Bill Gates made it deathly plain inan interviewthis weekend that he has no intention to return to Microsoft in a full-time capacity. Speculation had arisen that Gates, one of the famed founders of Microsoft, might return to the company to reignite its weak stock and reverse its perceived decline as a market leader. Anyone holding out for such a circumstance should be warned: it is not going to happen. Gates hasemphatically statedthat he will not return:...

A year ago, TNW visited an up and coming event calledSocialDevCamp Chicago, and we wereblown away. It was an intimate event, with a much broader cross-section of technology oriented people than we were used to seeing at such conferences. Needless to say, this year TNW is a media sponsor. We just couldn’t say no. The event, now just 15 days away (August 26th-28th), promises to do its previous edition one better....

With both sides, Google and the Chinese government, still denying responsibility for the slowdown of Gmail in China,Greatfirewall.biz, a website that keeps track of websites and searches that are blocked in mainland China, comes out with a new report: that Gmail is now 45 times slower than QQ and 8 times slower than Yahoo when accessed in China. Regardless of who the culprit is, tests done by the monitoring site verifies as clear as day the unusually slow loading times of Gmail in the country....

I’m going to take a guess and say that by nowyou’ve heardthatKevin Rose, the face ofDigg,has decided to step down from his role in the company. With Rose’s resignation, the Internet is ablaze with talk about how Digg is dead, because this is what the Internet does. You’ll pardon my sarcasm for a moment. Obviously, every time that something happens or something is made, something else must die a terrible death....

There’s no denying it: the trusty embargo remains a positive and productive tool for professionals on both sides of the press-PR divide. If anything, embargoes have only become more important in recent years, and they’re certainly not going anywhere. Why? It’s simple. Virtually every industry that depends on new releases and new information to push its news cycle forward makes use of the embargo. This includes arts and entertainment, publishing, science and medicine, gaming, and, of course, tech....