Tom Stein
Vision care is already an eye-catching opportunity. Growing at a rate of 9.8 percent annually, the North American market alone is projected to reach $100 billion by 2027. The consumer base is huge, as three out of four U.S. adults now use some sort of vision correction. Yet the potential is far larger, as many technologies […]
Like a lot of lumbering land-based species, luggage has evolved slowly, from the steamer trunk to the suitcase to the 1987 invention of the Rollaboard. Since that milestone, the luggage world has been relatively calm. But that calm caught the attention of entrepreneurs and investors, who — what else? — set out to disrupt the $40 […]
The average worker has changed a great deal in recent years. The average worker-training program has not. Too often, it still involves an instructor standing at the front of a room, droning away and scrawling on a whiteboard. It is so not the way workers want to learn, especially millennial workers. Employees today are young. […]
Remember the old days of voice recognition? Siri, which has been a part of Apple’s iOS since 2011, would hear you say “order pizza” and she’d give you cures for alopecia. No longer: Voice has arrived. Virtual assistants like Siri, Amazon’s Alexa, Microsoft’s Cortana and Google Assistant are now delivering far better voice recognition. And […]
There are tech startups focused on teens, tweens, millennials, baby boomers and just about every other market niche. Dog lovers and cat fanciers? They’re covered, too. And yet relatively few new companies are focused on women — surprisingly few, considering the fact that women are half the people on our planet and they wield the […]
Air travel hasn’t really progressed over the past 50 years. A flight from New York to San Francisco takes just as long as it always has, and with less legroom to boot. The only real improvements have been minor conveniences like online check-in and personal in-flight entertainment systems. “The industry’s most innovative products often end […]
The restaurant-tech category is cooking, with investors pouring about $600 million into 100 deals in 2016, according to CB Insights. Food-delivery startups like DoorDash and Grubhub were the early celebrities in the space. But restaurant tech goes far beyond delivery, encompassing anything that makes running a restaurant easier, from point-of-sale software that automatically splits the […]
The coming year could see unicorns lose their horns and morph into donkeys. That seems to be the consensus in the venture community. Nearly a third of the 90 U.S. tech startups that have reached $1-billion-plus valuations will eventually be worth less than $1 billion, according to report by private-markets-research firm SharesPost in the fall. “Some unicorns have been […]
Water may be the new oil. With the globe’s fresh-water supply shrinking due to pollution growth and severe drought in places like California, water is looking less like a cheap commodity and more like a precious resource. So can venture investors strike it rich in the water business? Experts say that while the multibillion-dollar deals haven’t […]
Technology has transformed nearly every industry. One glaring exception is the construction business. While white-collar professionals have made huge strides in productivity over the past several decades, construction workers have largely been left behind. “Construction is an industry stuck in the 1960s in terms of productivity,” said Yves Frinault, co-founder and chief executive of Fieldwire, a […]