• The slow collapse of Amazon’s drone delivery dream
• EBay’s Active Buyers Declined 2% (WSJ)
• Transforming the Driver Experience
• Zoom announces new ‘Focus’ mode to keep students from getting distracted
• Apple releases new developer tool to test iOS 15 feature that prioritizes 5G over Wi-Fi
• Three more high-profile Blizzard employees are no longer at the company, including Diablo 4’s director
• Google is adding an interactive periodic table to search
• China Smart-Car Makers Required to Store Key Data Locally
• WhatsApp to allow chat history transfers between iOS and Android
• Space manufacturing startup Varda inks deal with Rocket Lab for three spacecraft…”…potential market for bioprinted organs, specialized semiconductors, fiber-optic cables or pharmaceuticals — products that you can’t make in Earthbound-conditions — is high enough to make the costs of building a spacecraft and launching to space more than worth it…“
• Google launches Android 12 beta 4, hitting the platform stability milestone
• Hyzon Motors has begun shipping hydrogen fuel cell trucks to customers
• “…Amazon’s $1.5 billion air cargo hub in Northern Kentucky opened Wednesday, the latest effort by the e-commerce giant to connect a network of 40 sites and control all aspects of delivery as demand for speed and convenience accelerates…“
• Sicily hits nearly 48.8°C (119.8°F) , may have set Europe’s all-time heat record
• Pay cut: Google employees who work from home could lose money
• NASA to Study a $700 Quintillion ‘Goldmine’ Asteroid
• Where and how will we get the metals to feed our future technology needs?
• TikTok overtakes Facebook as world’s most downloaded app
• How Turkey became a star of European tech (FT)
• NASA has a new challenge to reaching the moon by 2024: Its $1 billion spacesuit program

• More Than 4.27 Billion Shots
• Training self-driving cars for $1 an hour
• Disney’s Star Wars hotel is just like Westworld
• iOS 15 may give the iPhone’s camera an upgrade: fewer green flares
• Home-Working Kills Innovation and Creativity
• Japanese startup ispace raises $46M to support planned moon missions
• Miami Launches ‘MiamiCoin‘
• Netflix announces Space X documentary on civilian mission into orbit
• Square to buy Australia’s Afterpay in $29 billion deal as ‘buy now, pay later’ trend takes off
• Amazon expands deliveries to serve unlikely clients: its rivals (FT)
• DoorDash in talks to invest in German grocery app Gorillas (FT)
• Germany after Merkel will face three key challenges, Goldman says
• Amazon’s office workers now won’t return until early 2022
• SpaceX stacks the full Starship launch system for the first time, standing nearly 400 feet tall
• Duolingo is working on a math app for kids
• “…On any given weekday some 50m meetings are held in American workplaces alone. The average executive now spends 23 hours in them each week…”

See It. Feel It. Live It. Get the details on Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser, a 2-night adventure launching at Walt Disney World in Spring 2022. ? https://t.co/Q4WaeIyX9L pic.twitter.com/yqKLOzNHYE

— Walt Disney World (@WaltDisneyWorld) August 4, 2021

• MS Flight Simulator on consoles: Finally, a next-gen game for Xbox Series X/S
• Apple reports a 50% year-over-year jump in iPhone sales, link2
• Japan’s virtual YouTubers have millions of real subscribers
• Blue Origin has a secret project named “Jarvis” to compete with SpaceX
• Lucasfilm hires deepfake YouTuber who fixed Luke Skywalker in The Mandalorian
• How to turn yourself into a cartoon for your next Zoom call
• Google Cloud offers a model for fixing Google’s product-killing reputation
• Groceries in 10 Minutes: Delivery Start-Ups Crowd City Streets Across Globe
• Same-day delivery apps need more than speed to survive post-pandemic
• Shopify allows merchants to sell NFTs directly through their storefronts
• Google Cloud reported revenue of $4.6 billion, up 54% year over year
• Google sets all-time records as search and YouTube profits soar
• Red planet has a big core, complex crust
• The Tokyo Olympics could be a COVID-19 “super evolutionary event”
• Starbucks Is the New Talent Factory Powering Corporate America
• Google postpones return-to-work until October, will require vaccinations
• The global chip shortage is starting to hit the smartphone industry
• First detection of light from behind a black hole
• How Artificial Intelligence Is Fighting Wildfires

• Delta COVID variant now dominant strain worldwide, U.S. deaths surge –officials…”This is becoming a pandemic of the unvaccinated,” Walensky said, adding that 97% of people entering hospitals in the United States with COVID-19 are unvaccinated.
• Visa Rebrands for the Digital Economy
• 4 Best Practices to Ensure Your Product Stands Out on the Digital Shelf…Ecommerce success isn’t just about the buy button
• Corning’s new Gorilla Glass protects smartphone camera lenses and lets in more light
• Intel CEO Says Chip Shortage Could Stretch Into 2023 (WSJ)
• How to Motivate Your Teen to Be a Safer Driver (WSJ)
• A DNS outage just took down a large chunk of the internet
• China Plans to Build the World’s First Waterless Nuclear Reactor
• How to mend your broken pandemic brain
• Gallium, once an industrial-waste product, is transforming our increasingly electrified world (WSJ)
• Apple Delays Office Return as Covid-19 Delta Variant Spreads
• DeepMind says it will release the structure of every protein known to science…AlphaFold program’s prediction of nearly 20,000 human protein structures now free for researchers
• Mercedes-Benz to build eight battery factories in push to become electric-only automaker by 2030
• Twitter’s revenue jumps as ad revamp pays off (FT)
• Robotaxis: have Google and Amazon backed the wrong technology? (FT)
• Google is starting to tell you how it found Search results
• Why vertical farms could be the next big microgrid market

Ad spending per vehicle sold:⁰⁰Hyundai Genesis: $1,955 Lincoln: $1,553 Jaguar: $1,235 Lexus: $984⁰Cadillac: $908⁰Honda: $183⁰Mini: $91⁰Dodge: $78 Mitsubishi: $43⁰Tesla: $0⁰⁰Source: Ad Age (2020 spending) pic.twitter.com/5T6mRSnwzZ

— Jon Erlichman (@JonErlichman) July 22, 2021

Douyin (TikTok China) experimenting with food delivery pic.twitter.com/BTg7qYZYFp

— Matthew Brennan (@mbrennanchina) July 15, 2021

• Anyone is building a marketplace for advice, one 5-minute call at a time
• Railsbank raises $70M to build out its fintech-as-a-service platform
• Walmart will be bringing Symbotic robots to 25 distribution centers
• “…today around 30% of the world’s population is exposed to a deadly combination of heat and humidity for at least 20 days each year, that percentage will increase to nearly half by 2100, even with the most drastic reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions…”
• History teaches us how to be brutally honest about a problem and yet optimistic for a technological solution
• One of Dubai’s Oldest Lenders Prepares for a Digital-Only Future
• A Neanderthal carved a geometric design in bone 51,000 years ago
• If we want to look for life on Europa, we’d better bring a drill
• what we know about kids and long covid
• Humanoid Robot Keeps Getting Fired From His Jobs…Pepper, SoftBank’s robot, malfunctioned during scripture readings, took breaks in exercise class and couldn’t recognize the faces of family members (WSJ)
• Our brains “read” expressions of illusory faces in things just like real faces…”For the brain, fake or real, faces are all processed the same way.”
• Japan appoints Minister of Loneliness
• Virgin Galactic plans to take a tourist to space every day, says chief (FT)
• Germany establishes new military space command
• Scientists develop bendable ice
• NASA Announces Nuclear Thermal Propulsion Reactor Concept Awards
• Cyberattacks and Ransomware: How Can We Protect Energy Infrastructure? (WSJ)
• How computers with humanlike senses will change our lives?
• Amazon launches its mobile-first Kindle Vella serialized story platform
• VW Group’s 10-year plan: A single EV platform across all its brands
• With Apple Pay Later, Apple may take another stab at the PayPal model
• How used cars became the next big ecommerce battleground (FT)

I was once a child with a dream looking up to the stars. Now I'm an adult in a spaceship looking down to our beautiful Earth. To the next generation of dreamers: if we can do this, just imagine what you can do https://t.co/Wyzj0nOBgX #Unity22 @virgingalactic pic.twitter.com/03EJmKiH8V

— Richard Branson (@richardbranson) July 11, 2021

• Which airlines will soar after the pandemic?
• Why Are Gamers So Much Better Than Scientists at Catching Fraud?
• Smart foam material gives robotic hand the ability to self-repair
• America’s Vaccine Future Is Fragmenting
• A traditional diesel-electric sub can stay under water for two or three days. Those with aip can do so for three weeks
• An Indonesian mapping platform is turning social media chatter into life-saving information during natural disasters.
• The Chinese content farms behind Factory TikTok
• Chip shortage to hit TV and smartphone OLED displays (FT)
• The great chip crisis threatens the promise of Moore’s Law
• Why Restaurants Feel Trapped By Delivery Apps…can’t live with them, can’t survive without them
• The Empires Jeff Bezos Built (WSJ)
• Juni, a ‘vertical’ neobank for e-commerce and online marketing companies, raises $21.5M
• Tencent Deploys Facial Recognition to Detect Minors Gaming at Night
• COVID vaccines to reach poorest countries in 2023 — despite recent pledges
• Bats’ brains predict their next move during flight
• WhatsApp will let you send images and videos in their ‘best quality’
• Square is going to make a hardware wallet for bitcoin
• mRNA vaccine technology moves to flu: Moderna says trial has begun
• Rail Network Hit by Possible Cyber Attack, State TV Says
• A logic circuit made from DNA

Every meeting of the flemish government in Belgium is live streamed on a YouTube channel.
Software is searching for phones and tries to identify a distracted politician. This with the help of AI. The results are then posted to social with the politician tagged. By @driesdepoorter pic.twitter.com/QUQHiYx2HI

— The Flemish Scrollers (@FlemishScroller) July 5, 2021

• Intel Delays Sapphire Rapids Xeon CPU Production To Q1 2022
• Virgin Galactic brings forward founder’s first trip to nine days before rival’s Blue Origin mission (FT)
  
• Virgin Orbit successfully launches its first commercial payloads to space
• Starlink’s “next-generation” user terminal will cost a lot less, Musk says
• Hepsiburada IPO,  F-1 Document
• Ant Group-Backed Kakao Pay Seeks Up to $1.4 Billion in IPO
• Bezos Hands Amazon Over to Trusted Deputy Andy Jassy
• Digital vaccination cards go into effect in Europe, with some turbulence.
• Physicists observationally confirm Hawking’s black hole theorem for the first time
• Sony Charging Devs At Least $25,000 For PlayStation Store Visibility
• TV-Style Commercials Are Coming To Console Games
• ‘Crucial Time’ for Cloud Gaming, Which Wants to Change How You Play
• Amazon Demands One More Thing From Some Vendors: A Piece of Their Company (WSJ)
• AI technology identifies 160 possible new drug treatments for COVID-19
• Uber will ask employees to return to work 50% of the time
• LinkedIn breach reportedly exposes data of 92% of users, including inferred salaries
• Faster Python programming: How these developers built Pyston, and where it goes next
• Qualcomm can beat Apple M1 chip, says CEO, thanks to ex-Apple engineers
• Japan’s In-Home Robot Experiment Short Circuits
• See the Highest-Resolution Atomic Image Ever Captured
• Good news: Google no longer requires publishers to use the AMP format. Bad news: What replaces it might be worse
• China’s Zhurong rover returns landing footage and sounds from Mars
• Ericsson Mobility Report
• DLD Summer: Videos

Global mobile data traffic is projected to reach massive 237 EB per month in 2026. Globally, the average usage-per-smartphone now exceeds 10 GB/month and is forecast to reach 35 GB/month by the end of 2026. #5G pic.twitter.com/MvTHl7eMy6

— Alvin Foo (@alvinfoo) July 2, 2021

• Why every platform wants to be a super app
• Microsoft just unveiled Windows 11: Here’s everything it announced
• Microsoft didn’t kill Skype, but Windows 11 is shoving it out of sight
• Microsoft announces Windows 11 will be able to run Android apps
• Biden’s new $1.2 trillion infrastructure plan includes $65B for universal broadband
• Microsoft hits $2 trillion market cap for first time
• Kickstarter CEO: Let’s try a 4-day work week
• London Underground to Gain Full Mobile Phone Coverage by 2024
• Google gets a new rival as Brave Search opens to the public…About 32 million people now use Brave’s ad-blocking browser each month.
• The next pandemic is already here. Covid can teach us how to fight it.
• Amazon, Google Probed in U.K. Over Fake Reviews (WSJ)
• Google delays plan to phase out third-party cookies by 2 years (FT)
• NASA’s Perseverance Rover Begins Its Search for Life on Mars (WSJ)
• Tesla Shareholder Panasonic Sells Stake for $3.6 Billion (WSJ)

I've spoken to 2,000+ people about remote work in the last 12 months

A few predictions of what is likely to emerge before 2030

[ a thread ] ???

— Chris Herd (@chris_herd) June 24, 2021

• The Future by a16z
• Spotify acquires Podz, a podcast discovery platform
• What makes the Delta covid-19 variant more infectious?
• How to Practice Emergency Preparedness as Self-Care
• BioNTech CEO Warns Delta Variant Could Lead to a Covid-19 Resurgence”…Roughly 16% of the global population had been fully vaccinated…”
• Bloomberg Vaccine Stats: 2.51 Billion Shots (Updated: June 17, 2021, 11:59 PM GMT+3)
• Germany’s Fraunhofer FKIE institute, who’ve built a drone prototype designed to find people by detecting human screams and listening for other signs of distress.
• Google’s adtech business set to face formal EU probe by year-end –sources
• The smart home gym that analyzes your moves will soon have Olympian trainers
• Amazon’s Halo body fat percentage calculator outperforms lab devices
• Nielsen Now Knows When You Are Streaming
• Facebook will start putting ads in Oculus Quest apps
• We Don’t Have Much Longer to Become a Type 1 Civilization
• TikTok Owner ByteDance’s Annual Revenue Jumps to $34.3 Billion (WSJ)
• This tech uses augmented reality to give surgeons ‘superpowers‘
• Google’s Next AI Move: Teaching Foreign Languages
• The global chip shortage is creating a new problem: More fake components
• A DNA-based storage system with files and metadata…Queries can take days, but it’s possible to pull out specific files.