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☆ Longer Battery Life, Better Screens: New Display Tech From Apple, Google, Others Is Just Around the Corner
▼ + stars: | 2023-01-21 | by ( Christopher Mims | ) www.wsj.com time to read: 1 min

American adults spend the majority of their waking hours looking at screens—and yet most of those screens, including the one you’re probably reading this on now, are based on the same LCD display tech that made its debut in the 1980s. Soon, however, all that could change. A raft of new display technologies are on the way and promise a variety of benefits, from significantly extending the battery life of our wearables, mobile devices and laptops to making them slimmer, lighter and easier to read in full sunlight. At least one of these new types of displays could also enable future technologies that are impossible now, like lightweight augmented-reality smart glasses that project digital interfaces on top of what we see.

☆ New Display Tech Is Coming From Apple, Google, Meta and Others
▼ + stars: | 2023-01-21 | by ( Christopher Mims | ) www.wsj.com time to read: 1 min

☆ This 3-D Printed Icelandic Fish-Gutting Machine Contains the Secret of a Future, Less-Globalized Economy
▼ + stars: | 2023-01-14 | by ( Christopher Mims | ) www.wsj.com time to read: 1 min

Hafnarfjarðarkaupstaður, Iceland, is a town of 30,000 souls built on a lava field, just south of the island nation’s capital city of Reykjavik. If sightseers come this way, it’s for tours of the homes of local “hidden folk”—the dwarfs and elves of the Norse fairy tales that inspired J.R.R. Tucked away in a nondescript 10,000-square-foot building there is a manufacturing facility that runs 24/7, producing parts for fish-processing machines in a way that was, even a few years ago, impossible. Elliði Hreinsson, the founder of Curio, which owns the building, says the machines he designs and makes would be difficult or in some cases impossible to produce without 3-D printing.

☆ RIP: Tech That Died in 2022
▼ + stars: | 2022-12-31 | by ( Christopher Mims | Joanna Stern | ) www.wsj.com time to read: 1 min

As we look ahead to the tech trends we face in 2023, we should also spare a moment to reflect on the gadgets and software that headed into the sunset in 2022. Meta Portal 2018-2022Despite cool video-calling tricks, the Portal never found mass appeal—even during Covid-lockdown Zoom marathons. After Facebook became Meta and refocused on its core business and the metaverse, it pulled the Portal plug.

☆ The Craziest Moments From the Longest Tech Boom (So Far)
▼ + stars: | 2022-12-31 | by ( Christopher Mims | ) www.wsj.com time to read: 1 min

It’s been a singular year for tech, one that marked the apparent end to a heady, madcap boom that changed how we think about the industry. Over the past dozen or so years, a tidal wave of money poured into a collection of technologies—from cloud computing and artificial intelligence to smartphones and two-sided marketplaces—that transformed whole industries and changed many aspects of how we live and work. Major businesses were born or grew into global giants, proving the durability of Silicon Valley’s underlying inspiration: that ideas that seem crazy or unworkable at first may yet prevail.

Big layoffs at Meta , Amazon , Snap and others? A global crypto fraud set in the Bahamas? Elon Musk buying and running Twitter? Look, not even Nostradamus could have seen all that coming. Of course, that’s what we love about this annual exercise, where our team sits around a crystal ball, roasting AI-generated marshmallows and predicting what’s to come in the new year.

☆ Meet the harbor pilots who make $434,000 a year, face high fatality rates, and are responsible for guiding hulking cargo ships into ports
▼ + stars: | 2022-12-30 | by ( Grace Kay | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +4 min

Harbor pilots are the highest paid city employees, but face a one in 20 chance of dying on the job. Harbor pilots are some of the highest-paid municipal employees and represent a crucial part of a shipment's journey. "I've been chased up the ladder by the boat," Craig Flinn, another harbor pilot, tells Mims. A harbor pilot's job is complete once the ship is safely tucked away in its berth. Ultimately, harbor pilots represent a little known, but crucial part of the supply-chain.

☆ Are You ‘Extremely Hardcore’ or Not? How Elon Musk Is Dividing Silicon Valley’s Elite
▼ + stars: | 2022-12-24 | by ( Christopher Mims | ) www.wsj.com time to read: 1 min

Elon Musk has sometimes seemed like the person Silicon Valley would create if venture-funded engineers figured out how to build humans in a lab: the bold innovator fearlessly disrupting one industry after another with a nerdy verve. And yet these days, Silicon Valley’s investors, leaders and commentators are profoundly divided about tech’s billionaire icon, in ways that are revealing about Mr. Musk and about the state of the industry.

☆ The Key to Widespread Adoption of EVs: Less Range
▼ + stars: | 2022-12-17 | by ( Christopher Mims | ) www.wsj.com time to read: 1 min

What if electric cars could cost significantly less than they do now, charge in the same amount of time it takes to fill up a tank of gas and use far less of the scarce materials that currently constrain their production? That’s a future some electric-vehicle experts say we should be focusing on. For years, electric-car buyers have been trained to look at one number above all others when considering a new vehicle: How far does it go on a charge? The more miles, the better, goes the logic, or else consumers will feel “range anxiety”—that fear that you could end up stuck on the side of the road, all out of electrons and with no place to recharge.

☆ Survival Lessons From Past Tech Downturns
▼ + stars: | 2022-12-10 | by ( Christopher Mims | ) www.wsj.com time to read: 1 min

People who have been in the tech industry long enough to remember its previous major downturns have a message for those facing the current one: Decisions made now will determine who survives—and lay the groundwork for the next tech boom. Surviving this tech winter, and building for the next boom, requires strategies that are often the opposite of those popular only a year ago. It also requires a change in mindset. Tech leaders generally are told to keep their eyes fixed on the horizon. But to navigate the current economic downturn, looking back at what worked and didn’t will be essential.

☆ The Myth of the Tech God Is Crumbling
▼ + stars: | 2022-11-19 | by ( Christopher Mims | ) www.wsj.com time to read: +1 min

Tech is full of smart people who build, run and invest in successful companies that have produced a tremendous amount of innovation. But the industry’s recent spate of failures and reversals has made one thing clear: Many of its leaders aren’t as smart as they thought they were. Just this month, a pair of the world’s mightiest tech names, Amazon.com and Facebook parent Meta Platforms, announced broad layoffs after years of breakneck hiring. Another giant, Google parent Alphabet , came under pressure from an activist investor to slash its costs. And Elon Musk, who perhaps more than anyone embodies the idea of the polymath tech genius, has made a mess of Twitter after paying $44 billion to buy it.

☆ Can You Tell Whether This Headline Was Written by a Robot?
▼ + stars: | 2022-11-12 | by ( Christopher Mims | ) www.wsj.com time to read: 1 min

You probably haven’t noticed, but there’s a good chance that some of what you’ve read on the internet was written by robots. And it’s likely to be a lot more soon. Artificial-intelligence software programs that generate text are becoming sophisticated enough that their output often can’t be distinguished from what people write. And a growing number of companies are seeking to make use of this technology to automate the creation of information we might rely on, according to those who build the tools, academics who study the software, and investors backing companies that are expanding the types of content that can be auto-generated.

☆ Why Elon Musk’s Quest to Revive Twitter Is Likely to Fail
▼ + stars: | 2022-11-05 | by ( Christopher Mims | ) www.wsj.com time to read: 1 min

Elon Musk is treating Twitter like a startup. The thing about startups is, most of them fail. At Twitter, as is typical at tech startups, Mr. Musk is making or has promised to make a great many changes quickly. This makes a lot of sense when a company is small and burning investor cash. Few operators in tech are as familiar with this well-worn playbook as Mr. Musk, who is almost unrivaled among entrepreneurs in the total market value of all the companies he has helmed or helped found—including SpaceX, Tesla and PayPal.

☆ Tech Is Getting Boring. That’s a Good Thing.
▼ + stars: | 2022-10-29 | by ( Christopher Mims | ) www.wsj.com time to read: 1 min

LAGUNA BEACH, Calif.—With their valuations and earnings down, and their guidance gloomy, America’s tech companies have entered a phase when they have to be brutally honest with themselves about what really works. This means executives are trimming staff, moonshots and unprofitable distractions. They’re also deciding what to focus on. It’s a transition away from more than a decade of “gee-whiz” projects—think self-driving cars, flying cars, metaverses and crypto—all fueled by seemingly limitless cash and venture-backed meal-replacement slurries. The task at hand now: the sometimes-boring but always-important work of building and expanding businesses that actually make money, by delivering things people and companies want and need.

☆ In the Future, There Will Be No Passwords—Because You Keep Giving Yours Away
▼ + stars: | 2022-10-22 | by ( Christopher Mims | ) www.wsj.com time to read: 1 min

Passwords have long been the linchpin in the machinery protecting our online accounts. Increasingly, they are seen instead as a weak link—one that some companies want to do away with entirely. Following the current advice on how to securely log in to our accounts can feel like trying to keep up with how many blades are on the latest disposable razor. The guidance has changed over the years, from simple, memorizable passwords to unpronounceable strings of characters customized for each account, and stored in password managers. Most recently, we’ve been admonished that every login needs a second proof of identity, known as two-factor authentication—usually a number sent by text or email.

☆ Meet the Army of Robots Coming to Fill In for Scarce Workers
▼ + stars: | 2022-10-15 | by ( Christopher Mims | ) www.wsj.com time to read: 1 min

A new wave of robots is arriving—and, in a world short of workers, business leaders are more eager to welcome them than ever. A combination of hard-pressed employers, technological leaps and improved cost effectiveness has fueled a rapid expansion of the world’s robot army. A half-million industrial robots were installed globally last year, according to data released Thursday by the trade group International Federation of Robotics—an all-time high exceeding the previous record, set in 2018, by 22%.

☆ Why Even Big Tech Companies Keep Getting Hacked—and What They Plan to Do About It
▼ + stars: | 2022-09-24 | by ( Christopher Mims | ) www.wsj.com time to read: 1 min

The companies that should know best how to fight hackers, tech firms, have reached an arresting conclusion: The weakest link in security, as it’s been since the Trojan War, is humans. Increasingly, they are taking a new approach: Trust no one.

☆ More Bosses Are Spying on Quiet Quitters. It Could Backfire.
▼ + stars: | 2022-09-19 | by ( Christopher Mims | ) www.wsj.com time to read: +1 min

In the battle against “quiet quitting” and other obstacles to productivity in the workplace, companies are increasingly turning to an array of sophisticated tools to watch and analyze how employees do their jobs. The sobering news for America’s bosses: These technologies can fall short of their promises, and even be counterproductive. Patchy evidence for the effectiveness of workplace monitoring tech hasn’t stopped it from sweeping through U.S. companies over the past 2½ years. Since the start of the pandemic, one in three medium-to-large U.S. companies has adopted some kind of worker surveillance system, and the total fraction using such systems is now two in three, says Brian Kropp , vice president of HR research at Gartner . While there is a broad spectrum of how these systems work and what data they gather, many of them include constant monitoring of nearly everything workers do on their devices.

☆ Christopher Mims — Technology Columnist at The Wall Street Journal
▼ + stars: | 2022-09-19 | by ( Christopher Mims | ) www.wsj.com time to read: 1 min

Christopher MimsChristopher Mims is a columnist who writes about technology for The Wall Street Journal's tech bureau in San Francisco. The subjects of his columns vary widely from one week to the next. He has written about bidets, brain implants, the cult of the founder, the history of technology, innovation, venture capital, robotics, batteries, energy, materials science, wireless communications, AI, data science, telepresence, microchips, logistics, IT, 3D printing and autonomous boats, trucks, cars, drones and flying taxis. Christopher joined the Journal from Quartz, where he also covered technology. He has won a SABEW award for commentary, and has written a book, “Arriving Today” on how supply chains work.

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