Waymo, the newly-minted Alphabet company that was previously Google’s self-driving car project, has a new addition to its vehicle fleet: 100 Chrysler Pacifica hybrid minivans, which were produced by Fiat Chrysler specifically for the purpose of making them fully autonomous using Waymo’s tech, onboard computer power, sensors and telematics. The 100 new cars will join… Read More
At 10pm on June 23, 2016, the polls closed in the UK on a referendum on EU membership and the counting began. The next morning Europeans woke to the news that the British public had voted to leave the 28 Member State bloc called the European Union. The ugly word Brexit — coined during the campaign as a shorthand media conflation for ‘British exit’ — was apparently… Read More
Everyone loves to joke how venture capital is the “Dark Side,” and most of the VCs I know are good-natured about simply accepting the comparison. It’s probably better than “vulture capital,” which was how we were ridiculed when I first started in the business in the early 90s. At my prior fund, my DFJ Frontier co-founder David Cremin coined the term… Read More
Copycats are a dying breed. Each month the gap shrinks between a new digital service emerging in the U.S. and it being copied in other markets. This trend has big implications for global businesses, forcing them to rethink investment and innovation strategies. Read More
For your weekend consumption I present Find my Phone, a 30 minute film about a stolen phone. The filmmaker, Anthony van der Meer, rigged an Android cellphone with Cerebus, a command-and-control system for Android that can survive a memory wipe. The app allowed van der Meer to record video, take photos, and even listen in on calls – all while tracking the phone around Amsterdam. Van der… Read More
One has to appreciate how Paul Graham built Y Combinator into the world’s flagship accelerator. In fact, I have yet to meet a founder who regrets joining the program. But after stepping away from the YC scene for five years and then returning to observe the last two demo days, I wonder if some of the views Paul shared in his original, widely read Essays are being taken to absurd extremes. Read More
We’re in the mid-digital age, but we live with the legacy of analog systems, technology and thinking that’s only embellished by the technologies of our new era. Read More
This, if you squint and adjust your tinfoil hat in just the right way, is the real story of the US election: the Russian candidate defeated the Saudi Arabian candidate. Why them? Because they’re more desperate than anyone else. Both are failed, fragile petrostates propped up only by oil money; so both see cleantech, and climate-change concern — ie Elon Musk — as the real… Read More
According to a 2014 study by Google, 74 percent of leisure travelers relied on the internet for travel planning. That same study found that 77 percent of business travelers also started their journey online. Yet in many companies, booking travel still involves emailing or calling an actual travel agent, who then books with the airline or hotel. Read More
When Niantic first showed a Pokemon Go app for Apple Watch back in September, the only sort of launch date the company would give was by “the end of the year.”
As December 31st quickly approaches, PoGo fans are starting to wonder if Niantic will ship things in 2016 after all. With wondering and doubt comes ample opportunity for rumors to spiral out of control.
An email started… Read More
Maingear and HP collaboration, the OMEN X is a good example of how far a consumer computer manufacturer will go to try and cater to a hard to please niche like PC gamers. Recently the latter has been doing a great job of appealing to different user needs with their Spectre line, from premium ultrabooks, to the VR-ready desktop replacement OMEN 17 laptop that I reviewed earlier this winter.… Read More
Earlier this week, President-elect Trump met with some of the top leaders of American tech companies. Some of these leaders are trying to find common ground after being on the receiving end of some of his sharp-worded tweets.
Like many of my friends in the tech community, I’m faced with the reality of a Trump presidency and searching for a way to honor the calls of President Obama and… Read More
“Silicon Valley is a state of mind,” said Ambassador Pedro Borio, Consulate General of Brazil in San Francisco, during a recent address at the annual BayBrazil Conference. Borio spoke of the major growth in ties and similarities between Silicon Valley and Brazil over the last decade, a stormy tide of a national political scandal starting to ease and his prediction that Brazil… Read More
The California Department of Motor Vehicles sent Uber a notice asking it to terminate its pilot self-driving car service in San Francisco last week, but Uber has continued to operate its vehicles in spite of that order. Now, the California State Department of Justice has followed up, with an order from the Attorney General’s office that adds some teeth to the DMV’s earlier request.… Read More
Multi-CEO and future builder Elon Musk may have been so frustrated by sitting in traffic that he’s going to start yet another company – a boring one. Yes, boring – as in boring tunnels, using machine diggers to create undercut routes to alleviate surface traffic.
Musk tweeted Saturday about being struck by inspiration for this new venture, making a series of… Read More
Biotech has been very hot this year as one of the fastest growing tech sectors as costs have plummeted, allowing innovation to speed up and bring us exciting innovations in health. But it’s been a bit of a rollercoaster ride for investors. The many Theranos scandals became a primer on what not to do when building a billion-dollar biotech startup and then we had exciting IPO’s (and… Read More
Artificial intelligence (AI) had a coming out party of sorts in 2016. Even though it has been in development for decades, this year, with the perfect combination of cheap computing power and access to increasing amounts of data, it seems AI’s time has come. Its first foray in business has been directed at making salespeople more efficient at every level of the sales workflow. If… Read More
Super Mario Run is the most downloaded app in 24 hours on the App Store, Soylent is back with its reformulation and we now know why Facebook’s drone crashed. All this on Crunch Report. Read More
There’s nothing like driving your nearly-empty Tesla up to a Supercharger station for a top-up and finding every spot taken by other cars — probably all charged up and ready to go. Where are their drivers? How dare they? Tesla shares your anger and will soothe it by giving those drivers a different kind of charge. You know, the money kind. Read More
This week, one could play Super Mario Run on iOS in a self-driving Uber if you lived in San Francisco. You could have also broadcast it live on Instagram or Snapchatted it to a group for the first time. These are the top stories in tech from this week, all in one place. Read More
