Digital technology is revolutionizing the provision of services. Consider the following scenario: A Berlin resident we’ll call Paul has recently moved to a new apartment in the city. To initiate phone and internet service, he plugs his router into a wall outlet. Five minutes later, he receives a call from his service provider. An agent we’ll call Anna asks Paul to confirm that he has moved. S...

Executives at the outdoor apparel company are sick and tired of Big Food's greenwashing.Yvon Chouinard, the short, bluff, fatalistic founder of Patagonia, the company renowned for its pricey parkas, fuzzy fleeces, and exhortations to buy fewer of them, sits in a cafeteria-style Chinese restaurant in Jackson, Wyo. He scratches a clam from its shell, forks it into his mouth, chews, checks the tim...

America’s internet landscapes are rich, pervasive, and very hard to see. The miles of fiber-optic cable that connect the country to the world are mostly visible in fragments—signs for buried cable along the side of a road, telephone poles running between houses forming serpentine labyrinths beneath city manhole covers. These glimpses of networks tend to feature the names of at least a few dif...

Chicken, peas, beef, sweet potatoes and blueberries, the stuff of $40 meals in places like Hayes Valley and Greenwich Village — and starting today, also the stuff of dog food.Ollie, a new startup founded by Alex Douzet, Gabby Slome and Randy Jimenez, is aimed squarely at disrupting the premium pet food space by offering something like a Sprig or Maple for dogs. With a new $4.4 million round co...

The Nvidia Titan X is one of the latest examples of GPU chips used in deep learning.Artificial intelligence driven by deep learning often runs on many computer chips working together in parallel. But the deep-learning algorithms, called neural networks, can run only so fast in this parallel computing setup because of the limited speed with which data flows between the different chips. The Japan...

Once known for its futuristic "capsule" hotels, Japan has expanded its offerings without expanding the space. Since 1979, when renowned Japanese architect Kisho Kurokawa opened the first capsule hotel in Osaka, Japan, the country has been a pioneer in designing hotels that expertly pack large numbers of travelers into teeny, tiny spaces. The greatest appeal of the small, self-contained sleeping...

The PitchBook Universities Report: 2016-2017 Edition is now available, featuring our latest annual breakdown of which universities produce the most VC-backed entrepreneurs. Ranking top undergraduate and MBA programs, the report also breaks down the numbers by sector, lists which universities produce the most female founders and more. In addition, the original rankings have been expanded conside...

Fresh out of the oven, on its way to a customer's home.At first glance, it looks like a solution to a particularly first-world problem: To eliminate the sogginess in pizzas caused by dwell time (i.e. the interim period it spends waiting to be delivered), startup Zume Pizza has launched a delivery truck equipped with 56 specially designed ovens to guarantee that their pies arrive at customers' d...

Smartphones offer a contextual channel, but require us to learn a new language of taps and swipes to navigate. This often increases complexity for a consumer who must wade through a series of screens to find an answer.Conversational interfaces driven by voice or text offer a cleaner and simpler user experience without having to learn a new syntax. It is this ease of use, and the resulting utili...