It all started—and this will come as no surprise to anyone who knows a teenage boy—with sneakers. Specifically, the Nike Kobe 7 Easter shoe.
Like much of Gen Z, Steven Schwartz, a restless 13-year-old living outside of Chicago, and Cameron Zoub (ditto), met online, specifically in a Facebook group. Their first messages to each other were about those sneakers. Specifically, developing bots that could snap up and then resell them. They became business partners before the
Life is unfair. Most parents inform their children as much at an early age, possibly to explain why another child has a cooler toy. What many of those parents understandably don’t mention to their kids, however, is that the unfairness of life is unfairly distributed.
Income inequality, for instance, is a major factor in life’s unfairness, and in America it’s only gotten worse as of late. According to a CNN report, the top 10% of wage earners saw their incomes ri
This week the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on House Administration convened an unusually well-attended hearing with a panel of government technology leaders from an alphabet soup of congressional agencies, including the Library of Congress (LOC), Government Publishing Office (GPO), Government Accountability Office (GAO), and the House Chief Administrative Office (CAO). The purpose of this gathering of the acronyms: to discuss how AI could make Congress govern more effectively.
Next month, in EU member states, third-party app stores will appear on the iPhone for the first time in the device’s history. The change was prompted by the European Commission’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), which is designed to ensure that there’s more competition in the tech industry by forcing giants such as Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon to open up some of their platforms so that smaller companies can better compete. In Apple’s case, the DMA mandates
Back in July 2007, I got my hands on the hottest tech product of the day: the original iPhone with 4GB of storage. It cost $499. Stupidly, I opened and used mine. I say “stupidly” because almost exactly 16 years later an original, unopened iPhone with 4GB of storage sold at auction for $190,373.
Now, 17 years later, do I have a chance at redemption? Could the latest first-generation Apple device, the Vision Pro, which went on sale to the public yesterday, appreciate in
Spotify Technology announced a new multiyear deal with comedian and podcaster Joe Rogan on Friday, in a bid to tap into the popularity of his show to drive its advertising revenue.
The Joe Rogan Experience podcast, which debuted in 2009, has been an exclusive offering on the music-streaming platform since 2020, with the company touting it as the most-listened-to podcast globally.
Spotify also said it will soon make Joe Rogan’s show available on other platforms, such
Overnight, TikTok video feeds started going silent—not as some sort of weird Charlie Chaplin homage, but because Universal Music Group did, as previously threatened, pull its expansive song catalog, igniting a “Mute-pocalypse” where videos featuring music by many of the industry’s biggest names (Taylor Swift, The Weeknd, Lana Del Rey, Bad Bunny, Britney Spears, Drake, Post Malone, Fleetwood Mac) were suddenly flagged for copyright infringement.
The reason
The New York Times lawsuit against OpenAI late last year over the tech company’s use of the newspaper’s journalism to train its large language model (LLM) represented a major move in unprecedented times. It also could portend a shift in the Big Tech/content creator relationship—one that was fraught to begin with and might now turn increasingly litigious. At the heart of the suit is the question of data, and whether the companies behind LLMs can claim ȁ
This year, something unusually dark is happening in an industry that is, by design, quite used to handling bad news. In a strong economy, with unemployment near a 50-year low, virtually every single part of the news business—digital media, local news, TV, print, podcasts, and documentaries—is laying off people at the same time. Audiences for news are shrinking. Thousands of journalists are losing jobs.
In conversations I’ve had recently, with both execs and work
From healthcare to Hollywood, the emergence of artificial intelligence has dominated the conversation in almost every industry in the past year. Another area where AI is becoming more prominent? The death industry.
The idea is that after a loved one dies, you can use AI to “speak” with them—and if it feels like something right out of Black Mirror, that’s because it kind of is. In a 2013 episode of the sci-fi series, a widow copes with the sudden death of