Crazy Stupid Tech

By Om Malik I’m addicted to Apple’s Vision Pro. It’s a nearly perfect entertainment device, serving as my ideal television. Sure, I would like it to be lighter. I so badly wish that its battery would last longer. And I wish Siri worked better on it, so that when I ask it a question about what I'm watching (say, how many home runs has Juan Soto...

By Om Malik Pete Warden is the kind of fellow you would run into at the old eTech conference or at Foo Camp—an old-school engineer who is equally at home hacking hardware and writing code in the latest languages. It was at an eTech conference that I first met Warden. I can’t remember the context, but we have been in touch ever since. He would...

By Fred Vogelstein Many still believe AI optimization is an oxymoron. You can’t optimize something as complicated and inherently unpredictable as a neural network. Even if it could be done, what AI chatbot would grant outside companies database access like that? That’s how they’re competing - on the proprietary quality of their data and...

By Om Malik Dennis Crowley has built his career at the intersection of emerging technologies and human behavior. Twenty years ago, as a 25-year-old inspired by Harry Potter's Marauder's Map, he created Dodgeball—turning text messaging into a way for friends to find each other in the city. When the iPhone emerged, he launched Foursquare, riding...

By Fred Vogelstein When Shiv Rao was a cardiologist and investor in Pittsburgh, he saw a patient with a 10-year-history of breast cancer who seemed particularly tense during the appointment. “At the end of the encounter I asked her if there was something I did or said to make her so anxious. She told me that since her initial diagnosis of breast...

By Om Malik It’s Saturday in South Park. Kids are squealing. A man shadowboxes behind me. Sitting across from me on a not-so-clean bench are Bethany Bongiorno and Imran Chaudhri, partners in both life and work. They are co-founders of Humane, the San Francisco company behind AI Pin, arguably the first AI personal computer. (Also: What is an AI...

By Om Malik I first met Matthew Prince in 2010, the day he launched Cloudflare at TechCrunch Disrupt. His original pitch for Cloudflare was “Content Delivery Network (CDN) for the masses” that would take a few minutes to set up. Others like Akamai offered similar services, but for big-budget customers. Cloudflare was going after a burgeoning...

By Fred Vogelstein I remember when Bill Gross launched GoTo.com back in early 1998. The idea seemed nuts. Search was broken. Spammers had polluted results. In many cases they’d become just a list of who’d paid the most for placement. Google wasn’t even a company until the end of that year. But GoTo’s solution - to just be up front about spammers’...

Welcome to Crazy Stupid Tech, a newsletter about the tech-of-technology that shapes the future If you don’t know us, here’s a quick introduction. • I am Fred Vogelstein, an investigative technology and biotech journalist. I’ve been writing about Silicon Valley mostly for Wired, The New York Times Magazine and Fortune since 1998. I’m also the...