Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday, May 25

• The Rise of the Fat Start-Up: For much of the past decade, tech investors have been enamored of software companies that could grow very quickly for little money — like Instagram, which raised less than $60 million before it was bought by Facebook for $1 billion. Even Uber, which has raised billions of dollars for expansion, has attracted investors on the promise of eventual low operational costs, as it neither owns nor actually employs its drivers. (They are considered independent contractors.) But modern capital markets have since unlocked far grander opportunities for tech entrepreneurs. They are blessed with essentially unlimited access to money, and ideas that once seemed too expensive, too risky or just too crazy are now getting off the ground. These start-ups are fat — with capital, with industry-altering ambition and, to their critics, often more than a little hubris. Consider how Elon Musk, the chief executive of Tesla and SpaceX, is building electric cars, a gigantic automated factory, solar roofs, rockets and, as a hobby, a tunneling company. There are start-ups trying to create superspeedy Hyperloop transportation and others working on flying vehicles. 

• DJI’s new selfie drone is controlled with just a wave of your hand: DJI, the world’s biggest drone company, has a tiny new drone called the Spark. It’s the most affordable, accessible drone yet from the Chinese drone maker, costing $499. The Spark weighs only half a pound and is about the size of a can of soda. It’s designed to be carried for daily, spontaneous use, like in a backpack. And unlike DJI’s other drones, which are piloted via a smartphone or a separate controller, the Spark uses gesture recognition, meaning it moves in the direction you wave your hand, making it super easy to position in front of you. The Spark can even land using gesture control, as was demonstrated in an unveiling event today when the presenter landed the small drone on his palm. The Sparks flies at about 31 miles per hour. Like other consumer drones, the Spark has a short flight time. It only flies for 16 minutes before needing to swap batteries or be recharged (though its batteries can be recharged with a micro USB on the go). The larger Mavic can fly for 27 minutes and GoPro’s Karma clocks about 20 minutes of flight time. But short flying time hasn’t stopped people from buying new drones, and analysts predict the market will only continue to grow. The analyist firm Gartner estimates that this year the global personal drone market will be valued at $2.8 billion.

• Bitcoin soars above $2,400 to all-time high: Digital currency bitcoin hit a fresh record high on Wednesday, surging above $2,400, as demand for crypto-assets soared with the creation of new tokens to raise funding for start-ups using blockchain technology. Blockchain, the underlying technology behind bitcoin, is a financial ledger maintained by a network of computers that can track the movement of any asset without the need for a central regulator. Bitcoin hit a record of $2,409 BTC=BTSP on the BitStamp platform and was last up 4.3 percent at $2,363. So far this year, the price of bitcoin has more than doubled. A key reason for bitcoin's dominance in the nefarious online underworld, say technologists and cybercrime experts, is its size - the total value of all bitcoins in circulation is more than twice that of the nearest of hundreds of rivals. Also, a big part of bitcoin's recent surge is the increase in demand for other digital currencies being sold in so-called "initial coin offerings", or ICOs. Under ICOs, blockchain start-ups sell their tokens directly to the public to raise capital without any regulatory oversight. "Bitcoin up 100 percent in under 2 months. Shanghai down almost 10 percent same timeframe, compared to most global stocks up. Probably not a coincidence!", Jeffrey Gundlach, chief executive at DoubleLine Capital tweeted on Tuesday.