New Florence. New Renaissance.

Zillow as your real estate intermediary?

Zillow’s initiative is called the “Instant Offers” marketplace, and it’s been in a test phase since mid-2017. Homeowners who want to sell receive offers from investors and an analysis of their home’s value, if the home were to be listed on the traditional real estate market instead. Zillow says it will aim to buy, renovate, and then re-sell homes in 90 days or less.

“The process offers transparency, convenience and choice for sellers, and gives them certainty over their sale price and timing,” Zillow said in a release.

What it offers for existing industry participants is less clear. “The program gives real estate agents the opportunity to acquire new listings by connecting them with motivated sellers who have taken a direct action to sell their home,” Zillow’s release said.

MarketWatch

 

Airstream goes fiberglass

Design purists will note that it is not original to Airstream. Nest was conceived by Oregon designer Robert Johans and was acquired by Airstream in March 2016, with further development in-house. Johans was brought aboard as project manager.

What’s even more radical is that Nest has a fiberglass shell, not the iconic aluminum shell that the company is known for. It turns out that founder Byam actually built fiberglass prototypes in the 50s and early 60s, experimenting with this new material.

Forbes

 

Uber moves into bike-sharing

“We see the Uber app as moving from just being about car sharing and car hailing to really helping the consumer get from A to B int he most affordable, most dependable, most convenient way,” Khosrowshahi said. “And we think e-bikes are just a spectacularly great product.”

As part of the acquisition, JUMP employees will join Uber’s team but the bike-share company will carry on as an independent, wholly controlled subsidiary, Rzepecki said.

JUMP is best known for operating dockless, pedal-assist bikes. JUMP’s bikes can be legally locked to bike parking racks or the “furniture zone” of sidewalks, which is where you see things like light poles, benches and utility poles. The bikes also come with integrated locks to secure the bikes.

Techchrunch

 

Search app for Sub-Sahara

The internet can be achingly slow and expensive in parts of Africa, undermining fledgling tech ecosystems and the ability of Africans to connect globally.

Google wants to fix that by releasing an app that will make it lighter to browse online, with search results optimized to save up to 40% data. The Google Go app, available in 26 sub-Saharan Africa nations, is customized to function on Android devices with low storage and will load on slow and unstable connections including 2G networks. At five megabits in size, the app will allow for voice recognition in search instead of typing, while easily switching between languages including Swahili.

Quartz

Image Credit

Granny Flats

Could these be a solution to the Bay Area housing shortage?

From Techcrunch

Whether you call them granny units, in-laws or backyard studios, accessory dwelling units are rising in popularity in the U.S., in part due to new regulations that make it easier to obtain permits to build them in California.

Now, a startup called Cover Technologies Inc. has raised $1.6 million in seed funding to give accessory dwelling units a high-tech makeover. General Catalyst and Khosla Ventures led the round.

The video below looks at some of the zoning and other issues as such units proliferate around Los Angeles

Blind, and coding software

At a time when most of us–software developers or not–spend hours each day staring at screens, it’s hard to imagine not using our eyes to work. In a recent email exchange with Fast Company (lightly condensed and edited for clarity), Forzano shared how he’s handled the traditional whiteboard coding challenge during his job interview and many of the other obstacles he’s confronted since as an engineer at a highly competitive tech company.

“One of my friends in Seattle, who is blind, uses Amazon Fresh (it’s just easier) and realized there was a bug in the Fresh app for blind users: You couldn’t select a delivery time if you were using a specific screen-reader on a smartphone. Once she told me that, I reached out to the Fresh team to make them aware of the issue and the customer impact. Then the team let me know, almost immediately, that they were working on a solution.

At that moment, I knew I was in a place where it didn’t matter who the customer was or what the struggle was, but that the customer obsession was ingrained in our DNA. That sort of egalitarian approach drives me and my team every day. The best part is, when you make things more accessible for one community, it often helps everyone, too. Being a part of making that happen for millions of customers is really exciting.”

Fast Company

 

Happy Birthday, Hubble

This colorful image, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, celebrates the Earth-orbiting observatory’s 28th anniversary of viewing the heavens, giving us a window seat to the universe’s extraordinary stellar tapestry of birth and destruction. At the center of this image is a monster young star 200,000 times brighter than our Sun that is blasting powerful ultraviolet radiation and hurricane-like stellar winds, carving out a fantasy landscape of ridges, cavities, and mountains of gas and dust.

This mayhem is all happening at the heart of the Lagoon Nebula, a vast stellar nursery located 4,000 light-years away, visible in binoculars as merely a smudge of light with a bright core.

NASA

For Earth Day

Apple introduces Daisy the robot.

Daisy is able to take apart the iPhone and gather the phone's main logic board, speaker, and rear camera and other parts that contain high-quality materials, important at a time when some of these components are made using rare-earth elements.

Self-driving luggage

The Puppy 1 is a 20-inch-high, 50-pound-capacity, remote-controlled suitcase. It uses sensors to balance itself on two wheels and follow its owner at as fast as 10 mph for about 30 miles on a single charge of its removable lithium-ion battery. The plastic hard-shell suitcase weighs just a few pounds when empty.

BusinessWeek

The WSJ tests some of the self-driving bags below.

NYC chic workplaces

I got to spend time at three stimulating workplaces in Manhattan this week. First was at the Cognizant Collaboratory on the top of the WeWork office a stone’s throw from Grand Central station. 

While the Collaboratory has the feel of a startup, the SAP offices in the Hudson Yards development exude power with lots of glass, ample space and the latest in office and meeting space technology. Hudson Yards is the largest private real estate project in the US. When finally done by the mid-2020s, it will have 17 million square feet of mixed-mode real estate.

A few floors below, BCG’s office with cafe and workout rooms is the blend between the two – meant to get Fortune 500 clients away from their daily work life and spend time thinking like startups by increasing the “collisions between people”.

Nearby, as you walk by remnants of the Garment district you are reminded the Future of Work is already available today and is only going to get even more interesting as this rendering of Hudson Yards reflects.