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.