This was the year Amazon went all-in on the Alexa. September saw the announcement of a new Echo Dot, Show and Plus, a subwoofer, an audio input device, an auto dongle and an amplifier. That would have been plenty, but the company also started dipping its toes into the other side of things. 2018 also…
The Gillmor Gang — Keith Teare, Esteban Kolsky, Frank Radice, Michael Markman and Steve Gillmor . Recorded live Saturday December 22, 2018. 2019 — the year to come in review. Tech, Trump, Connected TV: products, services and streams that could make a difference. Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor @kteare, @ekolsky, @fradice, @mickeleh,…
After the year Mark Zuckerberg’s had, you’d think he’d struggle to appear so chipper. “I’m proud of the progress we’ve made,” he said in an end-of-year note posted on his Facebook page for everyone to see. Acknowledging that the social network played its part in the spread of hate speech, election interference and misinformation, Zuckerberg’s…
911 emergency services in several states across the U.S. remain down after a massive outage at a CenturyLink data center. The outage began after 12pm ET on Thursday, according to CenturyLink’s status page, and continues to cause disruption across 911 call centers. Some states have seen their services restored. CenturyLink has not said what caused the…
We are living in an interstitial period. In the early 1980s we entered an era of desktop computing that culminated in the dot-com crash – a financial bubble that we bolstered with Y2K consulting fees and hardware expenditures alongside irrational exuberance over Pets.com . That last interstitial era, an era during which computers got smaller,…
Grove Collaborative, a four-year-old, San Francisco-based startup that sells household, personal care, baby, children’s and pet products, has been busy raising money in 2018, shows two new SEC filings that lists representatives from the company’s earlier investors, including Mayfield, Norwest Venture Partners and MHS Capital, as well as apparent new investor General Atlantic, represented by partner Catherine…
Fitness trackers and heart-rate monitors are all well and good, but if you want to track activity inside the body, the solutions aren’t nearly as convenient. Iota Biosciences wants to change that with millimeter-wide sensors that can live more or less permanently in your body and transmit wirelessly what they detect, and a $15 million…
Elon Musk has filed a motion to dismiss a defamation lawsuit filed against him by the British cave rescuer who sued the billionaire entrepreneur for calling him a pedophile. Musk’s motion presents numerous reasons to dismiss the defamation lawsuit, all of which come back to a two main points: Twitter is “infamous for invective and…
People in China have a host of reasons not to go outdoors these days. They may be too busy to leave their office, wary of air pollution or have chosen to live isolated lives. Among them is an expanding young consumer base who prefers to dwell in the virtual world of video games, animes and…
SpaceX’s futuristic Starship interplanetary craft may embody the golden age of sci-fi in more ways than one: in addition to (theoretically) taking passengers from planet to planet, it may sport a shiny stainless steel skin that makes it look like the pulp covers of old. Founder and CEO Elon Musk teased the possibility in a…
