On Our "Virtual Route 66" This Week: A Window into Our World

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STARTUPS VENTURE CAPITAL Clubhouse Isn’t Dead Yet By Kaya Yurieff Maybe the eulogies for Clubhouse were a bit premature. Sure, the social audio app’s star has dimmed since it became a Silicon Valley sensation during the first phase of the pandemic, when millions of people were stuck at home, bored out of their minds. By some estimates, usage of the app is down more than 70% from its peak in February 2021, and popular creators who once hosted lively interactive discussions on the platform are bailing on it. Even the luminaries from Andreessen Horowitz—the venture firm that backed Clubhouse and then flooded its chatrooms with its partners to expound on crypto and other topics—have become far less active personalities on the app. But Clubhouse is still alive and kicking. It raised boatloads of cash—around $310 million, according to PitchBook—and, more important, it doesn’t seem to have blown the money on the kind of extravagant spending spree that landed so many other tech startups in hot water. Clubhouse has under 100 employees and, at least so far, has avoided the kind of deep layoffs some companies have had to resort to recently—like Peloton, which cut 2,800 employees, or 20% of its corporate workforce, earlier this year. People who have recently left Clubhouse estimated that the company’s cash has given it enough runway to stave off existential questions for several years.    READ THE FULL STORY

OPINION POLICY The U.S. Is Writing a New Digital Doctrine By Karen Kornbluh In its infancy, the commercial web was thought to be a much-needed competitor against the incumbent players in the telecommunications market—or rather it could be, but only if it could steer clear of strangling regulations. So the U.S. created a governance system with minimal state control, enshrining the right of free access within the context of a global, secure and resilient internet. Over the decades that followed, repressive rulers alarmed by the role of a free, open internet in the Arab Spring in North Africa and the Middle East and in the Orange Revolution in Ukraine turned the technology to their advantage. The U.S. and the EU faced an asymmetric challenge. Even as violent campaigns targeted religious and ethnic minorities, cyberattacks crippled civic institutions and information operations undermined free elections, democracies confronted a dilemma. Their societies were increasingly operating online, and responding too aggressively to those attacks risked further compromising not only their own security, but also the openness of the global network. Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine may prove to be the end of the U.S.’s relatively passive approach. In response to Russia’s recent aggression, propaganda efforts, censorship and cyberattacks, the U.S. has worked with democratic allies to leverage their digital advantages to great impact. The group effort has also proved that a robust cyberdefense doesn’t have to come at the expense of online human rights.    READ THE FULL STORY

Daily Convergence Update 07/15/2022

Selected By Virtual Peter Riding in a Solar-Powered Electric Vehicle That Doubles as a Camper Seeing an Aptera vehicle in the wild is like seeing a spacecraft driving down the road. The unique, three-wheel setup makes a lot of sense considering that both spaceships and Aptera are designed with aerodynamics and efficiency top of mind. Yet despite its space age looks, it's actually an electric car that you might even want to sleep in.

Selected By Virtual Peter Alphabet’s Wing is working on larger drones that can handle heavier deliveries Wing, the drone delivery company operated by Google parent Alphabet, unveiled a series of new prototype aircraft designed to handle a variety of payloads. The company said the new drones will share the same underlying components with the aircraft currently in use delivering pharmaceuticals and other small packages in the suburbs outside of Dallas-Fort Worth.

Selected By Virtual Peter Time-Release Microparticles Could Deliver “Self-Boosting” Vaccines Most vaccines, from measles to COVID-19, require a series of multiple shots before the recipient is considered to be fully vaccinated. To make that easier to achieve, MIT researchers have developed microparticles that can be tuned to deliver their payload at different time points, and which could be used to create what the scientists describe as “self-boosting vaccines.”

From Peter Diamandis I’m going to say this a few hundred thousand more times before I die. Your mindset is the most important thing for you to focus on. And it’s about the only thing you have control over. You can’t control the market, global conflicts, or people's opinions of you. Only your mind. So I released a free newsletter to help you refine your mindsets in less than 5 min every Monday. Subscribe below and let me know what you think. Peter Sign up for MINDset Mondays

Space How AI Enabled James Webb Space Telescope to Capture Stellar Images of Space On Monday, President Biden hosted a gathering at the White House where he unveiled the James Webb Space Telescope’s first scientific photograph. It is one of the targets that NASA earlier disclosed on Friday, July 8: galaxy cluster SMACS 0723. SMACS 0723 is located in the southern constellation of Volans at a distance of 5.12 billion light-years from our planet. The image showed how this galaxy cluster looked 4.6 billion years ago. China's asteroid deflection test by 2026 to protect earth from doomsday space rocks Around 66 million years back, a giant asteroid hit the earth in its full fury and sent plumes of debris to mammoth heights into the planet's atmosphere. The impact was so intense, and it ultimately resulted in the extinction of dinosaurs, and several other species from the earth's surface.

Transportation Snowmobiles Go Electric with Help from 3D Printing « Fabbaloo Charles R. Goulding and Preeti Sulibhavi look at how ESG goals are assisted by additive manufacturing in the snowmobile industry. The May 16th issue of the New York Times (NYT) had a front-page article on Taiga Motors (Taiga) headquartered in Quebec, Canada and the manufacturer of the first, widely sold, electric snowmobile. Taiga’s first fleet sale was to Tao Ski Valley in New Mexico. Stratom’s RAPID Autonomous Refueling Holds Promise for UAVs At this spring’s EXPONENTIAL event in Orlando, FL, Stratom’s RAPID autonomous refueling system received an AUVSI XCELLENCE in Technology Award in the “Hardware & Systems Design” category. The awards honor “companies and organizations, and individuals that achieved significant accomplishments in operations, technology and innovation across the uncrewed systems community.”

Technology Meta's 'Make-A-Scene' AI blends human and computer imagination into algorithmic art Text-to-image generation is the hot algorithmic process right now, with OpenAI’s Craiyon (formerly DALL-E mini) and Google’s Imagen AIs unleashing tidal waves of wonderfully weird procedurally generated art synthesized from human and computer imaginations. On Tuesday, Meta revealed that it too has developed an AI image generation engine, one that it hopes will help to build immersive worlds in the Metaverse and create high digital art. New shape-shifting material can move like a robot Engineers have developed a new class of smart textiles that can shape-shift and turn a two-dimensional material into 3D structures. These artificial muscles, which are surrounded by a helical coil of traditional fibres, can be programmed to contract or expand into a variety of shapes depending on its initial structure.

Health Indian scientists develop peptides that arrest coronavirus entry into human cells The synthetic peptides are also capable of clumping the COVID-19 virions together, cutting down their ability to infect other cells Indian scientists have designed a new class of synthetic peptides that can potentially block the entry of SARS-CoV-2 virus into human cells. Augmented Reality & Virtual Reality In Healthcare Market is expected to witness Incredible Growth during 2021-2031 Global Augmented Reality & Virtual Reality In Healthcare Market report from Global Insight Services is the single authoritative source of intelligence on Augmented Reality & Virtual Reality In Healthcare Market. The report will provide you with analysis of impact of latest market disruptions such as Russia-Ukraine war and Covid-19 on the market. Report provides qualitative analysis of the market using various frameworks such as Porters’ and PESTLE analysis. Report includes in-depth segmentation and market size data by categories, product types, applications, and geographies. Report also includ...