The streaming wars raged on in 2021. The giant players—Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and Disney Plus—created more high-profile events to cement the viewing habits formed in the pandemic, and late entrants (welcome, Paramount Plus!) tried to make a dent in people’s streaming budget. All of the services benefited from the shift away from seeing movies in theaters, but viewers also began migrating off of couches and heading back into IRL social gatherings as well as returning to
From content recommendations on your Netflix dashboard to interactions with Amazon voice assistants to AirBnB, Uber, and Google—all couldn’t do what they are doing without AI. But these are some of the world’s most successful companies. What about the rest? This might be the intelligence era, but the vast majority of companies have yet to tap into its potential. And it’s not that they’re doing anything wrong. Big tech companies were data-first from the start. S
Most people try their voice assistant for a few simple tasks—asking Siri the weather, or Google a random factoid—but don’t dive much deeper. Maybe it seems too complicated, you’re worried about privacy, or you just feel weird talking to yourself. This is where I was a few years ago. But during the pandemic, with more time at home, I started to use voice for more tasks. I found it helpful ergonomically—voice gave my eyes, fingers, back, and neck a break from str
Welp, 2021 is nearly behind us. And if you ask me, it wasn’t quite the about-face from 2020 we’d been hoping for. It wasn’t as rough as last year. But it was still kinda rough. But! Dogged optimists that we are, we refuse to be cowed by doom-saying, humbuggery, and fashionable cynicism. So we’re delighted to present you, dear readers, with five tech-flavored things from the past year you can feel unequivocally good about.
- A flotilla of plastic-eating ocea
Meta, née Facebook, had a rough year in 2021, in public opinion if not financially. Revelations from whistleblower Frances Haugen, first detailed in a Wall Street Journal investigative series and then presented in congressional testimony, show that the company was aware of the harm it was causing. Growing concerns about misinformation, emotional manipulation and psychological harm came to a head this year when Haugen released internal company documents showing that the company’s own
The first time I tried to raise venture capital was a flat-out failure. I was an operator turned founder, and my startup, although early, had real velocity. But my attempts at raising went nowhere, and at the time I didn’t understand why. Back then, I had a sense that angels were different than VCs, and that some VCs invested more than others. But mostly I was just focused on my company, and under immense pressure to get funding. Any funding. So I plowed ahead, treated all investors alike
When it comes to gifts for yourself, one possibility stands out above all others. And in and of itself, it doesn’t even cost a dime. I’m talking about the gift of time—the intangible asset that’s always in shortest supply in my life. And given the fact that you’re here and reading this, I’m guessing that might be true for you, too. Well, here in this digital domain of ours, there’s no better way to shave seconds off your day than to unearth and em
We live in an era of big promises but results that fall far short of expectations. Take the failed construction startup Katerra. Founded in 2015, the company claimed it would use the approaches of digital and mass production industries, including glued and laminated “mass timber” products and modular design, to “disrupt” the construction industry, long seen as a bastion of backward, inefficient craft labor. Many people enthusiastically bought into this vision. Over si
It was the best of times; it was the worst of times. Actually, it was mostly the worst of times. It’s hard to look back on the past year and think of it as a monumental improvement over 2020. And that’s just as true in the tech space. Chip shortages affected every corner of the industry, making it hard to find a PlayStation 5, new graphics card or even a new car and Facebook got so much bad press, it changed its name. There were some good moments, though, along with some truly awfu
When the pandemic forced millions of teams to embrace remote work, tools like Dropbox, Zoom, Slack, and Atlassian’s Jira and Confluence made it possible to transition almost overnight. But the switch was rushed, and now we’re starting to see cracks in the foundation. The next step is replicating the human interactions and connections we’re accustomed to in the physical world in a digital one. The metaverse presents a massive opportunity here. New people are joining our