While the majority of fans might rely on their knowledge of the game, popular sports analysts, water cooler talk and a gut feeling, machine learning scientists are building a predictor tool to help the masses complete the ultimate bracket and win a few bucks from the office pool. … | Continue reading
If you were hoping that John Oliver would do a deep dive on the iPhone encryption debate: good news. Today’s the day. Read More | Continue reading
Cainiao, a three-year-old Alibaba-backed company specializing in logistics, has confirmed its maiden external funding round from Temasek Holdings and GIC in Singapore, Malaysia’s Khazanah Nasional and China-based Primavera Capital. Read More | Continue reading
Marley Spoon, the cook-at-home food delivery service that competes with the likes of Gousto, Blue Apron, Plated, and Rocket Internet’s HelloFresh, has closed $17 million in Series B funding. Read More | Continue reading
The Star Wars movies have captured the imaginations of everyone, from baby boomers through millennials on down to tots. It seems like everyone has been talking about the latest episode in this saga. Around the water cooler, discussions begin with “Have you seen it?” Being a datab … | Continue reading
They seem as anachronistic as helmetless hockey players, the no-dunking rule and bullpen carts. But the player-coach was once a familiar figure in pro sports. Bill Russell and Lenny Wilkens in the NBA. Curly Lambeau and George Halas in football. The first six World Series were wo … | Continue reading
As a travel enthusiast, it was a problem Ryan Wenger had often encountered; how can a person search for a flight and hotel based on the amount of money they want to spend rather than by destination only? Setting out to solve this problem, Wenger quit his job as an attorney and fo … | Continue reading
Future Finance — a startup based out of Dublin that provides loans to students using big data algorithms to asses their credit-worthiness — is today announcing a large round of funding of its own to build its business out in Europe. The company has raised £119 million ($171 milli … | Continue reading
Advertising has lost sight of a very basic concept: The pleasure principle. In the “golden days,” the 1960s and 1970s, colorful creative in a full-page spread was enough to create buzz — and that’s not just Mad Men nostalgia talking. With the advent of the Internet, new technolog … | Continue reading
As the launch dates of the Oculus Rift and the HTC Vive virtual reality headsets approach, so does the release of a ton of awesome VR gaming content. To gamers with full Steam libraries however, it’s kind of a shame that once they put the headset on, most of their favorite conten … | Continue reading
The opposing views of those advocating for preserving the current implementation of Bitcoin (Bitcoin Core), and those who believe that the block size needs to be increased immediately to overcome scalability challenges, has balkanized the Bitcoin developer community into mainly t … | Continue reading
When vulnerability is injected into technology used worldwide, it becomes everyone’s liability. Read More | Continue reading
We do not possess the ability to read the future, and yet we can predict with a high level of certainty that we will see more major cybersecurity incidents in 2016 and 2017. The world’s cybersecurity capability is not able to advance in line with the growing vulnerabilities. Incr … | Continue reading
In a chat with Guy Kawasaki at South by Southwest, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales spoke out about self-interested parties editing their own page on the Internet’s collaborated encyclopedia. “Companies think it’s a powerful marketing tool but I think they’re deranged and should … | Continue reading
NASA has successfully tested their first RS-25 rocket engine for the agency’s next heavy lift rocket, the Space Launch System (SLS), for 500 seconds. The SLS, which will use 4 RS-25 engines in its core stage, is designed to take humans to deep space destinations like asteroids or … | Continue reading
Video news startup NowThis is partnering with FWD.us, the immigration lobbying group backed by Mark Zuckerberg and other tech executives, to tackle one of the biggest issues in this year’s election cycle. Last night at South by Southwest, the two organizations announced a partner … | Continue reading
digitalundivided, an organization geared toward advancing equity in tech, is opening an innovation center for black and Latina female founders in tech this summer. Located in downtown Atlanta, GA, the BIG Innovation Center will be home to a four-month long accelerator program as … | Continue reading
Ulysses is a Markdown text editor for small and big projects. It works quite well for anything between a blog post and a novel. And Ulysses is also the kind of apps we need on iOS. It's an expensive $25 app that provides nearly all the features of its desktop equivalent. In … | Continue reading
The FBI wants Apple to do something no private company has ever been forced to do: break its own technology. Specifically, the FBI wants Apple to build a new version of its mobile operating system (iOS, or GovOS) so that the contents of an iPhone can be removed from an iPhone use … | Continue reading
Machines 3, humans 1… That’s the current score in a five-match series being played out between DeepMind’s AlphaGo and human Go world champion, Lee Sedol. Read More | Continue reading
In the first part of this series, we learned about designing products that use good triggers and motivators to get users like Joe to engage in healthy behaviors. Now, how can we ensure that these new behaviors become long-term habits? In this second part, we return to Nir Eyal’s … | Continue reading
New domain extensions have accumulated some pretty big numbers over the last couple of years. Collective registrations for the new GTLDs (generic top-level domains) have now surpassed 13 million, according to NTLD stats. This number is not small by any means. Read More | Continue reading
The World Economic Forum, the Detroit Auto Show and CES all occurred recently, and each has driven a great deal of discussion around self-driving cars. The expectation is that within a decade we will begin to see autonomous vehicles on the streets and a correlated reduction in ac … | Continue reading
While internet connects us and unites us, it also has the potential to facilitate a kind of imperialism and monoculture. Read More | Continue reading
The Gillmor Gang — John Borthwick, Robert Scoble, Daniel Ilkovich, Keith Teare, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live Friday, March 11, 2016. The Gang joins the hybrid world of thin media, where bots masquerade as us and vice versa. Plus, the latest G3 (below) with Elisa … | Continue reading
The concept of artificial intelligence has been around for a long time. We’re all familiar with HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey, C-3PO from Star Wars and, more recently, Samantha from Her. In written fiction, AI characters show up in stories from writers like Philip K. Dick, … | Continue reading
Is the tech industry partly responsible for the rise of Donald Trump? That’s what John Robb, who’s always worth reading, suggests in a series of recent posts, citing the great Nassim Taleb in support. His vision: “The nation-state as we’ve known it is rapidly hollowing out … this … | Continue reading
Michael Goguen, a longtime partner at Sequoia Capital who joined the tony Sand Hill Road firm roughly 20 years ago, has been named in an extraordinary breach of contract lawsuit that accuses him of sexually mistreating a woman he met in 2001, then refusing to honor a financial ar … | Continue reading
Living communities and the people who build them are unique, but they share many common threads: a mix of private and community spaces, a set of shared rules and a commitment to friendliness and warmth rather than the anonymity and awkwardness of a typical residential high-rise. … | Continue reading
After his nearly year-long mission on the International Space Station (ISS) and 20 years of service with NASA, Astronaut Scott Kelly will retire from the agency, effective April 1st. “This year-in-space mission was a profound challenge for all involved, and it gave me a unique pe … | Continue reading
Snapchat has been known for some bold (and perplexing) moves in regards to content features, attempting to revamp event marketing through Stories, redefine journalism through Discover and rethink the selfie through Lenses. They’ve tackled software features but now they may be loo … | Continue reading
Artificial intelligence is one of the hottest subjects these days, and recent advances in technology make AI even closer to reality than most of us can imagine. The subject really got traction when Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk and more than 1,000 AI and robotics researchers signed … | Continue reading
Consider this a public service announcement for DoorDash customers. In the coming weeks, you’re going to start seeing something new on your bills — a service fee.However, a spokesperson for the food delivery service said it’s not actually a new fee, and the total cost won’t chang … | Continue reading
“I am way on the civil liberties side of this thing” President Barack Obama said today regarding the balance between privacy and security surrounding the FBI’s ongoing fight with Apple about penetrating encryption. While speaking today at SXSW, Obama said he could not comment dir … | Continue reading
“[Technology can] empower individuals to do things they could have never dreamed of before, but also empower folks who are very dangerous to spread dangerous messages” President Barack Obama said today. Obama took the stage at South By Southwest to discuss how technology could be … | Continue reading
Mahindra, the India-based manufacturing giant, wants to offer more people the chance at a cleaner commute. The GenZe 2.0 electric scooter carries one person, a couple big bags of groceries, and a price tag of just $3,000. As a former scooter commuter myself (on a 50-cc gasoline-p … | Continue reading
The New York Times is expanding its native ad studio with the acquisition of HelloSociety, a digital marketing agency owned by Science, Inc. Los Angeles-based Science both invest in startups and builds its own companies. It launched HelloSociety (which it fully owned) back in 201 … | Continue reading
Gillmor Gang – John Borthwick, Robert Scoble, Daniel Ilkovich, Keith Teare, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor. LIVE recording session today, Friday March 11 at 1pm PT. Our LIVE chat during the show broadcast Gillmor Gang on Facebook HEREConnect with our other show – G3 – on Faceboo … | Continue reading
While most people think about hashtags, marketing stunts and SoLoMo when they hear about the Interactive part of SXSW in Austin, this year is going to be a bit different as President Barack Obama is about to give a keynote at the event. The event should start at 2:40 PM in Austin … | Continue reading
Instacart, the $2 billion grocery delivery startup that recently announced an extended partnership with Whole Foods, has slashed pay for its drivers and shoppers in major markets like San Francisco and Los Angeles, The Wall Street Journal reported earlier today. Here’s a nugget f … | Continue reading
YouTube is a beautifully weird world full of surprises. It turn’s out there’s a big community of TV show and movie reaction YouTubers out there. Some of them have hundreds of thousands of subscribers and millions of views. And yet, it seems like YouTube isn’t the right platform f … | Continue reading
By now, the advantages of open source are there for all to see. When you give people access to the underlying code, good things happen. People find bugs and security holes. They make it better. They adapt it to different needs. They even build entire startup ecosystems on top of … | Continue reading
Microsoft today released a new tool that will make it easier for users of Evernote’s note-taking service to make the transition to rival application OneNote, a part of the Microsoft Office suite. The “OneNote Importer tool,” as the software is called, aims to address the switchin … | Continue reading
For the fifth year in a row, biz school professors Yael Hochberg of Rice University and Susan Cohen of the University of Richmond have ranked the many accelerator programs now up and running in the U.S. as a way of helping making sense of which are worth the time, effort, and, of … | Continue reading
This week, Facebook made a selfie filter app acquisition, Google surprised us with the Android N preview, and we ate bugs. Yeah, seriously. Silicon Valley is eating bugs now. These are the tech headlines you don’t want to miss this week. Read More | Continue reading
NASA announced that it will send its next lander to Mars, known as the InSight Mars lander, in May of 2018. The mission was originally on schedule to launch later this month, but a technical issue found late last year put the InSight launch on hold. The new launch date comes as g … | Continue reading
Amazon’s virtual assistant Alexa, embedded in devices like the Echo speaker and Fire TV, is today taking on a new role: she’s now a banking assistant, too. Capital One announced this morning the rollout of a new “skill” (like an app for Alexa-powered devices), which will allow co … | Continue reading
Boston’s tech scene should shake off its inferiority complex: The “Boston Tech Party” revolution is starting to unfold. After many years of under-the-radar growth and profitable companies, the arrival of General Electric to the Seaport District brings Boston the high-profile “anc … | Continue reading