Spotify this morning announced its latest move to expand its marketing and advertising horizons: it has acquired and shut down content recommendation service MightyTV, a startup that (as its name implies) focused on video recommendations, with an app that used a Tinder-style swipe interface to help guide you to TV and film choices compatible with your own tastes. As part of the deal… Read More
Amazon’s brick-and-mortar retail plans currently focus on its ongoing roll-out of physical book stores, as well as its very limited experiments with cashier-less convenience, but it could expand those ambitions significantly with a number of plans currently in the works. The New York Times reports that it’s also exploring ways it might retail appliances and furniture, two categories… Read More
Yesterday UK government ministers once again called for social media companies to do more to combat terrorism. “There should be no place for terrorists to hide,” said Home Secretary Amber Rudd, speaking on the BBC’s Andrew Marr program. Read More
When it comes to artificial intelligence (AI) and Chinese tech companies, thoughts often begin and end with Baidu. But Tencent, Asia’s second highest-valued tech company behind Alibaba, has reminded the world that it too is investing in the field. Search giant Baidu was one of the first to make a major commitment to deep learning. It spent over $2.9 billion on R&D over a 2.5… Read More
Snapcart, a startup helping to bring transparency to the world of offline commerce in Southeast Asia, has raised $3 million in pre-Series A funding. We first wrote about the company when it launched in September 2015 with the aim of providing data on the largely uncharted world of offline commerce in Southeast Asia, a region of over 600 million consumers and a growing middle class.… Read More
Jared Kushner, the son-in-law of President Trump is going to unveil a new White House agency called the “Office of American Innovation”, which will hold extensive powers to overhaul federal procedures and potentially privatize certain government responsibilities, by culling ideas from the business community, according to a report in the Washington Post. Read More
NASA has always embraced emerging technology for visualization, even if that tech was seemingly developed for frivolous entertainment. We recently covered its holographic Mars exhibit, and the many 3D resources that NASA makes available to developers and educators. Now, the US space agency has partnered with Epic Games’ Unreal Engine to create a mixed reality International Space… Read More
The smartwatch era has done nothing so much as renew my interest in real watches, which have their own type of special intelligence, albeit laid out in intricate arrays of gears and springs rather than written in silicon. Few watchmakers express this intelligence site so wonderfully as Nomos Glashütte, the German manufactory that produces exquisite timepieces with house made movements in… Read More
Apple has bigger fish frying in the world of intellectual property. But it must be a relief that an IP court in Beijing has handed the smartphone pioneers a win. On Friday, the courts overturned a May 2016 ruling that said Apple had violated design patents of a small, and now defunct, Chinese company called Shenzhen Baili. The disputes were over the exterior design of the iPhone 6 and 6… Read More
Are we living in historically unprecedented times for job loss? Or is this part of a cycle that predates even the Industrial Revolution? Is it possible to retrain our workforce for these changes? Or will the gap between educated and non-educated workers only continue to grow? Read More
If the camera is the new keyboard, then the future of social media will look more like a slideshow than a Word document. So while Snapchat invented Stories, we’ll have to get used to using them everywhere. Read More
A few weeks ago, Dries Buytaert, founder of the popular open-source CMS Drupal, asked Larry Garfield, a prominent Drupal contributor and long-time member of the Drupal community, “to leave the Drupal project.” Why did he do this? He refuses to say. A huge furor has erupted in response — not least because the reason clearly has much to do with Garfield’s unconventional… Read More
Lyft is looking at one of its biggest potential opportunities to make up some ground on its rival Uber, given the latter company’s ongoing and worsening PR crisis. So it makes sense that Lyft would go even further in the opposite direction, with a new program that lets riders top off their fare to the nearest dollar, and donate the difference to one of a group of selected charities. The… Read More
Uber has now grounded its entire autonomous test fleet in the U.S., following an accident in Arizona which left one of its Volvo SUVs flipped on its side earlier today. Read More
Medical billing is a largely untapped and lucrative industry, potentially pulling in $55 billion globally by 2020. But it’s inner workings are still very murky — most of the time it’s not clear how much something will cost and sometimes you don’t even get the (possibly whopping) bill until months down the road. Founder Katelyn Gleason wants to make it easier… Read More
Next week in New York, Samsung will finally reveal the Galaxy S8. The handset has a lot riding on it — not simply because it’s a brand-defining flagship or because it’s seemingly been pushed back at least once. Next week’s Unpacked event will have even wider ranging implications for Samsung as its first major phone announcement since last year’s Galaxy Note debacle. Read More
Six years ago, a massive earthquake, consequent tsunami and nuclear crisis struck Japan. International organizations rushed to help the country’s devastated residents, and to figure out how to clean up Fukushima Daiichi, the wrecked nuclear power plant. Robots offered a ray of hope amid unfathomable loss. At least they did, until recently. As the Asahi Shimbun reported yesterday, members… Read More
If a picture is worth a thousand words, a video is worth that times the frame rate. Matroid, a computer vision startup launching out of stealth today, enables anyone to take advantage of the information inherently embedded in video. You can build your own detector within the company’s intuitive, non-technical, web platform to detect people and most other objects. Reza Zadeh, founder… Read More
The Gillmor Gang — Michael Arrington, Keith Teare, Doc Searls, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live Friday, March 24, 2017. Twitter ponders subscription services, Medium gets $5 from Steve and maybe Doc, Keith and Kevin offer their 2 cents from across the pond, and Mike holds down the fort from Crunchfund HQ.
@stevegillmor, @arrington, @dsearls, @kevinmarks, @kteare
Prod/Dir… Read More
In this episode of Technotopia I walk to Tobias Stone, a writer, entrepreneur, and academic. Tobias has been writing on Trump and Brexit and worked with Identity.ee, a workgroup focused on cryptographically proven citizenship.
Stone believes that the Estonian model of e-idenity is the future and that the mission for every country should be to make their workers, citizen, and expats digital. Read More
