In the 2010 holiday quarter, Apple reported $26.7 billion in revenue, up 70 percent from a year before. That means it's nearly as big as IBM, which did $29 billion in the same quarter.

The iPod wasn't the first MP3 player. Nor were the iPhone and iPad the first in their categories. The real reason for the success of these devices - the true unsung hero at Apple - is the iTunes software and iTunes Store. Because Apple provided them, it wasn't just selling hardware.

With the iPod, iTunes, iPhone, iPad, and iMac, Apple is the most powerful tech company in the world. It's also the No. 1 music retailer in the U.S. and among the top sellers of online movies, too.

The chance to interact with big shots is drawing scads of aspiring entrepreneurs to Quora, along with venture capitalists and other Valley players.

Mesh networking is an old idea. Oddly enough, the low-cost XO Laptop built by the 'One Laptop Per Child' organization - the so-called $100 laptop - was designed with built-in mesh networking. The idea with the XO machine was that many kids using those laptops would be out in rural areas without reliable Internet access.

Some people are using landline connections and dial-up modems to call ISPs in other countries and get onto the Internet. Still others are using satellite connections.

In the world according to Apple, content is just a bunch of digital bits, easily copied, nothing special.

Content is supposed to be king. But in the world of electronic devices, Apple seems to be placing the crown on its own head, apparently believing that its iPad and iPhone are more important to customers than the books, movies, and music they store on them.

With digital attacks becoming rampant, the computer nerds who work for the good guys to thwart such incursions have become the new Navy SEALs - elite commandos who can carry out sophisticated operations on the battlefield of cyberspace.

What if people could use the Internet to create a new kind of money, one that didn't involve governments and central banks and could be used anonymously, like cash?

Fingerprint readers require special hardware, and a lot of people find them creepy and don't want to use them. Smart cards and tokens can be lost or stolen.

These days a typical netizen has dozens of online accounts. If you really want to be safe, you need to have a different password for each one, and each password needs to be incredibly complicated, with a mix of capital letters, symbols, and numbers. Who can keep all that stuff in their head?

Is any job safe? I was hoping to say 'journalist,' but researchers are already developing algorithms that can gather facts and write a news story. Which means that a few years from now, a robot could be writing this column. And who will read it? Well, there might be a lot of us hanging around with lots of free time on our hands.

Some law firms now use artificial intelligence software to scan and read mountains of legal documents, work that previously was performed by highly paid human lawyers.

If your plumber or pool installer or local appliance store uses HubSpot software, HubSpot may be holding information about you without you even knowing it. We figure we're safe when we use online services. We figure we can trust the people who run them not to snoop on us. I used to believe that. I don't anymore.

A startup job is an investment, after all: Venture capitalists may wager money, but you're staking something more precious - your time. And unlike VCs, you can't spread your risk by betting on a bunch of companies at once. Start with TAM. That's 'total addressable market,' and if it's not big enough, there's no point in talking.

Most startups flame out or just muddle along. Your chances of spotting a unicorn, pre-horn, are incalculably small. But if, knowing that, you still want to toss aside your cushy job, at least listen to corporate vets who have made the transition.

Nvidia's self-driving-car business grew out of a long-standing relationship with auto companies. Car guys used Nvidia chips for computer-aided design, then used Nvidia supercomputer chips to do crash simulations. When the car guys started thinking about autonomous vehicles, Nvidia leaped at the chance to help them solve the problem.

Conventional companies try to find new uses for capabilities they already have. Transformers look at what the market needs and then go build it, hiring new people and/or taking people off other jobs.

Why can't modern tech companies both grow and turn a profit at the same time?

Since 2011, Groupon has lost $730 million, and Zynga has lost just over $1 billion. Twitter has been in business for 10 years and went public in 2013. Since then, the company has lost $2 billion.

There was a time when a company could not sell its shares to the public unless its revenues were growing and it was turning a profit. Companies that lost money were deemed too risky for public investors.

Confining a resume to a single page is good advice for anyone.

There's often a good, honest case to be made that a century-old company has not only a knack for growing and managing a P&L, but also, perhaps, a heart and soul.