Month: December 2021

Still, overcoming the cold start problem is deceptively difficult. Chen offers the example of Tiny Speck, the gaming company that would go on to become Slack. Tiny Speck had everything going for it: a star team, an exciting launch, and $17 million from respected investors (including Andreessen Horowitz, where Chen works). It also got plenty
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On December 10, the US Treasury Department imposed sanctions, including a bar on American investments, on SenseTime, a Chinese artificial intelligence company accused of developing facial-recognition software used to target China’s predominantly Muslim Uyghur community. The move, part of a raft of sanctions introduced on Human Rights Day, prompted SenseTime to postpone a planned IPO
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In May 2021, Twitter, a platform notorious for abuse and hot-headedness, rolled out a “prompts” feature that suggests users think twice before sending a tweet. The following month, Facebook announced AI “conflict alerts” for groups, so that admins can take action where there may be “contentious or unhealthy conversations taking place.” Email and messaging smart-replies
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None of that would matter if it all remained confined to the realm of social media. Except the past few years have witnessed the explosion of zero-commission trading apps that allow easy access to stock markets—and suddenly people can follow through on their love for the meme. US Securities and Exchange Commission chair Gary Gensler
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Luke Haverhals wants to change how yoga pants are made. Most performance fabrics used in athletic clothing, like Spandex, are made from synthetic fibers—plastic, essentially. Those plastics are problematic for humans and the environment. Haverhals’ company, Natural Fiber Welding, offers an alternative to synthetic fabrics. NFW makes a performance cotton textile called Clarus that can
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The most important technology of the year was not Mark Zuckerberg’s Metaverse, Jack Dorsey’s blockchain, or Elon Musk’s, err, dancing robot. It was more likely the same thing that has propelled progress in the tech industry for decades. The one that lets machines juggle and manipulate information, faster and more efficiently every year. It is,
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In the future, luxury brands may have storefronts in virtual worlds where users can browse their shops as though they’re walking through a real store. But between buggy software, a minimal user base, and a system that allows users to buy and sell slurs with only a complicated governance system to potentially stop them, the
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All of this chicanery raises the question: Why are obituaries highly valued? The answer is simple, according to Robin Heppell, a funeral marketing consultant: Obituaries attract web traffic. Take, for example, Monique Heller, whose obituary for her father, which included how he thwarted “lunch thieves with laxative-laced chocolate cake and excrement meatloaf sandwiches,” went viral
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Supporters of algorithmic reparation suggest taking lessons from curation professionals such as librarians, who’ve had to consider how to ethically collect data about people and what should be included in libraries. They propose considering not just whether the performance of an AI model is deemed fair or good but whether it shifts power. The suggestions
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Since 2018, Delta has worked with CBP to offer international passengers flying from Atlanta the option of checking in and going through security using face recognition instead of conventional documents. In 2019, the airline used face recognition during boarding for 86 percent of its international departures from Atlanta; the proportion fell during the pandemic due
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This month a successful entertainment-business newsletter written by an influential reporter joined forces with publishing legend Janice Min to form a news startup. Buried in the story was a fascinating detail: The cofounders had signed up to go through the three-month Y Combinator accelerator program. If you haven’t been paying attention, this news might have
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Early in the first pandemic summer, around the time California started requiring people to wear masks indoors, Jack Abraham booked a weeklong vacation to Miami. Four days into the trip, he tested positive for Covid-19. He canceled his return flight to San Francisco and, mildly sick, waited out his sniffles in an Airbnb. By the
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These programs are particularly widespread at community and technical colleges like Hillsborough. Community colleges serve the majority of students from underrepresented groups, said Martha Parham, senior vice president at the American Association of Community Colleges. Historically Black Bowie State University, for example, opened a $42 million entrepreneurship academy in August that includes space for student
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The idea that major retailers need to do more is a sentiment that those who lose out to bots at the other end of the process can agree with: On Twitter, Thorley ended up venting his frustration at one of the major UK retailers, over their seemingly scant attempts to verify buyers were human. “Retailers
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The way we use the internet has changed—and fast. Before the pandemic, telecoms and internet service provider BT was handling five terabits of data every second from its UK customers during the day. When the pandemic hit and the world locked down, data volumes doubled. In Germany, DE-CIX Frankfurt, a major connection point for the
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Despite all the hardship it caused, the pandemic also offered the chance of a lifetime. By proving that people could work responsibly—and often more efficiently—from home, and demonstrating how care for loved ones could exist alongside, not in opposition to, our jobs, it felt like there couldn’t possibly be a return to the Before Times.
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When Rob Curtis was running Gaydar back in 2018, he’d sit in chat rooms and watch the amorous hopefuls talk. “It was a dating site, but they were asking for help finding doctors, accountants, trying to navigate the complexities of being LGBTQ+ in a world not quite designed for us,” he says. Fast-forward three years
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In short, the customer experience on Amazon isn’t what it used to be. But I don’t want to single out the ecommerce giant for this regression of its core product. The phenomenon is now endemic among the giants of Big Tech. Google, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft rose to prominence with fantastic products that were laser-focused
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When former Uber driver Yaseen Aslam first started campaigning for app workers’ rights back in 2014, the battle felt hopeless; like a “dark tunnel.” He claims academics told him it was impossible to succeed because his fellow gig workers were too disparate and the majority were people from ethnic minorities, groups that did not have
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Bob Goodfellow has spent 30 years in underground construction and design projects and now works on the Los Angeles Metro system. His company Aldea is working with Petra on tests of its initial systems. “It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen before,” Goodfellow says. “There’s been talk about things like nuclear-powered tunnel-boring machines and contactless tunneling
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The summer of 2020 was something of a heyday—and a Wild West—for e-scooters in Scandinavia. Rental companies had been swarming to the region’s cities—Oslo, Stockholm, and Copenhagen among them—believing they would be easy e-scooter converts thanks to heavily ingrained cycling cultures and their strong interest in sustainability. As city officials balked at how to impose
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DoorDash said Monday it’s doing something different in New York City: It’s hiring about 60 delivery people as employees, rather than independent contractors. The couriers will travel by electric bicycle to make quick deliveries—within 10 to 15 minutes—in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood. The service marks DoorDash’s first foray into a new category of “instant” app-enabled delivery.
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