Business, Spoken

Kevin Systrom doesn’t know what’s next, but he’s starting by learning to fly. Three weeks after he and his Instagram cofounder Mike Krieger abruptly left the Facebook-owned company—and three days since his first solo flight—Systrom says he’s taking time to think about what problem he wants to attack next. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Social movements have spurred major transformations in society, from the end of slavery to universal suffrage, the rise of labor unions, and universal education. Yet somehow after decades of economic stability, we began to rely on technological rather than social tools to remake the world, says Glen Weyl, a principal researcher for Microsoft. While technology flourished, we “did not allow our soci...

With a user base of more than 2 billion people who can be chopped and sorted by almost any conceivable data point—men ages 21 to 45 living in the United States who are parents to preteens and like Fortnite; women with a bachelor’s degree who are away from family and whose friends are recently engaged—Facebook advertising is an incredibly powerful tool. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podca...

Microsoft wants to make peace with Linux, saying this week that it will allow more than 2,600 other companies, including longtime rivals like Google and IBM, to use the technology behind 60,000 Microsoft patents for their own Linux-related open source projects. That could be good news for makers of "internet of Things" devices. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Within hours of California governor Jerry Brown signing a sweeping net neutrality bill into law, the US Department of Justice sued the state, sparking the latest battle in the long legal war over the ground rules for the internet. Groups representing broadband providers followed suit on Wednesday, with their own lawsuit arguing that California's law was illegal. Learn more about your ad choices. V...

Over the past year, Facebook has faced a reckoning over the way its plan to connect the next billion users to the internet has sown division, including spreading hate speech that incited ethnic violence in Myanmar and disseminating propaganda for a violent dictator in the Philippines. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

When Amazon announced Tuesday that it was raising its minimum wage to $15 an hour for all employees, even vocal critics of its labor practices like Senator Bernie Sanders praised the company. The retail giant’s decision will undoubtedly put more money into the hands of its workers—especially the some 100,000 temporary US employees Amazon plans to hire in the coming months for the holiday season. L...

In 2001, a 25-year-old unemployed college dropout named Bram Cohen crafted an elegant protocol for moving data around the internet. Titanic numbers of pirated songs and movies, and countless lawsuits, later, he’s putting the finishing touches on what he hopes will be another world-changing protocol—this time for moving around money. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoi...

After months of increased public criticism about its grueling labor practices, Amazon announced Tuesday that it would begin paying all US employees, including part-time, seasonal, and temporary workers, at least $15 an hour and all UK employees at least £9.50 (with higher wages in London) beginning November 1. The move will affect 250,000 Amazon employees and 100,000 seasonal workers, according to...

Several major tech companies---including Apple, Google parent Alphabet, and Facebook---will likely have to add women to their boards of directors by mid-2021 under a pioneering new California law aimed at bringing more women into corporate boardrooms. California governor Jerry Brown signed the measure, known as SB 826, into law on Sunday. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/...

The nation’s largest state just adopted sweeping net neutrality protections, setting up a potential legal showdown with the Federal Communications Commission over the future of the internet. California Governor Jerry Brown Sunday signed a bill banning broadband providers such as AT&T and Comcast from blocking, throttling, or otherwise discriminating against lawful content passing through their net...

Elon Musk has long established himself as a both a visionary CEO and a lightning rod for attention, good and bad. The bad reared its head dramatically this week as the Securities and Exchange Commission charged Musk with securities fraud for misleading investors with August tweets about taking Tesla private. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

There are significant, real-world benefits to having an accepted and recognized identity. That’s why the concept of a digital identity is being pursued around the world, from Australia to India. From airports to health records systems, technologists and policy makers with good intentions are digitizing our identities, making modern life more efficient and streamlined. Learn more about your ad choi...

For all the advances being made in the field, artificial intelligence still struggles when it comes to identifying hate speech. When he testified before Congress in April, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said it was “one of the hardest” problems. But, he went on, he was optimistic that “over a five- to 10-year period, we will have AI tools that can get into some of the linguistic nuances of different...

Coraline Ada Ehmke has been writing software professionally since 1994. For the past decade, she’s been active in the Ruby programming language community and has created numerous open source tools to help fellow Ruby programmers. But these days she's best known for a different type of code altogether. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Google’s first public attempt to explain its reported interest in entering the Chinese market failed to appease critical members of Congress at a Senate Commerce Committee hearing on Wednesday. The hearing, which was attended by Google, AT&T, Amazon, Apple, and Charter Communications, began as a broad discussion of possible privacy legislation. But it concluded as a pointed condemnation of Google...

For Democrats, there are already plenty of signs pointing to a good election night this November. There's the record number of House candidates outraising their Republican incumbent rivals. There's the unlikely rise of Texas senate candidate Beto O'Rourke giving Ted Cruz a real run for his seat. There are the upset victories in state legislature races, like the one in Virginia last fall. And of co...

On Monday night, when the cofounders of Instagram announced that they had quit Facebook, reportedly over Mark Zuckerberg’s meddling, it marked the end of an era in more ways than one. It shattered the partition that protected the beloved photo-sharing app from the sins of its parent company. The departures also extinguished the idea of Facebook as a “family of companies. Learn more about your ad c...

Twitter on Tuesday announced a new policy addressing “dehumanizing speech,” which will take effect later this year, and for the first time the public will be able to formally provide the company with feedback on the proposed rule. The policy will prohibit “content that dehumanizes others based on their membership in an identifiable group, even when the material does not include a direct target. Le...

Cobbling together a DIY dossier about a celebrity is a time-honored internet tradition. Scan a few Wikipedia pages, click through some Google images, scroll through social media accounts, maybe some dubious gossip sites, and you have a snapshot of the person’s life. Now Google wants to do that detective work for you, accessible in a format that owes a lot to Instagram stories, except showcasing th...

When it came into being in 2006, Twitter seemed perplexing. Publishing teensy, 140-character updates? Whatever was that good for? Twitter seemed like a ghastly mashup of the preening narcissism and nanosecond attention spans that defined the worst trends in digital culture. Tim Ferriss, writer of productivity books, called it “pointless email on steroids.” Who cares what you had for lunch? But cri...

Henry Zhu makes software that's crucial to websites you use every day, even if you’ve never heard of him or his software. Zhu manages a program called Babel, which translates code written in one version of the programming language JavaScript into code written for another version of the language. That might not sound like a big deal. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoi...