Star Shot: The Longshot Interstellar Probe

Internet investor and science philanthropist Yuri Milner was joined at One World Observatory today by renowned cosmologist Stephen Hawking to announce a new Breakthrough Initiative focusing on space exploration and the search for life in the Universe.

Breakthrough Starshot is a $100 million research and engineering program aiming to demonstrate proof of concept for light-propelled nanocrafts. These could fly at 20 percent of light speed and capture images of possible planets and other scientific data in our nearest star system, Alpha Centauri, just over 20 years after their launch.

The program will be led by Pete Worden, the former director of NASA Ames Research Center, and advised by a committee of world-class scientists and engineers. The board will consist of Stephen Hawking, Yuri Milner, and Mark Zuckerberg.

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What are the odds the Star Shot will actually happen?

Perhaps Misreading the Tea Leaves?

For the last three years, the Berkeley, California-based startup delivered a rotating selection of carb-heavy comfort foods to your door in under 15 minutes. That speed couldn't save it. The company on Tuesday said it's closing up shop. Too much competition and too little cash made it impossible to keep going.

Goodbye, $8 pulled-pork smoked Gouda mac 'n cheese, a recurring customer favorite. I'll miss you.

Brazilian-based iFood reportedly bought SpoonRocket for its delivery tech. The company didn't respond to a request to confirm the acquisition.

SpoonRocket is only the latest on-demand startup to fall on hard times. Earlier this month, Instacart said that it's slashing the pay of people who deliver store-bought groceries to customers. In February, on-demand parking valet Zirx closed its doors, while food delivery startup DoorDash had to lower its own value to raise more funds.

On-demand companies have defined this decade's tech boom. Ride-sharing companies like Uber and Lyft and delivery apps like Instacart have made patience an overrated virtue. They've also caught the attention of venture capitalists, who have poured more than $9 billion into those three companies alone.

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This is being taken out of context, IMO.  This is the culling of the startups that have not made the grade as much as anything, to be sure, but its timing is interesting.  The VCs are pulling in their horns.  Silicon Valley workers are reportedly rather nervous.  Others are stating they are expecting an economic down turn.  The business cycle might be turning, guys.  No 'boom' goes on forever.

Silicon Valley is Interested in Testing Basic Guaranteed Income

Silicon Valley loves the idea of basic income. Luminaries such as Marc Andreessen and Peter Diamandis have spoken favorably of giving away free money, so that nobody is poor. And now a leading startup incubator is prepared to put money where its technobabble comes from. Y Combinator, which helped bring Dropbox, Reddit, and Airbnb into being, is funding an experiment to see whether a basic income could work in this country.

Y Combinator president Sam Altman says he's attracted to the concept because it's "the right thing to do" and because artificial intelligence and robots could eliminate millions of the jobs in the next decade or two. "I'm interested in how we can start preparing for that now," he tells Co.Exist.

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The Economist Traces SIlicon Valley's Roots to Whaling in New Bedford, Massachusetts

New Bedford was not the only whaling port in America; nor was America the only whaling nation. Yet according to a study published in 1859, of the 900-odd active whaling ships around the world in 1850, 700 were American, and 70% of those came from New Bedford. The town’s whalers came to dominate the industry, and reap immense profits, thanks to a novel technology that remains relevant to this day. They did not invent a new type of ship, or a new means of tracking whales; instead, they developed a new business model that was extremely effective at marshalling capital and skilled workers despite the immense risks involved for both. Whaling all but disappeared as an industry after mineral oil supplanted whale oil as a fuel. But the business structures pioneered in New Bedford remain as relevant as they ever were. Without them, the tech booms of the 1990s and today would not have been possible.

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Waiting for the Bubble to Pop: Uber Valued at $62.5 Billion

Uber Technologies is looking to raise as much as $2.1 billion in a financing round that would value the car-booking company at $62.5 billion, said people familiar with the matter. Uber has filed paperwork in Delaware detailing the fundraising plans, said the people, who asked not to be named because the plans are private.

The new funding shows Uber is accelerating its race to expand globally and branch into services beyond picking up and dropping off riders. The company has tested food and package delivery in some cities, and is working on new technology, such as self-driving cars. Uber is spending aggressively to expand throughout Asia, particularly in China, where the company expects to spend $1 billion, according to a June letter to investors from Chief Executive Officer Travis Kalanick.

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Apple Building Another Megacampus in Sunnyvale?

It appears that Apple is planning to land another "spaceship" on Silicon Valley. According to the Silicon Valley Business Journal, the tech giant has secured a deal for an already-approved development in Sunnyvale, California. Assuming the report is accurate and all goes to plan, the project will provide Apple with a sustainable campus that boasts space for over 3,000 employees.

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Does Silicon Valley Only Exist Because of the 'Big Lie'

A startup is hemorrhaging cash, and the VCs have yet to agree on terms for a capital infusion. The clock is ticking until deadpool, first weeks away then days. The founders, stress levels increasing to stratospheric levels, continue to sell their company to everyone, whether investors, employees, potential employees, or clients.

They have little choice. Funding is contingent on growth, but that growth can only happen if no one really understands the funding situation. Founders have to tell the lie – that everything is fine, that a feature is going to launch even though the engineer for that feature hasn’t been hired yet, that payroll will run even though the VC dollars are still nowhere on the horizon.

Lying is a requisite and daily part of being a founder, the grease that keeps the startup flywheel running. No one likes to put it that way of course. Instead, we use phrases like “hustling” and “fake it until you make it” to make the idea of lying more palatable. “Information control” is among the most important skills a founder has traditionally needed for success, and these euphemisms change nothing of the daily behavior.

But times are changing, and everyone is getting more sophisticated about startups. People know what questions to ask, and are not afraid to aggressively probe to get the answers they seek. That means that some of the key myths about success in Silicon Valley are at risk. We need a new transparent approach toward information, but we also need to understand that startups are inherently risky – and accept the lies as they come.

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Google's Architectual Plans for Mountain View

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Noel Asks: Is it Possible to Get $50,000 Homes in Palo Alto?

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Silicon Valley Startup Aims to Make Trucks into Hybrids

Ian Wright designed what may be one of the coolest street-legal cars of all time: the electric X1 looked like a Formula 1 racecar and went from zero to 60 in a breathtaking 2.9 seconds. Now, though, all Wright wants to talk about is trucks, especially the workaday delivery trucks and garbage trucks that ply city streets.

Why the excitement? Wright is the founder of Wrightspeed, a San Jose, CA-based startup that’s designed electric powertrains for medium- and heavy-duty trucks. “Garbage trucks are the perfect driving cycle for us: they get two or three miles per gallon, drive 130 miles a day with 1,000 hard stops that chew on the brakes. They’re just perfect,” he says.

Wright was among the founders of Tesla Motors. But despite his background in working on luxury performance cars, he’s come around to thinking that the biggest opportunity for electric vehicle disruption is where most of the fuel is burned—that is, big trucks. Cars may go through a few hundred gallons of gas a year but a commercial truck will burn through thousands of gallons or more. That means there’s a better financial incentive in terms of fuel savings to go electric.

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Viv: Watson's Robopocalyptic Little Sister

When Apple announced the iPhone 4S on October 4, 2011, the headlines were not about its speedy A5 chip or improved camera. Instead they focused on an unusual new feature: an intelligent assistant, dubbed Siri. At first Siri, endowed with a female voice, seemed almost human in the way she understood what you said to her and responded, an advance in artificial intelligence that seemed to place us on a fast track to the Singularity. She was brilliant at fulfilling certain requests, like “Can you set the alarm for 6:30?” or “Call Diane’s mobile phone.” And she had a personality: If you asked her if there was a God, she would demur with deft wisdom. “My policy is the separation of spirit and silicon,” she’d say.

Over the next few months, however, Siri’s limitations became apparent. Ask her to book a plane trip and she would point to travel websites—but she wouldn’t give flight options, let alone secure you a seat. Ask her to buy a copy of Lee Child’s new book and she would draw a blank, despite the fact that Apple sells it. Though Apple has since extended Siri’s powers—to make an OpenTable restaurant reservation, for example—she still can’t do something as simple as booking a table on the next available night in your schedule. She knows how to check your calendar and she knows how to use Open­Table. But putting those things together is, at the moment, beyond her.

Now a small team of engineers at a stealth startup called Viv Labs claims to be on the verge of realizing an advanced form of AI that removes those limitations. Whereas Siri can only perform tasks that Apple engineers explicitly implement, this new program, they say, will be able to teach itself, giving it almost limitless capabilities. In time, they assert, their creation will be able to use your personal preferences and a near-infinite web of connections to answer almost any query and perform almost any function.

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Hewlett Packard is Attempting to Reinvent Computers' Fundamental Architecture

If Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) founders Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard are spinning in their graves, they may be due for a break. Their namesake company is cooking up some awfully ambitious industrial-strength computing technology that, if and when it’s released, could replace a data center’s worth of equipment with a single refrigerator-size machine.

That’s what they’re calling it at HP Labs: “the Machine.” It’s basically a brand-new type of computer architecture that HP’s engineers say will serve as a replacement for today’s designs, with a new operating system, a different type of memory, and superfast data transfer. The company says it will bring the Machine to market within the next few years or fall on its face trying. “We think we have no choice,” says Martin Fink, the chief technology officer and head of HP Labs, who is expected to unveil HP’s plans at a conference Wednesday.

A decade ago, it wouldn’t seem as outlandish as it now does for a company such as HP, IBM (IBM), or Sun Microsystems to build a new computer architecture from the ground up. The hardware powerhouses, known as systems companies, all made their own chips, networking technology, and custom OS. Then commodity components became more powerful, and better data center software began to make up for deficiencies in the cheaper hardware. Consumer Web companies such as Google, Amazon.com (AMZN), and Yahoo! (YHOO) advanced new data center designs that were quickly adopted by the mainstream, shrinking the market share of the systems companies.

HP Labs, the company’s R&D arm, was once revered throughout Silicon Valley as a steady source of new products that could open up new markets. It’s been far less inspiring in recent years, ginning up a mishmash of mobile software, printing services, and teleconferencing systems that haven’t made it to customers in a meaningful way. Amid budget cuts, a costly, complex new computer system would seem like a stretch.

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Google Beats Facebook to Buy Drone Maker Titan Aerospace

The technology company announced Monday that it has acquired Titan Aerospace, a start-up founded in 2012 that makes high-altitude, solar-powered drones.

The purchase is part of the new push in Silicon Valley to find ways of delivering Internet service to underserved areas, particularly in the developing world.

"Titan Aerospace and Google share a profound optimism about the potential for technology to improve the world," Google said. "It's still early days, but atmospheric satellites could help bring internet access to millions of people, and help solve other problems, including disaster relief and environmental damage like deforestation."

The companies didn't respond to requests for comment on the terms of the deal.

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Facebook had been rumored to be trying to buy Titan back in the beginning of March.

San Francisco Grumbles

If there was a tipping point, a moment that crystallized the anger building here toward the so-called technorati for driving up housing prices and threatening the city’s bohemian identity, it came in response to a diatribe posted online in August by a young Internet entrepreneur.

The author, a start-up founder named Peter Shih, listed 10 things he hated about San Francisco. Homeless people, for example. And the “constantly PMSing” weather. And “girls who are obviously 4s and behave like they’re 9s.”

The backlash was immediate. Fliers appeared on telephone poles calling Mr. Shih a “woman hatin’ nerd toucher.” CheapAir offered him a free ticket back to New York. Readers responded that what they hated about San Francisco were “entitled” technology workers like him.

Mr. Shih, who said he received death threats after the post, deleted it and apologized.

But a nerve had been struck. As the center of the technology industry has moved north from Silicon Valley to San Francisco and the largess from tech companies has flowed into the city — Twitter’s stock offering unleashed an estimated 1,600 new millionaires — income disparities have widened sharply, housing prices have soared and orange construction cranes dot the skyline. The tech workers have, rightly or wrongly, received the blame.

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