Called CRAB, it can trawl through millions of scientific articles for clues to the causes of tumours, even stumbling on a potential reason why some chemicals induce pancreatic cancer only in men.

CRAB is the latest outcome of a rapidly-emerging form of artificial intelligence (AI) called natural language processing, used also in the Siri personal assistant software in iPhone 4S.

It allows computers to read texts and derive meaning from them, despite their complexity and ambiguities as humans do, the Telegraph reports.

The system will first be used to assess the risk that new chemicals could cause cancer. ‘The first stage of any risk assessment is a literature review. It’s a major bottleneck,’ said Cambridge University’s Anna Korhonen, who led the development of CRAB.

‘There could be tens of thousands of articles for a single chemical. Performed manually, it’s expensive and, because of the rising number of publications, becoming too challenging to manage,’ she said.

‘Although still under development, the system can be used to make connections that would be difficult to find, even if it had been possible to read all the documents,’ said Korhonen.

Is that a USB key in your pocket or a dual-core computer?

Norwegian company FXI Technologies showed off an amazing USB stick-sized portable computer prototype on Friday, Nov. 18. Code-named Cotton Candy because its 21 gram weight is the same as a bag of the confection, the tiny PC enables what its inventor calls “any-screen computing”: the ability to turn any TV, laptop, phone, tablet, or set-top box into a dumb terminal for its Android-powered operating system.

Packed in its tiny  body is a dual-core 1.2-GHz Samsung Exynos ARM CPU (the same processor as in the Galaxy S II), 802.11n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, HDMI-out and even a microSD card slot for memory.

The Cotton Candy has a USB 2.0 connector on one end and an HDMI jack on the other. When connected to an HDTV, it uses the HDMI-out port for video, the USB for power, and Bluetooth to connect to a keyboard, mouse, or tablet for controlling the operating system.

The device can output up to 1080p so even a full HD screen can display the Candy’s preloaded Android 2.3 operating system at its native resolution. The dual core CPU is powerful enough to play local 1080p video or stream HD clips from the Web.

When you plug the Cotton Candy into a Mac or PC, the Windows or OS X operating system recognizes it as a USB drive. You can then launch the software and run the Cotton Candy’s Android environment in a secure window while you use your desktop OS outside the window. You can even transfer files between your notebook’s native OS and the Cotton Candy’s Android environment by dragging them off or on the USB stick’s memory.

We watched as FXI CEO Borgar Ljosland popped the Cotton Candy into his MacBook Pro and, within seconds, had the device’s Android OS running in a full screen window and, though we didn’t get to play with the device ourselves, we were impressed with how quickly it started up. Borgar told us that Android developers can use this environment to test out their apps while they work on code in another window.

HDTVs, monitors, and computers are just the tip of the iceberg for the Cotton Candy. Borgar told us the device will be able to connect to tablets, smartphones, and even set top boxes via USB or Bluetooth. He says that he expects the device to be able to turn even an iPhone or an iPad into a terminal for its environment. Imagine an iPhone running Android!

Because the Cotton Candy is a full-fledged computer, it should be able to plug into a USB hub and connect directly to a monitor, keyboard, and mouse to launch its OS. Offices or schools could set up docking terminals to support users who carry it in their pockets.

Cotton Candy’s purpose is to provide a computing experience that users can carry with them and replicate anywhere they go. Imagine walking into an Internet cafe or a business center, popping your Cotton Candy into a USB port, and having your own operating system and applications take over the device.

Though the current prototype runs Android 2.3, Borgar told us that the ARM-based hardware can run Ubuntu Linux currently and future versions should be able to run the ARM version of Windows 8. Future versions of the device will have a USB 3 connector and faster processors.

From developers to students to mobile workers, there are a number of groups that could find innovative ways to use a computer the size of a USB stick. However, you won’t see a consumer product shipping anytime soon from FXI. The company plans to sell the Cotton Candy to developers and let OEMs license the technology and turn it into something that can appeal to a wide audience.

Borgar does not expect these future “any screen” products to replace your primary PC or smartphone, but says they could become popular secondary devices. With Ubuntu installed, the Cotton Candy can even be turned into a mobile file or web server!

FXI hasn’t set pricing yet for the Cotton Candy, but expects it to cost considerably less than $200 per unit. That’s not bad for a full-fledged computing device the size of a cigarette lighter.

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Apple Inc. has not held any public services for Jobs, the company’s visionary co-founder who died at age 56 on Oct. 5 after a long battle with pancreatic cancer.

• PHOTOS: Steve Jobs through the years

• PHOTOS: Reactions to Jobs’ death

In a way, the video may serve that purpose. It runs 81 minutes and gives a rare glimpse of a company in mourning, showing several executives and board members reminiscing about their time with Jobs and speaking about the indelible mark he left on the technology world.

Jobs was a tech visionary who started Apple in his parents’ Silicon Valley garage with friend Steve Wozniak in 1976. Both men left the company in 1985, Jobs after a clash with then-CEO John Sculley.

Jobs returned as interim CEO in 1997 after Apple, then in financial dire straits, purchased a computer company he created called Next. He led the company through a remarkable upswing that included the launch of such popular products as the iPhone, iPad and iPod.

He battled pancreatic cancer in 2004 and underwent a liver transplant in 2009 after taking a leave of absence for unspecified health problems. He took another leave of absence in January — his third since his health problems began — and resigned in August, handing the CEO job over to his hand-picked successor, Cook. His death came a day after Apple Inc. announced its latest iPhone, the 4S.

In the service honoring his life, CEO Tim Cook kicks things off, addressing an overflowing crowd of hundreds of Apple employees both on the ground and peering off balconies of surrounding buildings. Also in the audience was Jobs’ wife, Laurene Powell Jobs, wearing a black shirt and dark sunglasses.

Apple closed all of its retail stores for the service so its many employees at those locations could view the memorial live via a webcast as well.

Banners flanking buildings surrounding the amphitheater show images of Jobs, including one with a famous shot of the then young tech executive cradling the first Macintosh computer.

In his remarks, Cook said the past two weeks had been the saddest of his life.

“But I know Steve. Steve would have wanted this cloud to lift for Apple and our focus to return to the work that he loved so much,” he said.

Cook also divulged some of the last advice Jobs gave him, which he said was “to never ask what he would do, just do what’s right.”

Jobs saw how The Walt Disney Co. became “paralyzed” after founder Walt Disney’s death, with so many people spending time thinking about what Disney would want. “And he did not want this to occur at Apple,” Cook said.

Following Cook was former Apple executive and current board member Bill Campbell.

“He loved Apple so much, probably only a shade less than he loved his family,” he said.

Former Vice President and current Apple board member Al Gore took the stage as well. And Apple’s senior vice president of design, Jonathan Ive, who worked closely with Jobs on products such as the iPod, iPhone and iPad, spoke too.

Ive, who called Jobs his closest and most loyal friend, talked about Jobs’ habit of bouncing ideas off him — some of which were “really dopey,” but others which “took the air from the room and left us both completely silent.”

Ive remembered Jobs as an intense listener who revered the creative process.

“You see, I think he better than anyone understood that while ideas ultimately can be so powerful, they begin as fragile, barely formed thoughts so easily missed, so easily compromised, so easily just squished,” he said.

He also related a tale of how Jobs’ desire for excellence went far beyond designing Apple’s products, saying that when the two of them would travel Ive would go up to his room leave his bags packed by the door, and sit on his bed.

“I would wait for the inevitable phone call, ‘Hey Jony, this hotel sucks, let’s go,’” he said.

The service also included performances by singer Norah Jones and the British band Coldplay.

The service followed a memorial at Stanford University on Oct. 16 for Jobs’ friends and family. That service at Memorial Church reportedly brought out tech titans including Oracle chief Larry Ellison and Microsoft’s Bill Gates, as well as politicians including Bill Clinton. U2 frontman Bono and Joan Baez reportedly performed.

What kind of services do U.S. companies outsource to Central America? If “call centers” is all you can think of,  you’re missing part of the picture – and an interesting one.

Indeed, the region has rapidly established itself as a destination for web design and development, thanks to local studios which work almost exclusively for foreign clients. So who are these companies and what is their relationship with the local startup ecosystem – or the lack thereof?

A look at the trend

The inspiration for this article came from the comments we received after our post on Central America and startups. While these readers acknowledged that there were very few consumer-oriented startups across the region, they encouraged us to look at the Central American web studios which have been mushrooming in several countries over the last years.

According to the Costa Rican entrepreneur Ricardo Arce, this trend is particularly strong in his home country. “In Costa Rica, there are quite a few companies with over 100 employees that are aimed at offering software development services to U.S. clients,” he explained, mentioning a few of them, such as Avantica, Isthmus or Outcoding. His own company, the nine-year-old web design and programming studio InterGraphic Designs, grew from 2 to 32 employees and 30% of its clients are North American.

What Central America has to offer: the Costa Rican example

One of Ricardo’s foreign clients is Nearshore Americas, a website on the very same phenomenon he’s part of. Indeed, “nearshoring” is the name given to offshoring to nearby destinations. For North American companies interested in outsourcing, Central America offers the best of both worlds: lower costs and geographic proximity. It also has talent; Costa Rica, for instance, has one of the highest literacy rates in the world (96%) and a pool of educated, English-speaking web designers.

Some of these professionals have gained experience working at the many large foreign companies that are based in the region. This is the case of the team behind Edify Software Consulting. Its seven partners, six Costa Ricans and one U.S. citizen, met while working for a U.S. company. Their startup now provides software engineering services for customers in the USA and Costa Rica, mostly based on open source technologies. Its website is in English, a sign of its global mindset.

According to Ricardo Arce, this talent pool has earned Costa Rica a good reputation among foreign companies interested in outsourcing. As a result, the web companies which specialized in attending foreign clients have been doing very well – so well that “they’re not competing for clients, they’re competing for talent,” Ricardo said in a video in Spanish about the Costa Rican ecosystem.

A few years ago, he explained, there were over 100 web studios in the country, most of them with a staff of three or four people. Many of these disappeared when U.S. companies like AvVenta and The Hangar started developing software from Costa Rica, hiring hundreds of employees and therefore luring talent from local ventures. As a consequence, “wages have increased considerably in the sector over the last five years,” he adds, not to mention the non-monetary perks companies have started to offer to attract and retain employees.

The market has also become more professional, asking more from web designers, programmers, marketers and UI experts, many of whom have nothing to envy to their foreign counterparts (see an example below, taken  from the independent web designer Julian Solano‘s portfolio.)

Beyond Costa Rica: a regional trend

Retaining employees can be difficult when many are tempted to emigrate. According to Ricardo, this is still the case in El Salvador, which suffers from a “brain drain” to the U.S. More generally, insecurity is a serious issue across the region and homicide rates have increased sharply over the last five years.

Yet, Costa Rica isn’t the only Central American country where web studios are present. In Panama, for instance, an initiative called Latamapps is aimed at connecting clients with tech providers in the region. In El Salvador itself, it’s worth mentioning Happy Punk Panda Studios, which creates digital campaigns for brands.

Nicaragua also boasts a few web studios, such as Güegüe, which has been offering development, design and hosting services since 1996, using open source technologies. In 2008, it also opened an IT Education Center, in partnership with the Danish company Xcompetence A/S. In 2001, another company called Webbasica followed Güegüe’s path and started offering web development, design, marketing and hosting services. Both are now well established in the local market.

This trend is also quite strong in Guatemala. Web companies are quite varied, ranging from web solutions providers Shiftt and Solucionweb to the interactive digital marketing agency Milkn’Cookies and its cute designs.

As pointed out by our reader John Glasgow, it’s also worth noting that web design is only one of the main web activities companies can outsource. An American in Guatemala, he created a company called CEDS, whose product range includes online learning communities and language assessment tools. In other words, the next time you take an online test as part of a recruiting process, your English language skills could be evaluated in Guatemala – a good example of outsourcing and nearshoring.

An obstacle for startups…?

Still, working for clients is quite different from directly attending the local market. Could this trend be the culprit for the low number of startups coming from Central America? I asked this question to Ricardo Arce and here’s his answer:

“It’s not an obstacle per se. What happens is that this situation offers financial comfort – there are many developers and programmers in Costa Rica with good salaries. Which means that not many of them take the risk of giving up good conditions for the financial uncertainty of starting their own business.”

This is also true at the company’s level, he added:

The difficulty for us to create our own web startups is the following: how to find time to create our own projects while paying the bills and salaries at the same time? It’s a big challenge.”

… or an asset for the ecosystem?

However, saying it’s difficult doesn’t mean it’s impossible; Ricardo’s company itself recently launched what it describes as “its first effort of this kind: 11most.com, a startup where users can create  lists and rankings.”

InterGraphic Designs isn’t the only company that is working on its own projects; so is Edify. According to its Business Analyst Diego Munguia, working on internal products is part of the company’s growth: it needs to diversify its market and rely less heavily on its clients. This led the company to dedicate a portion of its revenues to developing its own software products in different fields, education and sports.

Looking from this perspective, exporting web services could actually be an asset for Central America to develop its own startups. Besides generating revenues, it also contributed to professionalizing the industry. Networking events have been recently created, where tech user groups gather to discuss the products they’re working with. Combined with the emergence of business incubators and dedicated subsidies, it could contribute to creating a fertile ground for a growing number of Central American startups.

The technology augments the Domain Name System that provides the numeric Internet Protocol (IP) address needed to get data to an Internet domain such as news.com. Those that developed it include OpenDNS, Google, and VeriSign. Called edns-client-subnet in technical circles, or more ambitiously the “Global Internet Speedup,” it uses geographic information associated with IP addresses to help computers fetching data get it from the closest–and therefore fastest–server.

“Anybody using OpenDNS or Google Public DNS will immediately get the benefits of this technology,” said OpenDNS Chief Executive David Ulevitch in an interview. Using it, “the worst-case scenario is that things remain they way they are today,” and the best-case scenario is that network delays are as low as they can be, he said.

Google proposed the technology last year, though Ulevitch said it’s been under discussion for longer than that. Google has a powerful interest in making the Web faster, including through the use of its own Google Public DNS service, and its Internet operations are big enough that it can use the technology both when requesting data from other servers and when others request data from its own servers.

Google endorsed the work, too. “Google is committed to making the Internet faster–not just for our users, but for everyone,” said Google Distinguished Engineer Dave Presotto in a statement. “We will do that any way we can, by improving protocols, browsers, client software, and networks.”

The tried and true analogy for DNS is that it acts like a phone book (tried and true, at least, if you remember what phone books were): you look up a person’s name and the book provides the phone number. Ulevitch likens the new technique to a phone book that gives a bit more information based on part of your own phone number.

Related stories:
• Google wants to unclog Net’s DNS plumbing
• Google to speed up, host customers’ Web sites
• WebCL: New hardware power for Web apps

Specifically, it uses the first three quarters of an IP address. That’s enough to narrow down your location generally but not pinpoint it. A server called a DNS resolver–typically operated by an Internet service provider–has the job of finding the IP address of the server you’re trying to reach then providing your computer with the answer. In the phone book metaphor, it’s as if you provide the area code and prefix of your phone number, but not the entire thing, and the phone book provides you with the number of the oil-change service station that’s close to you rather than across town.

Advocates for the technology have signed up some partners in the content delivery network (CDN) industry. These companies specialize in mirroring Web sites or other Internet operations around the world so that a person can get access to the data without having to request it from a server that’s on the wrong side of an ocean.
Web addresses

Participating CDNs are Bitgravity, Cloudflare, Comodo, CDNetworks, DNS.com, and Edgecast. The two biggest CDNs, Akamai and Limelight Networks, aren’t partners, though a representative from Akamai reviewed draft versions of the technology.

Ulevitch believes they’ll come around. “I do hope to have all of them on board,” Ulevitch said. They’ll need to be convinced the engineering and testing work is worth it, but Ulevitch says their services will grow more efficient with the technology.

That’s because with it, they can deliver data more smoothly. Even if a person has a high-speed Internet connection and the server has high data-transfer speeds, that person’s machine and a distant server has a greater lag in each step of their numerous back-and-forth communications. That lag, called latency, makes a Web site feel less responsive, and it contributes to problems such as lost data packets, Ulevitch said.

“Latency is king,” he said.

The technology isn’t standardized, but advocates hope it will be. It’s described in an informational draft at the Internet Engineering Task Force with the drab name of “Client subnet in DNS requests,” and the approach was hammered out by multiple companies.

“I think it’ll happen within a year,” Ulevitch said of standardization. “There have been a couple false starts…There were people who were ambivalent about it. [But] once something gets a significant amount of vendor adoption in the real world, that ends up speaking loud enough to make something a standard anyway. It’s more likely fast-tracked for the standards process.”

Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20098994-264/google-opendns-add-geo-speed-boost-to-net/#ixzz1WXdZshHJ

Do your Web and Mobile Sites work properly across all popular mobile devices? Take Gomez’s Cross-Device Website Compatibility Test and: Identify browser problems that impact your end-users and ensure device compatibility issues do not result in lost revenue and brand equity. Test your site now.

The latest innovations in SEO are definitely social signals and how they impact search results. We are seeing a shift in the authority scores that Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) is weighing. It is not based solely on in-bound links and page content, but also on the amount of social sharing and social signals that you actually see. Social signals encompass trending topics in Twitter and Facebook and how often those links are shared.

Over time, social signals will outweigh link building and emerge as the primary way to measure authority. Google is also tapping into this, because link building is evolving. It used to be that someone would send links to your website and it improved your site. Google does not yet have access to all the Facebook information, but they can access signals by people sharing Bitly links. Social signals tell the search engine if the article or content is important. Another important signal is showing the amount of retweets in the Google news section.

How Retailers Are Using SEO

Retailers are getting better at making content visible to search engines. Five years ago, retailers built their sites in Flash and moved on. It was all about beauty and the brand. Today, retailers have figured out that doesn’t work for e-commerce: Conversion rates and SEO were mediocre.

You have to rank for specific product types and actual products. That’s how you capture the people who have a specific intent to buy your products. To keep pace with this, retailers are shifting away from Flash and using jQuery.

An open source technology, jQuery delivers content to the search engine while creating a user experience that doesn’t force you to refresh pages with every click, thereby delivering a vastly improved user experience.
Room for Improvement

In order to fully optimize SEO, site architecture and navigation are still areas where retailers need to improve. Retailers are trying to change the way we see shopping, but it’s not working. Consumers want the simplest, fastest way to buy a product.

For example, when the search engine goes to a product landing page, the site tries too hard to be brand-centric, so the naming conventions don’t work. Retailers need to group terms into the right categories and better name the specific products so they are easier to find.

Users just want to get to the right category and narrow down what they are looking for as quickly as possible, and so do search engines.
The Mobile, Social Growth Spurt

With social, brands are taking the social networks into their sites rather than just pushing content to them. This concept is called “Orbital Content,” which is about taking all of the places you are appearing on the Web and putting them in one bucket.

For example, with Facebook, you can now do e-commerce on your Facebook page. This is about bringing it all under one roof, with one log-in, which means less jumping around for users.

We are seeing the same trend with mobile: The strategy should be the same, but the content should look better in the mobile browser. It is really about capturing consumers when they are at the highest attention span with a particular device — and integrating the right applications within the mobile site.

With mobile, the biggest SEO opportunity is in local search. The highest percentage of SEO involves a regular keyword search and a specific location.
How Commerce Platforms Can Drive SEO Innovation

Commerce platform providers can drive SEO innovation by keeping it in a running list of optimizations for their platforms. They must prioritize SEO continuously in order to keep up with the growing trends and constant evolution of SEO as things change every six months.

To do this properly, they should embed key features — such as having Facebook Like and Google +1 buttons appear on product pages — directly into their platforms, as opposed to making them “a la carte” custom features.

If they customize their content management systems and embed these features, they allow brands to make SEO changes on their own — with a bit of consultation support, of course.

This gives brands the power to constantly customize their site with the same platform, thus maximizing ROI and value all the way around.

The mammoth project to recreate the code-cracking Colossus capped a career built around electronics and computers.

Most recently, Mr Sale drove the campaign to save Bletchley Park, where Colossus aided Allied code-cracking efforts during World War II.

At Bletchley he also founded the National Museum of Computing to help preserve the UK’s ageing computers.

Born in 1931, Mr Sale displayed his talent for engineering at an early age by building a robot, called George I, out of Meccano. One of the later versions of George was built from the remains of a Wellington bomber.

Instead of going to university, Mr Sale joined the RAF, which nurtured his engineering talent, and by the age of 20 he was lecturing pilots and aircrew about advances in radar.

His career also included a six-year stint as a scientific officer at MI5. He rose to become principal scientific officer of the intelligence agency and aided the work of spycatcher Peter Wright. On leaving MI5 he established, ran and sold a variety of software and engineering firms.

During the late 1980s Mr Sale’s job at the Science Museum nurtured an interest in old computers. This led to the creation of the Computer Conservation Society which leads efforts to restore many key machines.

His interest led to the 14-year project that saw the re-creation of the pioneering Colossus computer. During wartime, Colossus gave the Allies an insight into the communications of the German high command.

The rebuilding work was difficult because the original Colossus machines were broken up at the end of WWII and all plans for it were destroyed.

The rebuilt Colossus became the centrepiece of The National Museum of Computing (TNMOC) that Mr Sale established at Bletchley Park.

“Tony Sale’s passing is a tremendous loss to us all on a personal and professional basis,” said Andy Clark, chairman of the TNMOC trustees.

“Tony’s contributions to The National Museum of Computing have been immense and I am quite sure that without his remarkable talents, enthusiasm, and drive, the museum would not have come into existence,” said Mr Clark.

The skinny man in the black mock turtleneck, and the company he created, have had arguably more impact than anybody on how we consume content in the digital age.

“Steve Jobs is one of the great innovators in the history of modern capitalism,” New York Times columnist Joe Nocera told CNN’s Piers Morgan Wednesday night. “His intuition has been phenomenal over the years.”

But four decades ago, you might have been hard-pressed to spot clues to Jobs’ future success.

He dropped out of Oregon’s Reed College after one semester, although he returned to audit a class in calligraphy. He quit one of his first jobs, designing video games for Atari, to backpack around India and take psychedelic drugs.

But those early experiences, Jobs would say later, shaped his creative vision. The graceful brush strokes of the calligraphy class influenced his elegant Apple aesthetic. His LSD trips as a young man expanded his mind and helped breed Apple’s counterculture, “think different” spirit.

“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future,” he told Stanford University graduates during a commencement speech in 2005. “You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”

Why Steve Jobs is so fascinating

Born February 24, 1955, and then adopted, Jobs grew up in Cupertino, California — Apple’s longtime home — and showed an early interest in electronics. As a teenager, he phoned William Hewlett, president of Hewlett-Packard, to request parts for a school project. He got them, along with a summer job offer at HP.

While at HP, Jobs befriended Steve Wozniak, who impressed him with his skill at assembling electronic components. The two joined a Silicon Valley computer hobbyists club, and Jobs soon teamed with Wozniak and two other men to launch Apple Computer Inc.

It’s now the stuff of Silicon Valley lore: Jobs and Wozniak built their first commercial product, the Apple 1, in the garage of Jobs’ parents in 1976 (the same year Microsoft began developing software). Jobs sold his Volkswagen van to help finance the venture. The primitive computer, priced at $666.66, had no keyboard or display, and customers had to assemble it themselves.

The following year, Apple unveiled the Apple II computer at the inaugural West Coast Computer Faire. The machine was a hit, and the personal computing revolution was under way. Jobs was among the first computer engineers to recognize the appeal of the mouse and the graphical interface, which let users operate computers by clicking on images instead of writing text.

“When you first start off trying to solve a problem, the first solutions you come up with are very complex, and most people stop there,” he told Newsweek in 2006. “But if you keep going, and live with the problem and peel more layers of the onion off, you can often times arrive at some very elegant and simple solutions.”

For Jobs, that solution was Apple’s pioneering Macintosh computer, which launched in early 1984 with a now-iconic, Orwellian-themed Super Bowl ad. Jobs has long had a reputation as a demanding taskmaster, and the mustachioed computer whiz — a multimillionaire by age 30 — drove his Macintosh engineers hard to produce the machine he wanted.

The boxy beige Macintosh sold well, but Jobs clashed frequently with colleagues, and in 1986, he was ousted from Apple after a power struggle. Then came an 10-year hiatus during which he had high-profile successes (buying Pixar Animation Studios from George Lucas before they made it big with “Toy Story”) and failures (founding NeXT Computer, whose pricey, cube-shaped computer workstations never caught on).

In 1996 Apple bought NeXT, returning Jobs to the then-struggling company he had co-founded. Within a year, he was running Apple again — older and perhaps wiser but no less of a perfectionist. And four years after that, he took the stage to introduce the original iPod, the little white device that revolutionized portable music and kick-started Apple’s furious comeback.

Internet mourns Jobs’ resignation | iReport: Share your thoughts

“I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple,” he said at Stanford in 2005. “It was awful-tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick.”

When it comes to Apple, you pretty much know the rest. Over the next decade, Jobs wowed launch-event audiences, and consumers, with one game-changing hit after another: iTunes (2003). The MacBook (2006). The iPhone (2007). The iPad (2010).

Observers marveled at his skills as a pitchman, his ability to inspire God-like devotion among Apple “fanboys” (and scorn from PC fans) and his “one more thing” surprise announcements. Time after time, he sold people on a product they didn’t know they needed until he invented it. And all this on an official annual salary of $1.

By the mid-2000s, however, Jobs was having serious health problems. In 2004, he announced to his employees that he was being treated for pancreatic cancer. He lost weight and appeared unusually gaunt at keynote speeches to Apple developers, spurring concerns about his health and fluctuations in Apple’s stock price. One wire service even accidentally published Jobs’ obituary.

Jobs, 56, who is married with four children, had a liver transplant in 2009 during a six-month medical leave of absence from Apple. He took another medical leave in January this year. Because of this, some observers said they weren’t surprised by Wednesday’s news that Jobs was stepping down as Apple’s CEO.

Read Jobs’ resignation letter

“There is a certain sort of sad inevitability to this moment,” the Times’ Nocera told CNN, adding that Jobs wouldn’t give up control of his company easily. “Apple is his life. He cares about it almost as much as he cares about his wife and children.”

According to the Wall Street Journal, Jobs once famously said, “It’s more fun to be a pirate than to join the navy.” He even flew a pirate flag over his engineers’ building while they were building the Macintosh. But the reality is his once-renegade tech company, the David to Microsoft’s Goliath, is long been part of the mainstream. Apple has more than $70 billion in cash reserves and even briefly surpassed Exxon Mobil this month as the world’s most valuable company.

Jobs doesn’t give many interviews, especially about his personal life, and Apple has been tight-lipped about his health. But perhaps mindful of his legacy, he has cooperated on his first authorized biography, scheduled to be published by Simon & Schuster in November.

“I’ve done a lot of things I’m not proud of, such as getting my girlfriend pregnant when I was 23 and the way I handled that,” Jobs is quoted as saying in the promotional material for the book, being penned by Walter Isaacson. “But I don’t have any skeletons in my closet that can’t be allowed out.”

By contrast, Jobs has always spoken with immense pride about what he and his engineers have accomplished at Apple.

“Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do,” he told the Stanford grads.

“If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on.”