Sean Johnson: Looking to Innovate? Ditch the Startup Mentality and Adopt a Venture Capitalist Mindset. Dwyer and Johnson advise a portfolio approach to innovation: investing in a range of ideas based on key insights into opportunities and needs. (more)

Tim O'Reilly: The fundamental problem with Silicon Valley’s favorite growth strategy. Most monopolies or duopolies develop over time, and have been considered dangerous to competitive markets; now they are sought after from the start and are the holy grail for investors. (Reid Hoffman and Chris Yeh’s new book Blitzscaling.) (more)

2017: FDA permits marketing of mobile medical application for substance use disorder (by Pear Therapeutics) (more)

7wireVentures Closes $100M Early-Stage Connected Consumer Health Fund With New Coalition of Top U.S. Health Plans and Health Systems. 7wireVentures was founded by Managing Partners Glen Tullman (Livongo) and Lee Shapiro, well-known entrepreneurs who have worked together for more than 25 years across more than 20 companies and investments. (digital therapeutics) (more)

Reality distortion field is a term first used by Bud Tribble at Apple Computer in 1981, to describe company co-founder Steve Jobs's charisma and its effects on the developers working on the Macintosh project.[1] Tribble said that the term came from Star Trek,[1] where in the Menagerie episode, it was used to describe how the aliens created their own new world through mental force. In chapter three of Steve Jobs, biographer Walter Isaacson states that around 1972, while Jobs was attending Reed College, Robert Friedland "taught Steve the reality distortion field." The reality distortion field was said by Andy Hertzfeld to be Steve Jobs's ability to convince himself and others to believe almost anything with a mix of charm, charisma, bravado, hyperbole, marketing, appeasement and persistence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_distortion_field

Fred Wilson: The Free And Open Internet. The mainstream publications, like Washington Post, have ceded their role as the public square to places like Twitter and Medium that remain open and free. (more)

The Inventor of the Hololens Just Left Apple. AR/VR pioneer and Hololens co-inventor Avi Bar-Zeev left Apple last month, Variety has learned. Bar-Zeev had been working on Apple’s augmented reality headset, which the company has been developing in secret for a possible 2020 launch. (more)

The National Railroad Passenger Corporation, doing business as Amtrak, is a passenger railroad service that provides medium- and long-distance intercity service in the contiguous United States and to nine Canadian cities. Founded in 1971 as a quasi-public corporation to operate many U.S. passenger rail services,[1][2][3] it receives a combination of state and federal subsidies but is managed as a for-profit organization. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amtrak

High-speed rail (HSR) is a type of passenger rail transport that operates significantly faster than the normal speed of rail traffic. Specific definitions include 200 km/h (120 mph) for upgraded track and 250 km/h (160 mph) or faster for new track by the European Union. In Japan Shinkansen lines run at speeds in excess of 260 km/h (160 mph) and are built using standard gauge track with no at-grade crossings. In China, high-speed conventional rail lines operate at top speeds of 350 km/h (220 mph), and one maglev line reaches speeds of 430 km/h (270 mph). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail (more)

Microsoft HoloLens, known under development as Project Baraboo,[3] is a pair of mixed reality smartglasses developed and manufactured by Microsoft. HoloLens was one of the first computers running the Windows Mixed Reality platform under the Windows 10 operating system. The HoloLens can trace its lineage to Kinect, an add-on for Microsoft's Xbox gaming console that was introduced in 2010.[4] The pre-production version of HoloLens, the Development Edition, shipped on March 30, 2016, and is targeted to developers in the United States and Canada for a list price of $3000. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_HoloLens

Patreon CEO says the company's generous business model is not sustainable as it sees rapid growth. Under the company's current business model, 90 percent of funds are paid directly to content creators. Patreon takes 5 percent, and the remaining 5 percent covers transaction fees. (more)

delivery service

In a hot week for audio, paid newsletterer Substack introduces a way for podcasters to earn money. In another snippet of podcast news this week — wait, you didn’t see the three pieces about the Spotify/Gimlet/Anchor news? — Substack, the all-in-one independent (paid) newsletter provider, is now offering support for subscriber-only audio, too (more)

Craig Mod: Oh God, It's Raining Newsletters. Launching it has given me reason to consider the state of newsletters and email, in 2019: It’s kind of amazing. (more)

Instacart and DoorDash’s Tip Policies Are Delivering Outrage. This week, Instacart and DoorDash — two giants of the app-based delivery industry, collectively valued by investors at more than $11 billion — are under fire from critics who are accusing the companies of taking advantage of their workers with deceptive tipping policies. Both companies have admitted to putting customer tips toward workers’ minimum pay guarantees, in effect using them to subsidize their own payouts. (more)

WeChat is a Chinese multi-purpose messaging, social media and mobile payment app. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WeChat

Owner of WeChat.

SnapChat is back in the news alongside AliBaba, which is investing $200 million as part of a new $500 million finding round... One notable point is that Alibaba missed the Instant Messaging-app race in China. That’s its single-greatest failure as a business. With money to burn, it is making another small bet (comparative to its wealth) on a messaging app — don’t forget that it invested $215 million in TanGo last year... Critical to understanding Alibaba’s interest in messaging is that rival TenCent’s WeChat app utterly dominates China to the point that it can be considered the de facto mobile intranet for the country... We Chat may be the common interface for how most Chinese use the Internet, but it hasn’t impacted Alibaba’s dominant E Commerce business. Yet. (more)

system for IPC communication (more)

Apple’s new Safari privacy settings threaten web-based VR and AR. With iOS 12.2, the company is introducing a new privacy setting called “Motion and Orientation Access” into version 12.1 of its browser, which will be disabled by default. (more)