Daily Tech Snippet: Wednesday, August 24

• Tesla’s new 100 kWH battery makes it the third-fastest accelerating car ever: Tesla’s Model S and Model X vehicles just got faster. On a call with journalists today, Elon Musk unveiled a larger battery pack — 100 kWH — that enables the Model S to accelerate from 0 to 60 mph in 2.5 seconds in what the company calls “ludicrous” mode. That makes the Model S the third-fastest production car ever made, after the Ferrari LaFerrari and the Porsche 918 Spyder, but it’s the quickest pure electric vehicle that has the capacity to seat up to five adults and two children, according to the company. In an industry first, the battery also enables the car to drive an estimated 315 miles on a single charge. This is the first electric vehicle to go above a range of 300 miles, according to Tesla. The Model S P100D will start at $135,000 — compared to a $125,000 MSRP for the Model S P90D equipped with ludicrous mode — and the Model X P100D will start at $135,500. The Model X P90D started at $115,500.

• Narrative Science can now describe your Tableau charts for you: Tableau Software‘s shares soared 13 percent on Tuesday following the announcement that the data analytics provider has partnered with Narrative Science, a Chicago-based company that develops natural language generation (NLG) tools. The result of the partnership is Narratives for Tableau, a free Chrome extension that automatically creates written explanations for Tableau graphics. Let’s say, for example, that you have a chart — made with Tableau — of sales and profits of your business for a certain amount of time. The extension, which works with Tableau Server 10.0 or the free Tableau Public service, will generate a narrative description of the data by writing sentences such as “Sales and profit ratio moved in opposite directions from January 2011 to December 2014,” as shown in this example. Narrative Science is best known for Quill, a platform that can take data — say, sports scores — and turn them into stories. Narratives for Tableau is one example of applying Quill’s capabilities, Frankel pointed out. Once Narratives for Tableau has generated the text, users can customize it by choosing a paragraph- or bullet point-style for the description, among other things. If users are not satisfied with the results, they can also make changes to the text.

• Pinterest Acquires Instapaper to Get Smarter About Articles: Pinterest Inc. is buying Instapaper, the app that lets you save an article to read later, as it works to understand the technology behind recommending stories for people. The acquisition of Instapaper, which has expertise in saving, curating and analyzing articles, aligns with Pinterest's goal to provide content that fits users' interests, the company said in a statement. Pinterest declined to comment on a price for the deal. Instapaper, started in 2008 by Tumblr co-founder Marco Arment, is known for helping people save longer-form stories they don't have time to read. Pinterest said people use its application to save articles, though they often tend to be image-based how-to stories about recipes or from inspirational do-it-yourself blogs. Instapaper's technology could help improve Pinterest's ability to match content with its users' interests.

• One Kings Lane sold for less than $30 million after being valued at $900 million: One Kings Lane, an online home-furnishings retailer, fetched less than $30 million in its recent sale to Bed Bath & Beyond, according to three people familiar with the deal. The purchase price marks a massive discount from a valuation of $900 million that the startup had secured when it raised more than $100 million from investors in early 2014. In the wake of Dollar Shave Club’s $1 billion sale to Unilever and Walmart’s impending $3.3 billion acquisition of Jet, the One Kings Lane outcome is a reminder of how brutal the e-commerce industry can be for many startups.