• Napster Co-Founder Sean Parker Is Building New Tech Tool For Politics and Civil Engagement

  It did not get a lot of media attention last month, but Napster co-founder and Facebook's first president Sean Parker took a major step towards building his new company - Brigade Media - that hopes to transform voter engagement at the state and federal level. Parker joins a growing list of technology leaders and billionaires who have formed for-profit and non-profit ventures over the past two years seeking to capitalize on the interest of political and advocacy campaigns in using new technologie

  

• MongoDB Conference Attracts eBay, Teradata and Rackspace In Continuing NoSQL Revolution

  MongoDB held their fifth annual "DB Days" event in San Francisco earlier this month, featuring presentations from some of their bigger name partners and customers such as eBay, Teradata, and Rackspace, but they also provided further evidence that they are poised to take full advantage of the big data revolution.

• Top Execs For Google, Pinterest, SpaceX, Cisco, Sound Off at Atlantic's 'Navigate' Tech Event

  An impressive lineup of technology executives took the stage on Tuesday in San Francisco at "Navigate," the Atlantic Tech Conference 2014, and several company leaders offered glimpses into future new technologies, the evolving "Internet of Things" industry, and their own personal passions.

• Palm Computing and Numenta Founder Jeff Hawkins Says True Machine Intelligence Now Less Than Five Years Away

  The man who produced the first Palm Pilot and went on to found Numenta told a Silicon Valley gathering last week that he believes his company will successfully produce the first computers which can think and reason on their own. "We're going to finish this off in less than five years," declared Jeff Hawkins, co-founder of Numenta.

  

• FAA Is Closer to Issuing New Rules Governing Drones, Says Former White House Official

  Lisa Ellman, a former White House senior advisor on technology and now counsel at the law firm of McKenna Long & Aldridge, told an audience of company executives at a meeting of the Bay Area Council in San Francisco on Monday that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has sent a draft of new rules governing the use of drones (unmanned aerial vehicles) to the White House for review. "The rules are literally being written as we speak," Ellman told the group.