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Tech Goes Full-On Creepy

Tech Goes Full-On Creepy

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Image by Pete Linforth from Pixabay

WC Fields warned never to work with kids and animals – advice Ring founder Jamie Siminoff should have heeded.

Ring , the surveillance camera that monitors your doorstep, produced what was supposed to be a warm and fuzzy Superbowl ad, showing the device using neighborhood surveillance to locate a missing family pet. Milo found! Be a hero and add to the unbridled neighborhood surveillance! Ok, so that’s not what they said, but that was the viewing public’s takeaway.

“Many viewers on both the right and left were disturbed by the privacy implications of the advertised “Search Party” feature. This AI tool is designed to reunite lost dogs with their owners, and the Super Bowl ad claims that one lost pet is found every day thanks to the technology,” reports Mashable. “Here’s how Search Party works: When a dog is lost, pet owners can upload a picture of their pet, at which point their neighbors’ Ring video doorbells and security cameras will start looking for the lost pup. Of course, as viewers quickly realized, if Ring can do this for lost dogs, there’s no reason it couldn’t identify a human face just as easily.” Read More...

Something Big Is Happening, But Something Bigger Is Being Missed

Something Big Is Happening, But Something Bigger Is Being Missed

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Image by NVD from Pixabay

Yeah, yeah, yeah, we all know that software is eating the world, and that something big is happening, thanks to Matt Shumer’s piece on the subject, which is  a must-read. Make no mistake about it, AI is here to stay, and it’s no longer a nice-to-have in your professional toolkit. Equally importantly, it’s critical to update it regularly, given the exponential rate at which it’s improving. Also, it’s important to be specific in your requests when utilizing it: It’s up to the user to use the AI and not vice versa.

“Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic…has a thought experiment. Imagine it’s 2027. A new country appears overnight. 50 million citizens, every one smarter than any Nobel Prize winner who has ever lived. They think 10 to 100 times faster than any human. They never sleep. They can use the internet, control robots, direct experiments, and operate anything with a digital interface. What would a national security advisor say?

“Amodei says the answer is obvious: “the single most serious national security threat we’ve faced in a century, possibly ever.” Read More...

The Roaring 2020s: A Throwback to the Past?

The Roaring 2020s: A Throwback to the Past?

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Image by Gill Eastwood from Pixabay

The passing of 2025 wasn’t just the end of another year: we wrapped up the a quarter century. Note that centuries tend not to define themselves until we’re roughly two or so decades in.

Looking back to the 1900s, Voices from History noted that “The 1920s…saw the birth of numerous inventions that transformed everyday life and laid the groundwork for future technological advancements… These innovations touched various aspects of society, from transportation to leisure activities.”

Kind of like, well, now, considering electric and self-driving cars, connected kitchen appliances and beds, et al. Read More...

What’s Eating the Medical Establishment. (That’s Not a Question.)

What’s Eating the Medical Establishment. (That’s Not a Question.)

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Picture by Schoklosters Castle at Unsplash

Every now and then, we turn our attention to food, which is especially timely as losing weight is a popular resolution on people’s lists  new year’s list. And Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr (RFKJ) just inverted one of the holiest of holies: the Food Pyramid.

“The new guidelines website states that every American should eat 1.2-1.6 grams of animal and/or plant protein per kilogram of body weight per day, along with “healthy fats” from whole foods such as eggs, seafood, meat, full-fat dairy, nuts, seeds, olives and avocados,” The Defender reports.

“The guidelines …will become the default for what’s served to schoolchildren, the military, veterans, the elderly and low-income families that participate in federal programs like WIC and Head Start.” Read More...

Dirty Little Secrets of 2025

Dirty Little Secrets of 2025

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Photo by Kristina Flour on Unsplash

We’re back after taking a holiday hiatus, kicking it off with a recap of 2025. Not with another Top 10 whatever list, which are out there, ad nauseam, but rather with a recap of those pivotal moments or items of the year that faded from the headlines like, well, yesterday’s news. So what are some of these things you missed or otherwise overlooked?

First, eyeballs matter. In the Web 1 days, startups didn’t have supporting business models, so the ‘New Economy’s’ stock in trade/measure of success was the number of eyeballs you could muster.

Dirty Little Secret: eyeballs still matter, and now they’re everywhere. Just ask Astronomer CEO Andy Byron and CPO Kristin Cabot, “who viva la vida’d a little too hard at a Coldplay  and the internet noticed,” says Morning Brew, who singled out the episode as the ‘Viral Moment of the Year.’ Read More...

The Killer App of the Year Is…

The Killer App of the Year Is…

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Image by Igor Omilaev at Unsplash

It was 2021 when Master of the Universe and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg decided it was time to move beyond mere social media. Given his uncanny sense of prescience, he felt he’d found the killer app, going so far as to rename Facebook Meta, reflecting the company’s shift towards developing the metaverse, a virtual environment for social interaction and commerce. From Zuckerberg’s point of view, VR was the future.

Oops.

“All told, the company has lost more than $70 billion… on its enormous long-term VR bet, a staggering sum that has left investors itchy and unimpressed as Zuckerberg has failed to convince the public of the high-fidelity virtual spaces he long insisted we’d be choosing to spend most of our time in,” said Futurism, reporting that  Zuckerberg Basically Giving Up on Metaverse After Renaming Entire Company “Meta”, thus adhering to the tech mantra: fail fast. Read More...

The Internet’s Horrible, Terrible, Very Bad Day.

The Internet’s Horrible, Terrible, Very Bad Day.

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Image by Luan Luan Rezende from Pixabay

It was just another Tuesday, until it wasn’t. 20% of the internet vanished in a heartbeat, all because Cloudflare, “which is supposed to protect the internet from attacks, accidentally “attacked” itself… when a  routine configuration change (database permission update) triggered a hidden bug in its bot protection system, and in an instant, this “gatekeeper” locked everyone out,” Bitget reported.

It’s not the first major outage we’ve witnessed in the past few months. “Amazon’s AWS Goes Down, Takes Out “Half of the Internet,” said Futurism. “Apps and platforms relying on Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon’s cloud computing service, were in a jam… in a striking example of how infrastructure consolidation makes the modern internet vulnerable to a failure by a single major provider.”

And this keeps happening. Days after AWS went dark Microsoft Azure experienced a major outage. “Cisco’s network monitoring service has logged 12 major outages in 2025 so far, 23 in 2024 and 13 in 2023. Cloud service provider outages climbed from 17% to 27% of all outages in 2024, while ISP outages decreased from 83% to 73%,” the Times of India reported. Read More...

Halloween Lessons for Founders

Halloween Lessons for Founders

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 We are still struggling with a broken right thumb, or boo-boo, considering that Halloween is upon us. Scary that it’ll take a few more weeks to heal, and speaking of scary, we decided to consider what lessons Halloween might have for founders.

First, a bit of history. “Some say the festival has its origins in pre-Christian traditions that mark the changing of the seasons,” according to MSN. “The ancient Celtic festival of Samhain, was also a pagan religious tradition that welcomed the end of summer harvest, and the changing of seasons… The Celts reportedly believed that around this time of the year, the veil between the living and the dead was thinner, and spirits could walk the earth. This is where the costumes came in, worn as disguises by festival-goers so they could “avoid being terrorized by all the evil spirits walking the Earth during Samhain.”

“Halloween just has that open world magic that you don’t get any other time of year. It’s this one day where everyone is encouraged to dress up as whatever wild thing they want, and go walking around town together while other groups of kids/teens do the same thing. It’s this wonderful, connected community that doesn’t exist for anything else,” a fan on Reddit commented. Read More...

The Founder’s Mid-Summer Must-Do List

The Founder’s Mid-Summer Must-Do List

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Photo by Ksenia Makagonova on Unsplash

It’s roughly midsummer. Investment deals are still being closed, but they generally tend to slow down or in many cases, take a bit longer in summer, as investors unplug a bit for the season, or at least spend less time vetting deals. They like to kick back, too: travel, spend time with their friends and/or families and generally spend more time minding their SPFs than the latest pitch deck that just came to them over the proverbial transom.

We host an Investor Insights – online – roughly every two weeks, with a different investor each time and have done for years. You’d be surprised at the number of founders who have gotten funded by investors they’ve met at this event, which we always post in our free newsletter.

Andrew Ackerman spoke at a recent Online Investor Insights, and shared great information, as the investors we host often do, each one imparting different advice from a unique perspective – and all valid. In fact, Ackerman, who has sat on both sides of the table as both a founder and an investor, recently published a book entitled The Entrepreneur’s Odyssey (25% off discount code: TEO25) which spells out what every founder needs to know. Read More...

AI and the Long Con

AI and the Long Con

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Image by Roland Steinmann from Pixabay

If you believe the hype, AIs are going to make humans obsolete in less than half a decade. Tick, tick, tick.

Or so they say.

If you scan the articles on LinkedIn these days, you might have noticed that most of them have been run through the LLM mill and are frankly crap, bereft of real-world context, for the most part, and lacking the depth and passion that only carbon-based beings can provide. Read More...