Carl Niedbala Contributor Carl Niedbala is COO and co-founder of Founder Shield, a commercial insurance broker. High-growth companies often set significant goals, knowing full well that the idea of “overnight success” is for the storybooks. However, there is no better time than the middle of a market downturn to start planning for the leap from a private to a public company. De-risking the path to going public requires strategic planning, which takes time. Companies with go ...read more

For several months now, 20 teams of Australian high-school students have been designing fuel-cell cars to compete in the country’s inaugural Hydrogen Grand Prix. They’ve been studying up on renewable energy, hydrogen power, and electric vehicles, preparing for the big day in April when their remote-controlled vehicles will rumble for 4 hours in Gladstone, a port city in Queensland. The task: make the most of a 30-watt fuel cell and 14 grams of hydrogen gas. A few months later and some 80 ...read more

As a rather commercially successful author once wrote, “the night is dark and full of terrors, the day bright and beautiful and full of hope.” It’s fitting imagery for AI, which like all tech has its upsides and downsides. Art-generating models like Stable Diffusion, for instance, have led to incredible outpourings of creativity, powering apps and even entirely new business models. On the other hand, its open source nature lets bad actors to use it to create deepfakes at scale — all whi ...read more

This year’s been eventful for investors and founders alike. Just as it seemed the venture capital boom of 2021 was slowing down, the startup and VC worlds spun on their axes practically overnight, birthing a new dynamic where “growth at all costs” was quickly replaced by a more measured and careful approach to business and investing. For 2023 then, it appears investors are focusing on trends that are relatively safer and likelier to bear fruit. Xfund’s vice president, Jadyn Bryden ...read more

Choose your answer and the correct choice will be revealed. Correct Answer: December 1992 Learn more about this trivia's answer… On the same day that Whitney Houston's "I will always love you" hit the charts as the #1 song in the US, and "Home Alone 2" topped the box office, 22-year-old software architect Neil Papworth sent the first SMS. Although the technology was conceived by Friedhelm Hillebrand and Bernard Ghillebaert in 1984 at the GSM Corporation, the first SMS message ...read more

from the ejecting-your-enemies-under-the-guise-of-venue-safety dept A private company can legally declare it has the right to refuse service to anyone (with a very small number of limitations under the law, mostly around discrimination against protected classes). The application of facial recognition tech makes it much easier to do. Rather than post photos and bad checks on the back wall to inform employees who isn’t welcome, companies can utilize tech companies and their databases of unkno ...read more

Deals from the good-deals-on-cool-stuff dept Mon, Dec 26th 2022 10:56am - Daily Deal The 2023 Ultimate Cybersecurity Analyst Bundle has 8 courses to help you become a cybersecurity expert. You’ll learn about social engineering, working with enterprise architecture, bug hunting, penetration testing, ethical hacking, and more. The bundle is on sale for $30. Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt D ...read more

from the password-sharing-is-the-devil dept Mon, Dec 26th 2022 06:35am - Karl Bode The UK Government’s Intellectual Property Office published new piracy guidance this week claiming that Netflix password sharing is illegal. Back when Netflix was a pesky upstart trying to claw subscribers away from entrenched cable providers, the company had a pretty lax approach to users who shared streaming passwords. At one point CEO Reed Hastings went so far as to say he “loved” password sharing ...read more

from the critical-media-coverage-should-not-result-in-spying-on-journalists dept Back in June we wrote about a blockbuster article in Buzzfeed by Emily Baker-White detailing how ByteDance engineers in China were still accessing data on US TikTok users. That was notable, given that ByteDance had signed this big deal with Oracle, while former President Trump held a proverbial gun to its head, to try to separate out its US data and keep it separate. It’s also still not entirely clear what Orac ...read more

WTF?! The next entry in Nvidia's Lovelace series of graphics cards, the RTX 4070 Ti, doesn't launch until early next month, likely January 5, but it seems nobody told a retailer in Serbia who is apparently selling the card early and for a comically high price. Redditors discovered the upcoming Gigabyte GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Gaming card for sale in a Serbian store. Gamers in the country will have to pay a high premium to become one of the first to own the GPU: it's priced at 172,229 RSD, includi ...read more