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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 …

Try this creative tactic to improve an idea or hone your pitch

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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 …

How Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are ushering in a new era of space startups

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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 …

Watch the ‘Perseverance’ rover land on Mars in this just-released video

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Since we began sending probes to the surface of Mars, our experience of their landings was a nail-biting silence, punctured only by a NASA Mission Control engineer announcing milestones in the spacecraft progress. That all changed with the Mars 2020 Perseverance rover filming its February 18 landing . Six of the 23 onboard commercial cameras shot high-definition footage of the supersonic descent—dubbed the “ 7 minutes of terror “—and first surface movements. Three cameras trained on the parachute, while another three videoed the descent stage, rover, and approaching ground. Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), the Pasadena, California, facility that built the rover and manages the $2.7 billion mission, premiered its high-resolution video during today’s briefing . This marks the first time we’re able to watch a spacecraft land on another planet. “These images and videos are the stuff of our dreams,” said Mars 2020 entry, descent, and landing (EDL) lead engineer Allen Chen. “I just couldn’t believe my eyes; the images were better than I could have imagined,” JPL’s Adam Nelessen told Fast Company about his initial reaction to the footage. An EDL lead systems engineer, Nelessen focused on the EDL camera technology. “There is a lot that we can learn from the imagery. One of the best engineering outcomes is going to be recording the inflation of the parachute at a high frame rate. We’re going to learn just how well this thin piece of fabric is actually performing.” This is also the first time EDL engineers have seen the landing process unfurl in its entirety, as they were only able to run tests in separate stages on Earth. The footage revealed that the EDL navigation system came to within 16 feet of its landing target. The video also gave a better sense of the debris that kicks up during landing, particularly as NASA looks to land increasingly heavier items on Mars. “We worry about dust and sand confounding radar sensors and making our landing more difficult,” he adds. “So seeing what the dust environment and hazards are like in the area have really good engineering uses for us.” Plus, observing the landing site on approach offers a head start on how to best navigate the area to achieve the science objectives. More raw images of Mars can be found here . High-resolution photo from the descent stage camera of Perseverance being lowered to the Martian surface via the sky-crane mechanism Read More …

6G internet? Internet pioneer Vint Cerf isn’t buying the hype

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Vint Cerf has seen a lot of upgrades to online access since he cowrote the internet’s core Transmission Control Protocol in 1974. So you’ll have to forgive him for a certain glibness in the recap he recently shared of the last 15 years of wireless connectivity: “2G to 3G to 4G to 5G and whatever the heck 6G is.” Yes, 6G. Although 5G wireless broadband is still emerging from a haze of hype , its still largely hypothetical successor was sparking discussion even before President Trump’s February 2019 tweet demanding “5G, and even 6G, technology in the United States as soon as possible.” The “6G and the Future of the Internet” online panel that featured Cerf (since 2005, a VP and the chief internet evangelist at Google) didn’t put 6G in much of a sharper focus. Instead, he used the event hosted by the nonprofit research organization Mitre to suggest two other pieces of technology that play a critical role in the internet’s future: low-Earth-orbit satellites and undersea cables. If Elon manages to get all 24,000 satellites up, in theory it will be impossible to avoid Internet access.” Vint Cerf on Starlink The activation of swarms of low-orbit satellites, Cerf told Mitre Labs chief futurist Charles Clancy, can help address the enormous demand for rural broadband . Meanwhile, the rapid deployment of undersea cables is helping to ensure that no one country can obtain any sort of chokehold on international internet traffic. Cerf said he sees SpaceX’s growing Starlink constellation and other low-orbit systems as a potential breakthrough, thanks to their potential for fast bandwidth, moderate latency, and near-universal access. “If Elon manages to get all 24,000 satellites up, in theory it will be impossible to avoid Internet access because these things, some of them will even be in polar orbits,” he said of SpaceX founder Elon Musk’s ultimate goal for Starlink Read More …