Edward Cone

About

Senior Writer and author of the Know It All blogEd Cone has worked as a contributing editor at Wired, a staff writer at Forbes, a senior writer for Ziff Davis with Baseline and Interactive Week, and as a freelancer based in Paris and then North Carolina for a wide variety of magazines and papers including the International Herald Tribune, Texas Monthly, and Playboy. He writes an opinion column in his hometown paper, the Greensboro News & Record, and publishes the semi-popular EdCone.com weblog. He lives in North Carolina with his wife, Lisa, two kids, and a dog.

Boeing: New Jet, New Way of Doing Business

Almost everything about the new Boeing 787 is different—from the cutting-edge materials and electronics used to build the plane, to the technology used during the design and assembly process. It is so different, in fact, that even the Boeing Co. itself—a fixture in the global economy for nearly a century—is undergoing a radical transformation as […]

Dalzells Filling Amazons Shopping Cart with Services

Rick Dalzells wish list at Amazon.com includes the original “Star Trek” series on DVD, a Sims computer game, and a book about trout and salmon that reflects his passion for fishing and outdoor life. Dalzells wish list for Amazon.com, where he serves as senior vice president and chief information officer, is more ambitious. He wants […]

Inside eBays Innovation Machine

Business is steady on an early December afternoon at the iSold It consignment store on Skeet Club Road in High Point, N.C., as customers drop off items to be sold on eBay. Bikes, electronics, power tools—a steady flow of stuff, forming a tributary to the nearly $50 billion flood of goods and services that will […]

Wireds Chris Anderson: Less Is More

In early 2004, Chris Anderson, editor of Wired magazine, was asked to estimate how many of the 10,000 albums accessible via a Web-connected digital jukebox had at least one track played at least once per quarter. Sensing that traditional sales metrics, which would indicate an answer of about 20 percent, didnt apply to this Internet-enabled […]

Robert Scoble: Life After Microsoft

Robert Scoble has earned a place in the history of corporate communications. Starting at Microsoft Corp. in 2003, he became the first high-profile blogger within a large business, ushering in a new era of interaction among companies, customers, critics and the general public. Using his blog, called Scobleizer, and now-familiar tools such as podcasts, RSS […]

Wikipedia Founder Pitches Openness to Content Managers

Jimmy Wales used the simple database software known as a wiki to launch a kind of open-source knowledge project called Wikipedia in early 2001. Today, thousands of people around the world contribute to the free, collaborative encyclopedia, which has become a staple of Web-based research. Wales, a former options trader, says wikis—which are written in […]

Leading With IT: A NASCAR Case Study

There is a small metal part in a race car engine—a pickup frame, to be precise—that supports a coil of wires in the distributor. If this part breaks and the wires come loose, the ignition fails, the engine stops and the race is lost. The race-car driver does not win the prize money or get […]

Merck Seeks a Cure

When Chris Scalet arrived at Merck in March 2003, he knew he had a lot to learn. His immediate predecessors at the pharmaceutical giant had backgrounds in scientific computing and intimate knowledge of the information technology needs of the drug makers all-important research and development arm—the organization that turned out blockbuster drugs such as anti-cholesterol […]

Hoopmasters: Courting Success

College basketballs championship tournament is known as March Madness, but things really get crazy in the business of amateur hoops in July. Midsummer is peak season for the high-profile tournaments and camps where high-school stars show their stuff to college coaches. In one four-day stretch, Las Vegas alone will host three major events involving a […]

Primary Concerns

The early returns are in and no voter fraud has been discovered in the wake of Marylands first statewide use of touch-screen electronic voting machines, which took place during the Democratic primary on March 2. Thats a good thing…right? Maybe not, says the expert who outlined several specific steps Maryland needed to improve its security […]