10 time-saving Windows keyboard shortcuts you should be using

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I love my mouse. It’s one of my favorite tools! And I’m not one of those keyboard-shortcut snobs who thinks anyone can just gallivant their way through Windows 10 with a series of finger gymnastics. That being said, there are a handful of things I do again and again in Windows 10 each day that I can do far faster using their respective keyboard shortcuts. There’s no need to become a shortcut whiz: just learn these 10 and you’ll be light-years ahead of all the mouse-only people out there. Windows Key + D: show and hide the Desktop You’ve got a thousand windows open but you need to find one of the files on your desktop, which also number in the thousands Read More …

Coinbase’s $100 billion lPO provides an alternate investment to bitcoin

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Coinbase , the San Francisco-based cryptocurrency exchange, is going public on April 14. The company will trade under the ticker COIN and list 114,850,769 shares on the NASDAQ with an initial valuation of $100 billion. Instead of following the traditional initial public offering (IPO) route, Coinbase plans to post its shares straight on the NASDAQ exchange via a direct listing, a technique pioneered by big names like Spotify and Palantir in recent years. Whereas an IPO involves a company creating new shares and having an underwriter that buys them for a set price and then sells them to the market, in a direct listing a company sells existing shares and has no underwriter. But what is Coinbase and why is this such as important development in the cryptocurrency market? The Coinbase business model Coinbase was founded in 2012 by Brian Armstrong, a former engineer at Airbnb, and Fred Ehrsam, who was a trader at Goldman Sachs. Their mission was to make investing and transacting in cryptocurrencies easier, more efficient, and fairer. The company has since risen to become the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the U.S. Even though there are numerous other exchanges around the world with considerably larger trading volumes, including Binance, Huobi, and OKEx, Coinbase’s growth has been incredible lately. Read More …

Roku’s new Voice Remote Pro might have just outsmarted smart speakers

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More than six years after Amazon introduced its first Echo speaker, Roku is finally releasing its own entertainment product with hands-free voice controls. But instead of building a smart speaker, Roku is adding “Hey Roku” voice commands to one of its remotes. With the Roku Voice Remote Pro, users can ask to launch apps, play specific videos, listen to music, control playback, or turn off the TV. The remote costs $30 on its own, and Roku hasn’t announced any plans to bundle it with its current line of streaming players. The announcement—one of several that the company is making today—is vintage Roku. The giant of streaming video believes devoutly in incrementalism, so while Amazon and Google have been selling millions of smart speakers that integrate with their respective Fire TV and Chromecast streaming platforms, Roku has hung back and waited for its own voice technology to improve. Read More …

You can talk to this new digital re-creation of Albert Einstein

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A maker of “digital humans” for customer service and chat applications has developed a digital version of Albert Einstein that you can talk to, either by speaking or typing. The company, New Zealand- and Austin-based UneeQ, worked with Hebrew University to get the Nobel Prize-winning physicist’s look, voice, and mannerisms right, Daryl Reva, its senior VP of marketing, told me. Wolfram Research, the creator of the WolframAlpha “computational intelligence” tool, contributed the natural language engine and knowledge base that acts as the digital human’s brain, Reva says. If you’d like to ask Albert some questions, click here . Since the Einstein character wasn’t designed for open-ended chats (UneeQ has another digital human called Sophie for that), he won’t answer just any question, but seems to respond best to questions on a finite set of subjects. You can ask digital Einstein questions about the theory of relativity and about his early life, for example. I asked him how he does his hair, and he was ready for me Read More …

Amazon’s healthcare push is a threat—and an opportunity—for the industry

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That Amazon Prime membership could soon come with a free same-day doctor’s appointment. The COVID-19 pandemic has made it clear that we need a robust digital healthcare system that extends from the doctor’s office into the home—and the e-commerce Goliath just jumped into the ring prepared to win it all. Investors have flocked to the sector over the past 12 months, and some Wall Street analysts have projected several years of robust growth. However, between last December, when news of Amazon’s planned move into healthcare began leaking in the media, and this March when the company officially announced its plans , stock prices for legacy health companies such as CVS, Walgreens, and digital-first disruptors along the lines of GoodRx lost billions of dollars in value and reshuffled the presumed leaderboard. What can existing healthcare providers do to survive and thrive in the face of what will surely be heated competition? The simple answer is to take a page directly from Amazon’s playbook: Create an incredibly easy-to-use one-stop digital shop for everything prospective patients could ever need and pay obsessive attention to customer experience and satisfaction. Amazon is renowned for taking costly business expenditures—cloud computing, logistics, and fulfillment—and developing solutions that solve internal challenges while also becoming profitable to the company. Next up on the list is healthcare. Amazon plans to offer 24/7 chat access to clinicians, nationwide telemedicine access, in-home diagnostics, health provider house calls in select cities, and prescription drug delivery, all within an easy-to-use interface. Consumers have come to expect frictionless experiences online and in the physical world. Want a ride somewhere? Press a button. Need your groceries? Press a button. However, today, far too many people seeking healthcare must navigate an endless sea of paperwork, providers, insurance companies, and websites from the mid-’90s. And after all that, they often don’t walk away with what they need. Because healthcare in America is not user-friendly, people defer or delay care and let prescriptions go unfilled or unused. Thousands of lives are lost as a result, and these challenges cost the U.S Read More …