Robots won’t take your job, but automation might

“Many of us will live to see the day where we have physical, non-human colleagues,” says Matt Beane, a researcher at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, and he doesn’t mean the office dog. Beane’s research addresses what he calls “The Avatar Economy”, where remote workers operate robots.

Twitter’s down … and it has cost the economy $1 billion already?

Update: Twitter returned to fully-operational status at about 9:30am Pacific time, after about 45 minutes offline.

Twitter is down right now — hard down. The site is unresponsive, and DownForEveryoneOrJustMe says it’s down for you as well as Yours Truly. …

In Google We Trust: Google helped create $80B for American businesses in 2011

Google may be a worth upwards of $200 billion by itself, but the company is also helping to generate some serious revenue for everyone else.

So says the company’s latest Economic Impact Report, which estimates that Google’s search and advertising …

Is there a tech bubble? Don’t count on VCs for a straight answer

“I don’t think we are in a bubble,” said mega-VC Marc Andreessen onstage today during a Wired conference on business.

Well, no duh — of course a venture capitalist whose livelihood depends on perpetuating tech froth is going to say …

Internet economy set to hit $4.2T in 2016, half of world’s population will be online

The Internet economy among G-20 nations is expected to nearly double by 2016, reaching $4.2 trillion (up from $2.3 trillion in 2010), according to a projection released today by the Boston Consulting Group.

The big drive in the web economy …

Protestors block bank entrance, snarl traffic in San Francisco

San Franciscans took to the streets today to express their frustration with banks and a host of other economic institutions.

About 200 protestors blocked all three entrances to the Wells Fargo headquarters downtown, chanting, singing songs and waving signs. While …

Tech executives offer their views on the U.S. economy (It’s not good)

Sorry to rain on your parade, but this will only take a minute. A new report surveying leaders of technology companies indicates the U.S. economic recovery is two years away, instead of previous forecasts that it will happen in 2012.…