Gig work has transformed transportation, hospitality, and food. Why not law, too?
Lawtrades, a legal gig work platform founded by Raad Ahmed and Ashish Walia, launched its app this month to help connect its 2,000-plus legal professionals with customers (mostly mid-market and enterprise companies). The goal is for corporate attorneys to essentially run their own practices and take back their time.
For Ahmed, the idea for the app was spurred by first-person accoun
Lyft debuted autonomous vehicles on Thursday for riders in Austin through a partnership with self-driving startup Argo AI and Ford.
The announcement marks Lyft’s latest foray into the autonomous vehicle (AV) space via partnership. Lyft is far from alone on that front: Competitors, including Uber and DoorDash, have also worked with outside autonomous companies to bring robots to consumers.
Gig companies have long eyed automation as a means to cut down cost
On Monday, an app designed to help pull timely information from email messages, like package tracking numbers, was unveiled by one of the companies that helped bring email to the masses: Yahoo.
While many people have moved on from their Yahoo addresses since the company’s heydey in the Web’s infancy—Yahoo first launched free email accounts 25 years ago in October 1997—the company says that one in four U.S. consumers still has a Yahoo Mail accou
Meta said Thursday it has figured out how to teach an AI to create original video content based on text input. The result is a still-in-development generative tool called “Make-a-Video.” You might type in “make a video of a dog riding a horse,” and voilà: AI creates the image. The system can also create videos based on images or other video fed into the system.
That could be great, even revolutionary, for content creators—but also a boo
“Somebody once said ‘numbers is the language of business.’ No, it’s not. Language is the language of business,” says Brian Chesky, cofounder and CEO of Airbnb. “The key is that, it’s not that creativity should drive everything. It’s that it should be in the room. It should be in the conversation.”
On this week’s Most Innovative Companies Podcast (can’t access a link), Chesky shares how he navigated bot
Amazon came out swinging at last week’s annual hardware event with the announcement of a slew of new gadgets due out this fall, including a pen-equipped Kindle, an upgraded Fire TV streaming box, and a bedside clock with contactless sleep sensors.
But the most interesting part of the news wasn’t any individual gadget. Rather, it was the benignity of the products: Instead of seeing flying security-camera drones and virtual barking guard dogs to fend off perceived threa
Google’s introduction of its new Pixel 7 and Pixel 7 Pro phones Thursday features renewed attention to what can seem the least interesting part of these devices: the app through which you place and receive phone calls.
“We see a big opportunity to apply Google’s AI to yield a better experience,” says Jonathan Eccles, group product manager for Google’s Phone app. “Time spent on a phone should be time well spent.”
The Pixel 7
For everyone tired of picking the perfect real or illustrated Zoom background, a startup called the TMRW Foundation is releasing a videoconferencing alternative called Room, which places participants in a video game-like 3D environment.
Founder and CEO Cevat Yerli says humans have evolved enough to interact in 3D spaces, not only to look at Brady Bunch-style images of each other in typical video chat software.
“It’s a tiring experience, as opposed to video g
Uber announced on Thursday a 10-year partnership with autonomous vehicle-maker Motional to offer driverless rides using the company’s electric robotaxis. Motional’s IONIQ 5-based robotaxis will be available to riders booking an UberX or Uber Comfort Electric.
The move is Uber’s first foray into robotaxis within its rideshare segment since the company sold off its own self-driving unit, Advanced Technologies Group, to Aurora in December 2020. The first trips wit
Everette Taylor, former chief marketing officer at Artsy, has taken over as Kickstarter’s CEO, the Brooklyn-based crowdfunding company tells Fast Company. His appointment caps a roughly six-month search for a new chief, after Aziz Hasan announced his departure.
He’ll be inheriting a company that’s had a difficult few years, wrestling with layoffs, increased competition, and blowback over its plans to move to blockchain technology. As he steps into his new