
More than 400,000 people have signed on to Twitter Blue, the $8-per-month subscription that CEO Elon Musk launched late last year. That not-insignificant total comes despite mass confusion over the social media giant’s verified blue check mark program.
Musk had previously tweeted that users who had been verified under the old program—celebrities, public officials, journalists, and the like—would lose their so-called legacy blue check mark on April 1 unless they
Venture capital in the United States this year is on pace to see the lowest fundraising since 2017, according to new data from the Q1 2023 PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor.
The VC industry has slowed dramatically from the highs of 2021, as broader market pressures and increased interest rates have led VC firms to focus on fundamentals rather than on pushing their portfolio companies forward with a growth-at-all-cost mindset.
The report says that the momentum gained in 2021 i

With countless users jumping off the Twitter train since Elon Musk took over, and millions more expected to leave in the coming year, alternatives to the platform were bound to emerge. Now a bold new competitor has arrived, and it comes from the email subscription platform Substack.
The publishing platform announced a new Notes feature today. It closely resembles Twitter in its design, and, much like “tweeting,” allows users to share posts, images, and ideas. It also h

“3-16.”
It’s a term that’s been uttered thousands of times within the conference rooms and hallways at Microsoft over the past few months. It refers to March 16, the day the company announced that it had brought generative AI models codeveloped with OpenAI into its Microsoft 365 productivity suite. Under the new initiative, every app, from Outlook to Word to Teams, will have a generative AI-powered “Copilot.” The technology is currently bein
Our country’s infrastructure is rapidly deteriorating, and it goes much further than the train derailments in Ohio and Texas. According to the White House, 20% of U.S. highways and major roads, and 45,000 bridges, are in poor condition. Overall, America’s infrastructure gets a barely passing C- grade.
Historically, the infrastructure sector has been slow to adopt new technology, but technology is exactly what we need to fix what is broken. We can modernize the traditio

In January, Seattle Public Schools sued social media companies, including TikTok and Meta, alleging that they’d helped cause the youth mental health crisis. Florida and New Jersey followed suit in February. In March, California’s San Mateo County Board of Education and Pennsylvania’s Bucks County also hopped on the Big Tech lawsuit bandwagon.
“For too long these companies have exploited developing minds without consequence, exchanging our children’

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For a tech pundit, the smartest possible thing to say about Apple’s upcoming mixed-reality headset right now might be absolutely nothing.
Until Apple announces the gadget—possibly to be named

Semiconductors are to the 21st century what petroleum was to the 20th: essential to economic growth, military power, and a modern, connected society. The U.S. invented semiconductors but today produces only 12% of the world’s supply.
Recent shortages and supply chain interruptions have proven the risk of relying on foreign production (where the U.S. is not always the first customer in line) while rising geopolitical tensions have made semiconductor supply an urgent priority f

Monsters, AI, scary DALL-E art, Marcus Aurelius, cannibalism. An interview that covers such a wide range of topics was probably a pretty good chinwag. And that’s what happened when Fast Company spoke to Emmy Award-winning actor Paul Giamatti and philosopher/author Stephen Asma about their new podcast—called, appropriately enough Chinwag—which debuts today on all major podcast platforms.
The podcast finds Giamatti and Asma talking each week with a different celeb

On Tuesday, the U.S. Defense Department said it has named Apple executive Doug Beck to lead its Defense Innovation Unit, a special group that seeks out and certifies commercial sector technologies for use by the armed forces.
Beck will report to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, creating a direct-report line between the DIU chief and secretary of defense for the first time in years. With that change, and the appointment to the role of an executive from a high-profile tech industry com