Category: Tech news

Temperatures have soared in the Southern California city in recent years, but taming them presents its own set of challenges.

Opinion: The only way to clean up tech’s biggest platforms is stronger, smarter government regulation.

 So that flamethrower that Elon Musk teased The Boring Company would start selling after it ran out of its 50,000 hats? Yeah, it’s real – and you can pre-order one now if you want need a ridiculous way to spend $500. Musk revealed the flamethrower on Saturday, after some digging tipped its existence late last week. The Boring Company Flamethrower is functional, too, as you can see… Read More

 If hardware is hard, robotics are next to impossible. Even so, Sphero managed an impressive feat over its first five years, growing from a small startup with a glowing, smartphone-controlled ball into the maker of the most talked about piece of merchandise for cinema’s biggest blockbuster franchise. But last week, it became clear that not all was rosy with the company, as they cut 45 jobs. Read More

 Facebook Messenger was down for me for about an hour earlier this week. My MacBook Pro randomly kernel panics overnight and restarts. Slack was down, and Github, and AWS. A little more than a year ago, Dyn went down, throwing the DNS layer of the internet into a tailspin. Practically every chip made by Intel has serious security flaws. Equifax leaked 143 million accounts. Tokyo-based… Read More

 SpaceX has set February 6 as the target for its Falcon Heavy launch, the first ever test flight of the new, high-capacity rocket that the company is building to allow it to send nearly three times as much payload per mission into orbit. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk tweeted the target date on Saturday, adding that there will be plenty of viewing opportunity for the public from the nearby causeway.… Read More

 Elon Musk, a charismatic entrepreneur, is nothing if not audacious. You’d expect the board of Tesla Industries to shape a CEO compensation plan that suits its outsized leader, and boy, did they ever. But a look at Tesla’s newly announced pay plan reveals many elements that should cause shareholders to raise their eyebrows and pause. Read More

 We aren’t so much seeing through a lens darkly when we log onto Facebook or peer at personalized search results on Google, we’re being individually strapped into a custom-moulded headset that’s continuously screening a bespoke movie — in the dark, in a single-seater theatre, without any windows or doors… Read More

 Big IPOs by the best-known brands tend to dominate attention in startup circles. But when it comes to delivering significant returns on invested capital, it’s often lower-profile companies that come out on top. We look at some of the top-returning large exits, first for tech and Internet companies, and then for life sciences. Read More

 The Gillmor Gang — Doc Searls, Esteban Kolsky, Denis Pombriant, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live Friday, January 26, 2018.
G3: White Roses — Halley Suitt Tucker, Francine Hardaway, Maria Ogneva, and Tina Chase Gillmor. Recorded live Friday, January 26, 2018.
@stevegillmor, @dsearls, @ekolsky, @kteare, @DenisPombriant
Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor… Read More

 Welcome back to another glorious episode of CTRL+T. This week, Henry Pickavet and I explore Amazon’s new cashier-less stores that promise no waiting in line — except to get in — and Uber’s newest C-level executive hire. Later in the episode, I rage with Safiya Umoja Noble, a professor at the University of Southern California and author of “Algorithms of… Read More

 Founders are extraordinarily busy, even for their own investors. A decade ago, they might have had relationships with a handful of VC partners as they scaled their businesses and raised additional rounds of capital. Today, it is hardly rare to see as many as fifteen or twenty investment firms and angels listed on the cap table following a seed round. If you add up all the partners at those… Read More

 From the furore engulfing the FCC this last year you might think that the agency had accomplished little but appalling privacy advocates and dancing for its patrons, the telecoms. But as is often the case, small works were overshadowed by more controversial items. Ajit Pai has released a list of “accomplishments,” such as they are, reminding us both of the FCC’s hard work and… Read More

 Dental care can be costly and hard to access, especially if you live in a rural community or a third-world country. In fact, the biggest barrier to dental care is cost. This is according to the American Dental Association, which says many rural areas lack access to dental professionals.  Read More

A dust storm predicted for 2018 could change the face of the Red Planet.