If you have never owned a Raspberry Pi, you do not know what you are missing. While it is designed for tinkering and learning coding, it can be used for so much more. It can run Linux distributions and even a special version of Windows 10. If you install Kodi, it can become a powerful media box too.
If you have been wanting one, I have good news. We here at BetaNews are giving away the best version — the Raspberry Pi 3. We aren’t stopping there, however, as we are also including a very nice aluminum case — including heatsinks for overclocking. It is the exact Raspberry Pi 3 and case as seen in the video above. In other words, the case has already been installed by yours truly. Want to enter to win? There are multiple ways to enter. Just click the link below!
Win a Raspberry Pi 3 and Eleduino Aluminum Case with Heatsinks!

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Drones feel a bit like old news already, don’t they? At least in the Valley, with its hyper-fragmented mayfly attention span. The military has used them for decades. DJI, the undisputed (consumer) polycopter industry leader, was founded in 2006. We tech journalists can’t stop talking about drones, but they’re still mostly playthings, curiosities. One might well ask: what became of all that hype?
It’s a fair question, given our raised expectations — drones replacing FedEx trucks, drones providing emergency relief, drones creepily face-scanning every protester at a demonstration — but I think it evinces an unrealistic expectation of consistent, linear change.
Most profound technological change happens “gradually and then suddenly,” to quote Hemingway on bankruptcy in The Sun Also Rises . (Chris Dixon of Andreessen Horowitz wrote a great post about this a couple of years ago.) The question is, how do you know when you’re at the knee of the curve? When does gradually turn into suddenly?
It’s always hard to be anything like confident about this. It’s the kind of thing that generally only becomes apparent in retrospect when you look at the available data. But there is reason to believe, when we look at the accelerating pace of the drone news of the last few months, that 2017 is the year that drones really begin to, well, take off.
Consider:
But consumer drones will remain toys for the foreseeable future. The big important drone market, the one to watch, is enterprise / industrial drones … which, in turn, will be heavily affected by regulation. 7-11 has pilots on the ground overseeing its Reno service to obey FAA regulations. Amazon is testing Prime Air in the UK because its drones are (after much testing) allowed to go out of line-of-sight there.
I attended a Buchalter Connect drones-and-the-law event hosted by the firm of Buchalter Nemer earlier this week, and aviation lawyer Paul Fraidenburgh made an interesting point: the FAA, a previously distant and abstract entity in most American lives, regulates “‘any’ ‘device’ that is ‘used for flight.’” As and when drones become a big part of our lives, so will those federal regulators.
If that regulation becomes too onerous, though, drone developers will go jurisdiction shopping. Some already are. Three months ago Zipline began its groundbreaking deliveries of medical supplies via drones … in Rwanda. This is partly because Rwanda’s tiny, hilly geography makes drones a very appealing solution, but the lack of heavy-handed regulation can’t hurt.
Of course the FAA doesn’t regulate military aircraft , and the military is pursuing drone research very aggressively. The Pentagon recently tested a 103-drone swarm , which is a big deal — a true swarm is to a single drone as a multicellular organism is to an amoeba.
(I wrote a whole novel about FPGA-powered drone swarms in The Wrong Hands eight years ago, so it’s a little personally disconcerting to see that news in conjunction with the reports of the UAVs that ISIS uses daily to attack its enemies .)
The most important thing to do, though, is to look past all the trees itemized above, and focus on the forest; the speed of drone developments seems to be accelerating.
Nathan Walter of Buchalter Nemer analogizes drones to smartphones in that the actual aircraft is a platform, like a phone, and what’s installed on / done with it is, in essence, an app. This in turn hearkens back to Chris Dixon’s exponential-growth post: “The core growth process in the technology business is a mutually reinforcing, multi-step, positive feedback loop between platforms and applications.”
I submit, tentatively, that feedback loop has finally been established for drones, and we’re at the knee of an exponential growth curve. If so, then prepare to stand back and marvel, because from here on out, the acceleration pedal of dronetech progress / promulgation will, for the foreseeable future, be pressed to the proverbial metal.

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The commonwealth of Puerto Rico is steeped in more than $70 billion of debt that has been accruing for the better part of a decade. The local government’s irresponsible issuance of bonds and the decision by the U. S. Congress to cut corporate tax breaks have contributed to the current fiscal crisis and subsequent exodus of U. S. companies and Puerto Rican citizens from the island.
To make matters worse, the island’s agricultural industry is at a standstill, importing more than 85 percent of its produce. Puerto Ricans also pay two to three times more for electricity than average Americans, due in part to their dependence on oil imports and because the government-owned utility company is plagued with billions in debt.
On June 30 , President Barack Obama signed the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management and Economic Stability Act (PROMESA), which creates a committee (consisting of no elected Puerto Rican officials) to oversee the island’s finances. Some have criticized the law as a devolution to America’s colonial past.
Former Governor Alejandro Garcia Padilla lobbied heavily for the bill’s passage and he acknowledged that the commonwealth has a long way to go to recover financially.
As part of its new economic development plan, Puerto Rican officials are looking to technology and entrepreneurship to revitalize the economy, attract its bright minds back to the island and solve the sustainability problems bedeviling the commonwealth.
In 1976, Congress passed Section 936 of the federal tax code , granting U. S. corporations a tax exemption from income originating from U. S. territories. Manufacturers, largely from the pharmaceutical industry, flocked to Puerto Rico to take advantage of these tax breaks.
It was boom time on the island; until the tax incentives phased out in 2006 (Congress voted in 1996 to rescind them), the island enjoyed 28 out of 29 years of economic growth. Since 2005, Puerto Rico has seen negative growth eight out of 10 years and, just as the automotive industry left Michigan, so too fled Puerto Rico’s most prevalent manufacturers — pharmaceutical companies — in droves.
With the exodus of the big corporations, the workers soon followed. Puerto Rico has been experiencing a net population loss since 2005 that accelerated in 2010 as the mainland began to recover from the 2008 recession. According to the Pew Research Center , Puerto Rico had a net population loss to the mainland of 64,000 in 2014, more than double the net loss of 26,000 in 2010. Vice’s Samuel Oakford reported in April of 2015 that “for the first time in history, stateside Puerto Ricans — 4.9 million — outnumber the 3.5 million who remain on the island.”
Puerto Rico is trying to bring back corporations through a series of tax incentives , which have been signed into law since 2008. Two laws in particular, Act 73 (2008) and Act 20 (2012), set a fixed income tax rate of 4 percent for commercial manufacturers and companies exporting services from the island, respectively. A 50 percent tax credit for research and development activity costs has also been instituted under Act 73. According to Puerto Rico Secretary of Economic Development and Commerce, Alberto Bacó Bagué, “20% of the companies that operate under [Act 20] are tech oriented … and the rest have a tech-related component.”
“Technology is certainly one of the pillars of our economic development program,” wrote Bacó in an email to me. “As of today, we have a strong tech cluster with examples like Infosys, a global leader in creating breakthrough solutions that address mobility, sustainability, big data, and cloud computing and Honeywell, with a new EMI (electronic magnetic [sic] interference) research lab that alone will create 300 jobs.”
Bacó also mentioned Truenorth , Rock Solid and Fusionworks as examples of a burgeoning corporate IT sector.
To buoy the tech sector, Puerto Rico is trying to reinvent itself as a knowledge-based economy that will compete globally in part by creating a thriving entrepreneurial ecosystem.
The 2012-2013 Global Competitiveness Report from the World Economic Forum ranked Puerto Rico third in the availability of scientists and engineers. According to Lucy Crespo, the CEO of the Puerto Rico Science, Technology and Research Trust, a public-private trust aiming to turn the island into a tech hub by 2020, Puerto Rico graduates 22,000 STEM students and 60 to 70 percent leave the island.
“For many years, our schools and universities prepared our professionals to work for someone else,” said Crespo during an interview in the capital, San Juan. “So we didn’t develop a full ecosystem, we didn’t create a culture in which students from the universities thought, you know, gee, how can I become an entrepreneur?”
The trust recently established the Technology Transfer and Commercialization Office to help develop and commercialize intellectual property from the island’s universities and provide income tax breaks for researchers working in their grant program.
Bacó tells me, “While big hitters are important, a new breed of entrepreneurs has flourished, and we have joined forces with our diaspora using their knowledge and network reach to further propel economic growth.”
Parallel18, a startup accelerator in San Juan backed by the trust and the government, has reached out beyond the Puerto Rican diaspora, soliciting help from Start-Up Chile founder Sebastian Vidal .
Ducking in and out of a corner office at Parallel18 to check on a presentation from a local P&G executive, Vidal told me that he didn’t come here to copy what he did in Chile. “Start-Up Chile was more about building a startup community and the entrepreneurs were tasked with going to universities and being like mentors,” said Vidal. “Parallel18 has those aspects but the focus is more on making an impact with the economy as fast as possible.” He acknowledged that the political and economic system is much different from his homeland and there is a short timeline to create a significant, economic impact.
Also staffed by Puerto Rican entrepreneurs returning from abroad, Parallel18 is a five-month accelerator program for companies from around the world and from the island that offers $40,000 equity-free funding with a chance for follow-on funding if qualified alumni decide to establish their company in Puerto Rico. In exchange, entrepreneurs engage with local university students to help foster a culture of entrepreneurialism.
The program is already starting to bear fruit. Of its first cohort of 36 startups, seven international startups have stayed to continue their businesses from Puerto Rico and 12 local startups are up and running, according to Marie Custodio, spokesperson for Parallel18.
Other startup initiatives include Piloto 151 , a co-working space in the colorful Old San Juan district that has partnered with the Founder Institute; ConPRometidos , a social impact incubator and consulting firm; Grupo Guayacan , which since 1996 has been working to develop a private equity and entrepreneurial ecosystem on the island; and PRANS , a community of business leaders from different sectors that donate time to help potential investors evaluate and set up investment projects.
Parallel18 is being used as a vetting source to help bring quality companies to the attention of local and international VCs to create a deal flow — a main challenge for the ecosystem.
“In general, capital is frozen because of the uncertainty surrounding the [island’s] fiscal issues,” says Kenneth Kay, an angel investor and founder of the Puerto Rico Capital Network. “Despite the challenging environment, I am optimistic that a vibrant startup scene is possible in Puerto Rico.”
Kay points to recent tax legislation favorable to venture capitalists, particularly an amendment to allow software as a service (SaaS) companies the fixed income tax rate of 4 percent under Act 73 and Act 185 , which provides tax incentives for private equity funds, as moves to help attract investors to the ecosystem.
The government estimates that 790 Act 20 decrees will have been granted by the end of 2016, with 423 projected to have been granted in 2016 alone — a sign that this program could be gaining steam among investors.
In August, several Puerto Rican business associations sued the public utility PREPA for proposed electricity rate hikes on an island where its citizens are already paying two to three times more for electricity than average Americans. The strongest factor for the island’s high energy costs is that four-fifths of energy used in Puerto Rico comes from petroleum and the island neither produces nor refines crude oil — it imports all of it, according to the U. S. Energy Information Administration.
“Sustainable energy is key to Puerto Rico’s future,” Puerto Rico expert and journalist Juan González told a crowd at New York University in 2015 , the same year the island began to comply with a Renewable Energy Portfolio Standard that forces PREPA “ to supply 20% of retail electricity sales from eligible ‘green energy’ resources by 2035 .”
In September, energization began at the largest solar farm in the Caribbean located on Puerto Rico’s northwest coast, and local startups are also taking on the toughest energy issues.
For example, San Juan-based TEBS (short for Traffic Energy Bar System) has patented a system that captures kinetic energy from cars passing over a mechanism implanted in roadways and converts it into electrical energy to power nearby street lamps. And Sunne Cleantech Labs , a company that creates solar energy products, recently announced pre-sales of its Sunne Heater, a patent-pending solar water heater.
Energy rates aren’t the only sustainability woes on the island. In 2015, Puerto Rico imported more than 85 percent of its produce and Puerto Rican-grown rice went on sale in August for the first time since 1989.
The government has taken steps to boost agriculture, including a $4 million investment to help a local university improve soil conditions. But perhaps more promising is that local entrepreneurs are stepping up to tackle the issue.
UAV-IQ uses drones to scout acres and acres of growing area, using multispectral sensors so farmers have better insights into their crops, and eFARM , a social media-inspired e-commerce platform, connects Puerto Rico’s organic farmers directly to consumers on the island and around the world.
In an email interview, 16-year old eFARM founder José Nolla-Marrero told me he “noticed that finding organic and sustainable foods was very difficult and expensive in Puerto Rico and [I] envisioned an app to help find the farms, their products and plan a route to them.”
Nolla-Marrero embodies the next-generation Puerto Rican professional that the government is trying to cultivate: The entrepreneur.
“I believe we are adopting an entrepreneurial mindset already,” wrote Nolla-Marrero. “We are creative, hard-working, have great mobility to the US and the world, and are ready to tackle problems and scale outside of the traditional corporate career path.”
“The enthusiasm in our generation is palpable and contagious. I feel strides have been made and it’s a path many want to take but may not have had the level of support seen these days.”

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Everywhere you turn these days, there’s talk of automation replacing people. Technology is surely advancing at a rapid rate, and in today’s click-driven media environment, sensationalism sells , but just because tech can replace a human worker doesn’t mean we’re always going to want that. In some instances, even when tech can do an adequate job, we still want to deal with a person.
While a machine can perform a given task, often more efficiently than we can, what it lacks is the artistry in the activity, that uniquely human ability to cater to the needs of the individual. The protocol may suggest one approach, but a person who is good at their job understands when to adjust and the subtleties that are required.
The Obama administration’s recent report on the possible economic impact of artificial intelligence and automation looked at the issue at least partly through a policy prism. “Whether AI leads to unemployment and increases in inequality over the long run depends not only on the technology itself but also on the institutions and policies that are in place” the report stated. It went on to peg the percentage of jobs affected by automation over the next 10-20 years somewhere between 9 and 47 percent, a broad range that suggests the true impact won’t be known for some time.
Many people involved in the startup ecosystem believe that we will always push tech to its fullest extent simply because we can, but not everyone agrees that’s a desirable approach. The New York Times reported on a McKinsey study last week, that found that, while automation is growing, it may not be at the pace we have been led to believe. “How automation affects employment will not be decided simply by what is technically feasible, which is what technologists tend to focus on,” McKinsey’s James Manyika told the Times.
Ultimately, there will be many factors involved in the impact of automation, including our desire to interact with our fellow humans. Consider the automatic teller machine as a primary example. Developed in the 1960s and popularized in the 70s and 80s, it likely replaced some human tellers, but it’s 2017 and most banks still have tellers. Yes, you can get money whenever and wherever you want, even when the bank isn’t open. Heck, you can bank on your phone, but when you walk into the bank, there are still people working there because, when it comes to our money, sometimes we still want to talk to a trained professional.
Certainly when it comes to medicine, we are going to want to continue dealing with highly educated people, even when there are machines helping our doctors come up with the proper diagnosis and treatment. Even if a machine could determine an appropriate plan — and as we know there are few absolutes in medicine — we still want to work with a doctor, who has been trained to talk us through the options and administer the treatment protocol — and who understands that art in the science.
People still matter. And that’s an important point to keep in mind. Even in scenarios that don’t involve advanced education like physicians, it doesn’t mean that we as humans don’t want to interact with people instead of machines.
For instance, technology exists to replace waitstaff with an iPad menu. One San Francisco restaurant has taken people out of the equation completely. After placing your order on the iPad, your food comes out of a little cubbie — no runners or any human contact required — but not everyone is going to want this kind of experience. Some people like to be welcomed by a person, who not only takes the order, but answers questions about the menu and brings you your food.
The same goes for Uber or Lyft. Clearly, driverless cars are a growing reality , and car services want to go that route because it’s cheaper for them, but it doesn’t mean all consumers will enjoy a driverless ride. Some like the experience of talking to drivers. It’s more than simply getting from Point A to Point B (or enriching the car services).
This is not about being a luddite. Technology marches relentlessly forward, and it would be foolish to argue otherwise, but some things remain fundamental, and people-to-people communication will continue to be one of them. Just because the tech is available, doesn’t mean it’s always going to be the best option in every situation.

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When the internet was first created in the 1970’s and 1980’s with the introduction of the ARPANET its early years were focused on the development of infrastructure and protocol — beyond the knowledge and far away from the consciousnesses of the general public.
The establishment of that foundational protocol allowed for a subsequent wave of application layer innovation in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s that has come to dominate the public consciousness (e.g., Google , Facebook , Amazon , etc.). Even though technology at the protocol layer created a ton of value, the application layer has ultimately captured most of the mindshare and the value.
Meanwhile, the television industry has seen a different, but related, phenomenon play out. For many years, cable operators and telcos served as intermediaries between consumers and content. They bundled packages of cable networks and sold them as monthly subscriptions. But with the proliferation of high-speed internet in the household, companies like Netflix began to instead sell and deliver content directly to the consumer, avoiding cable distribution entirely. This has become known as “over-the-top” television and is increasingly driving an unbundling of content.
The same patterns are emerging in financial services. New consumer-facing financial applications are being built on top of old banking infrastructure, while other startups are going around financial infrastructure altogether. Together, they are unbundling the roles of banks and other financial incumbents.
In recent years, financial services architecture has opened up in a way that we have never seen before. Data APIs like Yodlee , Plaid , and Quovo now make it easy for developers to pull user financial data. SDKs like Card.io make it easy to onboard payment cards into mobile apps, financial market APIs like Xignite pull live stock prices, and payments APIs like Braintree and Stripe make it simple for developers to accept payments.
The combination of this development at the infrastructure layer, with what my partner Sarah Tavel notes as the growing distrust of traditional financial institutions, has created an opportunity for fintech startups similar those in internet and television: to create application layer companies with massive mindshare and value capture without having to innovate at the infrastructure layer themselves.
And while some of these startups may piggyback on open financial architecture, others avoid traditional pipes altogether and go completely “over-the-top”. In fact, the next billion dollar fintech startup may not look like a traditional fintech company at all.
Here are a handful of areas where I expect we’ll see these patterns play out:
Transferring money between two parties was one of the earliest problems to plague peer-to-peer commerce on the web. Paypal was the first breakout success in this category when it created a payment system that enabled transactions on eBay, and it remains an important part of financial infrastructure today. With the advent of mobile, a new crop of startups emerged to enable p2p money transfer beyond commerce: Venmo in the US, Verse in Europe, and Toss in Korea, to name a few.
These applications have not only created sticky social networks, but have also habituated consumers to exchanging value back-and-forth via mobile. In doing so, they have created an opportunity for a third wave of innovation within social finance.
For example, Tilt enables users to collect money from friends in a simple, friction-less way. Tilt didn’t have to rebuild the financial piping it was able to build on top of Stripe and focus its innovation on user experience and social functionality.
Splitwise allows individuals to split expenses and exchange value via a shared cloud-based ledger. Splitwise takes p2p money transfer over-the-top: like Bitcoin, it enables users to exchange value with bits (debits and credits to a ledger) instead of financial pipes, and unlike the p2p money transfer apps can be global from day one.
But what about settling into real money? Rather than rebuild payment pipes, Splitwise allows its users to settle via its integrations with Venmo and PayPal, which are increasingly open architecture themselves.
In the past, creating a new wealth management offering required some heavy lifting: new entrants would have to build a clearing firm, connect to market exchanges, build and become licensed as broker-dealers, and then establish relationships with RIAs to secure distribution for the product.
But recently this ecosystem has been vastly simplified and startups no longer need to develop the entire stack themselves. Apex opened their clearing firm and onboarding tech to other broker-dealers, enabling startups like Robinhood and (our portfolio company) Wealthfront to launch new financial offerings.
And now there is a second wave of infrastructure development simplifying the wealth management stack even further: broker-dealer APIs. Companies like Tradier and Third Party Trade enable startups to avoid building the broker-dealer altogether and focus on developing a differentiated customer experience.
Another example is Trigger , an app that sets “if this then that” rules for trading. Interestingly, Trigger doesn’t have any financial infrastructure at all— it’s a rules engine that sits on top of brokerage accounts, yet it is quickly becoming a primary trading window for its users.
Among financial service verticals, insurance stands out in its ability to resist change. Yet even here there has been an opening of the industry architecture that has begun to allow for a new wave of innovation.
For instance, re-insurers like MunichRe and SwissRe have begun to partner with startups using Managing General Agent (MGA) structures. In an MGA the re-insurer maintains the balance sheet while the startup focuses on customer acquisition, experience, and product design. Such structures have enabled the emergence of startups like Ladder in life insurance, Hippo in home insurance, and Jetty in renters insurance.
On the other hand, several startups are utilizing p2p networks to, at least partially, go over-the-top of traditional insurance balance sheet providers altogether. Lemonade here in the US and Friendsurance in Europe are examples of this approach. By doing so, they create greater alignment of incentives, reduce fraudulent claims, and save money for their policyholders.
The most striking example of over-the-top fintech is Bitcoin. By design, it is a system of record that avoids intermediation by traditional financial institutions and instead allows for value transfer directly between two parties.
But Bitcoin itself is a protocol that, as my partner Reid Hoffman points out , could enable an entirely new wave of innovation in the years to come. Just as users of Facebook or Google don’t need to know anything about TCP/IP or HTTP, users of Bitcoin in the future may not have to think about it to benefit from it.
One early example is Abra , which enables money transfer between any two mobile phones in the world by utilizing Bitcoin on the back end. Users of Abra never need to know they are using Bitcoin to send money to friends and family.
2017 is a unique time to be a founder in fintech. The opportunity to improve financial services has always existed, but founders today can get to market much more quickly by leveraging existing infrastructure or circumventing it altogether. It’s no surprise that I am seeing so many talented entrepreneurs flock to fintech and I’m confident there is more to come.

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