Month: August 2021
How Amazon EC2 grew from a notion into a foundational element of cloud computing
The beta launched 15 years ago this week Ron Miller 18 hours Fifteen years ago this week on August 25, 2006, AWS turned on the very first beta instance of EC2, its cloud-based virtual computers. Today cloud computing, and more specifically infrastructure as a service, is a staple of how…
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The bar for behavioral health startups just got higher
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. Happy Saturday! After news broke that meditation app Headspace and on-demand mental health care platform Ginger were merging, we couldn’t resist hopping on the mics to do a bonus episode. And, because we…
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On the future of walls, or The Wall
Space may be the endless frontier, but here on Earth, we define space in the modern sense as something enclosed. Walls, fences and barriers enclose space, define it and make it legible. In fact, the sense of limits is so strong these days with place that we often have to…
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Air conditioning is one of the greatest inventions of the 20th Century. It’s also killing the 21st
When did indoor air become cold and clean? Air conditioning is one of those inventions that have become so ubiquitous, that many in the developed world don’t even realize that less than a century ago, it didn’t exist. Indeed, it wasn’t so long ago that the air inside our buildings…
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How national security is being redefined by climate change
One of the most unfortunate fault lines in climate change politics today is the lack of cooperation between environmentalists and the national security community. Left-wing climate activists don’t exactly hang out with more right-leaning military strategists, the former often seeing the latter as destructive anti-ecological marauders, while the latter often…
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Is the best way to solve climate change to “do nothing?”
When it comes to climate change, it might seem that a book entitled “How to Do Nothing” would not only be irrelevant, but also downright obscene and even dangerous. Not to mention that after more than a year of pandemic living, many people are understandably fatigued at the prospect of…
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