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Month: April 2025

The Myth of the Crowded Vertical

The Myth of the Crowded Vertical

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Image by Rudi Arlt from Pixabay

Disclosure: this is not a new product promotion but rather a study in how to potentially disrupt a very crowded vertical.

“A new American electric vehicle startup called Slate Auto has made its debut, and it’s about as anti-Tesla as it gets,” TechCrunch reported, once again missing the forest through the trees, and proving yet again that the tech media loves to get their digs in, whether it’s appropriate or not.

While there are current Tesla owner who are experiencing buyer’s remorse, or as the New York Times wrote, “In Marin County, There’s Trouble in Teslaville,” is the main selling point of the Slate the fact that it isn’t a Tesla? Or maybe the fact that “It’s affordable, deeply customizable, and very analog. It has manual windows, and it doesn’t come with a main infotainment screen. Heck, it isn’t even painted. It can also  transform from a two-seater pickup to a five-seater SUV,” as TechCrunch pointed out. Read More...

The Dire Wolf: A Lesson in Startup Basics

The Dire Wolf: A Lesson in Startup Basics

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Image by Dušan from Pixabay

Easter is coming and speaking of resurrections, dire wolves, made famous by HBO’s Game of Thrones, have been extinct for around 12,500 years, but “thanks to genetic engineers at biotech company Colossal Biosciences, these majestic predators are back,” Live Science reported. The pups were even named after the dire wolves from the HBO series: Romulus, Remus, and Khaleesi.

“The company claims to have achieved this by extracting DNA from dire wolf fossils in 2021, isolating and growing gray wolf cells, and “tinkering” with the genes. They then transferred that DNA into empty canine eggs and transplanted those into fertile dogs,” Daily Dot explained.

As for this being a resurrection event, “Colossal’s critics have pointed out that, out of thousands of genetic differences that distinguish dire wolves from gray wolves, the company made only a handful of edits focused on recapitulating obvious physical traits such as fur color and texture,” Science.org reported. “Many researchers were also quick to note that according to a 2021 genetic analysis published in Nature, the dire wolf might not even be a wolf at all, belonging instead to a North American lineage of dogs that diverged from the ancestors of gray wolves more than 5 million years ago. As that study’s lead author Angela Perri told Science in 2021, the dire wolf was more closely related to the African jackal than the gray wolf and may have resembled “a giant, reddish coyote.” Read More...

The Case for 360 Degree Thinking

The Case for 360 Degree Thinking

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New York City has a composting mandate that’s been in effect since October, but now the powers that be are getting serious about implementing it, meaning, they’re levying fines on buildings/landlords who don’t comply and separate organic material from other detritus.

“But despite the mandate, the participation rate is abysmal: Public data indicates less than 5% of the city’s organic waste is actually being composted,” Gothamist reported.

Meanwhile, NYC landlords fume over new composting fines turning them into dumpster divers: ‘Detached from reality, wrote the New York Post. Read More...

23andMe: Trust the Tech?

23andMe: Trust the Tech?

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Image by Victoria from Pixabay

Variations on a theme and in case you missed it, 23andMe filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy Privacy, “leaving the fate of millions of people’s genetic information up in the air as the company deals with the legal and financial fallout of not properly protecting that genetic information in the first place. The filing shows how dangerous it is to provide your DNA directly to a large, for-profit commercial genetic database; 23andMe is now looking for a buyer to pull it out of bankruptcy,” as 404 Media et al reported.

“Once valued at $6 billion, executives have yet to find a bidder for the $50 million gene testing company that has never turned a profit,” Reddit noted, but that’s a whole other story.

“This strategic shift coincides with the resignation of its co-founder and CEO, Anne Wojcicki, who stepped down to spearhead an independent bid to acquire the company after facing repeated rejections from its board,” said Reclaim the Net. “For the millions who entrusted their DNA to 23andMe, the assumption might have been that such intimate data enjoys the ironclad protections of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), a law designed to shield sensitive health information from unauthorized disclosure. Yet, 23andMe operates outside HIPAA’s reach, leaving it tethered only to its own privacy policies — rules it can rewrite at will.” Read More...