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Miami and Space - the new battlegrounds for tech's top egos

Miami and Space - the new battlegrounds for tech's top egos

Alexei Oreskovic

Hello, and welcome to this week's edition of the Insider Tech newsletter, where we break down the biggest news in tech, including:

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Soundtrack: This week's newsletter has been specially designed to be consumed $4

This week: Tech egos are clashing, from the shores of Miami to the depths of space

For more than a year, Silicon Valley techies have abandoned their homeland and poured into Miami in search of startup El Dorado. As Candy Cheng reports, the $4

A Founders Fund VC who moved to Miami in April declared the start of the inaugural "Miami Tech Week,">$4 never thinking that there already was a Miami Tech Week.
$4 said Brian Breslin, a longtime figure in the city's tech scene, comparing the newcomers' attitudes to "Columbus coming and claiming he discovered America."
If you're in Miami, $4

If not Miami, then space. There's another group of brash Silicon Valley adventurers setting off for new horizons, and lucky for them, where they're going there are no locals to clash with (we think).

$4 announced that he and $4 will be on-board the first rocket from his Blue Origin company to blast into space, on July 20.
Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket is $4 before returning to Earth.
There's one seat left on Bezos' spaceship, and the auction to buy the ticket closes on Saturday ($4). You may recall that $4 - could there be a surprise bid from Mar-a-Lago?

Meanwhile, rival space entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson may try to beat Bezos to orbit $4

Elon Musk, the other space race billionaire, has yet to announce plans for his own imminent trip. But chatter has centered on a prediction $4- seriously.

And a former Blue Origin employee $4.

Even Palantir, the data analysis company, has a spacebound employee. $4, will be aboard a separate Virgin Galactic flight expected to launch in 2022.

"Less than a thousand humans have ever been to space - fewer than 100 women, only a handful of moms - and my 3-year-old is going to watch her mommy become one of them," $4

Startups to watch

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Insider asked dozens of top VCs to name the most promising Startups of 2021. They were asked to nominate startups they had invested in as well as ones where they had no financial ties. And they delivered an exciting list of companies, across all stages from newly launched to unicorns, each thriving for different reasons.

In our first on a series of stories of the Most Promising Startups of 2021, we present a list of 46, many of whom were named by multiple VCs as being companies to watch this year.

Read the full story:

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Snaphot: $4

Yesterday's innovative breakthrough is today's retro tchotchke, and the miniaturized version of Polaroid's classic instant camera is a fun, and instructive, reminder of the olden times.

$4 Once upon a time, that was a big deal - it meant you didn't have to take your film to be developed at a shop and then wait a couple of days to get prints of your photos.

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For today's digital generation, there's nothing special about being able to view pictures right away, of course.

But perhaps the Polaroid has something better than mere nostalgia to offer Gen Z.

Scarcity is an increasingly foreign concept to those living in a time of $4, bottomless social media feeds, on-demand streaming movies, and smartphone cameras that take infinite selfies. With a film camera - even a toy-like instant camera - you only get a finite number of pictures. Each shot needs to count. Imagine that.

Not necessarily in tech:

Thanks for reading, and if you like this newsletter, $4.

- Alexei