How Google’s Powerful Lobby Legalized Driverless Cars In California “Behind the scenes it was a real struggle,” said Howard Posner, a veteran legislative staffer who helped Google lobby behind-the-scenes for autonomous cars in consults for California’s Assembly Transportation Committee. In an unusually candid interview with the investigative reporting outlet, the Bay Citizen, the soon-to-retire co

Movieclips Picks Up $18.5M From US Venture Partners, Rebrands As Zefr To Tackle Music, Sports, And TV Los Angeles-based Movieclips has done well for itself by, um, clipping movies into bite-sized clips that viewers love. But there’s a whole bigger world of content out there, and it plans to tackle it with a whole new brand and $18.5 million in new funding. Movieclips was founded in 2009 with the i

Netflix Heads To Scandinavia, With Plans To Launch In Norway, Denmark, Sweden, And Finland Later This Year Netflix announced during its second-quarter earnings call that it would continue expanding overseas with a new market in the fourth quarter, and now we know where it’s going: The streaming video company just announcing that it will be launching in four Scandinavian countries by the end of the

Y Combinator-Backed Instacart Wants To Be Amazon With One-Hour Delivery When it comes to being the Mall of the Internet, no one really does it better than Amazon. Yet, to truly best its offline competitors and put the icing on the cake in terms of user experience, Amazon has been pushing hard to offer same-day delivery for all items purchased within its virtual walls. However, Amazon CFO Tom Szkut

Republican Presidential front-runner, Mitt Romney, may hold the most unpopular stance in American history: he wants to ban as much porn as he can. A 2007 video (below) of Romney promising to place porn filters on every new computer have resurfaced after his legal adviser “assured” President Reagan’s anti-porn legal crusader that Romney sticks by his pledge to curtail porn and resumes prosecution u

Editor’s Note: Nir Eyal is a founder of two startups and an advisor to several Bay Area companies and incubators. He is a Lecturer in Marketing at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and blogs about the intersection of psychology, technology, and business at NirAndFar.com. Follow him on Twitter @nireyal. The belief that products should always be as easy to use as possible is a sacred cow of t

Netflix Adds Warner Bros. Exec As Its New Chief Marketing Officer Netflix announced that it has named former Warner Bros. executive Kelly Bennett as its chief marketing officer, six months after it lost its last longtime marketing head Leslie Kilgore. After 12 years on the job, Kilgore stepped down from the position in January. The resignation occurred after Netflix received an unprecedented uproa

Editor’s note: Ruslan Kogan is founder and CEO of consumer electronics company Kogan. Follow him on Twitter @ruslankogan. If you’re in business, you can’t ignore China. The economy is booming and it is the manufacturing capital of the world. In the last six years as founder and CEO of Kogan, I’ve travelled to China countless times. Each time, I fall more in love with it. It’s developing very quick

Feature phones are not the future. Of course that verges on tautology; of course everyone will have a smartphone, until everyone has something smaller and better and even more integrated into the fabric of our lives, like Google Glasses or cybernetic jawbone/retinal implants or whatever Charles Stross dreams up next. But when, exactly? I’ve spent a good chunk of my life wandering around and writin

Netflix announced today that it is rolling out a new content delivery network of its own, called Open Connect, which will reduce its costs of delivery and could improve delivery of its content. But Open Connect isn’t just about reducing its reliance on third-party CDNs like Akamai, Limelight, and Level 3 — by connecting directly with ISPs, Netflix could improve the relationships it has network ope

Editor’s note: Alexander Haislip is a marketing executive with cloud-based server automation startup ScaleXtreme and the author of Essentials of Venture Capital. Follow him on Twitter @ahaislip. Congratulations. You’re the CEO of a startup. You’re doing the hardest job in business. You’ve raised money from venture capitalists and turned down better-paying jobs elsewhere. You’ve mastered complicate