10 Things In Tech You Need To Know Today

JAY YAROW

 SEP. 5, 2014

Getty / Chip Somodevilla

Goodr moning! Friday arrived pretty quickly, eh? Let’s look at the news. 

1. Big profile at Fortune of billionaire investor Peter Thiel: “Thiel contends that the amazing advances we have seen in computer science and communications have masked ominously disappointing progress in energy, transportation, biotech, disease prevention, and space travel.”
2. Tim Cook gave the WSJ an interview about the iCloud celeb nudie scandal. He says Apple is planning additional security measures to make Apple accounts more secure in the future.
3. Motorola finally released the Moto 360 smart watch, and it doesn’t sound too good. For women, “it almost looks like I grabbed a clock off the wall and strapped it to my arm.”
4. New details on the iWatch and the iPhone 6 from the New York Times. The iPhone 6 will have a special one-handed mode. The iWatch will have a flexible screen, wireless charging, a small postage sized processor, and Apple put a lot of effort into developing sensors for tracking health/fitness.
5. Vice just got $500 million selling a big chunk of its company at a $2.5 billion valuation. According to Peter Kafka at Re/code, Vice will get a cable TV network to run from A&E, which owns 6 channels.
6. Bre Pettis, the CEO of popular consumer 3D printing company Makerbot, has stepped down. He will lead an “innovation workshop” for Makerbot’s parent company Stratasys.
7. Amazon is partnering with the U.S. Postal Service to test out delivering groceries to people in San Francisco. To be clear: The postal service is going to deliver groceries for you if this works.
8. Facebook updated Slingshot and killed the thing that people hated about Slingshot, making it into a Snapchat clone. Slingshot was an app for chatting by sending photos back and forth. To open a photo, you had to send a photo. It never gained traction, now it’s pivoting.
9. Megan Smith, a former Google executive, is now officially the CTO of the United States.
10. Tesla CEO Elon Musk: “I think our stock price is kind of high right now to be totally honest.”