©Toby LeighBefore he invented Pintofeed, a smartphone-enabled pet food dispenser, Carlos Herrera made drones. How far morality played a role in his decision to move out of the drone business isn’t clear but there were, at least, other factors. People spend $100bn a year on pets globally, while commercial drones – the kind that don’t spy on or kill people – remain an unproven market proposition.
A backlash is brewing against iOS 7’s new look
It was the moment designers and Apple fans alike have been waiting for since October: Sir Jonathan Ive – spiritual heir to Apple’s chief tastemaker Steve Jobs and creator of the world’s finest tech hardware – unveiled his vision for iOS on Monday in San Francisco.
After seven months of anticipation, perhaps some anticlimax was inevitable. But a lot of designers are already taking to the web to voice their dislike of iOS 7’s new look. Read more
Tim Berners-Lee is “deeply concerned” about PRISM
The inventor of the world wide web is not happy with the direction his creation is going.
For several years, Sir Tim Berners-Lee has been warning about incursions to the founding principles of the web, from the UK’s Digital Economy Act and SOPA to Facebook’s “walled gardens”.
This week’s reports about the PRISM system, through which the NSA extracts huge amounts of personal information from Google, Facebook, Apple and other internet companies, are “deeply concerning”, he says. Read more
Palantir: Our Prism is not the NSA’s Prism
In trying to reconcile the tech companies’ denials of involvement in the NSA’s PRISM programme and the agency’s presentation that suggests it has “direct access” to their servers, some have looked to private Silicon Valley company Palantir as a possible bridge between the two. Read more
August smart lock wants to be the doorway to your smart home
As the hardware startups battling for a place in your “smart” home multiply, one area has become a key battlefront: the front door.
Lockitron, Kwikset’s Kevo, Kisi and others are already in various stages of development to create door locks that can be opened with a smartphone.
Now a San Francisco startup called August, led by serial entrepreneur Jason Johnson, is hoping to unlock the market with help from its designer co-founder, Yves Behar of Fuseproject. Read more
Yahoo welcomes Tumblr, pornography and all
Yahoo bought Tumblr for its rambunctious community. Despite the coat of paint rapidly applied to its email, homepage and various apps since Marissa Mayer arrived as chief executive less than a year ago, Yahoo was still in need of an injection of youth and energy.
But in solving that problem, Tumblr may have created another for Yahoo. Ad execs and Wall Street analysts alike are voicing concerns about – along with gifs and memes – one of Tumblr’s most popular types of content: pornography. Read more
Hardware startups get hardcore at Haxlr8r
This week seems to be maker week in Silicon Valley. In the run-up to Saturday’s Maker Faire in San Mateo are a string of events and conferences for hardware startups and the folk building them.
Kickstarting the week, Haxlr8r – a hardware-hacker accelerator programme that takes ten startups to Shenzhen for three months – held its demo day at the Autodesk Gallery in downtown San Francisco on Monday afternoon. Ten startups pitched their ideas, fresh from the factory floor in China, to a group of early stage investors. Read more
Ouya looks beyond Kickstarter for more funds
Ouya, the open-source games console, has become the first Kickstarter tech project to graduate to a more traditional funding scheme – venture capital.
After getting $8m from 63,000 crowdfunders last August, Ouya on Thursday announced it has raised $15m from investors including Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers, Mayfield Fund and Nvidia, to accelerate its plan to attack the mass market. Read more
Facebook subverts Apple and Google’s best assets
Facebook is an incredible innovator, but one of its greatest strengths is its ability to absorb – the less charitable might say copy – its competitors’ best features. We saw it with Twitter and status updates; with Foursquare and Places; with Pinterest and last autumn’s Collections tool; and most recently Snapchat and the Poke app.
That’s fine when startups are nipping at your heels, but does that work when you’re competing against the tech industry’s biggest platforms?
| About this blog | Blog guide |
Richard Waters has headed the FT's San Francisco bureau since 2002 and covers Google and Microsoft, among other things. A former New York bureau chief for the FT, he is intrigued by Silicon Valley's unique financial and business culture, and is looking forward to covering his second Tech Bust.
Chris Nuttall has been online and messing around with computers for more than 20 years and since 2004 has reported from the FT's San Francisco bureau on semiconductors, video games, consumer electronics and all things interwebby.
Maija Palmer has been writing about technology for the FT since 1999 and is fascinated by cybercrime, privacy and all the other issues of the information society. Based in London, she covers European tech companies and hopes that they won't all get acquired by American rivals.
Robin Kwong is the FT's technology, media and telecoms page editor in London. Formerly he was the Taipei correspondent and wrote about the companies that manufacture the vast majority of the world's computers and gadgets. He is interested in the intricacies of the technology supply chain and how China is increasingly changing the tech landscape.
Tim Bradshaw is the FT's digital media correspondent, and has just moved from London to join our team in San Francisco. He has covered start-ups such as Twitter and Spotify, as well as the online ambitions of more established media companies, such as the BBC iPlayer. He also covers the advertising, marketing and video-game industries. Tim has been writing about technology, business and finance since 2003.
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