How the rebels behind scholarly publishing app Mendeley—once labeled sellouts—are growing their company after being acquired by Elsevier.
In 2013, when Victor Henning announced that his six-year-old startup Mendeley would be acquired by one of the world’s biggest media companies, he knew there would be blowback. He just couldn’t have anticipated how bad it would get.
After a series of missteps in video game development, this duo now hosts multi-player servers for the popular game Minecraft.
A two-person company from the small southern French town of Narbonne has unlocked a lucrative revenue stream from a global trend: Minecraft. After a series of missteps in video game development, Starlancer Studios, run by Jacques Vaquier and his business partner, Gregory Jung, now hosts multi-player servers for the immensely popular game.
When grad student Erica Berman visited Paris in 1992, the Internet was barely a thing. Now she runs a growing online lifestyle brand.
Erica Berman didn’t move to Paris to start a business. She initially landed there in 1992 in a way that probably sounds familiar: as a freshly minted journalism school graduate, curious about life’s possibilities.
You listening, California?
Last month Heineken tweeted that it had saved €75 million ($83.8 million) over the last six years by using less energy and water in its breweries. Like many people, I was intrigued. So I decided to find out how they did it and if others could follow their lead.
Plus, the devices will make money on their own.
At CES this past January, IBM researcher Veena Pureswaran described the company’s joint plan with Samsung to get home appliances to exchange cryptocurrency with one another. The currency, called Ether, is similar to bitcoin, except that the traded commodity isn’t directly related to a financial value. Instead, Ether’s value is computing power.
The technology promises a new legal battleground for rights holders, printer developers, and hobbyist figurine makers.
It didn’t take long for the email from Katy Perry’s lawyers to arrive.
The Netherlands spent seven years and $202 million to digitize huge swaths of AV archives that most people will never see. Was it worth it?
Driving through the Dutch countryside near the town of Hilversum, I have an overwhelming feeling that the surrounding water will wash out the road, given that my car is almost level with it. So it’s surprising that the Netherlands’ main audiovisual archives at the Sound and Vision Institute reside in a multilevel underground structure here, ostensibly below sea level.
A yoga startup increases its reach and looks to grab hold of the $60 billion digital health market. Is the concept a stretch?
During a recent class on the live streaming yoga app, Yoogaia, I started my computer’s camera and touched my toes.
Rapid prototyping has graduated to on-demand production. Here’s what that means for the future of manufacturing.
Jack Strauser’s relationship with the Chinese manufacturing industry is incredibly tense. Strauser, founder and CEO of Florida-based company Dok Solution, believes a Chinese factory stole his electronic charging station designs and then offered them to a U.S. distributor, who now sells them.
Will Turnage is SVP of technology at the R/GA agency. And cocreator of the algorithm-powered cooking app, My Robotic Kitchen.
Will Turnage loves food. But he may love wielding data and technology to master cooking even more.
Model Ashley Graham is turning her lingerie line into a cause. This is good news for Lena Dunham, Serena Williams, and women everywhere.
Walking triumphantly down the Tommy Hilfiger runway at the end of a show during New York Fashion Week in September while holding hands with her fellow models, Gigi Hadid looked happy and confident.
Benjamin Gaulon, a veteran digital artist, used his connections to cultivate the teaching faculty at the New School’s Parisian campus.
Since the early 2000s, French artist Benjamin Gaulon has built his career on revealing the faults in some of today’s most popular consumer devices. He and a friend once wrote display-scrambling software that numerous people have downloaded onto showroom computers inside Apple Stores while filming customers’ bewildered reactions. In another project, Gaulon ceaselessly trawled eBay for defunct Amazon Kindles, signed the backs of them, and put them back for sale on Amazon. Though his projects border on the rebellious, Gaulon also manages to celebrate technology’s possibilities.
Orr Shtuhl of design agency Blenderbox teaches classes on pairing cheese and beer. Company morale: Meet your master.
Only ask Orr Shtuhl about cheese, beer, and cocktails if you have a few minutes to spare.
Look for them in Boston in April.
In an attempt to appeal to design-conscious consumers, major athletic shoe brands like Nike and Adidas have been investing heavily in 3-D printing. Now, New Balance is aiming to beat both Nike and Adidas to the finish line.
Amy Robinson, executive director at the startup EyeWire, is making neuroscience into a playground for the hot tech du jour.
Virtual reality is here, and brands of all stripes are embracing the tech. The New York Times and Google newly partnered to send more than 1 million cardboard VR viewers to Times subscribers at the beginning of November so they could watch the paper’s first VR documentaries on a smartphone. Magic Leap published video of its augmented reality system online in October, causing more buzz around VR’s potential. Even Tommy Hilfiger now offers VR sets to its in-store customers so they can watch its recent New York Fashion Week show.
Scientists at Google and elsewhere are turning to the 30-year-old digital music standard MIDI to teach neural networks how to write music.
In May, Google research scientist Douglas Eck left his Silicon Valley office to spend a few days at Moogfest, a gathering for music, art, and technology enthusiasts deep in North Carolina’s Smoky Mountains. Eck told the festival’s music-savvy attendees about his team’s new ideas about how to teach computers to help musicians write music–generate harmonies, create transitions in a song, and elaborate on a recurring theme. Someday, the machine could learn to write a song all on its own.
Neuralink’s disclosure last week that tiny wires inside the brain of its first patient had pulled out of position is an issue the Elon Musk company has known about for years, according to five people familiar with the matter.
The company knew from animal testing it had conducted ahead of its U.S. approval last year that the wires might retract, removing with them the sensitive electrodes that decode brain signals, three of the sources said. Neuralink deemed the risk low enough for a redesign not to be merited, the sources added.
Neuralink is testing its implant to give paralyzed patients the ability to use digital devices by thinking alone, a prospect that could help people with spinal cord injuries.
The company said last week that the implant’s tiny wires, which are thinner than a human hair, retracted from a patient’s brain in its first human trial, resulting in fewer electrodes that could measure brain signals.
The signals get translated into actions, such as moving a mouse cursor on a computer screen. The company said it managed to restore the implant’s ability to monitor its patient’s brain signals by making changes that included modifying its algorithm to be more sensitive.
The sources declined to be identified, citing confidentiality agreements they had signed with the company. Neuralink and its executives did not respond to calls and emails seeking comment.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration was aware of the potential issue with the wires because the company shared the animal testing results as part of its application to begin human trials, one of the people said.
The FDA declined to comment on whether it was aware of the issue or its possible significance. The agency told Reuters it would continue to monitor the safety of patients enrolled in Neuralink’s study.
Were Neuralink to continue the trials without a redesign, it could face challenges should more wires pull out and its tweak to the algorithm proves insufficient, one of the sources said.
But redesigning the threads comes with its own risks. Anchoring them in the brain, for example, could result in brain tissue damage if the threads dislodge or if the company needs to remove the device, two of the sources said.
The company has sought to design the threads in a way that makes their removal seamless, so that the implant can be updated over time as the technology improves, current and former employees say.
In January, Neuralink implanted the device in the brain of its first patient, Noland Arbaugh, who is paralyzed from the shoulders down due to a 2016 diving accident.
In the weeks after the surgery, “a number of threads retracted from the brain,” Neuralink said in a blog update last week. The post made no mention of adverse health effects to Arbaugh and did not disclose how many of the device’s 64 threads pulled out or stopped collecting brain data.
So far, the device has allowed Arbaugh to play video games, browse the internet and move a computer cursor on his laptop by thinking alone, according to company blog posts and videos. Neuralink says that soon after the surgery, Arbaugh surpassed the world record for the speed at which he can control a cursor with thoughts alone.
It is common for medical device companies to troubleshoot different designs during animal trials and for issues to arise during animal and clinical testing, according to outside researchers and sources who have worked at Neuralink and other medical device companies.
Specialists who have studied brain implants say the issue of threads moving can be hard to solve, partly due to the mechanics of how the brain moves inside the skull.
Robert Gaunt, a neural engineer at the University of Pittsburgh, described the movement of the wires so soon after the surgery as disappointing but said that is not unforeseen. “In the immediate days, weeks, months after an implant like this, it’s probably the most vulnerable time,” he said.
In 2022, the FDA initially rejected Neuralink’s application to begin human trials, and raised safety concerns about the threads, Reuters exclusively reported last year.
Neuralink conducted additional animal testing to address those concerns, and the FDA last year granted the company approval to begin human testing.
The company found that a subset of pigs implanted with its device developed a type of inflammation in the brain called granulomas, raising concerns among Neuralink’s researchers that the threads could be the cause, according to three sources familiar with the matter and records seen by Reuters.
Granulomas are an inflammatory tissue response that can form around a foreign object or an infection.
In at least one case, a pig developed a severe case of the condition. Company records reviewed by Reuters show that the pig developed a fever and was heaving after surgery. Neuralink’s researchers did not recognize the extent of the problem until examining the pig’s brain post-mortem.
Inside Neuralink, researchers debated how to rectify the issue and commenced a months-long investigation, said the sources familiar with the events.
Ultimately, the company could not determine the cause of the granulomas, but concluded that the device and the attached threads were not to blame, one of the sources said.
—Rachael Levy, Reuters
In the current era of artificial intelligence (AI) reshaping industries worldwide, integrating AI in healthcare, public policy, and business is paramount. Dr. Soroush Saghafian, the visionary founder and director of the Public Impact Analytics Science Lab (PIAS-Lab) at Harvard, is a key figure at this intersection. His pioneering work as a Harvard professor involves developing, integrating, and using appropriate analytical tools in operations research, management science, machine learning and big data, decision-making, statistics, AI, and related fields has profoundly impacted societal outcomes.
As a leader in healthcare innovation with a stealth-mode AI company developing pain medications, my interest in Dr. Saghafian’s work was piqued by the potential of AI to revolutionize healthcare and the business landscape. Here, I present five significant insights from Dr. Saghafian, which I gathered from an interview with him on AI’s transformative power in healthcare, public policy, and business.
Dr. Saghafian’s research uncovers a crucial gap between the AI’s capabilities and its application in clinical settings. “Despite AI and machine learning tools often surpassing top medical professionals in simulations, their impact on practice is limited due to various issues. One such issue is “algorithm aversion,” where medical professionals often do not follow AI recommendations.”
Another is what he refers to as “human aversion,” where AI recommendations do not align with medical professionals’ intuition. However, there is a silver lining. PIAS-Lab’s ongoing research is focused on developing AI systems that are intuitive and closely align with human decision-making, thereby increasing their acceptance and implementation in real-world healthcare scenarios.
Dr. Saghafian’s research highlights a significant business challenge in healthcare: bridging the gap between AI’s potential and clinical use. Medical professionals’ reluctance to trust AI recommendations—due to algorithm aversion and mismatches with their intuitive judgments (human aversion)—limits AI’s impact. This presents an opportunity for healthcare technology firms to drive adoption by developing more intuitive AI systems that align with human decision-making. PIAS-Lab’s efforts in creating user-friendly AI could revolutionize patient care and open substantial market opportunities, offering innovators a competitive edge.
A pivotal area of Dr. Saghafian’s work involves integrating AI with public policy to optimize resource allocation, particularly in healthcare. “Our lab is developing AI algorithms that assist government bodies in distributing funds more effectively among hospitals,” he explains. Such initiatives are crucial during crises, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, when many hospitals faced financial challenges. By predicting which institutions would benefit most from additional support, PIAS-Lab’s algorithms aim to enhance the healthcare systems’ overall stability.
Dr. Saghafian’s AI work could revolutionize how we fund healthcare, particularly during crises like the COVID-19 pandemic. By developing algorithms that help allocate resources where they’re most needed, his team at PIAS-Lab is not just saving money—they’re making our healthcare system more innovative and responsive. This strategic use of AI solves immediate problems, but also opens up new markets and opportunities for innovation, setting the stage for a more efficient, stable healthcare future.
“Ethical considerations are central to AI deployment in healthcare,” Dr. Saghafian says, referring to the nuanced debates about including race in AI models. While some argue that excluding race from algorithms promotes fairness, others believe its inclusion could lead to more personalized and effective treatments. PIAS-Lab’s research suggests that while race may improve predictive accuracy, it does not necessarily enhance decision-making quality. Dr. Saghafian advocates a cautious approach, prioritizing patient outcomes over theoretical model enhancements.
Navigating these ethical considerations of AI in healthcare poses significant business implications. Companies must balance enhancing AI model accuracy with maintaining patient trust and regulatory compliance. Including race in AI models, a contentious issue, requires a cautious approach, prioritizing decision-making quality and patient outcomes over mere technical enhancements. This strategy mitigates legal and reputational risks and aligns with the broader goals of equitable and effective healthcare, potentially boosting market positioning and patient trust.
The path to integrating sophisticated AI tools in healthcare is fraught with regulatory hurdles. Dr. Saghafian points to the urgent need for updated FDA guidelines that balance safety with innovation. “The regulatory landscape must evolve to accommodate new AI technologies without stifling their potential,” he stresses. Addressing these challenges requires a delicate balance to ensure that AI tools can be safely and effectively integrated into healthcare practices.
Navigating the intersection of innovation and regulation in healthcare, companies face significant challenges as they integrate advanced AI technologies. The call for updated FDA guidelines highlights the urgent need for regulatory bodies to keep pace with AI advancements to prevent stifling innovation while ensuring patient safety.
For healthcare businesses, this means investing in compliance and maintaining a proactive dialogue with regulators, leading to faster product development, improved patient outcomes, and a competitive edge in the rapidly evolving AI healthcare landscape. This strategic approach could position them as front-runners in deploying AI-driven solutions effectively.
Looking forward, Dr. Saghafian is optimistic about AI’s role in moving from reactive to proactive healthcare models. He envisions a future where AI can anticipate health crises and offer preemptive solutions, potentially transforming smartphones into primary healthcare advisers with deep medical knowledge and expertise. “Imagine a healthcare system where preventive measures are as accessible as receiving a notification on your phone,” he says.
Dr. Saghafian’s work at Harvard exemplifies AI’s profound impact on society when directed toward public benefits. His insights underscore the technical prowess required to develop practical AI solutions and emphasize the ethical, regulatory, and implementation frameworks that must evolve alongside these technologies. His writings, including an upcoming book with Cambridge University Press and a series of dedicated blog posts, discuss the main ideas in the science of analytics in an accessible way and showcase how they have made a public impact.
Understanding these ideas is crucial for business leaders and policymakers to foster an environment where AI and other analytics tools enhance rather than complicate societal outcomes. As we stand on the brink of significant technological advancements, the lessons from PIAS-Lab provide a valuable road map for effectively integrating AI into public, business, and healthcare strategies.
Guadalupe Hayes-Mota is the CEO and cofounder of an AI healthcare startup and an MIT senior lecturer in business and engineering.
Chinese electric vehicle maker Aiways will go public via a merger with U.S. special purpose acquisition company Hudson Acquisition Corp in a deal that should value the company around $400 million, the two companies said.
The deal is a lifeline for Aiways, which halted production at its Shangrao plant last summer as a fierce EV price war in China squeezed automakers’ margins. The company is among a group of struggling Chinese EV startups including WM Motors and Human Horizons that have suspended operations amid sluggish sales.
The SPAC merger should close by the end of the year, the companies said.
Prior to its current financial struggles, Aiways had been selling its U5 and U6 electric models in 16 European markets, meaning it has existing products and operations where it is ready to go, though scaling up production is expensive.
The plant in Shangrao has the capacity to build 300,000 EVs annually.
Aiways had been in talks with investors for months on restarting production of its existing models and developing a new, affordable car as an export-only brand focused on Europe in the short term.
“The new entity will be strategically positioned to capitalize on our vision and resources in the European EV market,” Alexander Klose, managing director of Aiways Europe said in a statement issued late on Tuesday evening.
Aiways will be headquartered in Europe to handle sales, marketing, finance, while manufacturing, procurement and research and development will mostly be handled in China, according to a source familiar with the automaker’s plans who was not permitted to discuss them publicly.
The announcement comes just days after Chinese EV maker Zeekr, a unit of, saw its shares rise almost 35% above their initial public offering price in a strong start for the first major U.S. market debut by a China-based company since 2021.
Founded in 2017, Aiways’ investors include tech giant Tencent, ride-hailing group DiDi and battery maker CATL, which will remain shareholders, according to a source familiar with the matter.
—Nick Carey, Reuters
Wasting time on YouTube could soon be a thing of the past.
Instead of sitting through lengthy instructional YouTube videos, Android users will soon be able to ask Google’s AI questions about individual clips, and receive answers in seconds. The feature, which the company plans to make available in the coming months, could be a boon to consumers, but also have significant consequences for YouTube creators as well as the company’s own bottom line.
Android VP Dave Burke demonstrated these new capabilities during Tuesday’s keynote presentation for Google’s I/O developer conference. To do so, Burke pulled up an instructional video about pickleball on his phone. Instead of watching the entire video to learn about the sport, he simply asked Android’s built-in Gemini AI assistant a question about a specific pickleball rule. Within a few seconds, Gemini answered the question based on knowledge deducted from the video.
“You can use it on billions of videos,” Burke said, adding that Gemini uses YouTube captions and other unspecified signals to generate these kinds of answers.
Watching the video would have undoubtedly taken Burke longer. However, it also would have offered the creator an opportunity to participate in ad revenue, and potentially grow their audience on the platform. “When you’re watching a 10-minute video, you’re being served a pre-roll [ad],” says podcaster and YouTube content creator Jason Howell. “You’re being served a mid-roll [ad]. All of these are opportunities for Google and the creator to make some money.”
Google released the Gemini Android app in February, and only recently began more closely integrating Gemini into Android itself. The company has yet to fully replace its existing Google Assistant with the new AI assistant. That’s why Howell isn’t all too concerned that Gemini will depress advertising revenue he generates with YouTube in the near future. “The material impact in the short term isn’t going to be too huge,” he says, while also cautioning that this could change. “There would be an immediate impact if everybody suddenly started summarizing all their videos instead of actually watching.”
It’s not just creators that could be impacted by viewers skipping video viewing for AI summaries. YouTube generated $8.1 billion in revenue for Google in Q1 of 2024 alone; the video service was responsible for 10 percent of all of Google’s revenue during that quarter.
YouTube is also becoming a hugely valuable resource as tech companies race to train their AI models on ever-expanding corpuses of knowledge. Last month, The New York Times reported that Google competitor OpenAI secretly transcribed more than one million hours of YouTube videos to train its GTP AI models. YouTube spokespeople told the paper at the time that such a move would violate the site’s terms of service.
Now, it appears that Google is willing to use YouTube to power its own AI ambitions—even if that depresses income for YouTube and its creators. This makes Howell wonder: “Is it worth the sacrifice on Google’s part?”
At the same time, Google is also pitching AI as a boon for YouTubers and other content creators. This week, the company also previewed generative AI features for creators, including a new video generation tool called Veo that it is starting to make available to select creators.
Google’s Veo mirrors work that OpenAI has done with its generative video engine Sora. Both hint at a future in which YouTube creators can simply instruct an AI engine to generate synthetic footage for a fraction of the cost of a professional shoot. In a video shown on stage at Google I/O Tuesday, actor and director Donald Glover argued that Veo allowed professionals like him to iterate faster, while also removing barriers of entry for newcomers. “Everybody is going to become a director, and everybody should be a director,” Glover quipped.
And Google continues to push YouTube as being a driving force of the entertainment industry. Earlier this week, YouTube CEO Neal Mohan argued that major YouTube creators like MrBeast should be eligible for Emmy awards. “Creators are defining a new era of entertainment,” Mohan wrote in a guest column for The Hollywood Reporter. “They deserve the same acclaim as other creative professionals.”
However, Howell thinks that those very star creators with huge audiences on YouTube could see a significant revenue impact from AI summaries. “The people who really make a lot of money off of [YouTube], I can’t imagine them being too happy about this feature,” he says.
Unless, that is, Google eventually figures out a way to compensate them for the AI use of their works. However, the company didn’t hint at any such plans this week; YouTube spokespeople did not immediately respond to a request for comment for this story.
Howell believes that Google and other AI companies won’t be able to stay mum on these issues forever. “We aren’t hearing anything about compensation right now,” he says. “I’d be surprised if we don’t hear about that eventually, because people will start making noise about it.”