Tag: tech

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 …

TikTok is a thriving learning community—and may be the future of education

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Even pre-pandemic, the decline of traditional education was already underway. With exorbitant costs and a focus on standardized test scores, the industrial education model has become increasingly disconnected from the needs of both students and employers. Worse, little attention goes toward encouraging the skills and mentality needed for lifelong learning. As the cofounder of an education startup, I don’t think it has to be this way. A  recent Harvard study showed that students actually learn more when education is built on “active learning,” which promotes working collaboratively on projects. And now, the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the disruption of education as kids and young adults have been forced to learn from home Read More …

Why some developers are avoiding app store headaches by going web-only

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Earlier this month, the indie developers Feross Aboukhadijeh and John Hiesey launched a new app called Wormhole , which lets users quickly share large, encrypted files with just a link. But unlike most new mobile apps, Wormhole doesn’t show up in Apple’s App Store or the Google Play Store. Instead, Aboukhadijeh and Hiesey released their app exclusively on the web. You can run Wormhole in any browser, and if you use the “Add to Home Screen” function in Safari for iOS or Chrome for Android, the site becomes indistinguishable from a native app. Aboukhadijeh says that Wormhole has a long list of reasons for skipping mobile app stores, including the ease of developing for the web and the lack of platform gatekeepers to worry about. But for him, targeting the web is also just a matter of principle Read More …

Elon Musk just shared a video of a monkey controlling Pong with his brain

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For the first time, Elon Musk has shared video footage of his brain-chip technology Neuralink. The implantable chip allows the brain to communicate with computers. In a video released late Thursday, a macaque monkey implanted with Neuralink’s technology appears to play a Pong-style tennis video game without using a controller of any kind. In the video, a narrator explains that the macaque, named Pager, has two Neuralink chips implanted in his brain. These chips pull and record information from more than 2,000 electrodes that have been placed in Pager’s motor cortex in order to register his desired hand and arm movements. First, Pager plays a computer game using a joystick. Read More …