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Lots of CEOs make the news for being gruff, domineering, or brilliant, but oftentimes their employees have different impressions. Every year, careers site Glassdoor surveys hundreds of thousands of employees across all industries and then publishes its rankings of the 50 highest rated CEOs (see list below).

And, for 2013, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg took the top honor.

Despite shareholder lawsuits over its botched IPO and mixed reaction to Timeline and Graph Search, the social network's employees gave Zuckerberg a 99 percent approval rating over the past 12 months, which ended February 24. This is up 14 percentage points … Read more

Google appears eager to let other organizations use certain top-level domains that it wants to acquire and manage.

Last June, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Named and Numbers (ICANN) revealed which companies and organizations had applied for their own generic top-level domains (gTLDs). The effort is part of a move to foster competition on the Internet by allowing companies to use a greater variety of TLDs beyond just .com.

Google applied for 101 of the 1,900 available gTLDs, looking to score such obvious ones as .google, .chrome, .gmail, .goog, and .youtube. But along with those gTLDs were ones that … Read more

Over the past few years, Kickstarter has become a force to be reckoned with. Some of the coolest and weirdest gadgets I saw at this year's CES didn't come from big corporations or even small ones -- they came from independent inventors who found funding and encouragement through Kickstarter.

Which isn't to say that every Kickstarter project is a hit. The site is also a graveyard of hackneyed ideas, indie records, and films that no one wants to see. But when a Kickstarter campaign hits the right nerve, it's an exhilarating flip of the supply-and-demand model … Read more

Great chefs are crazy.

There are many kinds of crazy. Some of these culinarians rant, rave, and spit fire and brimstone. Some pore over their ingredients like scientists: quiet, brooding, and deeply serious.

All believe they can create their own particular gastronomic dreams, ones nobody else can copy. Especially not a computer.

IBM thinks different.

Having seen its Watson computer crush mere humans at the trivial game of "Jeopardy," the company is now setting the machine's sights on bigger business.

According to The New York Times, the world of haute cuisine is one in which IBM would like to make a robotic incursion.… Read more

I have to say that I'm a little disappointed in the pace of smartphone innovation recently. I have a hard time believing that the recent push toward bigger HD screens and quad-core processors really adds up to a dramatically better experience for most people. Maybe it's just a momentary lull in the industry, or maybe the smartphone is now a fully matured technology that's starting to plateau.

Either way, we're at a moment now where the distinction between last year's phones and this year's is pretty tough to notice. If you're shopping for … Read more

BARCELONA, Spain--Carriers love to bash companies like Skype and WhatsApp that provide services on top of their mobile networks at the Mobile World Congress trade show. But one thing was different this year: Viber Media founder and Chief Executive Talmon Marco entered the lion's den to defend the idea.

Viber's free messaging service, which competes directly with carriers' own high-profit services for text- and multimedia-messaging services, is a prime example of the despised over-the-top (OTT) approach. Marco showed no remorse for sapping telco revenues and argued that users are just moving to where the innovative, useful services are … Read more

Gamers have a lot to be excited about this year. The Sony PlayStation 4 just became official, and the announcement for the next-generation Microsoft Xbox can't be far behind.

But consoles alone aren't that interesting. What 2013 really needs are some great games.

A few weeks back, CNET's Senior Associate Games Editor Jeff Bakalar presented 25 of the most anticipated games of the year. To up the ante, I asked him to pick his favorite five from the list and rank them by degrees of anticipation.

So here you go. In this week's Top 5 I'… Read more

Being the person in charge of the Networking category, I've received many e-mails asking what my current personal router is, and how often I change it.

Even though I've worked with many routers -- in fact, I have reviewed most of the existing Wi-Fi routers on the U.S. market -- I don't change my home router very often. This is mostly because programing a router can be a tedious task, and I use a lot of different applications and services with many clients, all of which require different settings in the router's firmware.

That said, since the Wireless-N (802.11n) standard was introduced in 2007, I've used just about five Wi-Fi routers. Most of them them have served me very well over the years and I still have them all, except for one that was broken during a move.

The following is the list of those routers and how they've worked out for me.… Read more