• Steam balloons could be used to launch satellites
• Mobile gaming is a $68.5 billion global business, and investors are buying in…Global gaming has seen $9.6 billion in investments
• Splunk acquires cloud monitoring service SignalFx for $1.05B
• Porsche invests in ‘low visibility’ sensor startup TriEye
• China’s satellite tests pulsar navigation for future deep space exploration…The positioning accuracy in the experiments reached 10 km,
• Starbucks, monetary superpower
• Android ditches desserts as Q becomes 10
• German city offers $1.1M to whoever proves it doesn’t exist
• Matrix 4’ Officially a Go With Keanu Reeves, Carrie-Anne Moss and Lana Wachowski
• Flawed Algorithms Are Grading Millions of Students’ Essays
• Nasa mission to Jupiter moon Europa moves step closer to launch…Mission that could shed light on possibility of life on icy rock is expected to lift off in 2025

• Lumineye helps first responders identify people through walls
• Google discloses its acquisition of mobile learning app Socratic as it relaunches on iOS
• Y Combinator-backed Holy Grail is using machine learning to build better batteries
• Facebook is starting to sell streaming video subscriptions — but not from HBO or Showtime
• UPS Has Been Delivering Cargo in Self-Driving Trucks for Months And No One Knew
• Inside the effort to print lungs and breathe life into them with stem cells
• The world’s first solar road has turned out to be a colossal failure that’s falling apart and doesn’t generate enough energy, according to a report
• Free and open-source tools for analog filmmaking
• A hotter planet will make solar power less efficient
• The energy transition is underway: 10 charts tell the story

• With warshipping, hackers ship their exploits directly to their target’s mail room
• John Fallon explains why the education company is pivoting to digital textbooks
• BCG Decoding Digital Talent (Thanks to Can)
• LightSail 2, Pushed by Sunlight, Raises Its Orbit by 10,500 Feet in Just Two Weeks
• Finland, Solar Foods, is planning to bring to market a new protein powder, Solein, made out of CO₂, water and electricity. It’s a high-protein, flour-like ingredient that contains 50 percent protein content, 5–10 percent fat, and 20–25 percent carbs.
• Hyundai’s first car with a solar roof is available in Korea…The solar panels are expected to charge 30 to 60 percent of the battery per day. With six hours of daily charging, it could theoretically increase drivers’ travel distance by an extra 1,300 km (about 807 miles) per year.
• Xiaomi Is Developing A Smartphone With Solar Panel
• Tokyo offers $1 billion research grant for human augmentation, cyborg tech…Artificial hibernation is also of interest to the Japanese government.
• Apple rolls out Apple Card Preview to select users
• Apple expands its bug bounty, increases maximum payout to $1M
• Samsung is bringing PC game streaming to the Note 10
• GitHub gets a CI/CD service
• Slack, Zoom, Dropbox, Office: Which US presidential campaigns are using what

• TikTok-parent ByteDance is getting into mobile search
• Revolut launches stock trading in limited release
• Amazon acquires flash-based cloud storage startup E8 Storage
• Amazon develops a new way to help Alexa answer complex questions.. related blog post
• Prodly announces $3.5M seed to automate low-code cloud deployments
• Spotify hits 108M paying users and 232M overall, but its average revenue per user declines
• Apple’s services revenue grows 13% year-over-year
• Consumer internet companies are easy to understand, but hard to create
• Vizio rolls out its Apple AirPlay and HomeKit integrations to its SmartCast TV platform
• Hello Heart raises $12 million for at-home monitoring and behavioral treatment for hypertension
• DeepMind creates algorithm to predict kidney damage in advance (paywall)
• News consumption in the UK
• Artificial intelligence is quietly disrupting the fragrance development process
• A Wikipedia for Generation Z…Famous Birthdays has become a go-to database of teen culture—and is ushering in a whole new generation of stars.
• AI’s new workforce: the data-labelling industry spreads globally (paywall)
• The Hottest Phones for the Next Billion Users Aren’t Smartphones…First-time internet consumers are connecting to the web on a new breed of device costing about $25
• Digital Platforms Inquiry [PDF]
• The $60 Gadget That’s Changing Electronic Music
• LightSail 2 becomes first spacecraft to change orbit using sunlight
• How Robots Change the World, Oxford Economics [PDF]
• How to prepare children for the jobs of the future
• Physical factors such as natural light, temperature and air quality can increase the learning progress of primary school pupils by as much as 16% in a year.
• Amazon as experiment

• Burgernomics: The Big Mac index  was invented by The Economist in 1986 as a lighthearted guide to whether currencies are at their “correct” level.
• Apple Dominates App Store Search Results, Thwarting Competitors…Searches for ‘music,’ ‘audiobooks’ and other categories rank company apps first, a process some developers find unfair; Apple says algorithm doesn’t give own products an advantage…(paywall)
• YouTube probably generates $16 billion to $25 billion in annual revenue, making the video service big enough to crack the top half of the Fortune 500.
• AWS Well-Architected Labs
• Apple’s spending $1 billion to buy most of Intel’s 5G modem business
• Moon has more water ice than previously thought…UCLA study suggests that there may be enough water to sustain a future lunar settlement
• Carbon nanotube films created at Rice University enable method to recycle waste heat
• AT&T loses nearly 1 million TV customers after raising DirecTV prices
• Netflix thought it would have 5 million new subscribers this quarter. Instead it added 2.7 million
• Unity, now valued at $6B, raising up to $525M
• AWS yearly run rate is $33 billion…Google Cloud’s run rate is now over $8B
• Why Innovation Labs Fail, and How to Ensure Yours Doesn’t
• Stackery lets AWS Lambda developers debug their serverless programs locally on a laptop
• AWS gets a chatbot
• SoftBank Rolls Out Second Tech Megafund, With Apple Among Top Investors…Japanese banks and Microsoft are among those that have committed to $108 billion Vision Fund 2 (paywall)
• Tesla says its new self-driving chip will help make its cars autonomous

• Patreon raises $60M Series D, targets international growth and more customization
• Scooter Wars at TC Sessions: Mobility
• Instagram will now hide likes in 6 more countries
• Netflix thought it would have 5 million new subscribers this quarter. Instead it added 2.7 million.
• Some 14 percent of Netflix users are using a password from someone outside their household, while 11 percent of Hulu |  6 percent of Amazon Prime video 
• Microsoft Word hits 1 billion installs on Google Play
• Electric Vehicle charge points to be installed in every new UK home
• The First Complete Brain Wiring Diagram of Any Species Is Here
• Electric car models to triple in Europe by 2021

• Airbus Poised to Overtake Boeing as Biggest Plane Maker /paywall
• Nintendo announces a handheld Nintendo Switch Lite for $199
• Virgin Orbit performs a successful drop test of its LauncherOne rocket launch system
• Google’s internet balloon project is about to start its first commercial trial
• China Internet Report 2019
• It takes seven to ten years to get to real liquidity in a portfolio of early stage venture investments.
• Waymo has now driven 10 billion autonomous miles in simulation
• Growing number of car-sharing users don’t rent cars for driving
• The future of autonomous vehicles runs off roads and on to farms, construction sites and mines
• Surgeons perform first bioengineered blood vessel transplant in military patient
• German banks are moving away from SMS one-time passcodes
• Microsoft Teams overtakes Slack with 13 million daily users
• Scientists 3D-print human skin and bone for Mars astronauts
• New CRISPR platform expands RNA editing capabilities
• The United States is headed for a battery breakthrough
• Will Your Job Still Exist In 2030?
• The Geopolitics of Artificial Intelligence

• Apple Music Hits 60 Million Subscribers
• Bill Gates at Economic Club of Washington, D.C. Video
• Boeing’s 737 Max Software Outsourced to $9-an-Hour Engineers
• Google and Facebook Are Sucking the Brains Out of Europe…Europe is too worried about protecting old metal-bashing industries and not nearly enough about the exodus of deep-tech startups to the U.S…
• Amazon introduces computer vision into warehouses (FT: paywall)
• WeChat wants to own tourism…MyHelsinki is a first stab at intermediating Chinese tourism dollars
• Apple’s iOS 13 update will make FaceTime eye contact way easier
• According to a new report from Sensor Tower, the iOS App Store and Google Play combined brought in $39.7 billion in worldwide app revenue in the first half of 2019
• Bitcoin’s energy consumption ‘equals that of Switzerland’…around seven gigawatts of electricity, equal to 0.21% of the world’s supply…That is as much power as would be generated by seven Dungeness nuclear power plants at once.
• GPS on the Moon? NASA’s working on it
• NASA’s Dragonfly Will Fly Around Titan Looking for Origins, Signs of Life
• The consulting firm Moody’s Analytics says climate change could inflict $69 trillion in damage on the global economy by the year 2100
• After the Honeymoon Ends: Making Corporate-Startup Relationships Work (BCG)

• Millennials don’t want to get drunk. What do they want? Apéritifs.
• SpaceX’s latest Falcon launch has put a solar sail into orbit.”…LightSail is a crowdfunded solar sail project from The Planetary Society. Our LightSail 2 spacecraft, launched 25 June 2019, aims to become the first spacecraft in Earth orbit propelled solely by sunlight…” Kickstarter Campaign Link (2015)
• Google’s new media literacy program teaches kids how to spot disinformation and fake news
• Jony Ive is leaving Apple to launch a new firm
• Enterprise SaaS revenue hits $100B run rate, led by Microsoft and Salesforce
• NASA restores Apollo Mission Control to its 1969 Moon landing condition
• The cost of an ad-free internet: $35 more per month
• The Pentagon has a laser that identifies people by their heartbeat
• Tesla is quietly developing its own EV battery cells

Pivoting to digital maturity