🏠 X Marks The Spot

Bye bye birdy

Stephen Flanders
July 24, 2023

Gm. Bonjour. I’m still in Nice, and am actually on my way to a wine tasting as you read this. So, here’s a wine fun fact to start your week. Did you know you have to drink 7 glasses of OJ or 20 glasses of apple juice to get the same amount of antioxidants as wine? Basically, wine is the healthiest drink on Earth and I’ll hear no argument otherwise.

— Stephen Flanders

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🏠 SOCIAL MEDIA

Twitter → X

Everyone knows what the Twitter brand is. The name “Twitter” and that bluebird logo. This branding is so ingrained that you can say the “bird app” and everyone knows what you are talking about.

Changing it would be a massive risk, akin to changing Twitter’s entire identity.

To which Elon says hold my beer.

Bird App No Longer

In a Tweet rampage that would make even Kanye jealous, Elon unveiled his plans for his social media app.

Twitter and the bird are out, X and…X are in.

Yep, Elon’s strange obsession with the letter X has come full-circle, as the digital town square is now known as X.

If you’re thinking “wtf is this dude doing”, you are not alone:

Everyone thinks it’s dumb, but is there a method to Elon’s madness?

The X Vision

Maybe?

It is well known that Elon wants to turn Twitter into X, the everything app. Obviously, to do so, you need to rebrand the app.

Perhaps that is why he is not concerned about the risky rebrand. If X turns into America’s version of WeChat, fully equipped with messaging, social media, gaming, shopping, and payments, then who cares about a silly name change?

Or maybe he really is making a mistake.

Only time will tell.

The Big Picture: The Twitter rebrand seems completely out of left-field, but Elon’s been talking about turning Twitter into X for months. Now let’s see if he can deliver on his ultra-ambitious vision.

Mobile-first apps = iPhone. AI-first apps = ??

Wispr is building the next leap in personal computing – the consumer hardware platform for AI-first applications.

They’re a rare company building in the AI space today with a hardware angle. Their belief is that while software & AI has evolved with LLMs, the input devices like keyboards have stayed the same. To redesign input interfaces, they’ve raised close to 15M from NEA and 8VC in addition to Stanford AI professors like Chris Manning & Richard Socher’s fund AIX ventures.

A big revolution is coming. And it’s going to be spearheaded by innovation throughout the stack.

Wispr was also recognized as one of the top 100 AI companies by CBInsights in their most recent report. They were placed in the “AI assistants & HMIs” category along with Anthropic, Inflection, and Adept AI.

Although Wispr is still in stealth, you can learn more about Wispr here.

🏠 SCIENCE

A Geothermal Breakthrough

When it comes to clean energy, people often talk about solar, wind, hydro, and nuclear power. And for good reason. All of these power sources (especially nuclear) will play key roles in the future.

But, you can’t forget about the easily forgettable geothermal energy. Due to their 100% carbon-free and always-running nature, any clean energy future will likely include heaps of geothermal energy.

And now, due to Fervo Energy’s breakthrough, that has become a lot easier.

What Fervo has done is demonstrate that geothermal energy is ready for commercial use, as they were able to generate 3.5 megawatts of electricity (one megawatt can power 750 homes) in a 30-day test trial.

It was such an encouraging result that Google is now having Fervo power their data centers and infrastructure throughout Nevada. And, if the results are consistent, their new Utah site will be able to power 300,000 homes by 2028.

Any way your slice it, this is absolutely excellent news.

The Bottom Line: More clean energy is never a bad thing.