Fortune Tech: Technology blogs, news and analysis from Fortune Magazine

Sen. Rand Paul: 'The Senate should apologize to Apple'

2013-05-21T16:19:33Z

The junior senator from Kentucky has been tweeting up a storm in Apple's defense.

FORTUNE -- In subcommittee hearings Tuesday, Senators Carl Levin and John McCain were careful to balance praise for Apple's (AAPL) achievements with outrage over its "convoluted and pernicious" (McCain's words) tax avoidance strategies.

Sen. Rand Paul showed no such balance. He lit into his own committee's leadership for "dragging" one of America's great success stories into what he MORE

Where to watch the Senate's Apple hearings

2013-05-21T16:24:10Z

C-Span.org began coverage at 9:30 a.m. Tim Cook is scheduled to appear in Part 2.

FORTUNE -- If the subcommittee report is any indication, Tim Cook and his colleagues will face tough questions Tuesday from Sens. Carl Levin (Dem.) and John McCain's (Rep.) Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.

The report charges that Apple (AAPL) avoided paying roughly $10 billion in U.S. taxes a year by funneling foreign income through a series of Irish MORE

Why every advertiser should know about Drawbridge

2013-05-21T12:57:36Z

This AdMob vet wants to bridge the divide between desktop and mobile advertising. If she succeeds, even Google could find itself at a disadvantage.

FORTUNE -- Kamakshi Sivaramakrishnan never planned to go into advertising, much less run a startup. But when the 37-year-old Stanford graduate, with a Ph.D. in Information Theory, met AdMob founder Omar Hamoui, she turned her back on Wall Street and joined AdMob as a research scientist in MORE

Flickr: The ghost that haunts Yahoo

2013-05-21T14:11:58Z

Recent upgrades to the once-innovative service notwithstanding, the photo-sharing site is a lesson in what not to do.

By Verne Kopytoff

FORTUNE -- Flickr, the online photo sharing service, seemed to be heading for the big-time when Yahoo acquired it eight years ago. The site already had a lot going for it: legions of devoted users, a team of respected founders, and a headstart on the social media phenomenon. But Yahoo MORE

Apple vs. Subcommittee: Tim Cook has some explaining to do

2013-05-21T14:05:10Z

It's a good thing for Apple that most people won't read the Senate subcommittee's report.

FORTUNE -- The 40-page case study on Apple's (AAPL) overseas tax strategies submitted by the Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations Monday is not an easy read.

The 10-page overview of tax principles and law in the middle -- a history of how a program to block the use of offshore tax havens begun by President Kennedy was MORE

Watson will be taking your calls now

2013-05-21T14:44:06Z

IBM's supercomputer is getting a job in customer service.

FORTUNE -- It's still a sluggish job market out there, but apparently not for supercomputers. IBM's question-answering machine Watson, best known for beating lowly humans on Jeopardy!, just got a new job. According to the tech giant, Watson will now be employed in customer service centers, used as a tool for both representatives and consumers to get fast, data-driven responses.

It's been two MORE

How Apple sidestepped U.S. taxes: The Senate's version

2013-05-21T12:56:26Z

The results of its probe of Apple's offshore taxes are now available online.

FORTUNE: By Monday afternoon, the day before Tim Cook's scheduled appearance before the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigation, both sides of the story were available online as PDFs: Apple's (AAPL) 17 pages of airbrushed testimony and the subcommitee staff's blistering 40-page retort.

As reader Jim Neal puts it: "Anybody who thinks this is going to be a cordial exchange of ideas MORE

Meet AOI, Apple's mysterious Irish subsidiary - updated

2013-05-21T16:40:06Z

In a statement to the Senate, Apple explains -- sort of -- what it's doing in Cork.

FORTUNE -- There are three parts to the 17-page testimony Apple (AAPL) submitted Monday afternoon in advance of Tim Cook's appearance before the Senate Permanent Subcommitee on Investigations, scheduled for Tuesday:

The easy part: A recitation of how much Apple pays in Federal taxes ($6 billion in fiscal 2012), the number of jobs it has created MORE

Why Mayer chose Tumblr

2013-05-20T20:14:41Z

The reaction to Yahoo's acquisition of Tumblr is way out of proportion to its importance. It could be a relatively small mistake or a marginal gain.

FORTUNE -- It is only recently that Tumblr started asking itself, "So, how should we make money from this thing?" As of today, that's a question that Yahoo and its still-new CEO, Marissa Mayer, will have to address. And yet it's not necessarily the most MORE

Man who doesn't work for Foxconn kills self. Apple's fault?

2013-05-20T18:02:35Z

A suicide story that broke on Saturday had fallen apart by Monday.

FORTUNE -- The Agence France Press headline that moved over the business wires Saturday morning seemed like deja vu all over again:

Three new factory suicides at Apple supplier Foxconn

Citing only a statement issued by China Labor Watch in New York, the news agency reported that the deaths occurred at a Foxconn factory in the central city of Zhengzhou and MORE