🔮 Better VC; rebuilding the Web; self-driving snafus; cities meet tech; emoji, plasma & hipsters++ #173

Dept of the near future

📈 Diverse VCs make more money according to the data, say Paul Gompers and Silpa Kovvali. “VC firms that increased their proportion of female partner hires by 10% saw, on average, a 1.5% spike in overall fund returns each year and had 9.7% more profitable exits”.

🔗 Tim Berners-Lee is “devastated” by how the world-wide-web has evolved, dominated by a few corporations. His new project? To re-decentralize the web and “give people privacy and [...] control of their data”. (See also, The Economist asks "what if people were paid for their data?" Good question to ask but a complicated issue because their are many cases where our data can form part of a public good, and be more valuable for that than by private exploitation by us or an intermediary, like Facebook.)

😡 All-time heat records are broken right across the planet from Northern Siberia to the Middle East.

⏳ Self-driving cars are hitting roadblocks and are “years, maybe decades away”. Rodney Brooks comment on the…