Editor’s note: This post was written by guest contributor Aaron Levie, CEO and co-founder of Box.net. His last post on TechCrunch was Go Forth and Conquer. The narrative of the little guy going up against the hulking giant is baked into the history of Silicon Valley, starting with the traitorous eight leaving Shockley Semiconductor to subsequently found Intel, AMD, Kleiner Perkins, and many other

The creator of Lisp and arguably the father of modern artificial intelligence, John McCarthy, died last night. He studied mathematics with the famous John Nash at Princeton and, notably, held the first “computer-chess” match between scientists in the US and the USSR. He transmitted the moves by telegraph. McCarthy believed AI should be interactive, allowing for a give and take similar to AI simula

Looking over the web and especially the blogosphere over the past couple of days, it seems there is only one thing everyone wants to talk about: Siri. With the iPhone 4S now in millions of peoples’ hands, as expected, it’s clearly the stand-out feature of the device. But wait. Voice technology has been around for a long time. Or, as one TechCrunch commenter succinctly put it on Erick’s video demo