Airbnb may be another overvalued “unicorn,” but it’s no WeWork. The Information this morning reported new Airbnb financials — indicating a massive increase in operating losses — that immediately call Airbnb’s future into question. Precisely, Airbnb lost $306 million on operations on $839 million in revenue, namely as a result of marketing spend, in the…
Swarm Technologies aims to connect smart devices around the world with a low-bandwidth but ever-present network provided by satellites — and it just got approval from the FCC to do so. Apparently the agency is no longer worried that Swarm’s sandwich-sized satellites are too small to be tracked. The company’s SpaceBEE satellites are tiny things…
The policy is the technology and the technology is the policy. That is the truth of city governance in the digital age, says Gartner. Any government services delivered at scale are underpinned by various technologies, it says. The challenge is to get these technologies right; failure to do so will undermine service, policy, and government…
Is our age of ubiquitous smartphones and social media turning into an era of mass civil unrest? Two years after holding an independence referendum and unilaterally declaring independence in defiance of the Spanish state — then failing to gain recognition for la república and being forced to watch political leaders jailed or exiled — Catalonia’s…
Nintendo today released sales figures for the Switch, and it should really not come as a huge surprise to know that it’s surpassed 15 million units sold in North America alone. That means Nintendo’s hybrid console is dominating its two main competitors, the PS4 and the Xbox One. According to the NPD Group, a market…
Humankind had come a long way from the time when the Internet became mainstream. What started as a research project ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) funded by DARPA has grown exponentially and has single-handedly revolutionized human behavior. When WWW (world wide web) came into existence, it was meant to share information over the Internet,…
The fact that NVIDIA is updating its Shield TV hardware has already been telegraphed via FCC filing, but a leak earlier today paints much more of a detailed picture. An Amazon listing for a new NVIDIA Shield Pro set-top streaming device went live briefly before being taken down, showing a familiar hardware design, a new…
A year ago, at a demo day south of San Francisco, we watched a number of recently formed startups pitch investors on their companies. One that stood out to us at the time was Zubale, a Mexico City-based outfit whose founders were looking to connect big corporations with Latin Americans eager to address tasks on…
What do BMW, Tencent, Pokémon Go creator Niantic, movie director Jon Favreau and construction giant Skanska have in common? They’re all using the same platform to create their products. Founded in a small Copenhagen apartment in 2004, Unity Technologies’ makes a game engine — a software platform for building video games. But the company, which…
What do BMW, Tencent, Pokémon Go creator Niantic, movie director Jon Favreau and construction giant Skanska have in common? They’re all using the same platform to create their products. Founded in a small Copenhagen apartment in 2004, Unity Technologies’ makes a game engine — a software platform for building video games. But the company, which…
