It wasn’t so long ago that venture capital was a suburban California phenomenon. Los Angeles didn’t have much in terms of a real tech scene — and even San Francisco only had a few VCs or tech companies. Now, VC offices have sprung up in San Francisco, moving more of the investment energy up there. That great migration of companies and activity touches upon what is now… Read More
Silicon Valley society showcased itself at Bloomberg’s late innovation confab in San Francisco as much as the organizations, items, business visionaries and investors on the dais and sidelines.
Speakers and participants alike exchanged remarkable dreams without bounds: colonizing different planets, driving to work in flying autos, utilizing self-programming PCs and expanding human life by hundreds of years.
One of the gathering’s most praised visitors, Marc Andreessen, offered a dream for enterprise itself, characterizing it as the capacity to perceive how the world conceivably could be, then imagining what is expected to change it.
What’s more, thus lies the enduring problem for Silicon Valley: The same inquiries that goad its business visionaries and their sponsor to revamp the world are regularly the same inquiries that lead it into struggle with the strengths that characterize reality for the larger part of individuals.
Why wouldn’t i be able to lease my home out for a day here or there? Is there a superior approach to arrange an auto than hailing a taxi? Shouldn’t autos have the capacity to drive themselves? Imagine a scenario where I could attach my cooler to the web. Who needs a console when you can converse with a PC?
Each of these questions has provoked driven, innovative individuals to begin “troublesome” organizations and develop new items that market innovation in ways that enhance regular encounters.
However, in the meantime, these inquiries — and the answers gave as connected tech — offer as much instability as they do upgrades.
Why wouldn’t i be able to lease my home for a day here or there? No reason, unless it triggers a pattern that saps moderate lodging in underserved markets to oblige vacationers. Without a doubt, there are better methods for requesting autos, or transforming vehicle proprietorship into wage — however shouldn’t something be said about the general population who have invested energy and cash getting authorized as expert drivers, the estimation of which is presently disintegrated? Should substantial machines that can go 150 mph truly control themselves?
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3D sound, it’s, ahem, all around you. From the look (or, rather, sound of it), hardware startups are convinced that the effect is set to be the next big thing in consumer audio, and Kickstarter, accordingly, is littered with headphones that promise a more immersive listening experience akin to the recent VR boom. Most companies went ahead and built the technology directly into a pair… Read More
The future is small in space: picture Cubesats the size of toasters and Femtosats an inch across crowding the skies. A newly invented motor that’s both tiny and powerful goes hand in hand with that vision, providing compact spacecraft with the ability to adjust their position without using a drop of fuel. Read More
Today there is enough data available to bring people of similar or adjacent profiles closer, and inform them about signals and contexts where they could either help, pay it forward or seek help. Over a period of time, a community (a micro-market network) will form that will prospect for each other — be it for a job or a deal or funding. Read More
It clogs systems, causes accidents, wastes energy and makes people unhappy. It’s more than a bad experience on a website — in cities, bad user experience (UX) design can actually kill. We’re talking about signage, public spaces, civic and emergency communications and other forms of urban design that influence our daily routines and, in some cases, are there expressly for… Read More
“You don’t just hand over a prototype to manufacturing and say, ‘make this,’ ” Maxwell Bogue explains, offering some off-hand advice to hardware startups. “Whatever you made is wrong. It’s just not mass producible, as much you think it is.”
He speaks from experience. The first time I met Wobbleworks’ CEO, his office was a small cube in a… Read More
Curiosity may be an older dog (the rover landed on Mars in 2012), but it’s still picking up new tricks. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory recently revealed (via Verge) that the robot can now pick its own targets when choosing rocks to scan with its laser spectrometer, a task formerly reserved for remote operation by scientists back here on Earth. JPL created the software that now… Read More
Monotype, a publicly traded company focused on font design and technology, announced today that it’s acquiring Olapic, a startup that helps brands promote themselves with user-generated photos. The deal is expected to close in the third quarter of this year — at that point, Olapic will operate as a division of Monotype. The purchase price is $130 million, plus $19 million in… Read More
Cola, a messaging app that integrates apps into chats, is opening up its developer kit today to enable anyone to build new apps.
The updated version available today comes with 12 “bubbles” that are essentially applications that run inside the messaging app. Users can share weather and flight information, gifs, and more without creating accounts with individual tools. The… Read More
