Business, Spoken

Pop quiz: What tech mogul dropped out of Harvard after two years to found a tech company that conquered the world? If you answered Mark Zuckerberg, congratulations! You are correct. And if you answered Bill Gates, congratulations: You are also correct! And the interesting thing is, it’s not just Harvard. The more you compare the two, the more similar they seem. It’s as if they were cloned from the same DNA: They both were born the only boy into a wealthy family.

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At Google’s cloud computing conference in San Francisco last week, CEO Sundar Pichai mused on his company’s commitment to openness, and artificial intelligence. “We create open platforms and share our technology because it helps new ideas get out faster,” Pichai said. Then he namechecked TensorFlow, the machine learning software Google developed and uses internally. The company open sourced the code in 2015, and it has since been downloaded more than 15 million times.

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Lawyers for a group of UK residents whose Facebook data was harvested by Cambridge Analytica are now threatening to sue for damages. In a 27-page letter served to the company Tuesday, they accuse Facebook of violating British data privacy regulations. The letter before claim, as it's called, is the first step in the UK's legal process for filing a class action suit.

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There’s a not so subtle irony to the President of the United States tweeting that Twitter is suppressing prominent conservative voices in America---and almost instantly receiving tens of thousands of likes, retweets, and replies. But such are the times.

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A year ago today, Airbnb announced a wise move designed to to increase the company’s presence in black neighborhoods: a partnership with the NAACP. By the time the press release crossed the wires, the move was a long time coming.

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Last September, the software company Atlassian launched a new workplace chat app called Stride, aimed squarely at taking on the similar app Slack. “We’ve been thrilled by the excitement we’ve seen from the tens of thousands of teams who have adopted it as their communication platform,” the company gushed in a March blog post. Now, less than a year after the launch, Atlassian is pulling the plug on the product, along with its earlier workplace chat app HipChat.

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On May 11, 2017, a reporter named Trey Yingst, who covers the White House for the conservative news network OANN, tweeted a photo of a framed map of the United States being carried into the West Wing. The map depicted the 2016 election results county-by-county, as a blanket of red, marked with flecks of blue and peachy pink along the West Coast and a thin snake of blue extending from the northeast to Louisiana.

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Your house is full of Amazon Alexas streaming Spotify; in the car, you pull up YouTube on your phone to play "Everything Is Awesome" (again!) for the kids. SoundCloud rocks. When was the last time you bought music on any physical medium? But back in the old days, music barely existed online. "Downloading music required people to search for websites where songs were posted. Most were unreliable. Links broke," we wrote more than a decade ago. "Traffic spikes slowed download times.

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Google Glass lives—and it’s getting smarter. On Tuesday, Israeli software company Plataine demonstrated a new app for the face-mounted gadget that understands spoken language and offers spoken responses. Plataine’s app is aimed at manufacturing workers. Think of an Amazon Alexa for the factory floor. The app points to a future where Glass is enhanced with artificial intelligence, making it more functional and easy to use.

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In “The Political Education of Silicon Valley,” which appears in the August issue of WIRED, Steven Johnson looks at the changing political worldview of the tech sector, a shift from the libertarianism of the 1990s to a more progressive, pro-government outlook today. One of the exemplars of that transformation is Ro Khanna, who was elected in 2016 to represent California’s 17th congressional district in the heart of Silicon Valley. In early May, Johnson sat down with Rep.

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