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Month: September 2021

The Great Tech Lies: Do They Hold Up?

The Great Tech Lies: Do They Hold Up?

When the tech industry was first establishing itself, it was something completely new to the planet, like, for example, the Industrial Age before it. Various mantras hit the zeitgeist: fake it til you make it; move fast and break things; fail fast. There are byproducts of these practices: the disregard for ethics, morality and responsibility or as we’ve said many times before, the only way to cover up a crime is to commit an even bigger crime.

 

The Elizabeth Holmes trial is on and it turns out that the Stanford dropout sidelined the real scientists at Theranos “By leaving them off email threads,” The Verge reported. Then attempted to blame them for Theranos’s failures. “A lot of new emails were introduced, showing Holmes was aware of the company’s problems, and was even actively trying to manage the situation. Several times in those emails, (former Theranos lab director Adam) Rosendorff tried to get Theranos labs to run FDA-approved tests instead of the ones Theranos developed. But maybe even more telling were the emails that Rosendorff was excluded from…“The company was more about PR and fundraising than patient care,” he said. Read More...

The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, Life, Investor Pitch Decks and All That

The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, Life, Investor Pitch Decks and All That

Image by PublicDomainPictures from Pixabay

The subject line references a book by Douglas Adams: the second in his Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy trilogy.

We’ve been out here in the countryside for over a year now, in the woods, not far from a small town. Quality restaurants are few and far between, if not basically non-existent, compared to the NYC restaurants to which we are accustomed.

We were doing errands a few years back and stopped for lunch at a restaurant right next door to one of the shops we’d visited. The décor was very ‘50s, and they did have a salad bar, which we took as a good sign, so we agreed to be seated. There was ‘50s and maybe early ’60s memorabilia everywhere, including in the salad bar, which offered up iceberg lettuce, onions, canned olives and what appeared to be cucumber and tomato slices. The latter two were the appropriate colors and shapes for said vegetables, so we’re assuming that that’s what they were. As for the lunch itself: all the vegetables came out of cans. In the middle of summer, in the midst of farm country, and where farm stands abound. Next, or as Oscar Wilde said, “Once is an experiment; twice is a perversion.” We never returned to that establishment. Read More...

EPIC!!!

EPIC!!!

Image by Peggy und Marco Lachmann-Anke from Pixabay

The news of the week was that the closely-watched trial between Apple Computer and Epic Games concluded. It was not a win all around, but it did deal “a massive blow to the walled-garden business model of Apple’s App Store.”

According to CNBC, “Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers…issued an injunction that said Apple will no longer be allowed to prohibit developers from providing links or other communications that direct users away from Apple in-app purchasing. Apple typically takes a 15% to 30% cut of gross sales.”

“Apple will now be required to allow developers to direct users to third-party payment processors, meaning developers can now collect revenue directly, and can no longer disallow developers from using account registration data to contact users outside the app,” Gizmodo reported. “…but it’s very far from a complete victory. Gonzalez Rogers ruled against the gaming company on every single other count, finding that while Apple violated California’s Unfair Competition law, the case did not establish Apple to be an illegal monopolist…It’s not clear, as of this moment, how wide the ramifications will be beyond the App Store specifically. Google, which also booted Fortnite from its Play Store in response to Epic’s moves, is facing a similar lawsuit that has yet to be resolved.” Read More...