Greg Ferenstein - Page 2

At around 10PM on Labor Day Sunday, I posted a coding problem to the popular software developer forum, Stack Exchange.

He’s received $3M from donors who self-identify in tech industry employers, compared to Jeb Bush’s $525K. Clinton, a presumptive Silicon Valley favorite, has only managed about half of Bush, at $247K. See the full graph for the breakdown.

I may have just visited the most San Francisco-ish restaurant in the entire history of San Francisco: a tasty fast food quinoa eatery that will operated by robots.

(Ferenstein Wire)—The taxi industry has launched yet another high-profile attempt to conquer their arch nemesis Uber. The upcoming Arro, like many of its predecessors, is an app for hailing and paying for a taxi, much like other ride-hailing companies out of Silicon Valley. Every similar app, so far, has either completely shut down shortly after launch or failed to slow the rise of Uber.

(Ferenstein Wire) – A European agency has taken the “Right to Be Forgotten” to the next level: Google may be forced to remove links to news reports on why the search giant had to remove the links in the first place. Europe has pioneered a new legal concept that permits individuals to force search engines to remove links to information about themselves that they find incriminating or embarrassing.

The New York Times caused a stir in Silicon Valley with a viral article claiming that Amazon.com brutally exploits its white collar workers with unforgiving management practices. The investigation caused such an outcry that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos personally responded with an email to employees assuring them that “callous” management practices wouldn’t be tolerated.

Uber’s low-cost service, UberX, reduces drunk driving deaths all over California and may be responsible for a drop in DUIs on NYE.

Hillary Clinton is directly courting Silicon Valley in her $350 billion plan to overhaul higher education. Clinton will reveal the full details of her plan at an upcoming talk in New Hampshire, but she has released the major tenets to news outlets.

(Ferenstein Wire) — White Americans are slowly dwindling into the minority, which poses big problems for Republicans. Democrats’ popularity with minorities has helped them snag the presidency in recent elections. By 2024, Republicans may need to blow past George Bush’s 2004 historic record with Latinos (44 percent) in order to ever have a shot again at another conservative president.

(Ferenstein Wire) — Twitter still hasn’t solved its liberal bias problem; during a Republican presidential debate Thursday night, a self-declared European-style socialist scored the most popular tweet of any candidate. Democrat Bernie Sanders snagged a whopping 29,000 retweets (and counting) for slamming Republicans for “not one word about economic inequality, climate change, Citizens United or student debt.”

(From The Ferenstein Wire) — The Republican field for president is massive, and conservative contenders are scrambling to stand out from the crowd. Polls tend to swing wildly from month-to-month, as new candidates enter the race or happen to get into a headline-making story.

(Ferenstein Wire) — Jdate, the popular dating service responsible for more Jewish hookups than a bottle of Manischewitz, is playing hardball in the dog-eat-dog world of nice Jewish matchmaking.

Uber just won a huge political battle. New York Mayor Bill de Blasio has dropped a proposal to place caps on the number of Uber cars on city streets, according to a statement released by Uber’s New York general manager Josh Mohrer.

(Ferenstein Wire) — Self-driving cars will save the average driver about $1,000 annually, or cost $250 a year total, according to estimates from auto insurance startup Metromile.

Netflix is on a roll. The video streaming giant has grown 6x in the last 6 years, expanding from roughly 10.3 million subscribers in 2009 to an astounding 65.6 million in the second quarter of 2015.

Hillary Clinton just laid out her economic agenda, and ambiguous statements about companies like Uber and Airbnb leave the entire sharing economy industry in limbo. Clinton said she “vows to crack down on employers who misclassify workers as independent contractors.” She also noted that the “so-called gig economy offers exciting opportunities but raises hard questions about workplace protections and what a good job will look like in the future.”

IBM announced a major breakthrough in chip technology, with a super-tiny seven-nanometer chip. This chip breaks the difficult 10nm barrier and proves that the industry can still move along an important innovation pace known as “Moore’s Law.”

If it weren’t for the excessive spending of late ’90s Silicon Valley startups, one of TV’s most iconic shows would likely have been axed by network executives. “Silicon Valley put the West Wing on television,” the show’s creator, Aaron Sorkin, tells The Ferenstein Wire.

Ferenstein Wire—China’s taxi-hailing monopolist, Kuaidi, has raised a whopping $2B to compete with the surging presence of Uber. Kuaidi controls 99.8 percent of the taxi hailing app market, after it recently merged with its Chinese competitor, Didi. Even with about

It’s been a good year for Yosemite National Parks. After the world’s richest tech company decided to name its premier operating system “OS X Yosemite”, it sent a wave of free advertising for the historic mountain range.

Early Facebook investor and Paypal billionaire Peter Thiel revealed two key pieces of advice he gives aspiring entrepreneurs and investors this week at the Atlantic Aspen Ideas Festival.

As Uber and other Silicon Valley startups come under legal pressure for employing an army of full-time freelancers, a well-funded new startup has decided to completely switch its workforce to staffed employees with full benefits (“W2” workers).

Just 3 minutes after the Supreme Court declared gay marriage legal nationwide, much of America shifted its attention to learn more.

A day after Apple began the mass purge of applications depicting the Confederate flag, the Nazi Swastika is still featured prominently in some games. The choice to ban a purported symbol of slavery from historical games, but not of mass genocide, reveals how tech companies struggle to apply hate speech guidelines — often with strange inconsistency.

 Gmail officially added the ability to temporarily un-send an email, promoting an experimental feature long popular with power users. The “undo” feature pairs delightfully well with the favorite email strategy of Google Executive Eric Schmidt: replying to important messages immediately and constantly throughout the day.

The California Labor Comission just ruled that Uber must treat its drivers like normal employees, rather than independent contractors, potentially forcing the company to pay benefits and cover expenses. The decision is being hailed as a victory for worker rights and a major blow to the growing billion-dollar transportation startup.

Last fall, Sean Parker, the technology billionaire behind Napster, Facebook, and Spotify, invested several million dollars into a risky stealth startup, Brigade, which has the ambitious aim of increasing mass civic participation.

After top tech talent from Silicon Valley helped rescue President Obama’s disastrous healthcare website launch, he decided that there was much more the brightest in Silicon Valley could do for the federal government. According to an interview with Fast Company, the President has been personally recruiting top talent from the likes of Google and Facebook to build next-generation government services.

Google has just announced a brand new initiative to improve city life, Sidewalk Labs, which will tackle cost of living, transportation, and the environment for urban citizens. While details are scant, it’s worth noting that suburban-based Google is just the latest influential tech giant to join the “cities” bandwagon.

If you want an idea of how the phone in your pocket and watch on your wrist is trying to change you, today’s Apple announcement is a great place to start.

In a national poll, more than 1 in 4 Americans said they would support limits on humans driving cars in the near future, given the fact that robotic self-driving cars could be safer.

Twitter has recently removed the ability of a political watchdog group to archive the embarrassing and incriminating tweets of U.S. congressmen automatically. The Sunlight Foundation’s much-beloved “politwoops” website was famous for revealing the regrettable tweets that members of Congress tried to erase from the history books.

There are two great new email mobile apps from Google and Microsoft and both offer helpful features, such as location-aware emails and calendar scheduling. While both apps offer something unique, I think one way to compare them is based on a single metric: which app gets me to inbox zero fastest. I don’t enjoy email — I just want to get my daily digital chore done and get on with my life.

Democrats and Silicon Valley are locked in a head-on collision course; this week, New York City regulators proposed rules requiring Uber and other ride-hailing startups to get pre-approval each time they make major changes to their apps and pay $1,000 to cover the government’s labor costs. The battle between Uber and New York is a perfect example of the fundamental conflict between Democrats and Silicon Valley.

A new economic analysis finds that Santa Clara Country could completely end its homeless problem at zero net cost by providing public housing for every single person living on the street. The study, from the Knowledge for Greater Good Economic

Up-and-coming tech titans are shelling out massive salaries to retain the best immigrants in the world. Netflix is paying an average of $239K per year, and Airbnb is dolling out $163K, up from $134K and $106K in 2012, respectively.