Month: April 2018

Video: Larry Harvey and JP Barlow on Burning Man and tech culture Larry Harvey, founder of the counterculture festival Burning Man, passed away this weekend. He was 70. Harvey created a movement and contributed to the flowering both of counter-culture and, ultimately, of tech culture. Both he and John Perry Barlow, who also passed in February this year after a long period of ill health, were huge advocates of free speech. Barlow wrote lyrics for the Grateful Dead, and then became a digital rights activist in later life. In 2013…

WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum confirms he’s quitting Facebook “It is time for me to move on . . . I’m taking some time off to do things I enjoy outside of technology, such as collecting rare air-cooled Porsches, working on my cars and playing ultimate frisbee” WhatsApp co-founder, CEO, and Facebook board member Jan Koum wrote today. The announcement followed shortly after The Washington Post reported that Koum would leave due to disagreements with Facebook management about WhatsApp user data privacy and weakened encryption. Koum obscured that motive in his note that says…

Artist uses custom-made robots to paint [unable to retrieve full-text content] Barnaby Furnas is one of the first painters in the world including robots in his creative process, using them to enhance his works. Elly Park reports. Source: Reuters Technology

Covee uses blockchain to allow experts worldwide to collaborate Solving complex data-driven problems requires a lot of teamwork. But, of course, teamwork is typically restricted to companies where everyone is working under the same roof. While distributed teams have become commonplace in tech startups, taking that to the next level by linking up disparate groups of people all working on the same problem (but not in the same company) has been all but impossible. However, in theory, you could use a blockchain to do such a thing, where the work…

Senate Democrats plan to push rollback of FCC’s new net neutrality rules in May One of the several ways opponents of the FCC’s new net neutrality rules plan to push back is to use the Congressional Review Act to nix the Commission’s order before it has a chance to take effect. Although Democrats in the Senate are currently one vote short of success, they plan to force the vote soon anyway, perhaps as early as mid-May. As explained in other posts about the steps that can be taken to combat…

Discovering that deckhands make great waiters — and why this matters TX ZhuoContributor TX Zhuo is the managing partner of Fika Ventures, focusing on fintech, enterprise software and marketplace opportunities. More posts by this contributor Winning deals as a new venture capital fund Teaching startups the art of the sale Breakthroughs in HR tech are not only giving employers game-changing tools with which to enhance processes and attract the best talent, they’re also solving longstanding labor gremlins, such as gender pay parity and blind hiring. At the same time, they’re…

Spam filters and AI help figure out what animals do all day The pond-dwelling Hydra is not a very complex little animal but it does have a complex repertoire of moves that aren’t clear until after extensive human observation. Examining these moves took a long time and scientists were never sure that they had seen all of them. Now, thanks to an algorithm used to catch spam, researchers have been able to catalog all of the Hydra’s various moves, allowing them to map those moves to the neurons firing in…