Business, Spoken

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 more about you...

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 ins...

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 more about your ad choices. Visit pod...

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 more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/a...

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 more about your 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,...

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 Ear...

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,”...

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 sa...

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...

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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 more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoic...

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 ce...

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 m...

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 more about your ad choices. Visit...

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 labra...

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 ensu...

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 Se...

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 al...

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 Wor...

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 more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adch...

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?...

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 more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.c...

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 t...

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 more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adch...