No one designing a piece of technology can possibly think up all the things that 7 billion people will do with a new technological toy.

FORBES: Apple and Amazon: Tablets, Cellphones, Capitalism and Markets

Over a billion people getting rich simply by making things that we want to buy.

FORBES: Isn't It Wonderful That China Will Be A Bigger Economy Than The US By 2016?

People have called her Braveheart, Fearless and India's Daughter, among other things, and sent up a billion prayers for a speedy recovery.

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Mr. PILLER: It's probably on the order of two or three billion dollars a year in terms of royalties, salaries, things like that.

NPR: Drilling for Gas in Dallas-Fort Worth

But its main purpose is serious: to reveal the large-scale structure of the universe and thus uncover what happened in the first billion-trillion-trillionth of a second after the Big Bang to cause things to turn out the way they did.

ECONOMIST: The Sloan star survey

Along with Motorola, Connect Things and bar code giant Symbol Technologies, AirClic has raised half a billion dollars to form a company that will put scanning technology into wireless devices.

FORBES: Scanned Goods

The forum will drive a blueprint for how technologies associated with the Internet of Things should and could work together to support the 50-billion intelligent devices due to be connected to the Internet by 2020.

ENGADGET: ARM forms UK group to foster an Internet of Things, put 50 billion devices online by 2020