Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen has passed away from non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. He was 65 years old. He was a well-known philanthropist, owned the Portland Trailblazers and the Seattle Seahawks, and was worth over $20 billion. RIP.
Twilio (an API to send SMS messages) is acquiring SendGrid (an API to send emails) in an all-stock deal worth $2 billion. The deal will close in the first half of 2019. Twilio's CEO says, "Increasingly, our customers are asking us to solve all of their strategic communications challenges - regardless of channel. Email is a vital communications channel for companies around the world, and so it was important to us to include this capability in our platform."
According to online hiring platform Hired, who analyzed 30000+ interview requests across 1800+ Silicon Valley firms, product managers on average make $133,000, while software engineers make $123,000 and designers make $115,000. The gap between product managers and engineers has only widened over the past couple of years, and exists even after controlling for experience (product managers are paid more to start and more after 6 years of experience). Data scientists were briefly paid more than product managers in 2015, but supply began increasing faster than demand, so now product managers are back on top.
A hilarious story (with step-by-step code examples!) about how hacker Matteo Pisani hacked his university's smart vending machine (seriously this a vending machine with an app). The article ends with video proof of him using his hack to get a free drink.
Case Study Club is a weekly newsletter that contains case studies about the specific design choices and thought processes that go into building a product. Curated by Jan Wennesland, a designer since 1996!
Hello is a super simple video chat tool that works without any sign up, you just go to the URL and it will give you a share link to invite any friends you want to the chat.
MIT announced that it is planning a $1 billion college called the MIT Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing, named after Blackstone CEO Steve Schwarzman who donated $350 million. The new college will create an additional 50 faculty positions. MIT's president L. Rafael Reif says that the goal is to "educate the bilinguals of the future", meaning people in fields like biology, chemistry, politics, history and linguistics who are also knowledgeable about computing. Former Google CEO and visiting innovation fellow Eric Schmidt says "It's a major fund-raising mechanism that gives M.I.T. a huge resource to apply A.I. to other fields."
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