From iPhone 6 to Wearables to Sex Testing, People Had a Whole Lot to Say about Tech World in 2014

Dec 31, 2014 06:29 PM EST

 "Employees are ridiculously expensive right now." (Venture capitalist Bill Gurley at SV Innovation Summit in July)

"Is your calendar talking to your alarm clock which notifies your coffee maker that tells your car to get started?" (Jason Pontin, editor of Technology Review at the MIT Summit in June)

"It used to be 'you've got mail.' Now it's 'you've got chlamydia'." (Ramin Bastani, founder of Healthvana, at HealthBeat, describing his new website that lets users receive and post their sexual health testing results, in October)

"Yes, iPhone 6s do bend." (Kara Swisher, executive editor of Re/code, holding up her damaged phone at the Privacy Summit in November)

"It's hard to have $20 billion in revenue and not make any money.  It's a real feat."  (major investor commenting on Amazon's continued string of losing quarters in mid-summer)

"That's the problem with technology. It always starts out crappy and expensive." (Jason Sosa, CEO of IMSRV at the Privacy Summit, in November)

"The most interesting question about Bitcoin is: are they the first or last cryptocurrency?"  (Reid Hoffman, CEO of LinkedIn, at the Dreamforce conference, in October)

"We're the worst place to do business in the entire country." (Venture capitalist Tim Draper, talking about his home state of California, at Techmanity in October)

"We don't go to jail if we blow up the world's economy, but we do if we violate privacy." (Paul Milkman, senior vice president at TD Ameritrade, speaking about the financial industry at the Cloud Security Conference in September)

"Wearables 1.0 was a huge failure. I don't want smart earrings."  (Francine Hardaway of Stealthmode Partners, at the SV Innovation Summit in July)

"Humans have five senses.  Your virtual assistant will have 5,000."  (Norman Winarsky, vice president of SRI, speaking about the rapid advances in computer learning at the Intelligent Assistants Conference in September)

"When you hear 'cloud computing' or 'big data,' you should think fraud and just run away." (Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, at DEMO Fall in November)

"Yes, but we actually make money." (Steve Clemons, Washington Editor of The Atlantic, during an interview with Aaron Levie, CEO of Box, at AtlanticTech in December. Box has lost over $400 million in the last three years.)

"We never thought someone would want to steal a Mycokerewards point." (Michael Bowers, director of operations for Coca Cola, at the Intelligent Assistants Conference in September describing security measures he had to take after Coke's point rewards redemption site was hacked)

"We played with cats a lot." (David Cohen, when asked how he invented Mousr, a robotic toy for cats, at the HAXLR8R Demo Day in November)

"There's two groups of people today who use pagers: drug dealers and doctors. And I think the drug dealers have moved on."  (Ross Mason, founder of MuleSoft, at the HealthBeat conference in October)

"It's a little awkward to be calling out China when what we're doing seems to be so successful." (New York Times reporter Nicole Perlroth, commenting on the NSA disclosures at the RSA Conference in February)

"The value of the Internet is in the bits it carries, not the carriers of those bits."  (Dan Geer, chief information security officer for In-Q-Tel, at the BlackHat Cybersecurity Conference in August)

"The reality is that we are drowning in data." (Paul Rogers, chief development officer for General Electric, at the TRUSTe Privacy Summit in July)

"It's the fine line between stupid and genius." (Moshe Hogeg, describing his micro-notification app - Yo - in July at Mobile Beat)

"Why the hell does my thermostat need two gigabytes of flash memory?" (Daniel Buentello, security researcher in August at the BlackHat Conference where he demonstrated how to hack into the Nest thermostat in less than 5 minutes)

"We are going to be in a fully monitored world where we are watched all of the time and that's going to make us very uncomfortable." (Robert Scoble, technology evangelist, speaking at Augmented World Expo in May)

"I don't think the mass public really wants a Tweeting dress right now." (Syuzi Pakhchyan, roboticist and designer, at the Augmented World Expo in May)

"If you want to see the best IT in the world, go to a food truck." (Peter Christy of 451 Research, commenting on the growing use of cloud-based mobile sales tools at the CITE Conference in May)

"They continue to milk, bilk, and bill by the bit." (Gordon Smith, President of the National Association of Broadcasters, commenting on broadband providers at the NAB conference in April)

"Make it freakin happen. Pull out the whip and make it happen." (Haim Saban, Chairman of Univision, at NAB in April urging Gordon Smith to lead the broadcast industry in adopting a new standard for cross-platform transmission.)

"Snark seems to be the food that the Internet feeds on."  (Ted Landau, Apple writer at MacWorld, March)

"In the industrial revolution you had to open a factory to change the world. In the Internet revolution, you only need to open a laptop." (Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of Reddit, at the Docusign Momentum Conference in March)

"Every time the President picks up his Blackberry, the French are trying to get on it." (Richard Clarke, former White House national security official, at the RSA Security Conference in February)

"I pay more attention to my phone than I do my husband." (millennial mom quoted during a press conference to announce the results of BabyCenter's Millennial Mom report in February)

Here's a toast to paying more attention to each other in 2015!