The technology, called near-field communication, involves a microchip that can send and receive data across very short distances, about four inches. Instead of swiping a credit card, you hold your phone near a reader and let the data zip between the two devices.

Nvidia's CEO, Jen-Hsun Huang, is an engineer and a chip designer. He cofounded Nvidia and still runs it like a startup.

If we didn't have Net neutrality, carriers could do things like penalize companies that use a lot of bandwidth or create high-speed lanes and charge Internet companies extra fees to send their stuff over them. That would give an advantage to big companies and make life harder for startups.

To be sure, robotics are not the only job killers out there, with outsourcing stealing far more gigs than automation.

Amid all the job losses of the Great Recession, there is one category of worker that the economic disruption has been good for: nonhumans.

You can crank out Bitcoins on a PC, but it's an incredibly computer-intensive task, and it will keep getting harder as the number of Bitcoins in existence increases. Some people have pooled together hundreds of machines to 'mine' Bitcoins. Most folks, however, just buy them on an exchange.

People who write about technology love to huff and puff and hyperbolize. The fate of the entire world seems to hang on every move made by Microsoft or Google or Apple. Every new smart phone gets billed as a potential 'iPhone killer,' while every new product from Apple represents the dawn of a new era. It's ridiculous - and exhausting.

What if the Big Three automakers made products that were simple and easy to use - imagine a car with a user interface made by Apple - while also constantly trying to push the state of the art? What if they constantly sought out new technologies and ideas, and incorporated them into their products?

Hubspot's leaders were not heroes but rather a pack of sales and marketing charlatans who spun a good story about magical transformation technology and got rich by selling shares in a company that still has never turned a profit.

The iPhone is like 'omakase', the style of sushi where the chef chooses what you're going to eat, and might even tell you how to eat it - no wasabi allowed on this, no soy sauce allowed on that. Definitely no California rolls.

PayPal claims it can help merchants expand into international markets; its system makes it easier to do business with customers in multiple countries, for example, by handling tricky stuff like currency conversions automatically.

To make a vehicle autonomous, you need to gather massive streams of data from loads of sensors and cameras and process that data on the fly so that the car can 'see' what's around it.

You realize that if you're in the media business, technology is fundamentally what's driving the change in that business.

Facebook's position with rival tech companies boils down to this: if you want access to all the information we've collected, strike a deal with us.

If a developer wants to sell something via an iPad app - it's called an 'in-app purchase' - the transaction must go through Apple, which keeps 30 percent of the money and passes 70 percent on to the developer.

Instead of inventing a gobbledygook password, you join three simple words that come from a thought known only to you. If one day you were driving to work and ran over a frog that ended up flat, you might choose 'frog work flat.'

The world of online marketing, where HubSpot operates, though, has a reputation for being kind of grubby. Our customers include people who make a living bombarding people with email offers or gaming Google's search algorithm or figuring out which kind of misleading subject line is most likely to trick someone into opening a message.

There are too many ways that a startup gig can go sideways. If the startup won't agree to hefty severance, pass.

The Kindle app runs on iPads, BlackBerry, and Android devices, so you can read your books wherever you want; with Apple, you're locked into Apple devices.

I was a technology reporter. And I think everybody who covers tech at some point or another feels like a little kid with their face pressed against the glass looking in at the candy shop and going, 'Wow, it looks so cool and so much fun.'

There are people who do things in tech that have the same skill sets that journalists have. They write, they edit, they put out press releases.

I want to get in on how the media business is changing, how people are telling stories in new ways.

People in startup-land live inside it. They see themselves as really good people even when they're doing something that's very bad. There's a huge disconnect from reality in the tech world.

I wanted to write a book about what it's like to be 50 and trying to reinvent yourself - that struggle. There are all these books and inspirational speakers talking about being a lifelong learner, and it's so great to reinvent yourself, the brand of you. And I wanted to say, you know, it's not like that. It's actually really painful.

My role on 'Silicon Valley' was so small that I didn't have a lot of influence anyway in the show. There are four guys who really write that show and run that show and then six or eight hanging out in a room kicking in a few bits.

I think the issues around diversity of all kinds are really a huge problem in the startup world.

I guess I always had made some assumptions about what it would be like to work in a tech company, and some were right, and some were wrong. I had a lot of, looking back on it, now naive ideas about how companies build their brands, and a lot of those notions I ended up realizing were kind of wrong.

There are two types of young people - the partiers and the people who wanted a sense of purpose in their life.

I was drawn to journalism as a young guy because I felt like there was some purpose to it, not always but sometimes.

I feel like there are some careers that do have a higher meaning.

HubSpot's offices occupy several floors of a 19th-century furniture factory that has been transformed into the cliche of what the home of a tech startup should look like: exposed beams, frosted glass, a big atrium, modern art hanging in the lobby.

The office-as-playground trend was made famous by Google and has spread like an infection across the tech industry. Work can't just be work; work has to be fun.

HubSpot is divided into 'neighborhoods,' each named after a section of Boston: North End, South End, Charlestown.

Every new HubSpot employee has to go through training to learn how to use the software. That's a good idea, and it also keeps me from having to worry about what I'm supposed to be doing here or why Cranium, who hired me, still has never come by to say hello or talk about what he wants me to work on.

Even in the business department of a magazine, tech was a backwater.

'Silicon Valley' likes being satirized. They've all been waiting for someone to come along and make fun of it.

Some people don't have a sense of humor.

The people running Silicon Valley are not making the show because they want to do a satire of Silicon Valley. They are just comedy writers, and they want to make a funny show.

I wouldn't say that I know a lot about 'Silicon Valley'. I live in Boston, for one thing. And I don't live and breathe this stuff the way most of the guys out there do.

I was working at 'Forbes,' and I covered big enterprise companies - IBM, Sun, and EMC - and it was kind of boring. 'Forbes' only came out every other week, so it was not the most fast-paced job in the world. It was very nice, comfortable.

I wanted to learn how to blog, so I was playing around with Wordpress and Typepad and Blogger, starting all these different blogs just to learn how these things work. I had a fake Sergey Brin blog, an anonymous, fake Ph.D kind of blog. I did it for, like, I don't know, six weeks, and the Steve Jobs one just caught on.

My prior stint at 'Newsweek' was a very different world. So it's what it's like to be in one of these kooky software startups as a grown up. It's not entirely pleasant! It's like, 'Oh, I don't fit.'

My job, originally, was to write blog posts for their 'HubSpot' blog. They have a business model built on content. Then I was writing e-books for them, and after I came back from L.A., they had this new plan to launch a podcast.

I feel like Valleywag has been different things with different writers over the years. Up and down. I think it's at their best when they get a legitimate scoop, like when someone leaks them documents. I feel like we could do more of that, breaking stories.

We like the John Gruber model - he writes some long stuff that's very thoughtful and analytical, and then other stuff, he just adds a bit of commentary. I like that.

GE rolled out a popular TV ad campaign in 2015 explaining why youthful techies should give the 'digital industrial' giant a second look.

NBC Universal has created a role called 'talent branding specialist' - a marketer whose job is essentially to put the company on the radars of the most sought-after candidates.

There's often a good, honest case to be made that a century-old company has not only a knack for growing and managing a P&L, but also, perhaps, a heart and soul.

Confining a resume to a single page is good advice for anyone.

There was a time when a company could not sell its shares to the public unless its revenues were growing and it was turning a profit. Companies that lost money were deemed too risky for public investors.