Keeping it short as we wind down 2024, but we do want to leave you and the year with this: we noticed something of a tech story arc as we find ourselves heading into this age of fakes and bear with us. First, a few articles we need to share:
No full-on editorial due to the holiday weekend and hope you enjoyed yours!
Thanksgiving is the biggest travel weekend of the year. Then again, Americans seem to always be on the move.
It’s not just the country itself that people are leaving. For the curious or those whose for whom home was not where it was last Thanksgiving, here are The Top 5 States Americans Are Leaving, with California once again being the big winner. Or in this case, loser.Read More...
The headline is courtesy of a little poem by Ogden Nash
“A flea and a fly in a flu
Were imprisoned, so what could they do?
Said the fly, “let us flee!”
“Let us fly!” said the flea.
So they flew through a flaw in the flue.”
Not the usual tech-focused editorial this week, as we’ve been under the weather with a very debilitating bug that’s going around, and a particularly virulent one, according to one of the medical practitioners in my family. Two, actually.
Then again, it’s flu season, and symptoms at the onset may vary: headache, sneezing, congestion, coughing, fever, sore throat, stomach/intestinal pain, loss of appetite and then the general aches and pains that come with the malady.Read More...
From what we’ve been hearing from the investors whom we know personally, the funding purse strings are opening up again, and mergers are moving forward.
We hosted Jonathan Hakakian of SoundBoard VC at last week’s Online Insights, and part of the discussion centered around changes on how VCs vet startups. Yes, they’re still vetting decks, doing their due diligence and all that, but many meetings are still held over Zoom or some other such platform. Which means that funds have eased the requirements in terms of geolocation. Many VC/Angel firms don’t even feel the need to have a dedicated office. Some use co-working spaces to have somewhere to hold meetings from time to time, and for conference room access. Offices, for both investors and founders, are no longer necessary, at least, in some cases, not until you’ve reached a certain stage.
Jonathan has returned to taking in-person meetings, circumstances permitting, meaning, when it’s geographically possible for him and the founder/founding team. And there are times when they’ll keep it casual, meeting at a diner or restaurant. There is a different dynamic at in-person meetings, but still important to mind your Ps and Qs – and your table manners.Read More...
There’s no doubt that AI has changed the world, and we’re still basically at the beginning of this cycle in tech. New to the zeitgeist, at least. The idea of human-like thinking machines was first posited at the Dartmouth Conference in 1956. This year, ‘Godfather of AI’ Geoffrey Hinton won a Nobel even though he’s now scared of AI. Is anyone paying attention?
“Hinton shares his Nobel with John J. Hopfield of Princeton University. Hinton’s work built upon Hopfield’s breakthrough work where he created a network system that could save and recreate patterns. Combined, their work led to future breakthroughs in Machine Learning (systems that can learn and improve data without programming) and the concept of artificial neural networks, which is often at the core of modern AI,” saidTech Radar.
Hinton left “Google’s DeepMind where he and his team helped lay the groundwork for today’s chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google Gemini. However, when Hinton left in 2023, he sounded the alarm, worrying that Google was no longer, as he told The New York Times, “a proper steward” for AI.”Read More...
Every now and then we like to focus on the founders’ journey, and we’ve included this graphic for comic relief. The process is not an easy one. In fact, there’s no shortage of lists that go into the top reasons as to why startups fail. May be time to flip the focus: when the authors of this CNBC article interviewed 18 Harvard startup founders, they found that “Here’s the No. 1 trait that made them successful.”
Resilience.
It’s a well-known fact that 20% of startups fail within their first year, no matter how carefully the founder/team plans. ‘Uncontrollables’ always crop up and derail the best laid plans, and this includes acts of God. Example: we know of a founder who launched an app that allowed users to make us of any gym, any time, anywhere in the world. It was an immediate hit – with no freemium version available – so much so, they didn’t even need investment money. Fantastic!Read More...
First, a bit of history. At the dawn of the Web 1.0 era, everyone felt the need to have a presence on this new information superhighway. Something. Anything. Businesses/corporations started putting up websites, which by today’s standards were placeholders, for which they paid millions to early web-focused ad agencies/web dev shops. But consultants to whom they paid thousands/hour advised them that this was what they needed to do, or their businesses/corporations would become irrelevant in this new tech age. For context, HTML coders were commanding salaries well into six figures. A lot of money was being thrown at a lot of youth and inexperience – web shops where the founders knew nothing about business, luckily, working with clients who knew nothing about the web. If the young founders walked into a client meeting with a palm pilot, they were clearly members of the digerati and you needed to go along with anything they said.
These young companies were renting way more office space than they needed, hiring way more employees than they needed, and were running out of money, so they’d throw a party, get some press, and get acquired by a large company/corporation. Who’d learn too late that they’d acquired little more than smoke and mirrors. But what they really bought was the hype.
Which is a large part of the reason why the Web 1.0 bubble burst.Read More...
First, a bit of history. At the dawn of the Web 1.0 era, everyone felt the need to have a presence on this new information superhighway. Something. Anything. Businesses/corporations started putting up websites, which by today’s standards were placeholders, for which they paid millions to early web-focused ad agencies/web dev shops. But consultants to whom they paid thousands/hour advised them that this was what they needed to do, or their businesses/corporations would become irrelevant in this new tech age. For context, HTML coders were commanding salaries well into six figures. A lot of money was being thrown at a lot of youth and inexperience – web shops where the founders knew nothing about business, luckily, working with clients who knew nothing about the web. If the young founders walked into a client meeting with a palm pilot, they were clearly members of the digerati and you needed to go along with anything they said.
These young companies were renting way more office space than they needed, hiring way more employees than they needed, and were running out of money, so they’d throw a party, get some press, and get acquired by a large company/corporation. Who’d learn too late that they’d acquired little more than smoke and mirrors. But what they really bought was the hype.
Which is a large part of the reason why the Web 1.0 bubble burst.Read More...
Before you get your backs up, this is not about politics, and sung to the tune of ‘Let’s Talk About Sex:’ It’s about tech, baby, it’s about you and me, it’s about all the good things and the bad things that can be, It’s about tech. Let’s talk about tech.
At the dawn of the Age of Social, it was widely proclaimed that we, the users, were the product. Is a shift underway at a tectonic level?
Two men engaged in a conversation on X’s Spaces last week and the audience numbers were off the charts. Live, watched later, or simulcast over various sites, it was reported that between a quarter billion to a billion people tuned in.Read More...
There’s an old German proverb that says that all things have an end, except for a sausage, which has two. Well, all things have a beginning, too, including environmental issues. Especially since it seems everyone’s concerned with solving the problems, but that perhaps we’re quickly offered solutions that aren’t.
PFAs
Example: plastic straws were outlawed/removed from many fast-food establishments as they tended to end up in the oceans, endangering marine life. Enter paper straws, but as xatakaon reported, “Paper Straws Are Often Touted as a Great Alternative to Plastic, But There’s a Small Problem: They’re Toxic… After analyzing 39 brands of straws made of various materials such as plastic, paper, glass, stainless steel, and bamboo, a team (of scientists) found that paper straws contain the most perfluoroalkylated and polyfluoroalkylated substances, also known as PFAS. These synthetic substances are considered harmful to humans, animals, and the environment.”
PFAs are ‘forever chemicals’ that “can lead to health problems such as liver damage, thyroid disease, obesity, fertility issues and cancer,” according to the European Environmental Agency, and they’re also found in packaged foods, fabrics, paints, electronics, and pizza boxes, to name just a very few.Read More...
