The modern automobile, say cybersecurity experts, is not a car with a computer in it. It’s a computer with four wheels and a motor. To prove the point, hackers have been breaking into cars’ software, remotely shutting off engines, tracking riders, and disabling brakes.
For more than a century, farmers have been gathering in coffee shops to trade information about what crops grow best, which seeds are worth planting next season, and the prices for everything from factors to fertilizer. Now those cafes are moving online—and farmers are handing over their fields to the nerds.
For years, cosmetic, toothpaste, and body care product manufacturers added “microbeads,” microscopic balls of plastic, to their merchandise, touting their skin-exfoliating effects. A Congressional ban that goes into effect beginning in 2017 will put an end to the environmentally toxic practice, at least in the US.
In 2012, Google dropped off two self-driving cars near the steps of Florida’s statehouse in Tallahassee. They were there at the behest of a freshly elected Florida state senator, Jeff Brandes. Lawmakers, some with families in tow, stepped into Google’s modified Toyota Priuses. With a Google employee standing by in the driver seat, the cars drove loops around the capital building, and then headed to the freeway, accelerating to 70 mph. No one touched the steering wheel for most of the ride, Brandes recounts.
On Friday (Sep 16), Terence Crutcher’s SUV stalled on the way back from music appreciation class at a community college near the heart of Tulsa, Oklahoma. Officers arriving on the scene, according to footage released by the Tulsa police on Monday, ordered Crutcher back to his car at gunpoint with his hands raised, and then tazered and shot him. He died at the hospital.
Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk announced the latest major upgrade to its Autopilot system on Sunday (Sept 11). It marks a strategic shift from reliance on cameras to ”see” the road much like human eyes do, to using radar that can detect far more objects in the environment and, hopefully, avoid collisions. The end result, wrote Tesla in a post on its website, is that the new Autopilot “should almost always” avoid a collision in any situation, detecting objects as far as two cars ahead.
Earlier this year, the App Association calculated that there were 223,000 unfilled coding jobs in the US. Companies have started touting coding as the new literacy, almost a prerequisite to getting in the door. Last month, General Electric’s CEO Jeff Immelt announced that every new hire at the 305,000-person company will learn to code.
Venture capitalists have always thought one person’s trash is another person’s treasure—theirs. For at least a decade, investors poured money into technologies to turn garbage into electricity by burning it. That proved profitable enough. But in the last five years, the economics have changed.
Around 2006, Jeremy Liew started noticing an intriguing trend.
Software-as-service companies have a great business model. Instead of one-off payments for software, these companies charge subscriptions, monthly or annual payments for delivering software through the browser. It gives them a predictable, ongoing stream of payments with plenty of room for lucrative upgrades. No wonder SaaS businesses are on track to grow five times faster than traditional software firms, reports market research firm IDC.
Location, location, location. What a difference a city makes.
Come to Silicon Valley, California. Build something important. Get rich! It’s a narrative that has attracted thousands. But for some, it turns into a nightmare.
The hardest part of building a startup for many is just arriving in the United States. For six years straight, Silicon Valley lobbied hard to get Washington to offer visas to foreigners who wanted to launch companies in the US, but despite bipartisan support in Congress, the effort failed last year because “few people were willing to make it a priority,” immigration activist Craig Montuori told Bloomberg.
In Silicon Valley, software engineer is synonymous with eye-watering compensation. Monthly salaries for engineering interns (about $81,600 per year annualized) are about twice the median wage in the rest of the country. While the reality of high-paying coding jobs is not wrong, programming isn’t the only way to climb Silicon Valley’s career ladder, and it’s definitely not the most lucrative.
Tesla says it has built the fastest production car in the world powered by one of its most potent electric batteries. Yet it won’t be enough to power a new generation of mass market electric vehicles.
Kobe Bryant’s work ethic is legendary: he’s known for showing up three hours early to practice, sinking 400 shots in drills, and taking midnight bike rides to cross train. And for better or for worse, he’s never been afraid to take a shot. Now he’ll be looking for similar qualities in entrepreneurs he’s backing as part of his new $100 million venture capital fund, Bryant Stibel.
For Silicon Valley startups, valuations are dropping even if the sky is not (yet) falling. The law firm Cooley reported this week that it has seen more ”downrounds,” fundraising rounds where a company’s valuation has fallen, than anytime since 2011.
Upgrades are not just for software anymore. Humans are steadily gaining access to technologies that enhance our brains and bodies. But most Americans, says the Pew Research Center, see this as yet another way for the haves to get a leg up over the have-nots.
Garbage trucks are one of the least efficient vehicles on the road. Powered by diesel fuel, they average just 3 miles per gallon, burn about $42,000 of fuel per year, and emit about 20 times the carbon emissions of the average US home. As they rumble down city streets waking residents at dawn, they make more than 1,000 stops a day and log an average of 130 miles a day.
Nobody on Wall Street expected profits. Tesla delivered on that calculation and then some this Wednesday reporting a loss of $293.2 million, about twice what analysts were expecting according to Thompson Reuters, with $1.27 billion in revenue for the quarter. Despite the losses, investors were relatively sanguine, with shares down less than 1% in after-hours trading.
An engineer holds up what looks like a silver shotgun shell. The shiny metal reflects the immaculate white walls of Tesla’s Gigafactory rising out of the Nevada desert. The cylinder contains silicon, lithium, and electrolytes, and fits easily into the palm of one hand. It is the electric-car company’s entire future. Without this battery, the Model III won’t sell at prices that a large number of Americans can afford. The company’s energy storage business will be stolen away by Asian manufacturers.
Europe loves its coffee. The continent drinks more espressos, doppios, guillermos, and ristrettos than anywhere else in the world, and European nations monopolize the top 10 countries for coffee consumption. (The US, meanwhile, ranks 16th). In the top-ranking Netherlands, residents drink an average of 2.5 cups a day.
Elon Musk is building his dream factory in the Nevada desert. “I find this to be quite romantic,” he said during an interview session at the Gigafactory on Tuesday. “It feels like the Wild West.”
Anonymity, we often assume, is the breeding ground for bad behavior on the internet. Among the gatekeepers of comment sections and social media sites, the conventional wisdom is that anonymity empowers bullies to voice hateful opinions without consequence. When unmasked by real-name policies, the theory goes, these trolls will slink back to their caves, taking the vitriol from Twitter, Facebook and other social media with them.
