The inconveniences caused by scooters controlled via smartphone contributed to something of a micromobility meltdown a few years ago.

But in 2025, the micromobility sector aims to learn from the mistakes of its past and ride a fresh wave of interest in solutions that can help people get from Point A to Point B without a car. Last-mile delivery of both goods and people, return-to-office mandates, and the soaring popularity of e-bikes are among the factors fueling micromobility’s next chapter.

“The big story is that, in my view, the next big winner in micromobility does not exist today. That company has yet to be built,” Jiten Behl, partner at venture-capital firm Eclipse Ventures, told Tech Brew. “It’s a wide-open field for an actual Tesla of micromobility.”

Lessons learned: The history of micromobility dates back decades, but in December 2001, the US saw the introduction of a product that would in many ways represent the sector’s promises and failures: the Segway, an electric scooter that never quite delivered on its mission to transform transportation (unless your name is Paul Blart).

Keep reading here.—JG

It was half a year into the new millennium when Human Genome Project leader Francis Collins announced internally that the consortium would be presenting a first draft of a fully sequenced human genome at the White House in around a month’s time.

The only problem? The teams didn’t yet have a sequenced genome—it was more like a “pile of DNA” fragments, according to David Haussler, scientific director at the UC Santa Cruz Genomics Institute. And the deadline was part of a negotiated tie in the heated race with biotech company Celera.

“That was like a thunderbolt,” Haussler told Tech Brew. “There was no way we were ready to do any kind of presentation.”

A UC Santa Cruz grad student named Jim Kent “worked night and day for four weeks, writing 20,000 lines of C code and icing his wrists periodically,” in order to make the historic milestone possible.

On June 26, 2000, President Bill Clinton and UK Prime Minister Tony Blair stood, via telelink, by the two teams of rival scientists—Celera’s and the Human Genome Project’s—as they announced the “rough draft” of a full human genome. It was the culmination of decades of work by thousands of researchers all over the world, and Clinton declared that “humankind is on the verge of gaining immense new power to heal.”

Keep reading here.—PK

There once was a time when a piece of software would be loaded from a disk onto your computer. And that was that; the software lived on that computer in perpetuity.

Over the last 25 years, that relationship between software provider and user has evolved drastically, transforming how the entire tech industry operates in the process. The growth of cloud computing and widespread internet connections gave rise to a new model for how businesses and people alike access digital technology: software as a service, or SaaS.

That model boosted a generation of bootstrapping startups that might not otherwise have been able to afford top-shelf enterprise software. Now, a new revolution in giant generative AI models could be poised to further shift tech industry business models.

Back-SaaS: But let’s back up. In September 2003, Adobe, already one of the top software makers in the world for graphic design, bundled its various offerings—Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and others—into a Creative Suite for the first time, setting the stage for the monumental shift to the web-only Creative Cloud nearly a decade later.

Keep reading here.—PK