the voice command feature has the same Achilles’ heel as the one on phones – it is often confounded by background noise. It worked more consistently in quieter places.

There are three models of Martian Watches in a variety of colors. They are priced at $250 to $300 on pre-order from Martian for delivery in about a month.

Technology: Plug and Play for Internet Connections

Far too often, drivers of older vehicles try to add the services available in new Internet-connected cars by balancing smartphones in their laps. But smartphones — aside from the obvious distraction they present — cannot do things like monitor the car’s location when someone else is using it or send a maintenance reminder based on miles traveled.

One solution is the Audiovox Car Connection kit, a device that went on sale at the end of last year, which tracks the car and monitors the driver.

No screwdrivers or wrenches are needed for installation. The $169.99 package includes a matchbox-size device that simply plugs into the OBD-II port, a required feature of vehicles built since 1996. It has a built-in GPS unit and a two-way cellular data connection, so the car is always connected, no smartphone required.

Once an account is established and the unit is wirelessly recognized by the Car Connection service, owners can track their car’s movements and receive e-mail or text alerts should the vehicle be driven without their permission. Anxious parents can also designate up to five so-called safety zones on the Car Connection Web site; any time the vehicle leaves those specified areas, an alert is sent.

To aid a driver who’s having a momentary memory lapse, the unit automatically notes the car’s location each time it is parked; auto and owner can be reunited using an associated free smartphone app.

Because it’s connected to the diagnostic port, the Car Connection device will also deliver plain-English explanations for any Check Engine warnings to the owner’s account. Nothing went awry during my test.

Car Connection aims to make drivers better by monitoring their habits. I received several “driver scoring notification” e-mails expressing dismay at my excessive speed; the speed warning is set at 75 miles an hour and cannot be changed. To enforce discipline on drivers who can’t resist texting or making calls, a ZoomSafer function can be set to block communications, with three specific number exceptions on BlackBerry or Android phones.

Because the Car Connection uses its own cellular link, it requires a subscription — $10 a month or $90 for a year — and a one-time activation fee of up to $20.

Lockheed Martin Harnesses Quantum Technology

But a powerful new type of computer that is about to be commercially deployed by a major American military contractor is taking computing into the strange, subatomic realm of quantum mechanics. In that infinitesimal neighborhood, common sense logic no longer seems to apply. A one can be a one, or it can be a one and a zero and everything in between — all at the same time.

It sounds preposterous, particularly to those familiar with the yes/no world of conventional computing. But academic researchers and scientists at companies like Microsoft, I.B.M. and Hewlett-Packard have been working to develop quantum computers.

Now, Lockheed Martin — which bought an early version of such a computer from the Canadian company D-Wave Systems two years ago — is confident enough in the technology to upgrade it to commercial scale, becoming the first company to use quantum computing as part of its business.

Skeptics say that D-Wave has yet to prove to outside scientists that it has solved the myriad challenges involved in quantum computation.

But if it performs as Lockheed and D-Wave expect, the design could be used to supercharge even the most powerful systems, solving some science and business problems millions of times faster than can be done today.

Ray Johnson, Lockheed’s chief technical officer, said his company would use the quantum computer to create and test complex radar, space and aircraft systems. It could be possible, for example, to tell instantly how the millions of lines of software running a network of satellites would react to a solar burst or a pulse from a nuclear explosion — something that can now take weeks, if ever, to determine.

“This is a revolution not unlike the early days of computing,” he said. “It is a transformation in the way computers are thought about.” Many others could find applications for D-Wave’s computers. Cancer researchers see a potential to move rapidly through vast amounts of genetic data. The technology could also be used to determine the behavior of proteins in the human genome, a bigger and tougher problem than sequencing the genome. Researchers at Google have worked with D-Wave on using quantum computers to recognize cars and landmarks, a critical step in managing self-driving vehicles.

Quantum computing is so much faster than traditional computing because of the unusual properties of particles at the smallest level. Instead of the precision of ones and zeros that have been used to represent data since the earliest days of computers, quantum computing relies on the fact that subatomic particles inhabit a range of states. Different relationships among the particles may coexist, as well. Those probable states can be narrowed to determine an optimal outcome among a near-infinitude of possibilities, which allows certain types of problems to be solved rapidly.

D-Wave, a 12-year-old company based in Vancouver, has received investments from Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com, which operates one of the world’s largest computer systems, as well as from the investment bank Goldman Sachs and from In-Q-Tel, an investment firm with close ties to the Central Intelligence Agency and other government agencies.

“What we’re doing is a parallel development to the kind of computing we’ve had for the past 70 years,” said Vern Brownell, D-Wave’s chief executive.

Mr. Brownell, who joined D-Wave in 2009, was until 2000 the chief technical officer at Goldman Sachs. “In those days, we had 50,000 servers just doing simulations” to figure out trading strategies, he said. “I’m sure there is a lot more than that now, but we’ll be able to do that with one machine, for far less money.”

D-Wave, and the broader vision of quantum-supercharged computing, is not without its critics. Much of the criticism stems from D-Wave’s own claims in 2007, later withdrawn, that it would produce a commercial quantum computer within a year.

John Markoff contributed reporting from San Francisco.