"Ali Ghodsi was happily researching AI at Berkeley when he helped invent a revolutionary bit of code — and he wanted to give it away for free," remembers Forbes India. "But few would take it unless he charged for it.

"Now his startup is worth $28 billion, and the career academic is a billionaire with a reputation as one of the best CEOs in the Valley." (Literally. VC Ben Horowitz of Andreessen Horowitz calls him the best CEO in Andreessen Horowitz's portfolio of hundreds of companies.) Inside a 13th-floor boardroom in downtown San Francisco, the atmosphere was tense. It was November 2015, and Databricks, a two-year-old software company started by a group of seven Berkeley researchers, was long on buzz but short on revenue. The directors awkwardly broached subjects that had been rehashed time and again. The startup had been trying to raise funds for five months, but venture capitalists were keeping it at arm's length, wary of its paltry sales. Seeing no other option, NEA partner Pete Sonsini, an existing investor, raised his hand to save the company with an emergency $30 million injection...

Many of the original founders, Ghodsi in particular, were so engrossed with their academic work that they were reluctant to start a company — or charge for their technology, a best-of-breed piece of future-predicting code called Spark, at all. But when the researchers offered it to companies as an open-source tool, they were told it wasn't "enterprise ready". In other words, Databricks needed to commercialise. "We were a bunch of Berkeley hippies, and we just wanted to change the world," Ghodsi says. "We would tell them, 'Just take the software for free', and they would say 'No, we have to give you $1 million'."

Databricks' cutting-edge software uses artificial intelligence to fuse costly data warehouses (structured data used for analytics) with data lakes (cheap, raw data repositories) to create what it has coined data "lakehouses" (no space between the words, in the finest geekspeak tradition). Users feed in their data and the AI makes predictions about the future. John Deere, for example, installs sensors in its farm equipment to measure things like engine temperature and hours of use. Databricks uses this raw data to predict when a tractor is likely to break down. Ecommerce companies use the software to suggest changes to their websites that boost sales. It's used to detect malicious actors — both on stock exchanges and on social networks.

Ghodsi says Databricks is ready to go public soon. It's on track to near $1 billion in revenue next year, Sonsini notes. Down the line, $100 billion is not out of the question, Ghodsi says — and even that could be a conservative figure. It's simple math: Enterprise AI is already a trillion-dollar market, and it's certain to grow much larger. If the category leader grabs just 10 percent of the market, Ghodsi says, that's revenues of "many, many hundred billions."
Later in the article Ghodsi offers this succinct summary of the market they entered.

"It turns out that if you dust off the neural network algorithms from the '70s, but you use way more data than ever before and modern hardware, the results start becoming superhuman."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk says the biggest problem with corporate America today is that too many business school graduates are running the show. "I think that there might be too many MBAs running companies," Musk said Tuesday at the WSJ CEO Summit. This "MBA-ization of America," isn't great, Musk said, especially when it comes to product innovation. Big corporate CEOs often get caught up in the numbers and lose sight of their mission, which is to create "awesome" products or services, according to Musk.

"There should be more focus on the product or service itself, less time on board meetings, less time on financials." "A company has no value in itself. It only has value to the degree that is [an] effective allocator of resources to create business services that are of a greater value than the costs of the inputs," Musk said. This thing they call "profit," Musk added, "should just mean over time that the value of the output is worth more than the inputs." Musk said the biggest mistake he has made as a leader of both Tesla and SpaceX was spending too much time in meetings looking at PowerPoints and spreadsheets, instead of being out on the factory floor. "When I go spend time on the factory floor or really using the cars or thinking about the rockets...that's where things have gone better," Musk said at the WSJ summit.

He finds that if he is engrossed in the details of the issues, it boosts morale and his team is "more energized." Musk urged CEOs to "get out there on the goddamn front line and show them that you care, and that you're not just in some plush office somewhere."

Sexual activity among young American men has declined sharply since 2000, with nearly a third reporting no sex with a partner in the prior year, according to a survey study published on Friday that suggests social media and electronic gaming might be filling the void. Reuters reports: The survey found that from 2000 to 2018, nearly one in three U.S. men aged 18 to 24 reported no sexual activity in the past year. Lack of sexual activity, or sexual inactivity, was also on the rise among men and women aged 25 to 34 years during the survey period, the report in the journal JAMA Network Open found. Possible reasons for the decline in sexual frequency may also include stress of juggling work and intimate relationships, as well as the prevalence of other forms of solo entertainment.

"There are now many more choices of things to do in the late evening than there once were and fewer opportunities to initiate sexual activity if both partners are engrossed in social media, electronic gaming, or binge watching," Jean Twenge, from the department of psychology in San Diego State University said in an editorial accompanying the report.

Users of the social network's iOS app report seeing a new feature in the More section that lets them find nearby public Wi-Fi access points. From a MacWorld story: The feature does not appear to be widely available at the moment, which means this is probably something Facebook is only testing. The social network tests numerous features all the time but this one is particularly notable. Helping users find public Wi-Fi could enable more people to use Facebook Live. If your cellular connection isn't strong, a nearby Wi-Fi location can be a big help -- unless, of course, your Facebook Live broadcast is dependent on your specific location. There could be other uses for finding Wi-Fi beyond live video broadcasts. If you're desperate to upload a photo or recorded video, then locating the closest public Wi-Fi point helps. On top of that it's just one more reason to open the Facebook app, which Facebook obviously wants to encourage as much as possible. Check where the nearest Wi-Fi hotspot is, see that unread notifications indicator at the top of the screen, and before you know it you're engrossed in the news feed.

First time accepted submitter chentiangemalc writes While Australia is on "high alert" for terror threats a man walked past a Sydney Airport security screening while engrossed in his iPad and delayed flights for an hour. From the article: "This event was captured on CCTV and unnerved officials so much that they evacuated passengers. As the Sydney Morning Herald reported, the man found himself (or, perhaps, didn't) going into the terminal through an exit passage that clearly was convenient for him, but less convenient for the hordes of passengers who not only had to be removed from Terminal 3, but also re-screened. A spokeswoman for Qantas told the Morning Herald: 'The man disembarked a flight and left. It appears he wasn't paying attention, was looking at his iPad, forgot something and walked back past (the security area).'"

twoheadedboy writes "After being hit by a '72-hour' DDoS in May, WikiLeaks is claiming to be under attack yet again. All its sites appear to be down and fingers have already been pointed at government entities. WikiLeaks, posting on Twitter, said it had its suspicions of why it was being targeted. It was either because of its ongoing releases related to Stratfor and Syria, or because of an upcoming release, Julian Assange's organization speculated. The fact that everyone is currently engrossed in the Olympics may have given attackers good reason to target the websites right now, WikiLeaks said."

It's that time of year again. Last year's response to our Game of the Year post was so enthusiastic that I thought it would be worthwhile to give it another go. So, once again, some of the Slashdot folks have come together to offer up our 'games of the year'. Scuttlemonkey, Scott Collins, Chris Brown, CmdrTaco, and myself have all put together quick blurbs about the games we couldn't get enough of this year. When you're through reading those, it's your turn to speak up. What was the game you couldn't put down? The next-gen consoles really came into their own this year; was it one of those games, or something for the PC? In your opinion, what was the best game of the year?

koreth asks: "What are some good two-player games that a newbie can successfully play with a more seasoned gamer? I want to find a good console or PC game I can play with my girlfriend, who has only recently started gaming. Something cooperative would be great, but head-to-head is fine too. All the games we've tried are made for players of roughly the same skill level -- so either I end up dumbing my gameplay way down (no fun for me) or blowing her out of the water without much effort (no fun for her). Is there any game out there that gives two players tasks of varying difficulty to keep both of them engrossed, at the same time?"

honestpuck writes "Webmin is a pretty neat tool for administering a server using a GUI, particularly remotely. Managing Linux Systems with Webmin, written by Webmin's author, Jamie Cameron, is an extensive look at using and extending it, a good guide not without flaws." Read on for honestpuck's take on this book's good / bad ratio.

Gabe Anast asks: "The recent article on Microsoft's market dominance referred to an article at the International Herald Tribune, which I read until I became engrossed in the natural readability and intuitive interface of that site. It's amazing! I'll have to say that site has the cleanest design of any I have ever used. So, of course, I thought 'What are the other "best designed" sites? Would Slashdot know? My personal criteria for site design is: graphic design/appeal; an intuitive interface; and content that flows naturally (eg: high content density that does not sacrifice clarity). What are your favorite sites, and by what criteria do you judge such?"

Adam Brate, Slashdot reader, sent us a review of Cyberselfish: Technolibertarianism, a book which takes a look at the "cyber" culture, and what it means. It sounds interesting, although perhaps a bit off-base - comment below if you've read it.