The Hyperloop at first sounds like one of Elon Musk’s crackpot ideas. Musk, America’s premier huckster polymath, claims his Hyperloop can get travelers the 380 miles from Los Angeles to San Francisco in just 30 minutes by shooting passengers at 780 mph through frictionless pneumatic tubes.
To an international traveler, there aren’t many moments worse than sitting in a stale metal tube for countless hours, finally landing at a destination, and then turning the corner inside the airport to see a Kafka-esque nightmare of a line between you and the exit.
If you’re reading this story on a home computer, consider yourself luckier than a full third of Miami residents. This week, Florida International University took a look at internet connectivity across the country — and the startling results showed the city of Miami ranked second worst in the nation. FIU’s…
In a small, cheery, wood-paneled office in the back of the Design Center of the Americas in Dania Beach, the young, wavy-haired receptionist was polite but firm. “Mr. Abovitz isn’t available right now.” A green cartoon dragon grinned from the wall to her right, next to a glass-walled conference room…
Liana Lozada has been using Uber since it debuted in Miami in 2014, but it was only recently that she took note of a problem with the service. Whenever she got into a car with non-Spanish speaking friends, she was usually the only one who could communicate with the driver…
Look outside. The streets are teeming with zombiefied screen watchers. People wander day and night through parks and parking lots. They’re trying to catch ’em all, dammit! These digital pocket monsters aren’t going to catch themselves. Pokémon Go became a worldwide sensation literally overnight earlier this month. The mobile app…
Earlier this year, a Delray Beach-based Bitcoin exchange company called Cryptsy abruptly shut down, locking hundreds of thousands of users out of the system and leaving them no way to withdrawal their digital currencies. In January, Broward County attorney David Silver filed a class-action lawsuit against Cryptsy and its owner,…
As a young man back in 1992, Thomas S. Ross drew up plans for a then-futuristic handheld gizmo he dubbed the “Electronic Reading Device.” He envisioned it as a way for people to read novels, check the news, and view pictures and even videos, but also dreamed that the device…
When it comes to texting, Miamians have an outlook similar to the one Jay-Z takes about hookers on his hit “Big Pimpin'”: “I got no patience / and I hate waiting.” When a Miamians texts you they expect an almost immediate reply. More so than anywhere in the nation. At…
In August, Florida voters will decide on a proposed amendment that would provide property tax cuts for anyone who wants to buy solar panels or other renewable energy equipment. If passed, it could lead to a lot of Floridians looking into installing solar panels on their roof. Though, tax breaks…
Alan Amron’s living room on Evernia Street in West Palm Beach is barely wider than the dark sofa that dominates it. The kitchen is too small to eat in, so a tiny round table is crammed into the living room. It’s unclear whether two people can eat there at once…
The bad news: Zika is coming to Florida. On Friday, two new cases of the virus linked to serious birth defects were reported in the state, and scientists believe it could spread rapidly come summer as mosquito populations explode. And we’re still a long way away from a vaccine for…
In South Florida’s burgeoning tech sector, a non-profit called Endeavor Miami plays an outsized role. The group helps incubate new businesses with a $2 million Knight Foundation grant and a board stacked with a who’s-who of local power players. Since 2013, one of those players has been a charismatic Chilean tech…
As far as tech guru origin stories go, Alberto Chang-Rajii’s is as good as they get. As a humble, Chilean-born student at Stanford University in the mid-90s, Chang-Rajii has told audiences and journalists from Miami to Sydney, he met fellow students Sergey Brin and Larry Page just as they were…
Miami may be a diverse and vibrant metropolis, but that doesn’t mean that we’re known for being exactly political correct. In fact, a recent analysis of derogatory language used on Twitter finds that Miami is one of the top cities for Tweets that include sexist, transphobic and anti-Hispanic language. To…
Around 10 p.m. on a recent Wednesday night, some two dozen people huddled on a dark street corner outside of Havana’s Hotel Inglaterra, a dazzling, historic structure that faced the city’s Central Park. Just feet away, on the hotel patio, a live band regaled guests while bartenders pour drinks. Upon…
Call it the holiday news dump: Earlier this month, the TSA quietly released a new policy on its airport security checks. The days when travelers can request a pat-down instead of going through a nude imaging scanner are coming to an end; instead, TSA can now decline that request and…
By this time next year, you might just be getting your news fix by logging on to miaminewtimes.miami. OK, maybe not. But Miami has now become just the third U.S. city — after New York and Las Vegas — to snatch up it’s own top-level domain name. That means that…
Comcast has been testing internet data caps in some markets for the since 2012, and has slowly been rolling them out across the country. On October 1st, they’re coming to South Florida. For Comcast costumers on the most common plans that means that if you use anymore data than 300…
Cuba is now open for business — this morning, John Kerry is in Havana to officially inaugurate reopened diplomacy between the nations by re-christening the U.S. embassy there. There’s still plenty of debate about the pros and cons of the move: Kerry isn’t going to meet with dissidents, which has…
Last year, we answered a pressing social media question in South Florida: Namely, who was behind the 50 most followed Miami Twitter accounts. The result was a surprising list full of celebrities, athletes, politicians, media outlets, a few social media superstars, and even a good showing of people over 40. When…
For decades of Cold War deep freeze, communications between Miami’s exilios and their relatives back in Cuba were beyond primitive. Family updates came only from newly arrived relatives who survived the raft trip to America. Back in Havana, radio signals that bounced past censors or the odd smuggled foreign newspaper…
