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After entrepreneur Brynn Putnam sold her smart fitness company, Mirror, to Lululemon for $500 million in 2020, she was looking for her next big idea. It was the middle of the pandemic, and Putnam was living with five kids ranging in age from 2 to 21. She says she often found herself dreaming of an activity that would get her whole family to sit down and connect with each other. Brynn Putnam [Photo: Board] When we played games, we were either playing board games like Candyland, so that the littlest ones could participate, or we would try to play video games, but the teenagers who’ve logged a lot of hours on sort of modern controllers would always smoke us, Putnam says. There was a missing product: one that could give you the tactile feel of physical pieces and the face-to-face interaction of sitting around a shared experience, but with the interactivity of video games. Enter Board, Putnams newest venture. Board is a 24-inch game console that looks a bit like a gigantic iPad. Its function, though, is unlike pretty much any other device on the market: Board combines the setup and feel of a traditional board game with the digital screen of a video game, allowing players to use physical pieces on top of an interactive screen. [Image: Board] The console comes with 12 exclusive games and can accommodate up to 10 players in a team setting. It debuted on October 28 for a holiday price of $499, though its standard cost is $699. While the Board team wouldn’t share sales data, they did note that the product already surpassed initial forecasts. To make Boards premise work, Putnams team designed its own custom hardware and software that can identify different kinds of touch, withstand rough play and spills, and react in real time to players movements. For Putnam, Board represents an entirely new way to use tech; rather than isolating its users, Board is built to provide a social experience. [Photo: Board] How Board built a brand-new kind of game Creating Board started with one major hurdle, says Ryan Measel, the companys chief technology officer: Most touchscreens are only built to recognize 10 fingersand theyre certainly not designed to recognize objects. Board needed to identify not only an unlimited number of fingers, but also the consoles 49 unique game pieces. Measel explains that, with commercial platforms like Android and iOS, theres a programming layer that limits how many touch pointslike taps and swipesa developer can build into an application. With Board, Measels team built a custom driver that gave them full access to the consoles sensor array, opening up essentially endless possibilities for different interactions with the screen. [Photo: Board] Specifically, the Board screen is able to determine whats touching it (and how) through an embedded AI model thats been trained on the systems sensory outputs. It knows, for instance, how to distinguish between a hand accidentally brushing the board, a finger tapping the screen, and an arm passing over the board. It can also tell the difference between all 49 of the consoles game pieces using conductive traces, or unique patterns made out of a conductive material, that are etched onto the bottom of every piece. 30 fingers on the Board during the testing process. [Image: Board] Alongside the Boards unique ability to distinguish touch, Putnam says, a top concern was the consoles durabilityespecially given that some of its games are designed to be enjoyed by players as young as six. The device comes with a spill-resistant gasket around the display and a tight internal structure to keep it safe from liquids and bumps. My littlest one is 2, so she tends to use everything as a weapon, Putnam says. We have some great photos and videos from the testing process at the factory of te Board being submerged underwater, dropped from very high heights, and scratched multiple times. [Image: Board] How Board works When users receive their Board, the device comes with 12 games made specifically for the console, as well as unique pieces tailored to each game. Seth Sivak, Boards chief creative officer and former CEO of the game studio Proletariat, led game development. He says the consoles portfolio of games was carefully crafted specifically to offer something for all different kinds of players. [Photo: Board] The options run the gamut from 60-second-long arcade-inspired games to an escape room-themed experience that can take up to 90 minutes to complete. Even within the games themselves, players of different ages and skill levels can find roles appropriate to themlike in the chef-inspired game Chop Chop, where the kind of utensil game piece chosen by each participant determines their role in the kitchen. [Image: Board] The 2 year old can be the sponge and feel a lot of joy cleaning the kitchen, but it’s very simple and intuitive for them to do, Putnam says. The grown-up can be in charge of managing the order tickets as they come in and strategizing about how to navigate the changing kitchen layout, recipes, and tickets. I think thats really hard to dothere’s not a ton of experiences that really make sure everyone has a seat at the table. Right now, Sivak and his team are working to build out Boards IP into additional games. At the same time, Putnam says the company is working on making its software development kit available to external developers in order to bring existing games into the Board universe. [Photo: Board] Board is combining the old-school nostalgia of game night with all the advantages of digital gamingand it might just be a hit for everyone in the family. I think for a lot of parents, myself included, you don’t want to pretend like technology doesn’t exist, because technology makes things betterBoard does the rule maintenance for you, it does the score keeping, it does all these things, Putnam says. But you don’t want technology to remove social interaction. It’s important that the screen brings people together. It doesn’t replace your friends or your family, it doesn’t replace your teacher, but it helps make those experiences more rich.
Category:
E-Commerce
In his new book Ding Dong: How Ring Went from Shark Tank Reject to Everyones Front Door, Ring founder Jamie Siminoff pulls back the curtain on the chaotic, often absurd reality of building one of the most recognizable consumer tech brands of the last decade. The following excerpt captures one of the books most pivotal moments: the high-stakes, borderline-reckless gamble to secure the name Ring.com, a decision that nearly emptied the companys bank account, tested the patience of his investors, and set the stage for a brand that would soon reshape home security. eBay.com. Half.com. Cars.com. Shop.com. Toys.com. And yes, Nest.com. So many great four-letter domain names. And I wanted one: Ring.com. The owner of the URL was willing to part with it for 2 million bucks. That represented a massive chunk of the money my VCs were about to give me. Neither they, nor a couple of my seasoned tech friends who had experience with overpriced domain names, thought it was a great use of my new capital. Nor did the fellow who ran the mezcal company on the other side of the wall of our Santa Monica office. Youre going out of business! Your doorbell doesnt work! Its just a name! he yelled at me in the parking lot as I walked to my car one evening. On one hand, I wanted to yell back that he didnt know what he was talking about; on the other, I wondered if he was right and I was making a huge mistake. I also wondered where his anger at me was coming from, but realized hed probably heard some of my own raging through the walls. Youre going to spend all that money on a stupid name?! he barked.Another doubter wondered, Jamie, does it really have to be four letters? Whats so special about four letters? Yes, it had to be Ring. When Id come up with my voice message-to-email transcription service, I first called it Simulscribe, and it stagnated. When I changed the name to PhoneTag.com, we got a burst of interest. Names matter. I had once thought they shouldntall that mattered was having a quality product with an easy-to-understand benefit, a great customer experience, and a fair price. Turns out, the name matters. I would not make that mistake again with the doorbell. Soon enough, there would be lots of video-doorbell competitors whose products might be almost as good as ours when we launched F5. So the way to separate ourselves from the competition was brand. A mission as big as reducing crime in neighborhoods deserved a brand. That brand deserved a great name. For some totally unfathomable and fortunate reason, this URL owner showed zero curiosity about the individual or company that was trying to buy his name. In our exchanges, it seemed almost as if he was unfamiliar with the internet, which was particularly weird for someone who harvested domain names. I got the sense that for some time he had overplayed his hand, consistently valuing the URL higher than the market did. Which happens. Maybe he had tried to sell it during the dot-com boom for $10 million and it was worth only five then. Or maybe I was the one being played, and he knew exactly how much a perfect four-letter domain name could fetch, certainly way more than Id paid to own SlowDownAsshole.com ($15). My friend Diego Berdakina brilliant entrepreneur, USC professor, and the single smartest person I knowurged me, explicitly, to not pay a cent more than $100k for Ring.com. I explicitly did not tell him the owners starting price. First, I got the owner to knock the price down from $2 million to $1 million, but that was still an insane amount of up-front cash for a struggling startup to just light on fire, a full third of what I was getting from True Ventures. I had to figure a way to own the name without bankrupting our companywould the owner be interested in equity instead of cash? No. Wow. Clearly he hadnt read about Googles recent multibillion-dollar acquisition of Nest. I made one last offer for slightly under $1 million. Nope. One mill. We set a closing date. I forgot one thing, though. I didnt have the money. The morning of the closing, I called the owner. Listen, Im in the parking lot of my company and Im so embarrassed. The bad news is my board wont let me buy the name, full price today, for what I previously offered you. It was not a lie. I had a board. The only detail I left out was that the board was just me. Wow, said the owner. Thats a dirty thing your board did. Tell me about it. Worse than dirty. Disgusting. Im very upset. I hear you, brother. Me, too. I went on a bit. I doubled down about what a bunch of assholes my board were being. But the good news is Im authorized to deposit one hundred seventy-five thousand dollars in your account, todayI had $187,000 in the bank; the VC investments had not yet closedand the additional eight hundred twenty-five thousand paid in installments over two years, for a total of one million dollars. He lost his shit. He unleashed a string of four-letter words very different from Ring and eBay and Half. Effing this, mother-effing that. The connection dropped. Hed hung up. Damn, I thought. Had I overplayed my hand? Fifteen minutes later, I got an email from him. Wire the money. He included his bank information. He never asked who was on the board. Never asked what we did. I hope I would have, in his shoes. Maybe when youre offered a million bucks overall, with $175k coming that day, you just want to get it over with as quickly as possible. I called my friend Adam dAugellithe young VC at True who had been my biggest championto boast what a great deal I had cut, that Id essentially just saved us so much money. He wasnt quite ready for high-fives; their investment was about to close, and already a significant chunk of it was gone because I had a jones for a great four-letter domain name. Adam was fully Team Siminoff but, as Id done with others, I was not making it easy for him. Ring.com. What a great sound. As sweet as the three-toned jingle the doorbell made.
Category:
E-Commerce
Media personalities and online influencers who sow social division for a living, blame the rise of assassination culture on Antifa and MAGA. Meanwhile, tech CEOs gin up fears of an AI apocalypse. But theyre both smokescreens hiding a bigger problem. Algorithms decide what we see, and in trying to win their approval, were changing how we behave. Increasingly, that behavior is violent. The radicalization of young men on social networks isnt new. But modern algorithms are accelerating it. Before Facebook and Twitter (X) switched from displaying the latest post from one of your friends at the top of your feed with crazy, outrageous posts from people you don’t know, Al Qaeda operatives were quietly recruiting isolated and disillusioned young men to join the Caliphate, one by one. But the days of man-to-man proselytizing have long since been replaced by opaque algorithms that display whatever content gets the most likes, comments, and shares. Enrage to engage is a business model. Algorithmic design amplifies the most hysterical content, normalizing extremist views to the point where outrage feels like civic participation. Its a kind of shell game. Heres how it works: Politicians and CEOs spin apocalyptic narratives Online influencers chime in Algorithms spread the most outrageous content Public sentiment hardens Violence gains legitimacy Our democracy erodes The algorithms dont just amplifythey also decide who sees what, creating parallel worlds that make it harder for us to understand our opposing tribe members. For example, Facebooks News Feed algorithm prioritizes posts that generate emotional reactions. YouTubes recommendation system steers viewers toward similar content that keeps them watching. And it’s a total mystery how TikToks For You Page keeps users glued to the app. You search for a yoga mat on your phone, and the ranking algorithms decide youre a liberal. Your neighbor searches for trucks, and the system tags them as a conservative. Before long, your feed fills with mindfulness podcasts and climate headlines, while your neighbors features off-roading videos and political commentary about overregulation. Each of you thinks youre just seeing whats out there, but youre actually looking at customized realities. Up to now, the killing of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, along with the brutal killings of elected officials Melissa Hortman and her husband, embassy staffers Sarah Lynn Milgram and Yaron Lischinsky, United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, and Blackstone real-estate executive Wesley LePatner have all been tied to a rising wave of political violence. They are more likely the result of online radicalization being accelerated through social media algorithms. Given the snails pace of our judicial system, and the labor-intensive process of reconstructing someones path to radicalization online, the smoking gun is elusive. In the 2018 Tree of Life synagogue shooting, it took five years to reach a conviction. In the meantime, more people consumed extremist content giving rise to what the FBI now calls nihilistic violent extremism, which is violence driven less by ideology than by alienation, performative rage, and the quest for social status. By the time one case is resolved, new permission structures for violence take root, showing just how powerless our legal system is at policing social media platforms. What drives these communities isnt ideology so much as a search for belonging, status, and personal power. The need for validation is intertwined with whatever or whoever is commanding the most attention at any given moment. These days, the issue that has captured the most attention is an AI apocalypse. As new grievances take shape around artificial intelligence and national fears of job loss, technology executives are increasingly exposed to threats of physical violence, says Alex Goldenberg, director of intelligence at Narravance, which monitors social media in real time to detect threats for clients. Are predictions of AI joblessness stoked by algorithmic fear-mongering a recipe for social unrest? While high-profile tech CEOs have long traveled with security details, new data suggests those threats have extended to all corporate sectors. A study of over 2,300 corporate security chiefs at global companies with combined revenues exceeding $25 trillion found that 44% of the companies are actively monitoring mainstream social media, the deep web (content not indexed by Google), and the dark web (where criminals and dissidents go for cover). Two-thirds of those companies are increasing their physical security budgets in response to rising online threats, according to the study by security company Allied Universal. Before December, fewer than half of CEOs had any kind of executive protection. Now boards are demanding it, says Glen Kucera, president of Allied Universal. Executives make up 30% of a companys value, and shareholders want them protected. Companies are responding by hardening their perimeters, hiring armed escorts and social media threat analysts, and addressing vulnerabilities at executives homes. For CEOs, AI is both a windfall and a minefield. Its too lucrative to ignore, but too unsettling to discuss freely. High-profile people making controversial announcements about AI are at higher risk, says Kucera. According to Michael Gips, managing director at multinational financial and risk advisory firm Kroll, these findings fit into a broader trend, Were living in a grievance culture now, he says. If theres something to be grieved about, the risk is there. Even the people shaping this technology acknowledge its risks. Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, has said he believes the worst case for AI is lights out for all of us. Elon Musk has made similar warnings, cautioning that theres some chance that [AI] goes wrong and destroys humanity. OpenAI cofounder Ilya Sutskever repotedly talked about building a doomsday bunker for OpenAI engineers in the post-AGI world. Narravance analysts say apocalyptic narratives around AIespecially those centered on job losspromote online radicalization. After reading dystopian narratives about AI-driven unemployment, 17.5% of U.S. adults in a statistically significant sample said violence against Musk is justified. Musks remark about universal job loss spread rapidly across social platforms, stripped of nuance, meme-ified, and reframed as a prophecy of societal collapse. In online communities where people are hungry for belonging and validation, Musks rhetoric becomes the basis of permission structures that rationalize violence. Prior to his resignation from the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), negative sentiment toward Musk was higher. In March 2025 nearly 32% of Americans said they believed his assassination would be justified, according to another Narravance study. On Sam Altmans blog, the OpenAI CEO wrote, The development of superhuman machine intelligence is probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity. The more tech leaders issue dire predictions, the more support for unjustified violence against them grows. Alarmingly, Narravance also found that respondents said violence would be justified against Alex Karp, CEO of surveillance and defense AI company Palantir (15.4%), Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg of (14.5%), Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos (13.8%), and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman (13.3%). Fear of obsolescence As soon as Charlie Kirk was assassinated, a video went around the world. Ten-year-olds saw it within hours, said Jonathan Haidt, author of The Anxious Generation, at the Fast Company Innovation Festival. Haidt argues that since 2012 the share of adolescents who say their lives feel useless has more than doubled, and that boys in particular, left without traditional guidance and immersed in social media, gaming, and pornography, are struggling to find a path to adulthood. If you’re a boy, and your life feels useless, and you see no future, everything is about getting fame or money. You have to get rich quick or become famous, otherwise youll lose in the mating game, says Haidt. Boys around the world, historically, have gambled. Do something big. Get recognition, he says. A former senior social media executive who spoke on the condition of anonymity said negative narratives create desperation. When you give people doom scenarios, theyre going to be willing to do outrageous things, he says. Its an unfortunate by-product of the social media business. Social media meltdown Social media is a cancer, Utah Governor Spencer Cox said on 60 Minutes a few weeks after Kirks murder. Its taking all of our worst impulses and putting them on steroids . . . driving us to division and hate. These algorithms have captured our very souls. His dire warning underscores how platforms reward outrage, feed polarization, and erode the boundaries that once kept political disagreement from spilling into violence and chaos. In another interview, on Meet the Press, Cox argued that social media companies have hacked our brains, getting people addicted to outrage in ways that fuel division and erode agency. He said he believes that social media has played a direct role in every assassination or attempt in the past five to six years. The conflict entrepreneurs are taking advantage of us, and we are losing our agency, and we have to take that back, he said. When outrage gets amplified, all engagement looks like an endorsement, people mistake that as truth, even though it may be false or, worse yet, coordinated inauthentic activity spun up by the Chinese controlled TikTok algorithm or Russian bot farms. According to a report from safety research nonprofit FAR.AI, with artificial intelligence already more persuasive than humans, and frontier LLMs guiding political manipulation, disinformation, and terrorism recruitment efforts, the risks are already multiplying exponentially. Predictions of a dystopian, jobless AI future pale by comparison. The real threat is the erosion of human judgment itself. The existential risk of AIfirst raised in 1975 by computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum in his prescient book Computer Power and the Human Reasonis not joblessness or humanity suspended in Matrix-style bio-pods. The danger isnt sentient machines. Its algorithms engineered to keep us engaged, enraged, and endlessly divided. The apocalypse wont come from code, but from our surrender to it.
Category:
E-Commerce
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