Richard Branson has deep-sea ambitions, launches Virgin Oceanic

The intrepid Branson launches Virgin Oceanic, a quest to explore the deepest parts of the aquatic world.

FORTUNE -- Yesterday at the Brainstorm GREEN conference in Laguna Niguel, Calif., Richard Branson sat down with Fortune Managing Editor Andy Serwer for a conversation where he unveiled his latest venture, Virgin Oceanic, through which he will explore the deepest underwater areas of the world.

"Virgin Oceanic will expand the reach of human exploration on our planet. MORE

Goodnight Zune

After five years of false starts, word is leaking out that Microsoft is giving up on its much-maligned portable music player.

By Mark Horowitz, contributor

Dear Zune:

I gave you the best years of my life, and this is how you repay me, by breaking up? And I had to read about it online. You didn't even have the decency to Skype.

But who am I kidding, Zune, I'll always forgive you, because I MORE

Why startups don't go public anymore

Facebook, Twitter, Groupon -- hot Internet startups are using private financing to grow like never before. Why do they trust the social graph to be the backbone of their business model but not of their statement of ownership?

By Kevin Kelleher, contributor

The web is nothing if not a democratizing force. It has turned us into active investors with low-cost commissions from online accounts and free access to vast amounts of financial MORE

Flipboard: Publishing Friend or Foe?

Last year's top iPad app could be a force in online content for years to come

By John Patrick Pullen, contributor

For Mike McCue, 2010 was a very good year. In July, the CEO launched San Francisco-based Flipboard, a much-heralded social media magazine application for the iPad that captured the attention of users, publishers, and bloggers worldwide. Days later, his fledgling firm announced it had received $10.5 million in investments and had MORE

Can TripIt and Concur travel well together?

TripIt was an innovative startup that helps users organize travel. Concur is an entrenched leader in the corporate travel world. Their fates tied together will be a playbook--or a warning--for the current generation of startups.

By Chadwick Matlin, contributor

For the past four years, a small travel startup called TripIt has been quietly rethinking the way we travel. Overwhelmed with separate confirmation codes for your flight, hotel, and rental car? Forward the MORE

How the IT department can go from zeroes to heroes

With the rise of cloud and social, it's time for the IT department to change the way they work -- and become company heroes.

By Aaron Levie, contributor

On a daily basis, a select group of individuals are making technology decisions on behalf of their entire organization. They're implementing services to solve real business problems, sometimes under the guidance of their IT department, but most often on their own. For the MORE

The year of surfing dangerously

Facebook, Google Buzz, Gawker, Wikileaks, Chinese government hackers -- last year, the wheels fell off Internet privacy. So, aberration, or new normal?

By Kevin Kelleher, contributor

Was it only a year ago that Mark Zuckerberg was accused of declaring the age of privacy over?

Of course, he never said any such thing -- he was trying to say that blogging had gotten people to feel more comfortable about sharing information online – but the meme took flight anyway.

Rogue memes MORE

Would you sell your Kindle to sell a used book?

A recent Supreme Court decision, confusing Copyright Office rules and Amazon's Kindle policies all indicate that the only way consumers will ever get to resell "used" ebooks may be to sell their hard drives, too.

By Seth Greenstein, contributor

The holiday season is upon us, and with it thoughts of peace on earth, goodwill... and the latest electronic media.  Visions of Kindles and Kinects dance in children's heads (and no doubt yours MORE

Google's Groupon groping reveals the shifting power in the web world

First Yelp, now Groupon: Why hot startups -- especially those holding the key to "local" -- keep slipping through the search giant's fingers.

While the official confirmations have yet to land (and my colleague Dan Primack is following up on Groupon CEO Andrew Mason's hopefully tongue-in-cheek offer to discuss the finer points of his affection for miniature dollhouses), it's looking like talks between Google and Groupon have fallen apart. The situation MORE

The right way to lay people off

By Ben Horowitz, contributor

Cloud computing company Opsware was nobody's darling. Then founders Andreessen and Horowitz put the company through three rounds of layoffs. The unlikely result was a big buyout -- here's how it happened.

"I'm tryin' to right my wrongs / But it's funny them same wrongs helped me write this song" -Kanye West

Shortly after we sold Opsware to Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), I had a conversation with the legendary venture MORE