Spring is in the air, which means nicer weather, longer days, and the overwhelming urge to declutter the house. Might I suggest a dead-tree purge this year? Yes, it’s finally time to go paperless. It’s not quite as easy as just dumping everything into the recycling bin, but there are plenty of tools to help you go digital. Centriq: user manuals in the palm of your hand When we bought our house a while back, the former homeowner—bless his heart—handed over a stack of r
Twitter’s board has agreed to sell the company to Elon Musk, who will take it private. The deal was announced just hours after researchers at Tuft University revealed that Twitter users may not share in Musk’s enthusiasm for a Musk-owned Twitter. A sentiment analysis of 4.5 million tweets shows that while Twitter users very much enjoyed Elon Musk’s tweets criticizing the social media platform, their joy turned to sadness and anger when the multibillionaire tweeted his intent
Customers increasingly want to do business with companies that have a strong commitment to environmental, sustainability, and governance (ESG) goals. To win their business and loyalty, companies need to not only focus on these areas, but be transparent about how they’re doing so. In a recent discussion, Vlad Rozanovich, Lenovo’s North American President, shared how the company is working to achieve science-based ESG metrics by 2025. Watch the full panel, “Walkin
DoorDash, Uber Eats, and Grubhub have become synonymous with on-demand restaurant delivery. DoorDash alone accounts for 59% of U.S. business; Uber Eats has 24% and Grubhub 14%. But the big three have at least 550 competitors: small companies that cover a town or a segment of a state, such as GrubSouth in Alabama, Meals Now in Arkansas, Phoodiis in Tennessee, and Takeout Central in North Carolina. With smaller companies having nowhere near the name recognition of DoorDash, or even Caviar (now own
Of all the rudimentary forms of the metaverse out there, few if any are as fully realized and well used as Epic Games’ Fortnite. Fortnite grew from game to metaverse in an organic way: People began lingering in Fortnite‘s 3D world after they were done playing, just to hang out with friends. Picking up on this, Epic began hosting planned events for Fortniters, such as concerts and movie previews. Earlier this month, Epic released the latest version of its gaming engine, Unreal
Visitors to the Smithsonian Institution will soon be one small step closer to virtually walking on the moon. A new partnership between Meta and the Smithsonian’s Arts and Industries Building on the National Mall will let visitors don a Quest 2 VR headset and experience the 1969 Apollo 11 mission that sent Neil Armstrong and co. to the moon. Participants will first be placed in the Eagle spacecraft, and will then be able to walk on the moon’s surface. “You can literally
Fifty years ago today, photography changed forever. The 3,000-something people assembled at a Polaroid warehouse in Needham, Massachusetts were the first to hear the news—from Polaroid founder/president/resident genius Edwin H. Land himself, who declared it to be a turning point for the medium. Land was presiding over Polaroid’s annual meeting on April 25, 1972, and the change he was talking about came in the form of the company’s newest instant camera. It was indeed a trans
I love tools that save time. Especially when they take care of technical stuff for me automatically. That’s why I use IFTTT (If This, Then That). IFTTT lets you link together the sites or devices you use in creative ways. When you do something with one site or device, something automatically happens elsewhere. You can use it to link your favorite task app to Google Calendar, for example. Or to link your smart speaker (Alexa or Google Home) to an internet-connected light. Or link just
Even during times of conflict on the ground, space has historically been an arena of collaboration among nations. But trends in the past decade suggest that the nature of cooperation in space is shifting, and fallout from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has highlighted these changes. I’m an international relations scholar who studies power distributions in space—who the main players are, what capabilities they possess, and whom they decide to cooperate with. Some scho
In 2021, an investment firm bought 2,000 acres of real estate for about US$4 million. Normally this would not make headlines, but in this case the land was virtual. It existed only in a metaverse platform called The Sandbox. By buying 792 non-fungible tokens on the Ethereum blockchain, the firm then owned the equivalent of 1,200 city blocks. But did it? It turns out that legal ownership in the metaverse is not that simple. The prevailing but lega