How overhead projectors took over your classroom
How overhead projectors took over your classroom

It used to be so easy to get away with things in school. The teacher, after all, was always turned around writing at the chalkboard! But then came a bit of technology, previously mostly used for military purposes, called the overhead projector. It would change far more than just the disciplinary record of students everywhere. […]

Jad Abumrad loves a butterfly knife and a good springy pillow
Jad Abumrad loves a butterfly knife and a good springy pillow

It’s hard to overstate Jad Abumrad’s impact on the podcasting world. He created and hosted Dolly Parton’s America and Fela Kuti: Fear No Man, two Peabody Award-winning shows that offered unprecedented looks at the lives of two of the most important music icons of the last century. Before that, though, he created Radiolab, an experimental […]

SpaceX’s ambitious, expensive gamble to replace AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon
SpaceX’s ambitious, expensive gamble to replace AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon

Today, I’m talking with Walter Piecyk, a partner and analyst at LightShed Partners who covers tech, media, and telecom, about SpaceX’s recently announced plan to become a major wireless carrier. Last week, SpaceX agreed to buy a big chunk of low-band spectrum to expand the Starlink network, spectrum that’s been traded around the telecom business […]

Apple’s HomeView has an app problem
Apple’s HomeView has an app problem

It’s been a couple of days since Apple’s big smart home announcement, and we have some more information – and a bunch of new questions – about the Apple HomeView. The device has plenty of computing oomph, is always connected to power, and looks like a perfect place to run a bunch of apps. And […]

Benn Jordan on Flock, privacy, and the new surveillance backlash
Benn Jordan on Flock, privacy, and the new surveillance backlash

Today, I’m talking with Benn Jordan, musician, YouTuber, researcher, and investigative journalist. You might know Benn from those first two titles — he’s got a prolific discography of experimental music dating back decades. But in the last couple of years, he’s become a high-profile face in the creator and media spaces for his work investigating […]

Glean CEO Arvind Jain says he wants Glean to be easy to replace
Glean CEO Arvind Jain says he wants Glean to be easy to replace

Glean has no plans to raise more money and no concrete plans to go public, founder and chief executive Arvind Jain told TNW. The enterprise AI company could list if it wanted to, he said, and it is getting its internal processes ready. But the AI indus…

UiPath’s Michael Atalla on AI slop, junior jobs and a Shaolin monk’s advice
UiPath’s Michael Atalla on AI slop, junior jobs and a Shaolin monk’s advice

UiPath’s marketing team has stopped paying outside firms to pull together its advertising data. The head of its paid media team built an AI agent on UiPath’s own platform instead, chief marketing officer Michael Atalla told TNW. It collects the data, a…

Why the LeapPad couldn’t survive the iPad
Why the LeapPad couldn’t survive the iPad

For multiple years, the hottest toy in the United States was a book. But not just any book: a smart book that could play sounds and respond to taps and help kids learn to read. It was the kind of gadget seemingly any parent could get behind, but it came with a high price – […]

Will Warner Bros. kill Skydance — or will David Ellison kill Warner Bros?
Will Warner Bros. kill Skydance — or will David Ellison kill Warner Bros?

Today, I’m talking with Peter Kafka, chief correspondent at Business Insider and host of the Channels podcast, about the gigantic Warner Bros.-Paramount merger and the future of the company now simply called Skydance. Skydance is owned by David Ellison, son of Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, and its deal to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery officially closed […]

The AI is in the computer
The AI is in the computer

It’s gadget season, and a lot of companies are launching a lot of new products. But whether it’s Microsoft dropping a high-end laptop, Amazon shipping a fancy Android tablet, or Apple diving headlong into the smart home, the actual strategy appears to be almost always the same. All these companies believe AI assistants and agents […]