If you flip through the design books at Stanford's D-School, you'll find a lot of bite-sized sayings to inspire innovation: "A Child's Eye," "Find Rule Breakers," "People are Human." The general trend is to encourage empathy. Understand others and you'll understand their needs. Understand their needs and a solution will...

Back in August when the rumor mill was cranking out whisperings of a new e-reader from Amazon I was pretty excited. Before that point, my only interactions with the Kindle had been through my grandfather. He had raved to me about its ability to change font size so it could...

Back in 2009 there was a large commotion in the tech community when Yelp turned down a $500M acquisition offer from Google. Trying to make deeper inroads into local advertising, Google saw Yelp's 27 million reviews and 8 million users as a valuable asset to its hometown crusade....

In an age defined by rapid prototyping, overnight design, and the two-day turnaround, it's hard to imagine that something as ubiquitous as personal computing could still be constrained by hardware. But if the evolution of the tablet market has proved anything, it is that physical hardware -- with the exception...

Getting into college is like mounting a siege. One begins preparing for the long application process years beforehand, with counselor planning, a rigorous academic course load, and a mix of extracurricular activities - humane society, competitive bowling, student counsel - that students employ to feign a balanced lifestyle.

They work...

Weary headed, congested, and recovering from the flu, I walked into a foundation meeting with an audience of nine board members. Clad in business suits and briefcases, they were to be my interviewers for the final round of a prestigious college scholarship. They maintained an air of pleasant cordiality but...