Business, Spoken

LeEco is like the Netflix of China—except it also sells phones, televisions, and cars. Now, it’s moving into the US after acquiring the stateside television maker Vizio. Unlike some Chinese tech giants that seem happy to focus on a domestic market approaching 1.4 billion, LeEco has international ambitions. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

“Uber for X” has been the headline of more than four hundred news articles. Thousands of would-be entrepreneurs used the phrase to describe their companies in their pitch decks. On one site alone—AngelList, where startups can court angel investors and employees—526 companies included “Uber for” in their listings. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

On Election Night, voters in northeastern Ohio’s Trumbull and Ashtabula counties made Sean O’Brien—a three-term Democratic state representative—their state senator. They also helped make Donald Trump president. In 2012, 60 percent of Trumbull’s largely white, working class electorate voted for Barack Obama. In 2016, they flipped their support to the populist GOP candidate who offered his own promises for change. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Uber has acquired Geometric Intelligence, a two-year-old artificial intelligence startup that vows to surpass the deep learning systems under development at internet giants like Google and Facebook. But as this tiny AI lab slips into Uber’s increasingly vast and ambitious operation, the startup is still tight-lipped on what its technology actually looks like. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

OpenAI, the billion-dollar San Francisco artificial intelligence lab backed by Tesla CEO Elon Musk, just unveiled a new virtual world. It’s called Universe, and it’s a virtual world like no other. This isn’t a digital playground for humans. It’s a school for artificial intelligence. It’s a place where AI can learn to do just about anything. Other AI labs have built similar worlds where AI agents can learn on their own. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

For all his talk about bringing jobs back to the United States, President-elect Donald Trump has said virtually nothing about preparing Americans for the increasingly tech-driven jobs of the future. Even as he rails against trade’s impact on industries like manufacturing, he’s been mostly silent about the impact of automation. During the campaign, he never tried to court the Silicon Valley vote the way Hillary Clinton and many of his primary opponents did. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Attention all Netflix users: you can now download shows and movies for offline viewing. This is not a drill. Want to binge Stranger Things or Orange Is the New Black, on an airplane or on the road heading home for the holidays? Go wild. Want to watch The Imitation Game on a two-hour subway ride? Knock yourself out. To get offline downloads, just update your iOS or Android app. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Google’s artificial intelligence can play the ancient game of Go better than any human. It can identify faces, recognize spoken words, and pull answers to your questions from the web. But the promise is that this same kind of technology will soon handle far more serious work than playing games and feeding smartphone apps. One day, it could help care for the human body. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

This was supposed to be the year that texting wasn’t just texting anymore. After big announcements from Facebook, Google, and others, Americans were going to use messaging apps for so much more than chatting with friends. You were going to seamlessly interact with a world of online businesses. You were going to send questions to search engines and book tables at restaurants. You were going to get stuff done without ever opening another app. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The internet was supposed to mean a whole new world for the business of advertising. Gobs of data let advertisers become wildly efficient in who they target and how they measure results. Consumers also ostensibly win: If you’re in the market want a quality winter coat, the thinking goes, you’re not going to be annoyed if you see an ad for one. In this new world, Facebook is on top. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Since the election, Facebook has faced growing pressure to police hoaxes and misleading content. And with good reason: around 44 percent of US adults get at least some of their news through Facebook, and fake news often spreads more quickly through social media than real news. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Last month, the entire internet went down for a few hours. At least that’s what one of the biggest denial-of-service attacks in recent memory felt like to a lot of people. Sites from Netflix, Spotify, and Reddit to The New York Times and, yes, even WIRED went dark. The massive outage was the result of an attack on an Internet infrastructure company called Dyn. You’d think that finding yourself at the center of such a destructive online maelstrom wouldn’t be much of a sales pitch. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

On November 7, 2016, the day before the US election, I compared the number of social media followers, website performance, and Google search statistics of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. I was shocked when the data revealed the extent of Trump’s popularity. He had more followers across all social platforms and his posts had much higher engagement rates. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Fei-Fei Li is a big deal in the world of AI. As the director of the Artificial Intelligence and Vision labs at Stanford University, she oversaw the creation of ImageNet, a vast database of images designed to accelerate the development of AI that can “see. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Earlier this month Google filed its response to the European Commission’s Android antitrust complaint, which alleges that Google thwarts its competitors in search, mobile apps, and mobile devices by limiting their access to Android users through self-serving licensing terms. But the EC’s objections, rooted in an outdated understanding of marketplace dynamics, are a contrivance. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

To build OpenAI—a new artificial intelligence lab that seeks to openly share its research with the world at large—Elon Musk and Sam Altman recruited several top researchers from inside Google and Facebook. But if this unusual project is going to push AI research to new heights, it will need more than talent. It will needs enormous amounts of computing power. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Julie Lalonde knows all too well what it’s like to be harassed on social media. Lalonde is an Ottawa-based women’s rights activist intimately familiar with the deluge of abuse a single tweet can trigger. She’s endured everything from whack-a-mole trolls impersonating her onlineto enduring a coordinated campaign of abuse against women who dared to comment on Canada’s first Twitter harassment criminal case. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Howard County, Indiana—home to the city of Kokomo—has long been a center for the automotive industry. Or at least it was until that industry and others began to shift overseas in recent decades. By 2008, when Chrysler, the town’s largest employer, teetered on extinction, Forbes named Kokomo the third-fastest dying city in America; during the financial collapse of 2009, fully 40 percent of its home sales were foreclosures. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Google changed the world with its PageRank algorithm, creating a new kind of internet search engine that could instantly sift through the world’s online information and, in many cases, show us just what we wanted to see. But that was a long time ago. As the volume of online documents continues to increase, we need still newer ways of finding what we want. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Social analytics firm Networked Insights is spending Election Day gauging the feelings and intentions of the American electorate and sharing the findings exclusively with WIRED. Here's a peek into the methodology. Where are you getting your data? Our analytics engine Kairos processes unstructured data from millions of sites, blogs, and social platforms like Twitter and Tumblr. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

David Moran was all set to go out that Saturday night. He thought he might hit Parliament House, Orlando’s oldest gay nightclub, or maybe make it over to Pulse, another mainstay. But after he and a friend ended their shift at the restaurant where they both worked, car trouble kept them marooned in the parking lot for an hour. So Moran went home and fell asleep watching Bob’s Burgers on Netflix instead. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In late October ProPublica released a scathing investigation showing how Facebook allows digital advertisers to narrow their target audience based on ethnic affinities like “African-American” or “Hispanic.” The report suggested that Facebook may be in violation of federal civil rights statutes and drew parallels to Jim Crow Era “whites only” housing ads. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

For Nathan Schneider, the future of Twitter is the Green Bay Packers. Twitter is struggling to make it as an independent business, unable to increase revenues or expand its audience as quickly as Wall Street would like. So, in recent weeks, it tried selling itself. But no one wanted to buy—not Google or Salesforce or Disney or Microsoft. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Facebook and several other Western companies tried to give away free Internet in India, but regulators wouldn’t allow it. The trouble is that the service provided free access to some online apps—including Facebook—but not others. This is called zero-rating, and regulators believe it harms online competition, giving certain companies an unfair advantage over others. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The second week of August isn’t ordinarily a time given over to novelty and ambition in New York. The air is a jellied vapor of sweat and refuse, and anybody who can afford to be elsewhere is. But the vast Queensbridge housing complex was an unlikely scene of neon-vested hustle. The six-story brown-brick apartment blocks along 41st Avenue had been encased in green scaffolding and draped with long, heavy bolts of cream burlap, which gave the blunt rectilinear forms a veil of anticipation. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

When the Secretary of State pitches Silicon Valley, he’s looking for more than just series-A capital. John Kerry’s looking for help—for technological innovations that could help win the online war with extremist groups like ISIS, find a path between privacy for US citizens (and dissidents abroad) and unbreakable encryption available to terrorists, and maybe even provide energy without damaging Earth’s climate or global economies. So, you know, that’s a pretty big job. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

As we walk, Dan Zigmond pulls on a black baseball cap. The sun is high, and the trees give little shade. It’s a big park—stretching across a good nine acres of grass, mulch, shrubs, and gravel paths—but from where we are, it looks much bigger. Beyond the nine acres, all we can see are more trees, more green, and the mountains in the east, so the park seems almost endless. “That always amazes me,” I say. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In less than 12hours, three different people offered to pay me if I’d spend an hour talking toa stranger on the phone. All three said they’d enjoyed reading an article I’d written aboutGoogle building a new computer chip for artificial intelligence, and all three urged me to discuss thestory with one of their clients. Each described this client as the manager of a major hedge fund, but wouldn’t say who it was. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In announcing its $85.4 billion agreement to acquire media giant Time Warner, AT&T said this blockbuster deal was very good news for you—the good old American consumer. “We intend to give customers unmatched choice, quality, value and experiences that will define the future of media and communications,” AT&T chairman and CEO Randall Stephenson said in a canned company statement. But don’t take his word for it. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

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President Barack Obama envisions AI as the next Apollo program—an $80 billion effort shepherded by the US government. But not too much shepherding. In his interview with WIRED Editor-in-Chief Scott Dadich and MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito, President Obama said that the government should facilitate a range of research in artificial intelligence. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

AltSchool isn't just for AltSchool anymore. Since its founding in 2014, with backing from the likes of Mark Zuckerberg, Andreessen Horowitz, and eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, the San Francisco startup has opened eight of its new-age AltSchools in the Bay Area and New York City. It sees these as mini educational labs where it's working to create a new kind of personalized educational for the 21st century, and now, the company is sharing its philosophies with the outside world. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Donald Trump says that the Presidential election is rigged against him and that the news media unfairly treats him and his many supporters. So, naturally, the rumor is that Trump is now planning to launch his own television network after all the votes are counted in November. According to The Financial Times, citing multiple unnamed sources, Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, has contacted a top media dealmaker about the possibility of Trump TV. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Noe arrived in the United States after a treacherous two-month journey to flee El Salvador. He hiked through the jungle, rode on top of trains, slept on the streets of Mexico City, and trekked through the desert. Eventually he made it to San Francisco. When Noe enrolled in high school, he discovered a passion—and a valuable talent—for chemistry and calculus. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In this post-Tinder world, your profile picture is everything. The world swipes right (acceptance!) or swipes left (rejection!) based solely on what your photo looks like. Not what you look like. What your photo looks like. So, when hunting for dates and other forms of conjugation, you better get that photo right. Your future could hinge on whether you choose the pic where you're hugging the labradoodle or the one where you're hiking through the woods. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Artificial intelligence can bring enormous prosperity and opportunity. President Obama knows that. But in an interview with WIRED Editor-in-Chief Scott Dadich and MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito, the president also worries that AI could suppress wages, eliminate jobs, and create new inequalities. As we build new forms of AI, he says, we must also develop new economic and social models that can ensure these technologies don't leave people behind. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Why is Amazon opening brick-and-mortar grocery stories? Because it wants to dominate groceries online. Yes, Amazon is opening a string of physical groceries-or at least that's the word from The Wall Street Journal, which cites multiple anonymous sources familiar with the matter. According to the paper, Amazon calls this Project Como, and the first store is planned for the company's home city of Seattle, Washington. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The Situation Room is not as gee-whiz as you think it is. Take it from someone who knows: President Obama. "I always imagined the Situation Room would be this super cool thing, it'd be like Tom Cruise in The Minority Report," Obama, the guest editor of WIRED's November issue, said during a lengthy interview with Joi Ito of MIT's Media Lab and Editor-in-Chief Scott Dadich. "It's not like that at all. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

One in four people on Earth use Facebook to connect with friends and family. But Mark Zuckerberg and company really want all those people to use the social network for office chatter, too. This morning, at an event in London, the company formally released Facebook Workplace, a service designed specifically for business communication. It first unveiled the service-originally called Facebook for Work-eighteen months ago, testing it with many businesses. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

After nominating Donald Trump, the Republican party was always going to face a reckoning. But, no matter who won, that reckoning was supposed to happen after Election Day. Well, it's come early. And it's unfolding in real-time on Twitter. Less than a month before polls open, the GOP nominee is in open political warfare with his party. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Yes, tonight's vice presidential debate sounds about as rousing as a lukewarm cup of Sleepytime tea. Mike Pence and Tim Kaine aren't known for their colorful personalities, or known that much at all. (One recent poll found that more than 40 percent of Americans can't even name either vice presidential candidate). And why should anyone care? Vice presidents don't have that much power anyway, right? But the next vice president might. If Trump wins, Pence might end up running the show. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

When the doors to Code Next opened in Oakland today, Errol King knew the hard work of launching a community computer lab was a prelude to a far greater challenge. Google launched the lab in one of the nation's most diverse cities to introduce black and Latino students to coding and help reverse the tech sector's persistent lack of diversity. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Artificial intelligence can do remarkable things, like recognize faces on social networks, instantly translate speech from one language to another, and identify commands barked into a smartphone. But it also can do stupid things, like label an African-American couple "gorillas." The artificial intelligence underpinning Google Photos did just that last year. The platform uses deep neural networks to identify images in your photo collection. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Google Fiber wants a better way of beaming the Internet into apartment buildings. On Friday, the company filed a document with the Federal Communications Commission arguing that the agency should ease access to a chunk of wireless spectrum that could serve the ambitions of Google Fiber, the company's ultra-high-speed Internet service. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Over the next decade, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan say they will invest $3 billion in a sweeping effort to cure all diseases in the lifetime of today's children. "We are at the limit of our ability to alleviate suffering," Chan, a pediatrician, said this morning at an event in San Francisco. "We want to push back at that boundary. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

This week, Google retooled Google Apps for Work, signaling the company's ever-deepening interest in the enterprise market. It makes sense: the opportunities for growth are enormous, as is the competition. Apple continues to leverage its partnership with IBM to muscle its way in. Facebook will reportedly soon launch its business-focused Facebook at Work. And Microsoft still reigns, thanks to its entrenched Office apps. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Let's face it: artificial intelligence is scary. After decades of dystopian science fiction novels and movies where sentient machines end up turning on humanity, we can't help but worry as real world AI continues to improve at such a rapid rate. Sure, that danger is probably decades away if it's even a real danger at all. But there are many more immediate concerns. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

If you're a candidate spouting conspiracy theories from the stump after the first presidential debate, the��odds��are you didn't win. That's what Donald Trump did Thursday��when he offered���from prepared remarks, no less���the claim that Google is manipulating search results to suppress bad news about Hillary Clinton. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

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