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What Hath Tech Wrought…This Time

What Hath Tech Wrought…This Time

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Photo by TheDigitalArtist @Pixabay

The world was up in arms when Russia says it’s blocking Facebook in alarming new censorship push. Meta president of global affairs Nick Clegg then tweeted in response to the move, saying “Soon millions of ordinary Russians will find themselves cut off from reliable information…and silenced from speaking out,” The Verge reported. Yet, how long has the tech cabal been censoring people and posts that are not in lockstep with what they deem appropriate, or do not conform to their agendas?

 

Meanwhile, we’re witnessing The creeping authoritarianism of facial recognition that’s being adopted more and more. “The same technology that Russia uses to keep its people in line has come to America,” Spectator World reported. Of course, it’s all in the name of  lowering crime rates, but note to self, More States Than Ever Passing Laws For No Cash Bail and Pretrial Detention, including New York, where the NYPD provide(d) hard proof that no-bail law is causing a crime spike. Said the New York Post, “Since Jan. 1, 482 suspects busted for serious felonies were released without bail only to commit another 846 new crimes. Over a third were arrested for one of the seven most serious crimes: murder, rape, robbery, felony assault, burglary, grand larceny and grand larceny auto.” Read More...

Tech and Lessons from the Ukraine Invasion

Tech and Lessons from the Ukraine Invasion

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It’s been a stressful week in a stressful couple of years to the point where one barely knows where the road forward is anymore since the landscape is shifting so rapidly.

Given its global footprint, the tech sector is not immune from disruptive global events:

First, Mykhailo Fedorov, who is Ukraine’s Minister of Digital Transformation Urges Apple’s CEO to take action and stop selling products and services in the Russian Federation. Read More...

Is Tech Starting to Get Under Your Skin?

Is Tech Starting to Get Under Your Skin?

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We used to play competitive field hockey. Center halfback. Winning team and why? We and our center forward had a strategy: Yours Truly always fell back – to the least protected part of the field – rather than shadowing her.  She would invariably get the ball at some point, send it to us, who would guard it until she was in position to score, return it to her. Score! Game over. Worked every time.

It’s one thing to skate to where the puck is going, as per ice hockey great Wayne Gretzky’s advice. And quite another to follow the strategy/keep an eye on the field at large. Which is also potentially a winning play.

As a result of our lessons from field hockey, we personally don’t necessarily only follow where the puck is going, but rather, attempt to sort out the underlying strategy as well – and look to what else is happening on the field. For example, it was recently widely reported that Elon Musk says the US should ‘get rid of all’ government subsidies re EVs. As The Verge said, “Musk’s companies have benefitted from many different federal and state subsidies over the years, and the government is a major SpaceX customer (though SpaceX won much of that business by dramatically undercutting the prices of established players). Tesla has also found tremendous success in China after receiving lots of help from the central government there. Musk said Monday that Tesla “did not anticipate any subsidies” when the company was in its early years. Read More...

How to Make Money in Tech Without Starting a Company

How to Make Money in Tech Without Starting a Company

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Elon Musk is now worth $230 billion—as much as Bill Gates and Warren Buffett combined, and he has even surpassed Jeff Bezos. But, hey, a billion here, a billion there, why quibble? What was not mentioned in the CNBC piece is Elon Musk’s secret? Taxpayer money. His two companies that helped him to achieve that status – Tesla and SpaceX – “together have benefited from an estimated $4.9 billion in government support (subsidies),” according to the LA Times.

 

Considering that it’s lawmakers who decide who gets what, many of them have coincidentally done quite well picking stocks, even though we know that insider trading is illegal – at least for the rest of us. Still, congress is required to disclose their stock transactions. According to NPR, the “STOCK Act is a law that was passed and signed in 2012, (that) requires more disclosures by federal lawmakers when they trade, they purchase, they sell stocks. It also criminalizes trading on inside information.” Read More...

The New Global Tech Ecosystem: Why There’s No Going Back

The New Global Tech Ecosystem: Why There’s No Going Back

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It’s right about mid-summer, the halfway mark, and we hear more and more about how two of the tech capitals – New York and Silicon Valley – are ‘back.’ We also hear a lot of debate online about when events should be scheduled again where people will meet in person, at an actual venue. September? October? Some have already started, although in many cases, we see that the number of attendees is somewhat, if not greatly diminished, which was not necessarily true when the events were being held online.

 

We also wonder how many startups – and how much new funding – was a result of the new borderless ecosystem.  Do these new friendships/affiliations simply go away when the world goes back to in-person events and meetings? We regularly attend a now-online, formerly in-person event whose attendees span multiple states and several continents due to the lockdowns. As venues reopen and some people return to the tech hubs – not all will – and in-person events, will the online participants be cut off? So long and thanks for all the fish? Read More...

Lift-Off! A Milestone Week in Tech

Lift-Off! A Milestone Week in Tech

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First, SpaceX made history with the First-Ever Human Rocket Launch For NASA, as Forbes reported. Saturday’s launch was the first time since 2011 that humans had launched into orbit from U.S. soil. The Dragon shuttle did successfully dock at the International Space Station, and we recall when SpaceX was considered more or less a moonshot.

Tech has come of age, and with age comes responsibility. Read More...

140 Characters Who Helped Shape the Tech World

140 Characters Who Helped Shape the Tech World

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It was Peter Thiel who said, “We were promised flying cars. Instead we got 140 characters.” It looks like flying cars may be slowly rolling out, with Singapore’s flying taxi trial set to begin in the second half of 2019, but who the hell are those 140 characters to whom Theil might have been referring? As a co-founder of PayPal and an early investor in Facebook, LinkedIn, Yelp and Quora, he certainly knows what sorts of characters tech can breed.

We’ve been involved in the tech world since the nascent days of Web 1.0 in New York City – with monthly trips to Silicon Valley at the time, as well – and over the years, have encountered many of those characters, upfront and personal, for better or for worse. Of course we have stories to tell, but that’s for a later date and a much longer opus.

Some were true innovators who created platforms and software and devices that forged an entirely new industry. You may not be familiar with their names, but their contributions should never be forgotten. Some forgot their original drivers, whether it was to not be evil or to connect the world, tracked the world’s population in ways and to an extent to which it had never been tracked before, storing it and parsing out that information to the highest and/or any and all bidders, and paying no heed to the concept that we might have the right to be forgotten. Read More...

What is a post scientific world? Only AI may know.

What is a post scientific world? Only AI may know.

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Much has been written about AI, both utopian and dystopian. Elon Musk has launched a billion dollar crusade to stop the AI apocalypse. Bill Gates insisted that it was a threat, until he changed his mind. Mark Zuckerberg is a big supporter, insisting that “AI makes human life better.” Then again, he also told Congress that Facebook is not a publisher – until the issue came up in court: Is Facebook a publisher? In public it says no, but in court it says yes.

Remember when Facebook apologized after ‘the algorithm’ blocked the Declaration of Independence as ‘hate speech?’ And that was just an algorithm that was wrong or defective. Read More...