Marketplace Tech

PG&E has said it could take a decade to upgrade its infrastructure so it’s less likely to spark deadly fires. On Thursday, the utility reported a $1.6 billion loss in the third quarter related to fire charges. A group of California mayors think PG&E should be turned into a publicly owned cooperative utility. Is the answer here just to get off the grid or for utilities to split up into lots of smaller microgrids?

After a very dramatic bidding process, U.S. Department of Defense last month awarded a $10 billion cloud computing contract to Microsoft. Several companies, including Oracle, claimed the process was rigged and that President Donald Trump threatened to personally intervene in the choosing process because he’s been a critic of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.

As the amount of data coursing through the internet grows, so does the infrastructure needed to keep all that data flowing. Huge data centers are popping up around the country, but data centers don’t always make good neighbors due to their noise. Bianca Bosker, a contributing writer for The Atlantic, wrote about Chandler, Arizona, where a group of neighbors have taken on data center giant CyrusOne.

Google announced plans to buy Fitbit for more than $2 billion, and make no mistake, it’s not for the wristbands. Last year, it announced an effort to use artificial intelligence to scan electronic health records to make predictions about what might happen with hospitalized patients. Kirsten Ostherr, the director of the Medical Futures Lab and the medical humanities program at Rice University, said Fitbit’s trove of data is all about social determinants.

The tech industry is coming for traditional banking. Digital payment apps are changing how we move money around. A wave of so-called neobanks — all-digital services that let people do everything on a smartphone without any branches — is cropping up in the United States. Molly Wood speaks with Jelena McWilliams, the chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., best known for providing federal insurance to licensed banks. The agency also has oversight and consumer protection responsibilities. McWilliams said that there’s a lot going on.

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey announced that the social giant would ban political ads whether they’re about candidates or political issues. The move put even more of a spotlight on Facebook, which is not only taking political ads but is also not fact-checking them. While most people cheered Twitter’s move, critics said it puts a company in charge of deciding what’s political and could shut smaller groups or candidates out of a cheaper way to reach people.

Molly Wood speaks with Max Brooks about what kind of tech can save us during a zombie apocalypse. He wrote “The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection From the Living Dead.” But this isn’t just metaphorical planning, in some ways. Brooks is also a fellow at the Modern War Institute and advises the military on how his fictional ideas translate into real-world readiness for whatever form the zombie apocalypse actually takes.

There are a lot of companies out there wanting to take rich thrill-seekers to the edge of space, and they’re ready to convince investors there’s money to be made. Virgin Galactic made its stock market debut on Monday. It’s offering suborbital rides for about $250,000, although it has yet to fly paying customers.

The Federal Communications Commission is moving ahead with plans to stop telecommunication companies buying equipment from foreign companies it considers to be a security threat. This move has Chinese companies Huawei and ZTE in the crosshairs — telecom companies have to stop buying their equipment or even rip it out. Christopher Mitchell, who monitors community broadband at the nonprofit Institute for Local Self-Reliance, said that Huawei, in particular, has become a key provider in rural areas for a couple of reasons.

Sucking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere is known as geoengineering — manipulating Earth’s climate to try to fix a climate problem. Solomon Hsiang, who directs the Global Policy Laboratory at UC Berkeley, said there are some promising lines of research.