I recently had a meeting with a well-known Israeli startup investor. The talk somehow pivoted from my seed-seeking startup into talking about the macro view of venture capital and how it doesn’t actually make sense. “Ninety-five percent of VCs aren’t profitable,” he said. It took me a while to understand what this really means. Read More
Voice-controlled technology like Amazon Echo, Siri or hands-free features in Google Maps are things we’re starting to take for granted. But as Mary Meeker’s 2017 Internet Trends Report noted, voice controls are changing computer-human interfaces, and industries, broadly. Read More
Back in January we heard about Draper’s efforts to outfit a living dragonfly with a sort of solar-powered mind control backpack. This project, known as DragonflEye, is cruising right along, and the R&D firm just released a video of the modified insect taking flight. Read More
Amidst an array of enterprise companies that have jumped on the IPO bandwagon following Snap’s successful IPO (aside from its more recent whiff of an earnings report), Blue Apron appears to be the next major consumer IPO. That’s important, because it continues the tone that both enterprise and consumer companies see an opportunity to go public. Read More
Yext’s first earnings report as a publicly traded company seems to be a boringly pleasant one — but that’s a good thing for a company that needs to show strong performance out of the gate. Read More
Joining an overwhelming chorus that includes most Americans, several major businesses in the U.S. and much of the global community, several investors have come out swinging against President Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord. Read More
There is no such thing as too many rainbows. For LGBTQ Pride Month, Instagram is rolling out a special set of pride-flavored features, including a sticker set (Instagram has stickers now, you’ve probably noticed) and a rainbow brush. Did I mention you can never have too many rainbows? Read More
Elon Musk is making good on his promise to leave President Trump’s White House advisory councils, he said today on Twitter. The Tesla and SpaceX CEO promised Wednesday he would step down from his official advisory roles with the administration should Trump go through with his plan to leave the Paris Climate Accord. Trump announced the U.S. would be removing itself form the agreement… Read More
Intel CEO Brian Krzanich was interviewed at Code Conference on Thursday, where he talked about his long-term vision for automobiles. He said his prediction that “the car of the future is going to look much more like a server” was a driving factor in their recent acquisition of Mobileye, the Israeli auto startup for which Intel paid more than $15 billion. Read More
Google still has plans to introduce built-in advertising filters for its Chrome web browser, according to a new report from the Wall Street Journal, but it’s going to be more of a quality assurance feature, akin to existing tools in Chrome that prevent pop-ups from spawning in excess, and that warn users when they might be exposed to content that could harm their devices. The report… Read More
Years ago I called for a black and white computer, and that strange desire still lives within me today. While no one has yet taken me up on this amazing idea, the monochrome devices that do exist have improved, yet are still frustratingly limited in their capabilities. That’s why the reMarkable tablet is such a pleasure to me. They went full e-paper. Read More
Payments startup Stripe is always on the lookout for ways it can help its users make better use of its APIs, and occasionally builds new products to solve common problems they face. A good example of that is Sigma, a new data analytics tool the company is rolling out today. Read More
Facebook shareholders have once again rejected a proposal for Facebook to prepare a gender pay equity report to assess pay between men and women across race and ethnicity. A stockholder proposal called for Facebook to prepare a report by December 2017 around the company’s policies and goals to reduce the gender pay gap. Shareholders rejected a similar proposal last year. Read More
Ford’s mobility play isn’t just about new modes of using cars – GoBike, its bike sharing program, is also part of that same vision. The GoBike program is set to launch in earnest across the San Francisco Bay Area by the end of June, the company announced today, and will be available to all residents using either physical Bay Area transit Clipper cards or the Ford GoBike app.… Read More
E-books are a lot of things. Convenient. Good for the environment. Usually cheaper than printed books. One thing they’re rarely accused of is being good-looking. Ugly books is what 180g is declaring war on with a completely revamped, 2.0 version of Vellum. Oh, and in the process, they’re adding support for making wood-pulp books, too. Fancy. Read More
Adobe today is launching a new mobile app that makes it easier to convert paper documents and other things into digital, editable PDF files. While there’s no shortage of scan-to-PDF apps on the App Store, many are not free, have a dated design, or simply convert an image to PDF format, but don’t allow for edits. Adobe Scan, meanwhile, uses optical character recognition (OCR) to… Read More
Twitter might consider adding premium subscription features to TweetDeck, but likely won’t charge all users because the reduced access wouldn’t jibe with what Twitter wants to be, according to COO Anthony Noto. Today at Code Conference, Noto explained the four characteristics that make Twitter special, and how those guide its product evolution. Read More
Lyft just released its first-ever diversity report, a couple of months after Uber released its first one. Lyft, which committed to releasing a report last June, says it will continue to release reports annually. Read More
Walmart today says it has begun testing using store employees to make last mile deliveries for online orders in select markets. The idea is an expansion on the retailer’s recently launched 2-day shipping program, which lets customers order from over 2 million online items for fast delivery without an annual membership. The company said it realized those same trucks could just as easily… Read More
