Author: Elon Mark

1. Freight Rates: Mostly Flat, Small Downward Moves On 4–5 September, freight rates held steady across all destinations, with only minor tweaks for Basel (down by €0.02). By 8 September, spot deals were concluded at slightly lower levels, with Duisburg and Strasbourg down €0.25–0.50, and Basel dropping nearly €0.45. Takeaway: Freight rates are locked in a narrow range, with Basel showing the most movement but still trending lower overall. 2. Water Levels: High and Supportive Hydrology supported efficient loading throughout the week: Maxau hovered above 500 cm, briefly touching 600 cm on 6 September before easing to 542 cm by…

Industry giants dominate today’s business world through scale, resources, and established networks. Smaller companies often face two choices: compete directly and risk being outmatched, or accept a limited market share. But there’s a third strategy: coopetition. This approach transforms competitors and digital platforms from rivals into partners. Instead of fighting an uphill battle alone, businesses can combine strengths, reduce risk, and seize opportunities otherwise out of reach. As Harvard Business School Professor Feng Zhu, who teaches the online course Winning with Digital Platforms featured in the Credential of Digital Innovation and Strategy, says, “Your company may not be a platform…

As businesses around the world have shifted their digital infrastructure over the last decade from self-hosted servers to the cloud, they’ve benefitted from the standardized, built-in security features of major cloud providers like Microsoft. But with so much riding on these systems, there can be potentially disastrous consequences at a massive scale if something goes wrong. Case in point: Security researcher Dirk-jan Mollema recently stumbled upon a pair of vulnerabilities in Microsoft Azure’s identity and access management platform that could have been exploited for a potentially cataclysmic takeover of all Azure customer accounts.Known as Entra ID, the system stores each…

new video loaded: Fed Lowers Interest Rates by Quarter PointtranscriptBacktranscriptFed Lowers Interest Rates by Quarter PointJerome Powell, the Fed Chair, announced interest rate cuts by a quarter of a percentage point on Wednesday.While the unemployment rate remains low, it has edged up. Job gains have slowed and downside risks to employment have risen. At the same time, inflation has risen recently and remains somewhat elevated. In support of our goals, and in light of the shift in the balance of risks, today, the Federal Open Market Committee decided to lower our policy interest rate by a quarter-percentage point. We have…

It takes time to realize you don’t have to hold your hand out in front of you for these gestures to be recognized, but a surprisingly short amount of time to find yourself using them with very little second thought.Of course talking to Meta AI remains a key way of interacting with the glasses, but Meta hopes that adding the visual elements will enhance the chatbot experience. For example, live speech captioning and language translation is still switched on by voice—but with Meta Ray-Ban Display, you can see the translations and captions appearing in real time on the glasses rather…

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is in London, standing in front of a room full of journalists, outing himself as a huge fan of Gemini’s Nano Banana. “How could anyone not love Nano Banana? I mean Nano Banana, how good is that? Tell me it’s not true!” He addresses the room. No one responds. “Tell me it’s not true! It’s so good. I was just talking to Demis [Hassabis, CEO of DeepMind] yesterday and I said ‘How about that Nano Banana! How good is that?’”It looks like lots of people agree with him: The popularity of the Nano Banana AI image…

In the market for a new MacOS-based desktop, but don’t have a lot of space to spare? Amazon is currently offering discounts on both the 256GB and 512GB model of the late 2024 Apple Mac Mini (8/10, WIRED Recommends) with the M4 chip.Photograph: Brenda StolyarApple’s M4 CPU is at the heart of both versions of this miniaturized desktop, with 10 cores each for the CPU and GPU. Our reviewer Brenda Stolyar had no complaints about the performance, noting that it handled multiple browser tabs, chat programs, and other apps without lagging or slowing down. That’s good news, because the memory…

A product or service must stand out to compete with established brands. Companies might differentiate in price, offering a lower-cost option for budget-conscious customers, or build prestige brands that signal status. Others may rely on marketing, tailoring a familiar product to new audiences. While all can be effective methods for bringing a product to market, some of the most significant product launches owe their impact to a human-centered approach known as design thinking. Teams that succeed in design thinking can identify design principles that match real customer needs. But what exactly are design principles? How can product teams or entrepreneurs…

Other VPNs We’ve TestedPrivate Internet Access (PIA) has a long history in the VPN space, and it’s maintained a track record of defending user privacy—even in the face of actual criminal activity. In 2016, a criminal complaint was filed in Florida against Preston Alexander McWaters for threats made online. McWaters was eventually convicted and sentenced to 42 months in prison. Investigators traced the online threats back to PIA’s servers and subpoenaed the company. As the complaint reads, “A subpoena was sent to [Private Internet Access] and the only information they could provide is that the cluster of IP addresses being…

In an increasingly divided world, one thing that everyone seems to agree on is that artificial intelligence is a hugely disruptive—and sometimes downright destructive—phenomenon.At WIRED’s AI Power Summit in New York on Monday, leaders from the worlds of tech, politics, and the media came together to discuss how AI is transforming their intertwined worlds. The Summit included voices from the AI industry, a current US senator, a former Trump administration official, and publishers including WIRED’s parent company, Condé Nast. You can view a livestream of the event in full below.Livestream: WIRED’s AI Power Summit “In journalism, many of us have…