Ever since they were introduced at the turn of the 20th century, England’s iconic double-decker buses have moved billions of people. Now, some of these buses are being converted to serve the country’s most vulnerable population. Over the past 18 months, the number of people experiencing homelessness in the U.K. has almost doubled, with more than 130,000 households made homeless because of COVID-19. For them, somewhere to sleep is vital, but so is access to services like employment
I first experienced the power of bold risk-taking when working for Jeff Bezos at Amazon in the early 2000s, while he was not only inventing the gold standard of e-commerce but also literally building rocket ships. However, it wasn’t until I worked at Google that I truly caught the vision for the moonshot process: I saw it while sitting with the Google X team a day a week for over a decade and watching them invent the technologies that will power our future lives. Google X, now renamed sim
Today, it’s almost impossible to open your phone without scrolling across a mention of the ever-looming metaverse. This convergence of digital worlds—a new realm that grants infinite access to every XR experience imaginable—feels suddenly closer than we ever thought possible. That’s because, in the past, we tried to build these worlds with a heavy focus on AR and VR technology, but we were missing the underlying digital economies that would help make users stick. To s
If you’re a fan of getting stuff done with keyboard shortcuts, check out Omni, a new Chrome and Firefox extension for quickly navigating by keyboard. (The Chrome version also works with other Chromium-based browsers, such as Microsoft Edge and Brave.) Once installed, press Ctrl+Shift+K (or Cmd+Shift+K on a Mac) to bring up Omni’s action bar, then start typing to search through all your open browser tabs. Selecting a tab from the list will take you straight to it.
But Omni doesn&#x
Can you believe Makayla was dropped from Bama Rush? Do you think Couch Guy was cheating? Did you see Gabby Petito’s last post before she went missing? If you don’t spend much time online, you may not recognize these names. But on TikTok, their stories became sensationalized, memeified, hashtagged and rehashed. The most recent is “#WestElmCaleb.” Women took to TikTok to share their experiences of being peppered with affection, strung along and ultimately ghosted by a N
It’s been a dramatic and trying week for the crypto faithful. During the past week, Bitcoin abruptly fell to half of its November value. The cryptocurrency, which had cost more than $67,000 per coin in November, dove from $42,369 on January 18 down to $33,113 on January 24. Etherium hit $3,263 on the 21st, then dropped to $2,159 on the 24th. The crypto sell-off may have been triggered by rumors that the U.S. government will soon regulate digital currency. The market may also have been rea
The strategy-based word game Wordle hit the internet like a bomb cyclone storm this winter. Nobody was safe. Either you’ve since become hooked enough to find ways to slake your word-thirst in between games, or you’re part of the inevitable backlash. Anyone in that first camp, though, will probably appreciate the Redditor who recently hacked their way into finding the 10 most-used letters in the game. Wordle is, for the somehow-still-uninitiated, a solo Hangman where the word is alw
It’s not normal for your mail to arrive with the envelopes already open. Nor is it reasonable to expect that Amazon or FedEx box to land on your doorstep unsealed and agape. So why don’t Americans feel any different about the 5.5 billion unencrypted SMS text messages they send every single day? This analogy is the central point of the messaging platform WhatsApp’s first-ever U.S. brand campaign.
WhatsApp has about 2 billion daily users across 180 countries, and they send mo
I first noticed them about two weeks ago: the squares. Grids of black, orange, and green square emoji flooding my Twitter feed. The people posting them seemed to be happy about them. It turned out they came from a game: Wordle, a daily word-guessing game by artist/programmer Josh Wardle. It’s simple enough: there’s a new word each day, and you have six chances to guess it. Get it right, and you get a cute little emoji grid to show off how you did. With the rise of Wordle
Entrepreneurship is in a new moment, with a new set of circumstances and pressures, and a new collective cadre of players. Success in venture capital going forward will become less about chasing momentum and more about embracing collaboration. This is no small mindset shift. It’s an evolutionary imperative. The successful founders of tomorrow simply won’t look like the ones who came before them, and they certainly won’t look like today’s venture capitalists. Surviving