Nonprofits, not Silicon Valley startups, are creating AI apps for the greater good
Predictions for the potential of artificial intelligence wax poetic — solutions from climate change to curing disease — but the everyday applications make it seem far more mundane, like a glorified clock radio. Thankfully, the future may be closer than we think. And the miraculous feats are not happening in Silicon Valley X-Labs — in a plot twist, nonprofits are leading the charge in creating human-centered applications of the hottest AI technologies. [ Re/Code ]
Silicon Valley Investors Flexed Their Muscles in Uber Fight
The conventional wisdom in the world of Silicon Valley start-ups has been that the founders call the shots and that the investors are cheerleaders — and sometimes enablers — of the entrepreneurs they backed. But on Tuesday, when investors pressured Travis Kalanick to step down as the chief executive of Uber, the start-up universe was abruptly reminded that investors can flex their muscles and that founders are not untouchable. [ NY Times ]
Mark Zuckerberg explains why he just changed Facebook's
Mark Zuckerberg has spent the last dozen years making sure you know what your friends' babies look like and what your high school friends think about politics.And, of course, transforming media and politics by presenting news and opinion -- true and fake -- to billions of people around the world. Now the Facebook CEO is acknowledging that connecting people online isn't enough.
[ CNN ] [ Forbes ]
Facebook's Sandberg Won't Run Uber, But She Knows What It Needs
Uber Technologies Inc. is in the market for a new chief executive officer. And, as in any search for an important technology leader, Sheryl Sandberg’s name is on the wish list. Sandberg isn’t leaving her job as second-in-command at Facebook Inc., according to a person familiar with the matter who asked not to be identified discussing private information. [ Bloomberg ] [ INC ]
Qantas announces startups and scaleups taking part in AVRO accelerator
Qantas has revealed the cohort of startups and scaleups taking part in its first Avro accelerator program, run in partnership with Slingshot Accelerator. The 12 week program will see six startups and six scaleups work with various business units within Qantas Group to further develop and scale their businesses. [ Startup Daily ]
An introduction to Support Vector Machines (SVM)
So you’re working on a text classification problem. You’re refining your training set, and maybe you’ve even tried stuff out using Naive Bayes. But now you’re feeling confident in your dataset, and want to take it one step further. Enter Support Vector Machines (SVM): a fast and dependable classification algorithm that performs very well with a limited amount of data.
[ Monkey learn ]
Gwyneth Paltrow's Goop gets called out by NASA over healing stickers
NASA just called out Goop, the movie star's lifestyle brand, over wearable healing stickers that it promoted on its website. In a post on Thursday, Goop said that the stickers, which are sold by a group called Body Vibes, are "made with the same conductive carbon material NASA uses to line space suits so they can monitor an astronaut's vitals during wear." [ CNN ]
Some Uber employees are reportedly petitioning for Travis Kalanick to stay
There’s a petition circulating among Uber employees asking the board of directors to let Travis Kalanick return to the company, Recode reports. The email going around talks about how Kalanick is “critical” to the company’s future success. It ultimately asks employees to show their support for Kalanick and push for him to get reinstated in an operational role. [ Tech Crunch ]
[ Re/Code ] [ Fortune ] [ HIVE ]
Alert Logic Receives $70M Credit Facility from Square 1 Bank
Alert Logic, a Houston, Texas-based provider of Security-as-a-Service solutions for the cloud, received a $70m syndicated credit facility. Square 1 Bank, a division of Pacific Western Bank, provided the financing. The proceeds from the facility will be used for working capital and various internal growth initiatives. Led by Gray Hall, chief executive officer, Alert Logic combines cloud-native software and analytics with expert services to assess, detect and block threats to applications and other enterprise workloads. [ FinSMEs ]
Bridging the Chasm Between NYC's Engineers and VCs
One of the most unfortunate realities of the startup world is the wide gulf that exists between the business and technical sides of most startups. Born, like so many things, out of discomfort with the unknown and exacerbated by the different languages these two groups speak, it’s a reality that is quite pervasive in our community, and seems to materially limit many in the engineering community from taking the plunge and becoming founders. In an effort to demystify the financial side of the business, Primary Venture Partners is working to foster an open dialogue and empower more would-be/should-be technical founders to step forward. [ Primary VC ]
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