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By Katie BierachThe Tragical History of Divine Comedy: Reasoning Faith while Maintaining Faith in Reason
Introduction by the Author

Sandeep Jauhar in The New York Times:

Who doesn't remember the first time he or she interacted with a speech recognition engine? Sure, it felt a bit odd to be speaking to a computer, but it also felt so progressive and futuristic. As an end user of the technology, it was exciting.

As a contact center manager or CTO, it was a tad depressing. It was a technology so far out of the reach of your organization for a number of reasons: cost, implementation time, a lack of IT personnel to plan and administer it and the imagined headaches of troubleshooting it.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers [ICANN] has voted to allow--in addition to more traditional top-level domains [TLDs], such as .com and .org--theoretically any TLD at all, as long as it is no longer than 64 characters long. The application process for such custom TLDs looks set to be arduous and the criteria reasonably rigorous, but observers say the new system will create confusion.

Amazon Web Services, or more simply AWS, provides a wide range of web services for building technical infrastructure. It's not a replacement for having an ISP (or a data center, if your firm is that large), but it's a great way to avoid spending too much money on infrastructure before you even have a proven business model. It's also a brilliant way to scale up resources on demand, even if – and sometimes, especially when – you already have a successful business model.