Tech

Last summer, a secretive space company took up residence in a massive warehouse in the sun-soaked industrial neighborhood that surrounds Long Beach Airport. The company is building a massive centrifuge to accelerate rockets and send them screaming into space.

The likes of Amazon, Google, Samsung, Apple and others are all competing for smart home dominance – but what drove so many of us to invite these multinational corporations into the highly personal spaces where we live?

This Hotel lists hotel, hostel and bed & breakfast recommendations from trusted experts like New York Times, Lonely Planet, Fodor’s, Frommers, CNN and many more.

China was praised for a law it passed in 2002 — the world’s first integrated law dedicated to combating desert expansion. With this goal in mind, China has carried out several projects that have been successful, including at one desert in northern China.

Masayoshi Son, SoftBank’s chief executive, was hailed as a kingmaker in 2016 when he unveiled the Vision Fund. Using the cash hoard, Mr. Son poured money into fledgling companies across the world, many of which have a business model of hiring contractors who deliver their services. Above all, he urged these start-ups to grow as fast as possible.

In the last 10 years, Lego has grown into nothing less than the Apple of toys: a profit-generating, design-driven miracle built around premium, intuitive, highly covetable hardware that fans can’t get enough of. An exclusive look inside the company’s top-secret Future Lab.

Within Alphabet, Google’s parent company, it is grouped alongside Deepmind in “Other Bets”, although in that metaphor, X is more like the gambler. Its stated aim is to pursue what it calls “moonshots” – to try to solve humanity’s great problems by inventing radical new technologies.

What Instagram has allowed me to do is to employ a kind of digital physics, to warp my experience of space and time in my favor. In the offline world, I spend precious hours with her and then she disappears. But online, she is with me again when I post, and then again each time I receive a notification.

Venture capitalists have all aligned on the best solution: kitchens that only serve delivery customers, known as “cloud”, “ghost” or “dark” kitchens, that use a combination of advanced food preparation, underused real estate and algorithm-driven optimisation to lower overheads and increase output.

Tracking relationships with customer relationship management software. Automating Tinder date-hunting with chatbots. ‘Homeless’ camping dates. Techies are putting their stamp on San Francisco’s dating scene.

In the rapid-fire age of digital everything, with young listeners eager for discovery, the ground has shifted beneath record companies’ feet and catalog departments are being called upon to be hubs of innovation and fresh creativity.

While diabetics anxiously awaited the release of commercial systems, tech-savvy diabetics and their loved ones worked on do-it-yourself systems. How could a bunch of hackers, working in their free time, create something medical manufacturing companies had yet to put on the market?

The length of time our “collective attention” is on any given event has grown shorter, and topics become popular and then drop out of public view at an accelerating rate. It’s no surprise if it feels harder and harder to dwell deeply on any topic.

Jeff Bezos’s big bet is that he can make buying from Amazon so effortless that we won’t notice the company’s creeping grip on commerce and its underlying infrastructure, and that we won’t notice what that dominance costs us. Amazon has unprecedented power to steer our choices.

Google’s increasingly hands-on approach to search results, which has taken a sharp upturn since 2016, marks a shift from its founding philosophy of ‘organizing the world’s information’ to one that is far more active in deciding how that information should appear.

Holograms have the power to resurrect the dead. Want to see Michael Jackson live in concert? Digital technology can bring him back to life. Within 10 years, DJs will be replaced by holograms, we’ll use them to speak to one another, and they might even take our jobs.

In 2013, Bill Gates admitted ctrl+alt+del was a mistake and blamed IBM. With the del key across the keyboard from the other two, it seemed unlikely that all three would be accidentally pressed at the same time. Here’s the story of how the key combination became famous in the first place.

Life in the 21st century, we are told, is faster than ever. Time is scarce, the pace of everyday life is accelerating, and everyone complains about how busy they are. For all the smart tech, we still feel pressed for time. Are digital services the problem, or are we humans to blame?

How an insecure, acid-dropping hippie kid reinvented himself as a technological visionary – and changed the world. He rewrote the rules of business, combining Sixties idealism with greed-is-good capitalism. He never did anything first, but he did it best.

Whitney Wolfe Herd set out to build a safer dating app for women, but it’s not clear that she’s made a measurable difference. According to a company user survey, about a third of Bumble women had received lewd photos from men, whether through text or other social media that Bumble couldn’t control.

The limitations of color on older 1980’s computers and game consoles such as the Nintendo Entertainment System and the Commodore 64 explained.

With an aggressive marketing campaign and a new star in Sonic the Hedgehog, Sega solidified itself as a top contender in the industry and a force to be reckoned with. However, its reign at the top was short-lived, as it eventually caused its own downfall with a series of tragic mistakes.

Create a social network or risk everything. That was the original pitch for Google’s Facebook rival, Google+, a refrain hammered over and over by the social network’s chief architect, Vic Gundotra, in meetings with the company’s top brass.

20,000 former colleagues staged a walkout against Andy Rubin and other alleged sexual predation among senior management – Why did the man who won Google the smartphone wars get paid $90 million to leave?