Paul Allen | featured news

Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen helped revolutionize the world with personal computers. Now he's betting a half-billion dollars that he can do something even more radical: draw a circuit diagram of human consciousness.

Wikidata, the first new project to emerge from the Wikimedia Foundation since 2006, is now beginning development. The organization, known best for its user-edited encyclopedia of knowledge Wikipedia, recently announced the new project at February's Semantic Tech & Business Conference in Berlin, describing Wikidata as new effort to provide a database of knowledge that can be read and edited by humans and machines alike.

An AWOL soldier from Pittsburgh is charged with bank fraud for allegedly stealing the identity of one of the world's richest men: Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen.

Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and aerospace pioneer Burt Rutan are building the world's biggest plane to help launch cargo and astronauts into space, in the latest of several ventures fueled by technology tycoons clamoring to write America's next chapter in spaceflight. Their plans, unveiled Tuesday, call for a twin-fuselage aircraft with wings longer than a football field to carry a rocket high into the atmosphere and drop it, avoiding the need for a launch pad and the expense of additional rocket fuel.

If at first you don't succeed...sue, sue again? That appears to be Microsoft Co-Founder Paul Allen's strategy. Allen has refiled a lawsuit against an array of Internet giants, including Facebook, Google, Apple, Netflix, and Yahoo, alleging patent infringement.The LA Times reports:

A firm run by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen is suing Apple, Google and 9 other companies alleging they are violating patents developed at a Silicon Valley lab Mr. Allen financed more than a decade ago.