Weekly#300

  • YC alum Make School gains rare accreditation for 2-year applied CS bachelor’s degree
  • Mars Lander InSight sends the first of many selfies after a successful touchdown
  • Amazon wants brands to advertise Alexa voice shopping — essentially for free
  • AWS has %51.80 market share with 27 B USD revenue run rate.
  • AWS launches Arm-based servers for EC2
  • AWS Firecracker: Lightweight Virtualization for Serverless Computing
  • AWS reinvent videos
  • AWS launches a managed Kafka service
  • Goto Conference videos
  • newest Wi-Fi protocols: 802.11ax and 802.11ay
  • FT Books of the Year 2018
  • Chinese scientists are creating CRISPR babies
  • Researchers estimate that Python, Javascript, and R contribute billions to GDP
  • Andrew Chen: What’s next for marketplace startups? Reinventing the $10 trillion service economy, that’s what.
  • A new slow thinking movement
  • Revolut is ready to launch in Singapore and Japan
  • Microsoft wins $480M military contract to outfit soldiers with HoloLens AR tech

Weekly#299

  • Here’s everything you need to know about Facebook’s latest crisis
  • Why flammable ice could be the future of energy
  • Solar geoengineering could be ‘remarkably inexpensive’ – report
  • When the Tech Mythology Collapses
  • Verizon will reportedly support iPhone eSIMs and dual SIMs in December
  • Boss as a service
  • Satellites and rockets are getting smaller. Why not rovers, too?
  • Chrome is getting scrollable tab bar, Google confirms
  • French tobacco shops to sell bitcoins via fintech company
  • Blizzard is working on a Pokémon Go style Warcraft game
  • One of the fathers of AI is worried about its future


Weekly#298

  • Elon Musk : “Deleted my Tesla titles last week to see what would happen. I’m now the Nothing of Tesla. Seems fine so far.” Twitter, QZ Article
  • The three traits Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella looks for in leaders
    • Attribute #1: The ability to create clarity when none exists
    • Attribute #2: A knack for sparking energy
    • Attribute #3: An ability to succeed in “an over-constrained space”
  • These antique phones are precious, private Alexa vessels
  • BlackBerry is buying Cylance for $1.4 billion to continue its push into cybersecurity
  • SpaceX launched and landed another used Falcon 9 rocket (18th mission in 2018)
  • Instagram will now let users shop items from video posts
  • Elon Musk’s SpaceX Wins FCC Approval to Deploy 7,518 Satellites
  • Ford wants to launch a fleet of thousands of self-driving cars in 2021
  • Lab-grown ‘mini brains’ produce electrical patterns that resemble those of premature babies
  • List of jobs of 2028 that don’t exist yet. (Reddit)
  • Microsoft launches cloud-based development kit for blockchain

Weekly#297

  • Fortnite Breaks Records on YouTube for Concurrent Gaming Livestream Viewers (over 1.1 million viewers)
  • Unlocking success in digital transformations
  • Elon Musk: The Recode interview
  • A Holographic Display for 3D Creators
  • Google launches Cloud Scheduler, a managed cron service
  • The eight types of AI you should know about
  • Ford buys electric scooter startup Spin
  • Netflix’s hackathon
  • Disney’s new streaming service will be called Disney+
  • Xiaomi is opening a retail store in London as it extends its Europe push
  • David Attenborough to voice Netflix’s nature conservation series, Our Planet
  • Three challenges facing blockchain technology
    • Finding good enterprise-level blockchain software developers
    • Avoiding the temptation of regulation
    • Reaching critical mass

Weekly#296

  • Epic Games, Developer Of Fortnite, Now Valued At More Than $15 Billion... The company has raked in more than $1 billion in revenue from these so-called microtransactions over the past year, according to estimates from SuperData…
  • Britain’s mobile challenger bank Monzo has become one of the most valuable startups in Europe, today reaching a £1 billion ($1.31 billion) valuation in its latest funding round
  • IBM is making the third-largest tech acquisition ever
  • Apple’s Mac business now has 100 million active devices
  • Why Airbnb will be worth more than Uber
  • Handshake, a LinkedIn for university students and diversity, raises $40M on a $275M valuation
  • Facebook 100B messages & 1B Stories/day
  • Hydrogen gas trial in western Sydney could unlock $1.7bn in renewable exports
  • Windows 10’s Next Update Brings a “Zoom” Feature to the Console
  • Machine-learning algorithm beats 20 lawyers in NDA legal analysis
  • The Rush to Get Off the Water Grid
  • Visual network map of MegaTrends to 2050
  • The future of the TV and video landscape by 2030

Weekly#295

  • Project Stream
  • Can Germany survive the ‘iPhone moment’ for cars? (FT)
  • Berlin’s Emil launches pay-per-mile car insurance
  • The future of photography is code
  • How Netflix drives culture, in one chart
  • Dyson chooses Singapore for new electric car plant
  • Tearing Apart Teslas to Find Elon Musk’s Best and Worst Decisions
  • “Hardware Industrial Design is about space, Software Design is about time“
  • Dropbox expands Paper into planning tool with timelines
  • The automated programmer, called Repairnator, wrote patches good enough to fool actual human engineers.
  • Amazon’s most important businesses are all slowing down

Weekly#294

  • Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen has died at age 65
  • Winamp returns in 2019 to whip the llama’s ass harder than ever
  • Twilio acquires email API platform SendGrid for $2 billion in stock
  • 10 qualities you need to develop to improve your emotional intelligence
  • Tesla deploys massive new Autopilot neural net in v9
  • Adobe launches Premiere Rush CC, a video-editing app made for YouTubers
  • Amazon requires one minute of human labour to get a package onto a truck, but that number is headed to zero. Autonomous warehouses will merge with autonomous manufacturing and delivery to form a fully automated supply chain. (Twitter source)
  • Netflix Reports Strong Growth in New Subscribers
  • Uber Proposals Value Company at $120 Billion in a Possible IPO…”Uber would be worth more than Detroit’s Big Three automakers combined. GM $45.3 B, Ford $35.1 B, Fiat Chrysler $31.8 B”

 

Weekly#293

  • The first “social network” of brains lets three people transmit thoughts to each other’s heads
  • Machinify raises $10 million to help businesses use AI to monetize data
  • Google Slides gets real-time automated captions
  • Klarna raises $20M from H&M, will build financing and payment services for the fashion retailer
  • Facebook is audaciously launching a video gadget for your home, called Portal. Is that a good idea?
  • Investors are betting $75 million on AllTrails and its content for hikers
  • Why tech companies need to reinvent themselves every three to four years
  • AT&T will launch another streaming service in 2019, with HBO and other WarnerMedia content
  • Waymo’s self-driving cars hit 10 million miles
  • Kahoot, the educational gaming startup, has raised another $15M, now at a $300M valuation
  • Apple gets critical iPhone technology in $600 million Dialog deal
  • Amazon’s private label sales will reach $7.5 billion this year, analysts at SunTrust Robinson estimate. By 2022, they are expected to hit $25 billion. (Twitter source)
  • The next PlayStation is already in the works, says Sony’s new president
  • FT: “…JPMorgan Chase is putting hundreds of new investment bankers and asset managers through mandatory coding lessons, in a sign of Wall Street’s heightened need for technology skills…”

Weekly#292

  • Walmart plans to acquire fashion startup Eloquii for $100 million
  • Coinbase reached 8 B USD valuation
  • Netflix and Hulu go in for comedies while Amazon sticks to the drama: A look at the original content boom
  • “…Google, which has allowed some publishers to create Stories since February, is going to start using artificial intelligence to create its own Stories that will appear in Google search and image results…”
  • Honda will use GM’s self-driving technology, invest $2.75 billion
  • Nintendo would rather be defined as an “entertainment” company, not a gaming one
  • Wi-Fi branding to get a lot simpler with upcoming “Wi-Fi 6″
  • ‘Presidential Alert’ Goes to Millions of Cellphones Across the U.S.
  • Amazon Announces New Fire TV Stick Featuring 4K Support, and All-New Alexa Voice Remote
  • Tesla’s Model 3 Is Becoming One of America’s Best-Selling Sedans
  • YouTube TV is rolling out a bunch of new features to woo cord cutters away from cable TV
  • Instagram prototyping feature that would share your detailed location data with Facebook
  • Google Assistant can now help book rides from Uber, Lyft, and others
  • Jeff Bezos’s pet aerospace exploration project is planning to send “several metric tons” of unspecified cargo to the Moon in the next five years.
  • Maps for self-driving cars

Weekly#291

  • As Magic Leap preps for its first developer conference, the focus shifts to content
  • Alexa skills can now offer one-time-use purchases, like in-game hints or points
  • Uber drivers and other gig economy workers are earning half what they did five years ago
  • Stripe is now valued at $20B after raising another $245M led by Tiger Global
  • UK cyber security firm Darktrace raises $50M, now valued at $1.65B
  • Google is using AI to predict floods in India and warn users… Google Blog Post
  • Daimler Changes CEO as It Focuses on Electric Future
  • Windows 10 passes 700 million devices
  • A Japanese company has announced a long-term plan to develop the Moon
  • eBay is now selling wireless plans with secondhand phones
  • WEF The Future of Jobs Report 2018