February 7, 2025

The Download: DOGE’s tech-enabled destruction, and Meta’s brain AI for typing

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Elon Musk, DOGE, and the Evil Housekeeper problem —Dan Hon is principal of Very Little Gravitas, where he helps turn around and modernize large and complex government services and products. In trying to…

July 2023

Former NHTSA head blasts Cruise’s ‘Humans are terrible drivers’ ad

July 19, 2023
A former administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has responded to a full-page ad taken out in several major newspapers by Cruise, General Motors’ self-driving subsidiary, that calls humans terrible drivers. The ad points to the nearly 43,000 crash fatalities in 2022 and promotes autonomous vehicles as the solution. “Using the pain […]

Forerunner Ventures sees a future full of “digitally native franchises”

July 19, 2023
Forerunner Ventures made its name in the venture world by betting on once-nascent startups like Jet, Bonobos and Glossier when it was far easier to build a digitally native brand than today. But as commerce has evolved, so has the firm. As part of that evolution, Forerunner five years ago brought aboard veteran VC Brian […]

Basecamp introduces special reduced pricing in India

July 18, 2023
Basecamp, one of the widely used project management tools first released in 2004, is now available to users in India with special reduced pricing that is as low as about $4 a month. On Tuesday, 37signals co-founder and CEO Jason Fried announced the reduced pricing of Basecamp for new customers in India. The tool is […]

Meta releases Llama 2, a more ‘helpful’ set of text-generating models

July 18, 2023
The generative AI landscape grows larger by the day. Today, Meta announced a new family of AI models, Llama 2, designed to drive apps such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Bing Chat and other modern chatbots. Trained on a mix of publicly available data, Meta claims that Llama 2’s performance improves significantly over the previous generation of […]

Samsung teases latest foldables ahead of Unpacked

July 18, 2023
Samsung’s never been great with a secret. At some point the company leaned into the unceasing deluge of leaks by teasing out its big products ahead of launch. Since then, blog posts by mobile head TM Roh have become a tradition. The latest Unpacked event is a week away, set for the company’s backyard of […]

Threads update adds translation and a flurry of minor improvements

July 18, 2023
Threads exploded onto the crowded scene of aspiring Twitter rivals earlier this month, but it’s still very early days for the Instagram-adjacent text-first social network. Meta released an update to the iOS version of the app on Tuesday, the second since its debut two weeks ago and the first to add any noteworthy features. According […]

Sources: Lensa AI backer exits Servers.com for $200M

July 18, 2023
A backer of the Lensa AI app, which sent AI-generated images from Stable Diffusion rocketing into mainstream social media, has just exited a company for a substantial amount of money, say well-placed sources speaking on the condition of anonymity. CloudOne Digital has today announced its acquisition of Servers.com, a provider of ‘bare metal’ services with […]

TikTok launches its music streaming service in Australia, Mexico and Singapore

July 18, 2023
TikTok is launching its new subscription-only music streaming service called “TikTok Music” in Australia, Mexico and Singapore. Today’s expansion comes almost two weeks after TikTok debuted the music streaming service in Brazil and Indonesia. The streaming service lets users sync the service to their existing TikTok accounts and listen, download and share songs. The service […]