- Will's Weekly Roundup
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- Will's Weekly Roundup
Will's Weekly Roundup is a curated list of tech, business, and startup headlines from last week to kickstart your Mondays.
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Business
The business headlines you missed (or need to see again)...
Neuralink - Elon Musk's brain chip company Neuralink is reportedly worth ~$5 Billion based on private stock trades. LINK
Subway - Subway is clamping down on franchisees as the fast-food giant approaches an $8 Billion sale. LINK
Savings - US households still have about $1.2 trillion in excess savings. LINK
Sequoia - Sequoia, one of the top venture capital firms in the world, will split its China business into a separate entity called HongShan amid increasing tensions between the US and China. LINK
GM - General Motors will soon be able to use the Tesla charging network, joining Ford in leveraging the EV leader’s tech. LINK
Golf - Tiger Woods turned down more than $700 million to join the LIV golf tour in order to stay loyal to the PGA. Less than a year later, LIV and the PGA merged. Lesson: always take the money. LINK
Zume - Zume, a robot pizza startup, shut down after raising $500M. LINK
Aquaculture - Goldman Sachs has offered $600 million in cash to acquire a 72% stake in the Norwegian aquaculture group Froy. LINK
OpenAI - According to OpenAI's CEO Sam Altman, the company, known for creating ChatGPT, is planning to remain private, claiming that some of their future decisions will be ones that "public market investors would perceive as very peculiar." LINK
Twitter - Linda Yaccarino, the former chair of advertising sales at NBC Universal, has begun as Twitter's new CEO after Musk stepped down. LINK
Reputations - The seven brands with the worst reputations in America: (1) The Trump Organization, (2) FTX, (3) Fox Corporation, (4) Twitter, (5) Meta, (6) Spirit Airlines, and (7) TikTok. LINK
Tech
The tech headlines you missed (or need to see again)...
Diabetes - Scientists have hacked human cells to make insulin, and it reversed diabetes in mice. LINK
Uber - Uber will let you rent out your car with a new peer-to-peer car-rental feature called "Uber Carshare." LINK
Military - The US, Taiwan, and Japan are planning to share real-time data from drones to strengthen coordination in the event of a Chinese attack on Taiwan. LINK
Cars & Food - Autonomous-vehicle company Cruise is partnering with meal-finding nonprofit Replate to pick up would-be-discarded extra food at restaurants and businesses and deliver them to in-need organizations around San Francisco. LINK
Apple’s Big Announcement - Apple had its 2023 Worldwide Developers Conference Keynote early last week. As expected, it announced a VR/AR headset, the Vision Pro. The Vision Pro will cost $3,499 when it launches early next year. (A lot of the media is attacking the product for its high cost, saying that it’s a rip-off when compared to "similar" products like Meta’s new Quest 3 VR headset ($499); however, this is an unfair comparison, since the Vision Pro offers abilities and features that puts the device into an entirely different product category that has never existed before). Apple also announced a new 15-inch MacBook Air, a new Mac Studio, a new Mac Pro, iOS 17, iPadOS 17, macOS Sonoma for Mac, FaceTime for Apple TV, watchOS 10, visionOS for the Vision Pro headset, and Airplay for hotel TVs. Some features of the operating systems (OS) that I’m excited about are multi-device collaborative writing on iPads, a new password-sharing system for families to keep passwords synced and up-to-date, custom phone call screens, a Zoom-like screen-sharing feature, and the ability to turn frequently visited websites into Mac desktop apps. LINK
Watchlist
Startups and companies I’m keeping an eye on…
FranShares - FranShares lets you fractionally invest in franchises. LINK
CouchSurfing.com - CouchSurfing is a hospitality exchange platform that connects travelers with hosts worldwide. LINK
Bannerman - Bannerman lets you hire bodyguards and security as easily as ordering an Uber. LINK
Outside Interests
Interesting internet finds…
Airbnb - Airbnb is no fan of NYC’s new short-term rental licensing requirement and is now suing to stop its implementation next month. LINK
Dark Web - Deep fake videos can cost $300-20K per minute on the dark web. LINK
College Applications - The number of college applicants jumped 20% since the 2019-20 school year, pushing acceptance rates to all-time lows. LINK
China - China started digging a 32,000+ foot (10,000-meter) hole last week, which will be the world's deepest once it is completed in 450 days. LINK
Job Satisfaction - Here’s the list of the 10 US cities where people are most satisfied with their jobs—New York didn’t make the cut. LINK
Harvard - Harvard University’s introductory computer science course (CS50), the world’s most popular course attended by hundreds of students on-campus and over 40,000 online, plans to use artificial intelligence to grade assignments. LINK
Air - Smoke from Canadian wildfires has covered the US East Coast and brought the worst air quality on Earth to New York City. LINK
Fun Fact - If stars in the night sky are sparkling, it’s a sign of atmospheric turbulence. LINK
Visuals
Three visuals worth taking a look at...
Peloton hasn't made money from selling bikes for a while.
The number of AI-related mentions on earnings calls and other transcripts of publicly traded companies has skyrocketed in the last few months.
A visualization of how Apple makes its money.
Wisdom
Two quotes of wisdom...
"Anyone who isn't embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn't learning enough." ― Alain de Botton
"Talent is equally distributed, but opportunity is not." ― Leslie Cornfeld
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