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On the edge of Boulder, Colorado, a remarkable convergence of mutually beneficial collaboration is underway, and it could reshape how housing gets built, who builds it, and who is able to afford it. This is all happening inside BoulderMOD, a new modular housing factory built by the city of Boulder for use by the local Habitat for Humanity affiliate and powered by the labor of apprentice modular home builders from area public high schools. The students come to the factory several hours a day for hands-on education in advanced home building, working on actual modular homes that are now being installed in a section of Boulder devastated by flooding. At full capacity, the factory could produce up to 50 homes per year. [Photo: courtesy City of Boulder] BoulderMOD is a joint venture between the Boulder Valley School District, Flatirons Habitat for Humanity, and the city of Boulder, and each of the three partners is tallying very tangible returns. The school district gets to offer an advanced trade-based curriculum that prepares its students for careers they can start immediately. Flatirons Habitat for Humanity gets to streamline and multiply its housing production capabilities, and the city gets to chip away at a deeply ingrained housing affordability crisis. [Photo: courtesy City of Boulder] “It’s game-changing,” says Dan McColley, executive director of Flatirons Habitat for Humanity. “It is a complete reinvention of the way we are serving families and meeting the needs of our community.” This innovative partnership has its roots in tragedy. In 2013, devastating floods washed through the Boulder valley. One of the hardest-hit areas was the Ponderosa Mobile Home Park, a 68-unit community of permanently placed mobile homes, and though no lives were lost, many of the homes were heavily damaged. In a city where the median home price currently hovers around $1 million, Ponderosa was a rare place of affordability, and seemed on the verge of being lost completely. The city stepped in and, working with the community, annexed the mobile home park in 2017 and upgraded its infrastructure to prevent future flooding. It partnered with Habitat for Humanity to help rebuild housing for any resident who wanted to stay, and committed to preserving the community’s affordability in perpetuity. Getting that done was going to require an unconventional approach. “At the time, the Flatirons Habitat affiliate was building maybe three or four homes a year and looking at replacing 70-ish mobile homes,” says McColley. “It was going to take us a long time if we used our traditional model.” [Photo: courtesy City of Boulder] New skills, new homes In 2019, the city approached the school district about following through on those commitments. Factory-built modular housing was identified as the most efficient way of rebuilding damaged homes. The city had funding for the rebuilding effort in its affordable housing fund, and a willing builder in the Habitat for Humanity. But it didn’t have the factory. So city officials reached out to representatives at the Boulder Valley School District, which had recently opened a trade-focused campus called Apex that offers career pathways to high school students. One of its programs was centered on construction. The city asked the district if that program could expand in a new direction. “[The city] had this aspirational vision of what would happen if they were able to partner with the school district, build a facility, and then in a meaningful way take moves to help with the affordable housing issues in our community,” says Rob Anderson, superintendent of the Boulder Valley School District. After five years of planning, that facility came online. The city built the $13 million BoulderMOD facility using funds from its affordable housing program, with some state and federal grants and private foundation money. Construction of the facility was finished in late 2024, and the space was then outfitted with about $1 million worth of construction tools and equipment. [Photo: John Risi/courtesy City of Boulder] Flatirons Habitat for Humanity staffed the facility, and the school district created a curriculum to support the production process. Production started in February 2025, with around 30 high school juniors and seniors in the factory every week, working on every stage of construction, from framing, electrical, and plumbing to drywall and roofing. The first two duplexes were placed on the Ponderosa site in November and December. “It felt like the right thing to do for our community, for our kids. But man, it’s exceeded expectations,” Anderson says. The Habitat projects are also helping support the community in other ways, including tapping into local suppliers for energy-efficient building materials. For example, Alpen, a high-performance window manufacturer located near Boulder, is providing all the windows for the Ponderosa homes. McColley says the pace of construction will increase as the teams refine their processes and as the students gain more hands-on experience. The duplexes being built for the Ponderosa project are particularly conducive, as they use a single and relatively simple design for each three-bedroom, one-and-a-half-bathroom unit. “At full production, the house will take about eight weeks to move from one end of the factory to the other, and then we’ll have about four, maybe five weeks of site work to do before the family can move in,” says McColley. “We’ll be cutting our construction timeframe from 9 to 12 months to about 12 weeks.” [Photo: Linda Sanders/courtesy City of Boulder] It’s so fast that it’s tweaking one of the standard elements of the Habitat for Humanity building process, which requires homebuyers to contribute to the cost of their home via 200 hours of sweat equity during construction. Homes built at BoulderMOD will progress so quickly that a homebuyer’s sweat equity will likely extend into someone else’s home. McColley says building the 70 or so homes for the Ponderosa project will occupy BoulderMOD for the next few years, but his organization is already looking at using it for other Habitat for Humanity housing projects across the Boulder region. Every home built there will be sold as an affordable housing unit, and McColley expects about 90% of its production to be modular from this point on. “Everything about what we do is different because we’re doing it this way. We’re building houses faster and we’re giving them out to families much more quickly in a much higher volume than we’ve done before,” McColley says. “So we’re tackling the affordable housing crisis in the near term through a different production process, but we’re also tackling it in the long term by training a new generation of construction professionals.” The school district is already planning to expand the size of BoulderMOD to accommodate more students, even those not explicitly using it as a career path. “I see kids who plan on attending competitive four-year colleges and universities not even interested in construction signing up for this,” Anderson says. Whether or not it turns into a job, the students at BoulderMOD are doing more than just learning construction skills. “They are learning how to build. They’re not working on bird houses or dog houses to learn their construction techniques. They’re working on people’s houses, and that’s something that is not lost on them,” McColley says. “They understand at a level that I frankly did not expect the community impact that they are having by building these homes.”
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E-Commerce
The Swiss company Punkt has released its latest handset, the MC03, a cellphone that merges minimalist hardware design with a matching UX experience that promises total privacy protection against greedy corporations who want to track you and own your data for their own benefit. This thing got me at “DeGoogled From the Core,” which is one of the phone’s declared core selling points. According to founder Petter Neby, “Punkt is about using technology to help us adopt intelligent habits for less distracted lives.” In 2015, Punkt launched its first phone, the MP01, as a secure device that supported only text and calls. No apps. No tracking. Punkt later released the MP02an even simpler phone that had a small screen and physical buttonsand the MC02, a secure phone with basic encrypted apps like email and calendar. The new MC03 acknowledges that while people might appreciate this obsession with monastic simplicity, security, and privacy, there is clearly a need for some extra features from time to time, like ordering food, getting a cab ride, or wasting time on Instagram. [Photo: Punkt] Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde The Punkt MC03 UX design divides your phone experience into two environments: One is a distraction-free, fully protected private environment called the Vault; the other is called the Wild Web, and its where all the Android apps you want to install live. The Vault is the phone’s main screen. Here youll find the core built-in apps and services, all designed with safety and privacy from the ground up, with encryption, no third-party tracking, no data profiling whatsoever. Stuff like mail, messaging, calendar, contacts, or your file cloud live here. They’re featured on a white-on-black home screen in Helvetica type that’s meant to recall the iconic design aesthetic of Dieter Rams for Braun (an influence that permeates all of Punkts products). The Wild Web features a fully customizable “external” screen, where youll find your standard rows of icons (white over black square buttons) over a white background. Its clearly distinct from the Vault so it changes your mindset: Security is not guaranteed here, although each app lives in a privacy bubble. According to the company, the phone runs each app in its own walled playground, with no access to other data or hardware on the device. Punkt says this ensures your data privacy and limits third-party tracking from app to app (although if you use the same Gmail credentials to log into each app, Google will be able to track you on the server side). Ending you are the product The secret sauce behind this phone is AphyOS, a custom operating system that severs the umbilical cord that typically tethers Android phones to Mountain View’s data-harvesting servers. While a standard Android device “calls home” to Google every 4.5 minutes to report your location and habits, AphyOS uses “hardened code.” This OS core has been reinforced to block attacks and close security loopholesassisted by what the company calls a bank-grade Secure Element chip that keeps your data on the device. It cuts out the bloatware and hidden background services that drain your phones battery and your privacy, giving you what Neby calls “a modern, premium device without the need to compromise.” All of this digital sovereignty comes with a price tag, but thats exactly the point that Punkt is trying to make: Do you want to pay with your private life or do you want to pay to keep your life private? The MC03 includes a 12-month subscription to AphyOS, after which you will have to pay roughly $10 per month to maintain it. By paying for the operating system, you become the customer rather than the merchandise sold to advertisers. As Andy Yen, founder of partner company Proton, puts it: “People deserve choice. Choice over the phone they use, the software they rely on, and who they share their data with.” The monthly subscription price is not to use the phone but to pay for the services. The subscription bundles 5 GB of cloud storage, email, messaging, and calendar into a single secure package. But the real power comes from its integration with Proton. The phone comes with Proton Mail, Drive, Calendar, VPN, Wallet, and Pass, effectively replacing the entire Google Workspace with an encrypted alternative. For messaging, Punkt has preinstalled the cross-platform encrypted client Threema directly into the MC03s Vault, ensuring your chats have “rigorous data protection and rock-solid security” right out of the box, the company claims. It also includes a VPN called Digital Nomad, which protects your connection on sketchy public Wi-Fi networks. Unlike standard VPN apps, this one is integrated directly into the operating system for better performance and requires no extra setup or third-party subscription. p>Finally, the phone forces you to confront the cost of your digital life with the Data and Carbon Ledger. Punkt says this dashboard doesn’t just let you manage app privacy permissions in real time; it actually tracks the energy consumption and carbon footprint of every app you use, pushing you to make smarter, more sustainable choices about how you use your device. The ledger also gives you “full transparent control over app data flow,” allowing you to see and restrict app-specific privacy permissions. [Photo: Punkt] Nice hardware too The object itself is a solid piece of industrial art designed in Switzerland and manufactured in Germany. Solid, matte gunmetal finish. Simple. Nothing added for effect. Just a metal-and-glass slab with a 6.67-inch OLED screen with the usual high-end 120Hz refresh rate standard. One of the best features, however, is its removable 5,200mAh battery, which, oh boyin an era where phones are sealed shut like tombs, allowing users to swap their own power source is a radical act of repairability that extends the device’s life indefinitely. I missed this from the old 90s candy phones, and now I want it. The MC03 doesn’t skimp on the modern specs required for the Wild Web. It sports a 64-megapixel main camera that the company claims can capture sharp images in low light, backed by an ultrawide lens for landscapes and a macro lens for close-ups. Like most phones, its water and dust resistant, and supports wireless charging. Priced at $699, its shipping in Europe later this month and hitting North America in the spring.
Category:
E-Commerce
The federal government signaled a new direction in federal funding this week when it announced plans to put as much as $150 million into a private semiconductor startup. Instead of a grant or a loan, the government would take an equity stake. It’s a meaningful departure from how federal funding has traditionally operated. For years, federal R&D support came structured as non-dilutive grants and Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) awards that didn’t require equity concessions. An early-stage company proves its idea with federal support, investors wait for validation, and the company grows. If the government begins converting grants into equity stakes, that calculus changes fundamentally. A quiet shift The semiconductor deal is the latest in what has otherwise been a relatively quiet shift taking place inside the federal funding system as the Trump administration considers treating some grants like venture investments. For founders, this creates genuine uncertainty. The government has not yet defined the rules of engagement for what ownership in a startup means. There are no clear answers about how much equity might be taken, how dilution would work over time, when the government expects a return, or who would manage these positions. Startups already struggle to keep their capitalization tables clean enough for private investment. Adding a federal agency to the picture introduces new friction. While experienced investors routinely ask about investor composition before committing capital, even seasoned ones may hesitate if the answer includes “the United States government.” History lessons There is instructive history here. Twenty years ago, the state of Texas launched the Emerging Technology Fund with the goal of supporting high-growth technology companies through a venture model. The fund encountered structural problemsincluding non-dilution clauses that prevented it from being fairly diluted alongside other investorsthat ultimately undermined its portfolio companies’ growth. New investors wouldn’t fund them because the risk was not shared fairly. The lesson is clear: Public capital can be valuable, but if it ignores downstream market dynamics and investor expectations, it can choke off the very growth it intends to catalyze. The timing of this equity push is particularly concerning given that SBIR and STTR programshistorically the backbone of non-dilutive federal support for early-stage companiesexpired on September 30, 2025, and remain unauthorized. With traditional grant pathways frozen and equity stakes emerging as the new model, founders face unprecedented uncertainty about federal funding structures. The scale of this disruption is significant: These programs typically distributed approximately $4.73 billion annually to support scientific progress and early company formation. That scale alone makes it essential to understand how any replacement federal support structure would function. Program officers are experts in research evaluation and scientific merit. They are not trained to make venture-style assessments about valuation, equity terms, or long-horizon return timing. Asking them to perform both roles simultaneously creates tension. Conversely, finance-oriented staff who understand investment models are not necessarily equipped to evaluate frontier science. These programs do not operate like traditional venture funds. Ripple effects If the federal government proceeds with equity investments, it must understand the implications for early-stage companies and the ripple effects that follow. If federal agencies become equity holders, they will need to establish clear standards: How are positions structured? Who holds them? When is liquidity expected? How does the relationship evolve as companies raise capital? How are equity percentages, dilution rights, and board representation determined? These decisions cannot be improvised. They determine whether private investors engage or walk away. Startups also need to reconsider their assumptions about federal programs. If equity or royalty components begin appearing, founders must decide what they are prepared to trade for early capital. They’ll need to understand how those terms affect later fundraising rounds and how private investors react to a federal stakeholder at the ownership table. Digital health and medtech founders already have to navigate a complex landscape of regulatory pathways and clinical validation procedures. Having to decipher unclear investment rules from an early funder is more likely to stymie growth than accelerate it. Eyes wide open That’s not to say startups should avoid federal funding if equity is introduced. They may simply need to approach it with clear-eyed expectations about the long-term implications. There is opportunity here if the federal government establishes clear rules. Beyond Texas, other states have experimented with public venture approachessome that helped companies grow, others that created lasting complications. If policymakers systematically study both categories, they can avoid repeatable mistakes. The worst outcome would be moving forward without a framework and discovering too late that the system discourages private capital, slows company formation, or generates new burdens on innovators, investors, and taxpayers. Policymakers have a responsibility to design federal equity participation that is predictable enough that companies aren’t blindsided by unclear terms, and transparent enough that private investors understand the government’s expectations and governance role. Otherwise, having Uncle Sam on your capitalization table may come with complications no one is prepared to manage.
Category:
E-Commerce
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