Stories by: Lamont Wood

To accomplish anything in the suburbs, you need to get in your car and drive to another address. Downtown, in a skyscraper, you just use an elevator.

Heartland Payment Systems figured it was in pretty good shape when it took out a $30 million cyber insurance policy. Unfortunately, the credit card transaction processor was the victim of a massive data breach in early 2009 that resulted in losses estimated at $145 million. The insurance company did pay Heartland the $30 million, but the company was on the hook for the remaining $115 million.

A decade ago, it was a clever novelty: a webcam pointed at an office water cooler. The first one is still online, at www.coolercam.com, broadcasting a fresh picture every 10 seconds.

This year marks an almost forgotten 40th anniversary: the conception of the device that ultimately became the PC. And no, it did not happen in California.

Heading a start-up after leaving his position as head of Microsoft Game Studios, Ed Fries thought that he might be able to sell 10,000 units of his product -- personalized online game figurines -- the first year.

LAN technology recently passed a milestone -- it's been around for 30 years, some of them tumultuous. But while the LAN seems ubiquitous now, there are those who think its future may be more troubled than its past.

The concrete and plaster in his Rathdrum, Idaho, house blocks Wi-Fi signals. But computer consultant Marc Schoenberg found a way to network the six devices in his house without stringing Ethernet cables: He uses powerline adapters.

No less a personage than billionaire Microsoft co-founder, Bill Gates, has publicly stated (in the January 2007 issue of Scientific American) that robots are the next big thing, and that the current state of the robot industry resembles the PC industry 30 years ago.