Online labor marketplaces have been around since the dawn of the internet. Post a task, select a worker, verify the work, and submit a payment. There are dozens of companies that broker labor services, and the rise of these marketplaces has been a large factor in encouraging as many as a third of American workers to become freelancers. While finding individual workers for simple tasks is… Read More
04
Feb
2018
Hate your boss? B12 is designing work without (human) managers
Online labor marketplaces have been around since the dawn of the internet. Post a task, select a worker, verify the work, and submit a payment. There are dozens of companies that broker labor services, and the rise of these marketplaces has been a large factor in encouraging as many as a third of American workers to become freelancers. While finding individual workers for simple tasks is… Read More
The NFL season ends tonight with the New England Patriots losing to facing off against the Philadelphia Eagles in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The game starts at 6:30pm ET / 3:30pm PT and this year will be aired on NBC, meaning if you have cable or an HD antenna you can just tune into NBC to watch. If you want to watch it on a device like a phone, tablet or smart TV you can download the NBC… 
Today marks the 52nd Super Bowl, and quite a bit has changed since that first big game. Then, it was called the AFL-NFL World Championship Game. In 1967, the cost of a movie ticket was $1.25, and color TV was just starting to become popular. Today, more than fifty years later, we can now stream the big game to our pocket computers and have artificially intelligent assistants sitting around in… 
How do you build reliable software? It is a question that has been at the top of my mind the past few weeks, as I seem to be increasingly confronted by software that just doesn’t work anymore. Bugs, crashes, errors, data leaks: they are so common in our every day lives that they can seem completely unremarkable. The existing tools — unit tests, application performance monitoring,… 
Let’s talk about the side effects of the creeping apotheosis of solar power. I mean, don’t get me wrong, we’re a ways away yet — but we’re definitely heading in that direction. “Renewables are about to become our cheapest form of energy,” Wired UK observes. “We expect $7.4 trillion to be invested in new renewable energy plants by 2040 – 72%… 
Is there a point when investors will turn off the spigots for giant unicorn funding rounds? If so, we haven’t reached that threshold yet. Here, we break down the leading locations for new and existing unicorns, top sectors for investment capital, exits and a few other trends affecting the space. 
On this week’s episode of CTRL+T, it’s all about flamethrowers (yes, the devices that throw flames), startups trying to get inside your mouth and education in the prison system. Later on, I chat with the one and only DeRay Mckesson, who is known for his social justice activism via #BlackLivesMatter protests in Ferguson, Missouri and Baltimore, Maryland. He’s also the host… 
Manufacturing giant Foxconn has said it will make a major investment in artificial intelligence-based R&D as it looks for new business growth opportunities in a cooling global smartphone market, Nikkei reports. 
Big news outlets stupidly sold their soul to Facebook. Desperate for the referral traffic Facebook dangled, they spent the past few years jumping through its hoops only to be cut out of the equation. Instead of developing an owned audience of homepage visitors and newsletter subscribers, they let Facebook brainwash readers into thinking it was their source of information. Now Facebook is… 
In a town full of venture capital firms, Storm Ventures has made its mark with a singular focus on the enterprise. This week, the company announced it has taken on two freshly minted partners, Arun Penmetsa and Paul Willard, to continue the mission. They are doubling the number of partners with this announcement. Penmetsa has been a principal at Storm for the last 3.5 years before being…