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

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 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.'

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.

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

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.

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.'

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

I don't think you can hate anything that you know intimately. There is no fine line separating love from hate because there's a deep chasm separating love from hate.