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After explaining an idea to a friend, I’ll often ask them to explain it back to me. Not only does that help me understand whether the idea is landing, but it also helps me pick up new ways to explain it. When I first thought about writing this book, the bestselling author Dan Pink listened to my pitch and then explained it back to me, only far more eloquently Read More …
In early February, Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and one of the planet’s wealthiest entrepreneurs, dropped the bombshell announcement that he would be stepping down as CEO to free up more time for his other passions. Though Bezos listed a few targets for his creativity and energy— The Washington Post and philanthropy through the Bezos Earth Fund and Bezos Day One Fund—one of the highest-potential areas is his renewed commitment and focus on his suborbital spaceflight project, Blue Origin. Before space became a frontier for innovation and development for privately held companies, opportunities were limited to nation states and the private defense contractors who supported them. In recent years, however, billionaires such as Bezos, Elon Musk, and Richard Branson have lowered the barrier to entry. Since the launch of its first rocket, Falcon 1, in September of 2008, Musk’s commercial space transportation company SpaceX has gradually but significantly reduced the cost and complexity of innovation beyond the Earth’s atmosphere. With Bezos’s announcement, many in the space sector are excited by the prospect of those barriers being lowered even further, creating a new wave of innovation in its wake. “What I want to achieve with Blue Origin is to build the heavy-lifting infrastructure that allows for the kind of dynamic, entrepreneurial explosion of thousands of companies in space that I have witnessed over the last 21 years on the internet,” Bezos said during the Vanity Fair New Establishment Summit in 2016. During the event, Bezos explained how the creation of Amazon was only possible thanks to the billions of dollars spent on critical infrastructure—such as the postal service, electronic payment systems, and the internet itself—in the decades prior. “On the internet today, two kids in their dorm room can reinvent an industry, because the heavy-lifting infrastructure is in place for that,” he continued. “Two kids in their dorm room can’t do anything interesting in space. . . . I’m using my Amazon winnings to do a new piece of heavy-lifting infrastructure, which is low-cost access to space.” In the less than 20 years since the launch of SpaceX’s first rocket, space has gone from a domain reserved for nation states and the world’s wealthiest individuals to everyday innovators and entrepreneurs. Today, building a space startup isn’t rocket science. Related: Jeff Bezos: Blue Origin ‘is the most important work I’m doing’ The next frontier for entrepreneurship According to the latest Space Investment Quarterly report published by Space Capital, the fourth quarter of 2020 saw a record $5.7 billion invested into 80 space-related companies, bringing the year’s total capital investments in space innovation to more than $25 billion. Overall, more than $177 billion of equity investments have been made in 1,343 individual companies in the space economy over the past 10 years. “It’s kind of crazy how quickly things have picked up; 10 years ago when SpaceX launched their first customer they removed the barriers to entry, and we’ve seen all this innovation and capital flood in,” says Chad Anderson, the managing partner of Space Capital. “We’re on an exponential curve here Read More …
The mind-numbing inanity of last week’s GameStop hearing on Capitol Hill was just as predictable as the worthless result. Of course members of both parties wanted in on the media frenzy surrounding Robinhood and WallStreetBets, the Reddit forum where thousands of amateur investors mounted a historic campaign to pump (and dump) the stock of a left-for-dead video game retailer. Talking heads on CNBC were alarmed, and so the House Financial Services Committee ordered hearings, subpoenaed witnesses, and played for the cameras at every turn. By the end of last Thursday’s spectacle, the consensus was clear: We learned absolutely nothing. Not surprisingly, Congress focused on the wrong culprit. Yes, Robinhood’s marketing as “the platform for the average investor” ended up conflicting with their treatment of the average investor once they had to stop taking GameStop trades, making them look like greedy hypocrites. (Fast Company has a brief explainer here .) And yes, the use of Reddit and Twitter to drive market forces and propel certain stocks is new and a little scary. But Robinhood, Reddit, and Twitter were all using their platforms in the exact ways they were intended: to spread and drive information and access. If there’s a villain in the GameStop saga, it’s the federal regulators—in this case, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)—who failed to notice that the world was changing and didn’t bother to update the rules accordingly. By definition, regulation will always lag behind innovation. Regulators can’t know what rules are needed until an entrepreneur first thinks of the new idea, turns it into actual technology, turns that technology into a business, and then starts selling its product or service. But once that happens, it’s not necessary to wait for a debacle before updating the rules. In the case of GameStop, the two-day settlement requirement meant that Robinhood couldn’t keep taking trades absent raising more capital. That two-day waiting period made sense in a previous era—one before blockchain and the cloud. But that waiting period still exists because of inertia and complexity—and, historically, because it produced extra revenue for brokerages—not because it’s technologically necessary. Real-time settlement is not only feasible, it would have prevented all of the harms caused to Robinhood’s investors. The SEC knows that, but it didn’t act on it. That was a mistake. GameStop is but one example. Take something more significant like self-driving cars and trucks Read More …
An Israeli biometrics startup called AnyVision with ties to Israel’s military has applied for a U.S. patent on technology that tells drones how to maneuver to capture better facial recognition images of people on the ground. Facial recognition technology has become widely used by law enforcement around the world, but the technology is controversial in part for its accuracy issues, especially when recognizing Black and brown faces. Activists are now calling for ending its use entirely , and police use of facial recognition has already been banned in a host of U.S. cities. The patent application, titled “Adaptive Positioning of Drones for Enhanced Face Recognition,” describes a computer vision system that analyzes the angle of a drone camera in relation to the face of a person on the ground, then instructs the drone on how to improve its vantage point. The system can then send that image through a machine-learning model trained to classify individual faces. The model sends back a classification with a probability score. If the probability score falls below a certain threshold, the whole process starts over again. A future defined by this type of mass surveillance would “obliterate privacy and anonymity in public as we know it,” said Kade Crockford, head of the Technology for Liberty Program at the ACLU of Massachusetts who’s led the charge on banning facial recognition in Massachusetts cities, in an interview with Fast Company last year. “Weirdly this is not a hugely controversial issue for voters. People don’t want the government to be tracking them by their face every time they leave their house.” People don’t want the government to be tracking them by their face every time they leave their house.” Kade Crockford As with any patent application, there’s no guarantee the technology will show up in a real product. But it does address a very real technical problem with existing facial recognition systems. Such systems usually process images captured by stationary cameras. Capturing a clear angle on someone’s face, and compensating for bad ones, is always a challenge with these systems. Shooting video from drones that can move around and intelligently zero in on the right angle is a way of taking the chance out of the process. The application, which was originally reported by Forbes cybersecurity writer Thomas Brewster, was filed last summer and published by the U.S. Patent Office on February 4. AnyVision , which was founded in 2015, sells artificial intelligence designed to let cameras in retail stores recognize the faces of people on “watch lists” who have been convicted of theft in the past. Read More …
Every big tech company these days seems to have a health tracker, and now that includes Facebook. Last week, The Information reported that the social networking company is working on a wearable health tracker it’s planning to launch next year. At first glance, it’s unclear why Facebook would invest in a piece of hardware that seems unrelated to its core business. But the company has actually been creeping into the health category for years through a series of projects that haven’t garnered a ton of attention. There are a few reasons why Facebook might want to get into the wearable business. Health aside, Facebook may be keen to put its apps even closer to consumers, and The Information article indicates the watch will have an emphasis on messaging. A tracker could help boost engagement among Facebook’s billions of users by sending them notifications for messages or other health reminders. It could also jump-start Facebook’s purported ambitions to impact public health. But Facebook’s data-mining practices make a foray into healthcare controversial Read More …