Category: Business Planning

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This startup is building a modular, repairable laptop that actually looks good

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A new hardware startup is trying to make a name for itself by selling you fewer new devices. It’s called Framework , and its first product is a laptop that will let users replace or upgrade every component on their own, from the screen to the keyboard to the mainboard inside. That means customers won’t have to pay a premium for repairs when a part breaks, and won’t have to buy an entirely new laptop just to improve one particular component. Nirav Patel, Framework’s founder, says that the startup’s ultimate goal is to build an ecosystem of repairs and upgrades around its products so that users can easily breathe new life into their gadgets Read More …

If DoorDash wins, what do we lose?

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In the first-ever season of Sesame Street , in 1970, cast member Bob McGrath appeared in a memorable sketch where he receives a delivery from his local grocer, a grumpy blue muppet. “Did you get everything I ordered?” McGrath asks. “No,” comes the reply, but he’s helpfully supplemented the delivery with other fresh veggies. McGrath breaks into song, a version of the now iconic “People in Your Neighborhood,” to explain to kids the role a grocer plays in the community. The grocer is the bearer of sustenance. A few weeks ago, during Super Bowl LV, “People in Your Neighborhood” got remixed into an anthem for the app-based delivery platform DoorDash to signal to the world that it is expanding from restaurants to convenience and grocery. In a crisp 60 seconds, a tap dancing Daveed Diggs ( Hamilton )—directed by French auteur Michel Gondry ( Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind )—wanders through a hyperrealized Sesame Street urbanscape with Big Bird, Elmo, and Super Grover, pointing out all the great local businesses. His message: Your neighborhood is a bounty of bakeries, grocery stores, restaurants, and smoothie stalls. And in 2021, DoorDash is the bearer of sustenance. For DoorDash, its Super Bowl bet paid off. It informed tens of millions of viewers that DoorDash could bring them everything from both “big shops and mom and pops,” as Diggs crooned. It told investors that the company had a strategic plan to live up to and grow into its lofty valuation. Finally, it put a happy face on what’s a highly challenging, cutthroat business which has yet to produce a successful company built to last. The ad may have cost somewhere north of $10 million to produce and air, including a $1 million donation to Sesame Workshop, but DoorDash’s market cap increased by $10 billion, to more than $65 billion, in the 10 days after the ad debuted. For almost all of DoorDash’s seven-plus years, two things about the company have been true: It has aspired to be a logistics company that did more than restaurant delivery—one of the first articles ever written about the startup, in March 2014, was headlined ‘DoorDash enters food-delivery fray with much grander ambitions’—and it’s been controversial as it’s pursued those dreams. It has been accused of “ swiping “delivery driver tips, and restaurants have sued it for listing their eateries on its platform without their consent. DoorDash has also fielded complaints from the restaurants it aims to serve for taking too fat a slice of their revenues. Finally, it took part in a $200 million-plus campaign last year to convince Californians to legalize the use of contract labor in delivery, via ballot Proposition 22, thereby preventing workers from attaining the protections that come with employee status. So when DoorDash went public just over two months ago and stock-market investors bid the company’s shares up to 92% higher than its IPO price on its first day, the fervor, which valued the company almost four-times higher than its last private fundraising in June 2020, only further stoked the debate around DoorDash. Read More …

Fry’s is dead, and it’s taking part of Silicon Valley culture with it

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Fry’s Electronics is dead. The chain of computer and consumer electronics superstores is closing its 31 remaining stores , thereby joining Circuit City, CompUSA, and my own beloved RadioShack among the once-mighty retailers of technology products that went into decline and finally collapsed. If you live in one of the 41 states that didn’t have a Fry’s, or you don’t consider yourself much of a nerd, this news might mean nothing to you. But for some of us, Fry’s demise—though inevitable—is a shock. (Happily, Micro Center, another venerable chain skewing more to the eastern half of the U.S., is still with us .) Fry’s eventually had locations as eastward as Indiana, but it began in the Bay Area in 1985, where it was cofounded by three brothers whose father had sold his grocery empire (also called Fry’s ) and given them some of the proceeds Read More …

This new digital rights report flunks the tech giants

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A new report on the human-rights policies of 26 tech and telecom firms around the world delivers a harsh verdict: From Alibaba to Vodafone, they all get an F. The 2020 Ranking Digital Rights Corporate Accountability Index , as previewed in advance of its Wednesday posting, blames this collective failure to get “even close to earning a passing grade” on widespread opacity among these firms in how they analyze, promote, and demote the speech of their customers for marketing, advertising, and content-moderation purposes. That focus on the uses and abuses of algorithms was the major new addition to this corporate scorecard from Ranking Digital Rights (RDR), a project founded by longtime digital-human-rights advocate Rebecca MacKinnon and housed at the nonprofit New America in Washington. Founded with a Knight News Challenge grant and since underwritten by foundation grants and State-Department funding, RDR has graded the policies of tech and telecom companies worldwide since 2015. RDR has yet to hand out a score better than 65 out of 100 (to Google , in 2015 and 2017 ; it’s down to 48 this year). In the new report, Twitter’s score—just 53–was the highest of any company. The report credits Twitter with transparency in such areas as its content-moderation decisions, ad-targeting operations, and government demands that it remove users’ posts. Amazon is way behind its peers in the U.S.” Ellery Biddle, Ranking Digital Rights But the report also knocks the company for not shedding the same light on security practices. In particular, it calls for more disclosure of how Twitter controls employee access to user data, citing Twitter insiders caught spying on Saudi dissidents in 2019 and the July 2020 breach that saw such boldface-name accounts as those of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos hacked to push a Bitcoin scam . Bezos’ own firm Amazon, meanwhile, lands at the bottom of RDR’s digital-platforms list with a score of 20—below even the Chinese e-commerce firm Alibaba, the other company the group added to its 2020 list. The report raps Amazon for disclosing so much less than other U.S. firms about its marketing uses of customer data, its oversight of products in its online store, its rules for use of its of its AWS hosting service , and its responses to government demands for customer information. Amazon’s transparency reports have been skimpier than those of other tech giants for years. The latest runs all of three pages and does not itemize requests for data from Alexa devices Read More …

These states are on track to pass data privacy laws this year

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Over the last decade there has been a reckoning over how digital companies collect personal data, what they do with it, and whether or not they’re capable of protecting it. Online data collection is still not regulated at the federal level in the U.S. But states are slowly embracing policies to ensure that digital companies protect their users—or at least introduce more transparency. Illinois led the way in 2008 with the Biometric Information Privacy Act, a law that lets Illinois residents sue companies that collect their biometric data (face scans, fingerprints, etc.) without their consent. After Europe passed the General Data Protection Regulation in 2016, which entitles people to obtain any data collected on them and have their records deleted, California decided to use it as a framework for its own law. Two years later it introduced its version of the GDPR, called the California Consumer Privacy Act . California has since passed an amendment , called the California Privacy Rights Act, that clarifies the original law and adds a governing body called the California Privacy Protection Agency that can bring action against violators. Read More …