Julianne Pepitone

3 min read Julianne Pepitone is a contributing editor covering consumer tech, cybersecurity, and business. Eric Millette Steve Blank came of age as an entrepreneur in Silicon Valley in the 1970s, when it was truly about the silicon, and by the 1990s he had founded or worked at four high-tech startups. He eventually drew on this experience to create a model of developing customers inspired by the scientific method; it calls for working up various

6 min read Julianne Pepitone is a Contributing Editor covering consumer tech, cybersecurity, and business. IBM researchers [from left] Gerald Burns, Marshall I. Nathan, Gordon Lasher, Frederick H. Dill Jr., and William P. Dumke developed the gallium arsenide laser in October 1962. The semiconductor laser, invented more than 60 years ago, is the foundation of many of today’s technologies including barcode scanners, fiber-optic communications, medical imaging, and remote controls. The tiny, versatile device is now

5 min read Trina Solar’s assistant vice president of technology Yifeng Chen received the IEEE Stuart R. Wenham Young Professional Award for his technical contributions to photovoltaic energy conversion. Trina Solar When Yifeng Chen was a teenager in Shantou, China, in the early 2000s, he saw a TV program that amazed him. The show highlighted rooftop solar panels in Germany, explaining that the panels generated electricity to power the buildings and even earned the owners

5 min read Stuart Parkin, an IEEE Fellow, received the Draper Prize for Engineering from the U.S. National Academy of Engineering for developing spintronic technologies. Stuart Parkin Ours is a data-centric world. Many modern inventions and occupations rely on data. Artificial intelligence feasts on it. Machine learning identifies patterns within it. Internet of Things devices generate and transmit it. Genomics, bioinformatics, climate science, telecommunications, finance, health care and so many more fields depend on it.