Five Things Tech: Dirty VC Secret, Robotic Bees, VanMoof, Modern Warfare, Useless Tech in Cars
Tech is all around you. Sometimes it could be better.
It’s been an interesting week in tech again. There was some discussion about Threads getting less attention from its users than before, which I attribute to the start of summer and also to Meta being forced to kick out European users like myself. As much as I like it that the EU forces Zuckerberg to do certain things differently, I would really like to decide for myself what app I want to use. And while I’m complaining: can we finally get rid of all those stupid cookie banners, please? I find this totally annoying and instead of having to choose between “no cookies”, “some cookies” or “all cookies”, I really just want to choose “I couldn’t care less, really.”, but unfortunately none of the Chrome plugins that offer this choice work perfectly well.
Anyhow, I hope you like my carefully selected articles about the wonderful (and sometimes annoying) world of tech!
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The dirty little secret that could bring down Big Tech
I’m not so sure about this being a secret at all, but the underlying mechanisms of venture capital work in this way and at the end the VC (and their fund investors) make a lot of money on the expense of a lot of users.
Robotic Bees Could Support Vertical Farms Today and Astronauts Tomorrow
The concept of robotic bees does indeed sound very futuristic, but it is interesting to understand how these robotic bees are being used to pollinate flowers in vertical farming setups.
World's "most well funded e-bike brand" VanMoof goes bankrupt
I own a nice bike that I take across the street to a bike dealer every so often to get some parts fixed. It’s not connected to any app and there aren’t any services attached to it. When I read about the bankruptcy of VanMoof, this is what I find amazing: the company is still losing money on every bike, even though the bike costs €4000 plus add-on services like theft prevention, that provide nice lock-in effects - and on top of that they secured $200 million in investments.
A Battlefield AI Company Says It’s One of the Good Guys
I remember when it became public that Daniel Ek, one of the founders of Spotify, invested €100 million in Helsing AI - people weren’t really amused that he invested in an operating system for warfare. But now that we have a war in Europe again, people will probably start to think differently about this. Let’s see how how selling to the good guys will pan out in the future.
People are getting fed up with all the useless tech in their cars
I just got a letter (yes, really, in 2023, they send paper letters) from Mercedes-Benz telling me that soon (at the end of November) I will have to return my company car because the leasing contract ends then. I am 100% sure that I won’t be getting another Mercedes-Benz again, basically because their engineers have no clue about UX/UI. Anyone who has ever tried to use “Mercedes me”, will understand what I’m talking about. I also don’t want any stupid “car-entertainment” systems that can do less than my iPhone could 10 years ago, thank you very much. I just want to use my personal device of choice instead. And please, hire people who grasp current concepts of UX/UI.
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