Category: TC

Activist gig workers seek to form nonprofit to support fellow workers

Vanessa Bain (pictured above), a well-known gig worker-activist, has teamed up with fellow gig worker-activist Sarah Clarke (pseudonym) to form the Gig Workers Collective. It’s early days for the organization, which is a pending 501(c)(3) organization, but its ambitions are big. “We want to be the first responders that, whenever…

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SoftBank-backed Brandless shuts its doors for good

It was a roller coaster ride — a short one. Brandless, a San Francisco-based e-commerce company that made and sold an assortment of “cruelty-free” products in beauty and personal care, household, baby and pet categories has shut its doors less than three years after officially opening them in July 2017.…

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Tesla ramps up solar tile roofs installations in U.S., eyes China and Europe expansion

Tesla appears to be ramping up installations of its solar tile roofs in the San Francisco Bay area and will eventually roll out to Europe and China, according to CEO Elon Musk who in a series of tweets provided the first substantial update since the company launched the third iteration…

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Facebook quietly acquired another UK AI startup and almost no one noticed

Over the last few years, Facebook has been busy building out AI capabilities in areas like computer vision, natural language processing (NLP) and ‘deep learning,’ in part by acquiring promising startups in the space. Understandably, this has seen the U.S. social networking giant look to the U.K. for AI talent,…

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SpaceX’s first astronaut mission could take off in May

SpaceX is getting very close to its goal of flying actual astronauts aboard its Crew Dragon spacecraft. After a successful in-flight abort (IFA) test in January, it had basically crossed off all the major milestones needed before flying people, first on a demonstration mission referred to as “Demo-2” by SpaceX…

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2021 NASA budget request includes $3.3B for human lunar landers, $430M for Moon resource development

The Trump White House today issued its fiscal 2021 budget request, and it included a 12% increase in requested funding to NASA’s coffers, as expected. That puts the total request for NASA at $25.2 billion, nearly half, or $12.3 billion, of which is earmarked specifically to support NASA’s efforts to…

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