Tuesday, March 28, 2017

Elon Musk's new existential defense initiative for humans. It's The Daily Crunch.

THE DAILY CRUNCH
TUESDAY, MARCH 28 2017 By Darrell Etherington

Build me a better brain, Elon: It's time to get cyber smart with The Daily Crunch for March 28, 2017. Plus, if you've got a story, Facebook wants to help you tell it in the most Snapchat way possible.

1. Elon Musk's new company wants to get inside your brain

If there's one thing that drives multi-CEO and serial founder Elon Musk, it's 'existential imperatives.' That's why he felt the need to start Neuralink, his latest company (that's four including his tunnelling company, for those keeping count).

Neuralink will explore better ways to 'link' our 'neural' pathways with computers – basically, it wants to make sure your brain can interface directly with tech, decreasing exponentially the bandwidth crunch that we currently experience when doing this. Why? Because we need a way to keep up with the pace of advancement of artificial intelligence. That's what keeps Musk up at night: your car payments probably seem somewhat trivial now.

2. Facebook completes its Snapchat cloning process

Facebook has deployed Snapchat Stores in the main Facebook app, though it calls these just "Stories," dropping Snapchat from the name for whatever reason. The things disappear after 24 hours, and it's exactly what you expect/are used to if you use that other app. That's what you get when you build your company on a feature, rather than a platform, I guess.

3. Twitter now pre-Periscopes

Ads before content – this is the rule of the land, immutable. Now Periscope is abiding by this universal law, putting pre-roll before its videos. This is how we bake the content cake, folks.

4. Tinder's final form is what you'd expect

The long arc of dating websites leads to the desktop, where people can make superficial choices about mates in a browser window ready to be minimized when the boss walks by, or where they can judge others more easily in a group setting.

5. Tencent picks up 5 percent of Tesla

Chinese internet giant Tencent, which owns WeChat, has purchased 5 percent of Tesla's shares, in a deal worth $1.7 billion at the time of purchase. Both companies share the first two letters of their name in common, which is probably the real reason this went down.

6. Amazon picks up Souq, giving it a foothold in the Middle East

Amazon has purchased a company frequently described as the "Amazon of the Middle East." This is why, if you're a startup, you want to welcome those kinds of comparisons: sometimes, they can chart a path to an exit.

7. Samsung's Galaxy Note 7 gets a second life

The Note 7 will get re-released for rent or for sale in some markets, refurbished and sans explosions. Canada is one of the lucky(?) markets getting this boon, so maybe I'll pick one up: I do enjoy living dangerously.

Get more stories at techcrunch.com 

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