Expectations are ridiculously high as Westworld rides onto HBO tonight. The first season cost a reported $100 million to make, and it’s being pitched in some quarters as the new Game of Thrones. When you’ve got any TV show with that much hype, some disappointment seems inevitable, but judging from the first two episodes, Westworld is even better than anticipated. Based on a 1973… Read More
The latest sports phenomenon sweeping the globe wasn’t represented at the Olympic Games in Rio; it doesn’t require an intense physical training regimen or even traditional sports equipment. We’re talking about e-sports — competitive video gaming — and the opportunities for huge windfalls for players and advertisers are immense. But the real money up for grabs here… Read More
On Thursday night, at an insider event I’d organized in my second but closely related life as the founder of StrictlyVC, I interviewed famed entrepreneur-investor Marc Andreessen, whose most recent headline-grabbing maneuver (intentionally or not) was to take a Twitter break one week ago. I talked with Andreessen about why he has had enough of the social media platform for now, along with… Read More
The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Keith Teare, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live Saturday, October 1, 2016. The Gang announces its version of the Alexa Prize, TrumpBot: an undisclosed amount of virtual tax breaks to the first person to create a chatbot that speaks intelligently for 20 seconds. Believe me, it will be great.
@stevegillmor, @scobleizer, @kevinmarks, @kteare… Read More
While most founders want to make a boatload of money, achieving a stunning exit is not the only driver for most entrepreneurs. Many are fueled by the challenge of solving a problem or producing something meaningful. Some want to make a corporate commitment to social responsibility by organizing their business as a B Corporation, with a mission to do good written into the governing documents. Read More
Let’s start with a bit of background. How did you get into angel investing? I was one of the early folks at eBay and by 1999 it was completely overrun by consultants from McKinsey, Bain and BCG. It went from being a cool fun startup to an MBA factory. Angel investing was an outlet for me to hang out with people I liked– startup founders doing crazy stuff! Where did you get the money… Read More
In as little time as a decade, affordable robots that can bottle-feed babies, change diapers and put a child to sleep might be here. The human-machine bond that a new generation of kids grows up with may be unbreakable. We may end up literally loving our machines almost like we do our mothers and fathers. Read More
It doesn’t get much more meta than this. Raising $77k on Indiegogo, the filmmakers behind It’s All Good absconded with the money, spending it all on cocaine, prosti… oh, wait. No, it was limousines and champagne. The backers were rightfully outraged, but there’s a twist. It turns out that the real movie the scallywags were making was about a team of filmmakers… Read More
This week on the Technotopia podcast I talked to Ken Mages, a Chicago-based inventor and co-founder of Secure One. Mages has been working in computers since his college days at the University of Illinois where he started a business doing what would later be called desktop publishing. His experience in the tech industry is boundless and he’s a really easy guy to talk to. He and I chat… Read More
Here’s yet more evidence that the US patent system needs over-hauling. Back in February we reported that Apple had been ordered to pay $625 million to notorious litigator VirnetX after a U.S. court judged that the iPhone-maker had infringed on patents held by VirnetX in its iMessage and FaceTime services. (VirnetX often described as a patent troll because it makes almost all of its… Read More
One of the biggest challenges of the 21st century is to make computers more similar to the human brain. We want them to speak, understand and solve problems — and now we want them to see and recognize images. For a long time, our smartest computers were blind. Now, they can see. This is a revolution made possible by deep learning. Read More
This was a LIVE recording session of The Gillmor Gang – today with: Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor. Today’s LIVE recording has concluded.
Our live chat stream during the show broadcast
Gillmor Gang’s Facebook page HERE
G3’s archive on ustream
G3’s Facebook page HERE Read More
On Thursday night, at a StrictlyVC event at SurveyMonkey in Palo Alto, this editor sat down with CEO Zander Lurie to learn more about the direction of the 17-year-old company, known for the roughly 90 million surveys that the outfit and its customers create for their various constituents each month (and whose average order volume is $300, says Lurie).
I was particularly interested… Read More
Most people understand that in order for digital services to work properly or stay free they may need to allow the services to track some of their data. It’s time to demand that all third parties hold themselves to a higher standard and disclose what they do with consumers’ data. Those that resist the urge to collect, share and sell data not vital to their service will ultimately… Read More
Everything is terrible. Most software, even critical system software, is insecure Swiss cheese held together with duct tape, bubble wrap, and bobby pins. See eg this week’s darkly funny post “How to Crash Systemd in One Tweet.” But it’s not just systemd, not just Linux, not just software; the whole industry is at fault. We have taught ourselves, wrongly, that there is… Read More
Over the last decade, Argentina’s public profile has been far from flattering. With a steady feed of headlines that have included, “Inflation”, “Corruption”, and “Political Instability”, the country has been shut off from most international tech investment since the “dot com” bubble. Since then, Argentina has had to overcome severe… Read More
Facebook is testing a Snapchat clone in Poland, PewDiePie’s Tuber Simulator hits the top of the charts, Marc Andreessen talks about quitting Twitter, Yahoo open sources porn-detecting software, Nutanix is up 131% on its first day of trading on the Nasdaq. All this on Crunch Report. Read More
Top cancer researchers recently reported their findings and recommendations to President Obama and Vice President Biden’s Cancer Moonshot task force. All 10 recommendations in the report heavily concentrate on enabling computational infrastructure, and included these key words: sharing data, engaging patients, precision medicine, genetic understanding, interdisciplinary, ecosystem and… Read More
The consumer products startup founded by Jessica Alba, The Honest Co., on Friday told The Wall Street Journal that it plans to reformulate its dish soap, laundry detergent and other cleaners after an earlier controversy over their ingredients.
The Honest Co. markets its products as gentler, healthier and more environmentally sustainable than those of mainstream brands in the U.S.
However… Read More
Remember Meerkat? It came out of nowhere in early 2015 — a star of SXSW, in particular — and was on everyone’s tongue for weeks. Then came Periscope, a strikingly similar competitor built mostly in stealth mode, and word that Twitter had acquired it for nearly $100 million dollars before much of the world even knew it existed. Suddenly, interest in Meerkat fizzled. A year and… Read More
