Music listening has come a long way over the past few decades. Gone are the days when you had to buy CDs, vinyl records, or cassette tapes. You don't even have to buy digital downloads anymore. These days, you can simply sign up to a music streaming service and have access to all the music you'll ever need on a device that sits in your pocket.

Of course, there are quite a few music streaming services out there, and they're all a little different. Because of that, it can be hard to find the service that's perfect for your needs.

When deciding which streaming service to get, it's worth considering a few things. For starters, you'll want to make sure that there's an app for your chosen streaming service on every device you use for music listening.

You'll also want to consider things like streaming audio quality and support for platforms like digital assistants. Voice assistants are getting better at working with third-party services, but they're still not great at it — especially when it comes to Siri.

Still figuring out which streaming service is for you? We've done the research so that you don't have to. Here are the best music streaming services worth considering.

Keep scrolling to check out our top picks.

I never planned to be an entrepreneur.

I was a nerdy kid from rural Alabama, but not an outstanding one. I wasn't the smartest, or most ambitious, or really the best of anything in my class of 100 students. But even back then, I was fascinated with — and passionate about — stories, about using technology to tell them, and about the communities those stories affect.

In college, I realized that I was queer right around the time I got obsessed with working for the student newspaper. Just after I came out, we debated gay marriage in a political science seminar. As I very consciously quelled my emotions to recall policies and court cases, I thought, "This will never happen in my lifetime." A little later, I wrote the first story on a trans person for the campus paper. I was astonished and outraged at how hard it was for him to simply use the bathroom on campus.

Throughout my career — from restaurant gigs, to internships, to management, to eventually starting my own company — I have grappled with being a queer woman at work. A steady drip of fear, doubt, and responsibility niggles away at everyone who's ever been "the other." What should I do about my manager using a slur? How can I be most fair with this politician who deeply opposes my relationship? How can I help everyone who works here perform their very best? How can I get the power to make decisions and set priorities?

If you had asked me back at 18 to predict what the world would look like for LGBTQ people 20 years later, I would have landed far short of where we actually are. But people kept coming out. They kept fighting in court, protesting, lobbying, talking to their neighbors, challenging every little thing to try to change the one big thing: equality. And the tides are turning faster than I imagined. We still have a long way to go, but the progress when we work consciously and constantly to improve is obvious.

It's still difficult for LGBTQ employees to navigate the workplace

All that social and cultural success hasn't necessarily been as apparent in our work lives. LGBTQ people still face discrimination, are underrepresented in many companies and industries, and often lack employment protections. We can change this. As entrepreneurs, founders, and leaders, we have a mandate to disrupt broken systems and build a better way forward for our businesses. Diversity and inclusion efforts are often framed as a part of building company culture, but prioritizing diversity is also an essential business strategy.

You've probably read that diverse teams are more innovative, make better products, and make more money. But the benefits of consciously working on diversity stretches beyond internal initiatives. Inclusion is more important than ever in industries like media and tech, which aim to rapidly grow very large audiences of very different people, all while facing radical disruption and a crisis of mistrust with their users.

WhereBy.Us, the startup I co-founded, is not perfect at this by any measure. But embedding diversity and inclusion into our work helps us to punch above our weight in the highly competitive market for attention. Our teams collect and analyze dozens of feedback reports and metrics each day to understand who we may be missing in our work, to learn more about the needs of our customers, and to find new ways for us to grow.

We ask a lot of direct questions to our users: What are you curious about? What should we know about your work, your neighborhood, your community, your passions? What can we do better? These questions regularly turn into stories or sales leads, but they're also sending a strong, steady signal of inclusion. We are listening to you. We want to learn from you. We work for you and with you.

Active outreach is key to cultivating a diverse audience and staff

Our teams are constantly working to strengthen relationships in the cities we serve, particularly among communities that are unfamiliar to us. Outreach builds networks that help us grow, find better stories, understand different user needs, and identify new sales and partnership opportunities. Ultimately, investing in stronger, deeper relationships helps us compete against far bigger teams with far bigger budgets.

When diversity and inclusion are deeply rooted in our work as a core value and a strength — rather than viewed as a lofty cultural aspiration — we create a continuing cycle for culture efforts. Extensive community outreach helps us get more highly qualified, diverse candidates in the applicant pool for every job we post. In turn, more diverse teams guide more diverse coverage, welcoming new audiences and helping our work serve more people more effectively.

It's hard not to be proud of how far LGBTQ communities have come during the time my career has unfolded. Yet we still have a lot more work to do. This requires extending equality at every step to every other "other." As entrepreneurs, we have even more opportunity to do that work through solving problems, disrupting broken systems, and building better businesses.

Rebekah Monson is cofounder and COO ofWhereBy.Us, a platform for local media in growing cities, with a focus on delightful email newsletters and experiences for communities of local explorers, makers, and leaders. WhereBy.Us owns and operates The New Tropicin Miami, The Evergreyin Seattle, Bridgelinerin Portland, Pulptown in Orlando and The Inclinein Pittsburgh.

There are some technologists who are fascinated with UFOs and what they could mean for technology here on Earth, according to Vice. And with US Navy pilots reporting mysterious spherical objects flying around at high speeds, these tech execs may get their chance.

Vice interviewed three tech executives willing to admit their fascination with UFOs for the piece. The article says that admitting an interest in hypothetical alien spacecraft is "still a pretty taboo subject" in the tech industry, and that many investors are unwilling to support related ventures because there is "no guarantee of payoff."

Deep Prasad, CEO of Canadian quantum computing startup ReactiveQ, told Vice that his goal is ultimately to find a UFO and reverse engineer it, for the betterment of mankind.

"In front of our eyes are technologies underlying these UFOs that are far beyond our understanding" Prasad said, but "if we pay close attention and reverse these technologies to bring to the masses, we will see a world with interstellar travel at our fingertips."

Rizwan Virk, executive director of Play Labs @ MIT, told Vice that UFOs could have technology beyond what modern science thinks is possible.

"This phenomenon seems to be about advanced technology that doesn't always fit into our current model of 'what is technology' and what isn't," Virk said to Vice.

Vice also references " American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, Technology" by Dr. Diana Walsh Pasulka, chair of the University of North Carolina Wilmington's philosophy and religion department. That book argues that much of the fascination with UFOs is tied up with religious elements, but that there are those who approach the matter scientifically.

Most industrial designers aren't household names. It's not often that we know the name of the person responsible for overseeing the design of products that we use and love.

But with some of Apple's most iconic products, we can easily assign a name and a face to the person working behind the scenes to bring them fruition: Jony Ive.

Because we only really know Ive as Apple's chief designer, much of his work outside of Apple isn't as well known. It turns out that when Ive wasn't designing iPhones, iPods, and Mac computers, he's been cooking up some pretty unusual things, many of which you'd never expect.

Could you picture Ive designing a toilet, for example? Well, he did.

Check out some of the non-Apple products that Jony Ive has designed:

For years, the only part of Los Angeles I saw was the trip from Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) to whatever hotel I was staying in.

The plan was always the same: To cover E3 2019, the big annual video game trade show, held downtown.

Across the next week, I'd mostly experience a small section of blocks in downtown Los Angeles that were close to the Staples Center, where the Lakers play and the Los Angeles Convention Center resides. That last bit is important because that's where E3 is held.

A view of E3 2019 at the Los Angeles Convention Center taken from across the street. Ben Gilbert/Business Insider

As I've gotten older, I've gotten smarter about my annual trip west. I stay in an AirBnb instead of an overpriced hotel, for instance, and I schedule travel time between appointments at the show.

But there's one thing I've always made sure to do, as long as I've been going to E3 annually: Eat well. These are the four places I look forward to eating at all year:

For decades the video game industry has relied on new hardware to promote growth in cycles. The release of new Xbox, PlayStation and Nintendo consoles generate an unmatched excitement that has long defined how developers create and sell their games.

Microsoft and Sony have been slowly teasing the details of their next-generation consoles, with Microsoft confirming a holiday 2020 release date for the new Xbox.

But this time around, competing companies wont be waiting to see what the traditional gaming giants have in store. Google and Apple are both planning to launch their own video game subscription services this fall with two very different business models.

Apple Arcade is expected to launch this fall across all Apple devices. Apple

Apple Arcade will offer more than 100 games for a fixed price, and they'll work across iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple TV. Apple reportedly spent more than $500 million to get Apple Arcade ready for a fall launch. Several independent studios are slated to create exclusive games for Apple Arcade, but it's not clear how much the service will cost.

Read more: Tech giants like Google and Microsoft are battling to become the Netflix of gaming, but the CEO behind 'Grand Theft Auto' and 'NBA 2K' says it won't happen anytime soon

Google's Stadia is an ambitious new gaming platform that relies on a streaming cloud service. By streaming games directly to players from high-powered cloud computers, Stadia will remove the requirement for expensive consoles. Stadia will be exclusive to subscribers to its paid, premium offering when it launches in November, but the platform will eventually be free to use. Either way, gamers will need to buy games specifically for Stadia to play.

While Google and Apple have made major investments in their gaming initiatives, their approaches are a large departure from what gamers are used to. In contrast, Microsoft has slowly established its own subscription service and cloud gaming platform without compromising the core of its Xbox business.

Here's why Microsoft is ahead of the competition as the video game industry prepares for a new era of technology:

Tesla should report second-quarter vehicle deliveries next week, and a significant amount of chatter has broken out over what the number could be.

In the first quarter, Tesla delivered 63,000 cars, a drop of over 30% from the final quarter of 2018. The company wants to get back on track in Q2 and has been targeting something like 90,000.

It might not get there. The ultimate total could be between 80-90,000. At that level, Tesla would need a huge second-half finish to deliver over 400,000 vehicles in 2019 (it moved about 250,000 in 2018).

Tesla watchers are preoccupied with the Q2 numbers because Tesla stock has rebounded about 20% over the past month and it is poised for a breakout if deliveries come in at the top of the range or, perhaps, beat that 90,000 figure.

Read more: The big question about Tesla demand makes no sense. The company has created demand where there was none before.

That's a stock story, of course. Whether Tesla's business needs a 90,000-vehicle quarter or could manage just fine on 80,000 is a more useful question, and that's getting lost in the noise. A quick auto-industry lesson: most car makers, being very good at building cars, worry more about producing too many, not too few. If they overdo it, they encourage inefficient excess capacity and end up filling dealer lots with vehicles that they have to discount.

Another quick lesson: Tesla would be better-served to sell 80,000 cars if the mix of sales is high-priced; 90,000 in sales, if a chunk is cheaper vehicles, could hurt the bottom line.

Why ignore Tesla deliveries?

Tesla CEO Elon Musk. AP

In any case, my argument that you should ignore Tesla's Q2 deliveries leads into a more critical question: What is Tesla's current, logical level of production and sales? (By the way, no matter where Tesla lands in Q2, numbers-wise, the total should be a big increase over Q2 2018 — Tesla is the only automaker seeing such a massive demand surge in a US market that's been running at peak levels for going on five years).

In 2018, BMW sold about 311,000 vehicles in the US. They did this with a lineup of around 18 cars and trucks (I'm excluding anything special). Tesla sold something like 200,000 vehicles in the US — but with a lineup of just three models. That comparison actually isn't one; Tesla is serving pent-up electric vehicle demand, more so than additional organic premium-demand, demand.

But the takeaway is notable: Tesla is approaching BMW-level US sales with six times fewer vehicles available.

Before you conclude that I'm about to insist that BMW is in trouble, don't. BMW isn't in trouble. But BMW serves as a useful guide to what kind of car maker Tesla should be. And in my view, that's a premium company, not a mass-market manufacturer.

Don't push for more deliveries

Tesla's factory. Tesla

And in that context, Tesla shouldn't be pushing, pushing, pushing to sell more vehicles each quarter. It should align its US manufacturing capacity — perhaps 400,000 to 500,000 vehicles annually — with demand for cars that it can make a serious profit on.

If Tesla sells another 100,000 vehicles per year that it barely posts a margin on, then what's the point? I'd prefer to see 300,000 every year, with a 10%-ish margin (maybe higher).

The stock market doesn't want this right now. The stock market wants more deliveries. But I think the market could live with lower deliveries, so long as those deliveries are consistent, quarter-to-quarter and year-to-year, and so long as Tesla swings to serial quarterly profits — just like every other carmaker doing business these days.

So there you have it — all eyes are on Tesla deliveries for the second quarter, but all eyes should be on something else.

Apple is deepening its financial services play as a means of invigorating revenue, and its expertise could make it a legitimate threat to legacy players. Google's platform-agnostic approach, wide international penetration, and top talent position it as a hub with unrivaled global reach beyond just consumer payments. And Amazon — which has eaten up market share in every industry it's touched, and now has its sights on financial services — could swiftly undercut legacy players.

In The Tech Companies In Financial Services report, Business Insider Intelligence will examine the moves that Apple, Google, and Amazon are making to gain a larger foothold in the global financial services industry. We will then detail each tech company's threat to incumbents and outline potential next steps based on their existing moves in the financial services sphere.

The companies mentioned in the report include: Apple, Amazon, Google, Goldman Sachs, Mastercard, Barclaycard, Citi, Chase, Capital One, Paytm, and PhonePe.

Here are some key takeaways from the report:

In full, the report:

Apple's reported desire to shift production outside of China has been linked to the trade war, but the iPhone maker has plenty of additional reasons to explore a move to other countries, as do many other companies.

Manufacturing in China has long had a number of drawbacks, said Bruce Arntzen, the executive director of the supply chain management program in MIT's engineering school. For years, the benefits of producing products there — most notably a large supply of low-cost labor — outweighed those shortcomings. But those advantages have now largely gone away, he said.

"Most of the reasons everyone went to China in the first place aren't there any more," Arntzen told Business Insider.

Companies in industries including apparel, footwear, aerospace, and automobile parts have already been shifting production out of China in recent years, even before President Trump started slapping tariffs on goods made in the country, he said. It's no surprise that Apple and other electronics makers would be interested in moving production too, he said.

Indeed, some have already started. Some of the Taiwanese electronics manufacturing companies have shifted a portion of their production of server computers out of China to Taiwan over the last year.

Read this: Here's why Apple's plan to escape Trump's tariffs by building iPhones outside of China won't actually be possible anytime soon

From day one, there have been significant downsides to manufacturing goods in China, Arntzen said. For US companies, there were language and time zone differences, he said. The huge geographic distance between the two countries often meant long supply lines between companies' manufacturing facilities and their component makers. That in turn also often meant that they needed long lead times to start manufacturing products to make sure the goods could get to market by particular dates, he said. And those long delays meant that manufacturers couldn't respond quickly to market changes and often had to have larger inventory stashes than they would otherwise, he said.

Companies also faced rampant intellectual property theft, Arntzen said. And if they needed to speed goods to market, they'd have to ship products by air — a much costlier proposition from Shenzhen than Chicago.

"Those challenges were always there," Arntzen said.

Companies put up with such headaches because of the distinct advantages of producing in China, he said. The country had a huge pool of low-cost labor. It had little in the way of pollution controls, worker protections, or other regulations. As more factories were built there, they gave rise to an entire manufacturing ecosystem that often wasn't present and couldn't easily be duplicated anywhere else.

But China no longer offers many of those advantages, Arntzen and other supply-chain experts said. Although the country still has large pools of untapped labor in its interior, the labor market is relatively tight in the coastal areas that are home to much of its manufacturing base, he said. Worker pay has been rising and is now on par with Taiwan and other countries. And as it has become more affluent, China has started to put in place more stringent rules governing pollution and workplace safety.

"The shift to other locations is addressing the low-cost labor part" of the equation, said Abe Eshkenazi, CEO of the Association for supply chain management. "China is not low cost-labor anymore."

In that context, the Trump tariffs are like the straw that broke the camel's back. Companies already had reasons to move from China. The tariffs just made the situation more urgent.

"There has been a process underway long before these tariffs," Arntzen said.

Got a tip about Apple or the tech industry? Contact this reporter via email at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., message him on Twitter @troywolv, or send him a secure message through Signal at 415.515.5594. You can also contact Business Insider securely via SecureDrop.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un said he was "surprised" by President Donald Trump's abrupt Twitter invitation to meet him at the North-South Korean border on Sunday afternoon.

Surrounded by reporters inside a South Korean-controlled building at the border, Kim told Trump that some people speculated if the meeting was pre-arranged through official letters sent between the two leaders. Trump and Kim have exchanged numerous official letters during their tenure, some of which have not been publicly revealed.

"To be honest, I was surprised after I saw the president express his intention," Kim said, adding that he did not know until late afternoon that he would be "formally" meeting Trump.

Prior to leaving the G-20 summit in Japan, Trump tweeted he would be willing to meet with Kim at the Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea.

"After some very important meetings ... I will be leaving Japan for South Korea (with President Moon)," Trump said in the tweet. "While there, if Chairman Kim of North Korea sees this, I would meet him at the Border/DMZ just to shake his hand and say Hello(?)!"

Read more: 'This is a great friendship': Trump invites Kim Jong Un to the White House after crossing North Korean border to shake hands

"I just put out a feeler because I don't know where he is right now," Trump told reporters at the Imperial Hotel Osaka in Japan. "He may not be in North Korea."

North Korea's First Vice Foreign Minister Choe Son-hui responded to Trump's tweet and described it as "very interesting," adding that the country has "not received an official proposal in this regard," according to a Yonhap News report citing North Korea's state-run Korean Central News Agency.

Trump met Kim at the military demarcation line separating the border at around 3:45 p.m. local time and shook the leader's hand — a similar scene to that of the first summit between Kim and South Korean President Moon Jae-in in April 2018.

After the two leaders exchanged pleasantries, Kim welcomed Trump to step over the line and into the North Korean side of the border. Trump briefly stepped over the line and took several steps into North Korea, pausing to take several photos with Kim.

Trump became the first sitting-US president to step into North Korea. Photographers and videographers, including ones from North Korea, scrambled over each other to take footage of the historic moment, prompting security personnel to shout verbal warnings.

Trump and Kim later held a roughly 45-minute bilateral meeting at the Freedom House on the southern side of the DMZ. Following the meeting, Trump walked Kim back to the military demarcation line.

Trump told reporters he invited Kim to visit the White House in Washington DC: "At some point, it'll all happen."

A chilling new documentary created by two undercover reporters reveals the paranoia at the heart of China's 21st-century police state in Xinjiang, the western frontier region where authorities are cracking down on millions of Muslims.

The VICE News Tonight documentary shows dozens of police officers lining the streets of Xinjiang and repeatedly questioning the journalists, who had posed as travel bloggers in order to enter the region.

The documentary — titled "They Come For us at Night: China's Vanishing Muslims" — premiered Thursday night. It focuses on the plight of the Uighurs, a mostly-Muslim ethnic minority under intense surveillance and oppression by Beijing authorities in Xinjiang.

A line of uniformed police officers patrolling the streets of Xinjiang. VICE News Tonight

China justifies its crackdown by describing Uighurs as national-security threats, but experts say it could also be because Beijing wants to protect its infrastructure along the Belt and Road, a massive trade project connecting China with the rest of the world.

Uighurs in the region constantly live in fear of being detained and taken to one of China's prison-like camps, which authorities euphemistically call "free vocational training centers."

Former detainees in such camps have described being physically and mentally tortured.

Uighurs are not allowed to communicate with people outside the region. Uighurs living abroad previously told Business Insider of their anguish at being blocked by their families in Xinjiang to avoid getting arrested.

Read more: This man's family vanished in China's most oppressed region. The next time he saw his son was 2 years later, in a Chinese propaganda video.

Uighur men pray before a meal during the Corban Festival, also known as Eid al-Adha, in Turpan, Xinjiang, in September 2016. Kevin Frayer/Getty

The documentary shows the journalists repeatedly being stopped on the street and forced to delete all the footage on their phones, even as they insisted that they were tourists snapping photos for their own leisure.

Despite the heightened security apparatus in Xinjiang, the region has continued to attract tourists, but authorities say they can only take photos of sidewalks and tourist sites.

At one point in the documentary, two police officers who appear to be in anti-riot gear are seen stopping the reporters from talking to two local men in Kashgar, a major city in the region. Those two men, ironically, had been praising local law enforcement.

"Individuals cannot accept interviews without government approval," one police officer can be heard saying. "Especially in Xinjiang."

Police officers, who appear to be wielding weapons and wearing anti-riot gear, stopped undercover VICE News reporters from talking to local Chinese citizens on the street in Xinjiang. VICE News Tonight

Isobel Yeung, one of the VICE News reporters, told Business Insider: "I can't even count how many times we were stopped. It didn't help that I was constantly mistaken for a Uighur."

"Their goal was to keep close tabs on us, to track our every move, and to try to ensure we didn't take photos or video of anything the Communist Party of China considers sensitive," Yeung added. "They didn't know we were filming secretly."

Read more: 14 seconds of undercover footage reveals the shadowy, sinister reality of China's 21st-century police state

China's distrust of the Uighurs permeates into daily life. Authorities require residents to place QR codes on knives— even for those used in the kitchen — so they can track whether they are being used as weapon.

While visiting a wheat dumpling stall, the VICE News reporters also noticed that an axe for chopping firewood had been chained to the ground in accordance with regional rules.

An axe used to chop wood for fire chained to the floor at a wheat dumpling stall in Xinjiang. It symbolizes China's distrust of the region's Uighur citizens, whom Beijing claims are national-security threats. T. Wang / VICE News Tonight

China's ruling Communist Party regularly cracks down on content and people deemed unsavory to the regime. It believes that by censoring content and, in some cases, detaining dissidents, it is maintaining political and social stability.

Read more: Barging into your home, threatening your family, or making you disappear: Here's what China does to people who speak out against them

This paranoia is particularly evident in Xinjiang, with journalists having described being tailed by plainclothes officers — as many as six in the VICE News's case. The country has hired more than 100,000 new police officers over the past two years alone.

Reporters from The New York Times and Agence France-Presse have previously reported seeing police stage fake car crashes to disrupt their travels.

A sign taken in September 2012 in Yarkand county, Xinjiang, which says in both Arabic in Chinese: "Stability is a blessing, instability is a calamity." Eric Lafforgue/Art in All of Us/Corbis via Getty Images

Yeung, the VICE News correspondent, told Business Insider that being tailed by police "makes you paranoid to go places or say things."

"It does strange things to the mind, to know that there are people watching and listening to your every move," she said. "It makes you paranoid to go places or say things, even among my colleague and I and while in the comfort of our hotel rooms."

"I can only imagine what living there would do to you."

Watch a trailer for the documentary below:

Food delivery apps such as Uber Eats and Deliveroo are so ubiquitous that investors are betting millions of dollars that people will order takeaway from 'virtual' restaurants.

Although most people go onto food delivery apps to order from nearby physical restaurants, that poses a problem: these weren't set up to serve a massive influx of customers ordering food for takeaway at the same time.

Now founders have spotted an opportunity here and are creating an entirely new type of restaurant that only serves takeaway apps. There's no physical dining space, no waiters, no tables, chairs, crockery or cutlery, just chefs in 'dark kitchens' churning out food orders.

One example is Taster, set up by former Deliveroo executive Anton Soulier. The company has just raised $8 million in funding in a round led by US investor Battery Ventures, Heartcore Capital, and other backers. It operates in London, Paris, and Madrid.

If you log into the Uber Eats app and search for Taster, you won't find anything.

But search for 'Vietnamese', 'poke bowl' and 'fried chicken', then one of its three brands might pop up. But none of those brands — Out Fry chicken, Mission Saigon, or O Ke Kai — are real restaurants in the conventional sense. Instead they involve chefs working in kitchens operated either by Taster or rented from third parties like Karma Kitchen, while delivery drivers wait outside. For now, there's no way for passers-by to go into these spaces to sit down and eat.

CEO Soulier was employee number 10 at Deliveroo, helping the UK food delivery firm expand to France. By the time Deliveroo had grown to its tenth market, a realisation struck.

An Uber driver takes delivery of bags of donuts destined for a customer via Uber Eats in Sydney, Australia. REUTERS/Jason Reed

"The market was crazy, very big, the infrastructure, the logistics was here with Uber Eats, Deliveroo, Glovo and the other aggregators, but the restaurants weren't designed for delivery," Soulier told Business Insider. "Sometimes the food wasn't consistent, the experience wasn't consistent, the prep time was very long and actually I started thinking: 'How can we build a massive business if you rely on traditional restaurants?'

"So I began thinking that it's really time for restaurants to go online. And like an ecommerce brand could be built on Google or Facebook, it's time for a brand to build on top of these platforms."

And thus Taster was born. Of the firm's 115 employees, 100 are chefs. The costs saved from paying waiters and maintaining an expensive high street location go into technology and improving food quality, Soulier said.

He isn't alone.

Established London restaurateur Karam Sethi, whose restaurant group includes the prestigious Mayfair eatery Gymkhana, set up a Deliveroo-only restaurant called Motu last year.

Deliveroo also helps restaurateurs set up delivery-only brands for its platform, and has put aside funding to create its own 'virtual' restaurant brands.

Deliveroo CEO Will Shu. Deliveroo

Soulier and the investors pouring millions into these ventures are betting on two major trends.

The first is that restaurants as we know them are about to undergo a radical overhaul.

The thinking is that people will primarily go to restaurants for a higher end experience, while mid-range restaurants that cater to both a takeaway audience and a dine-in audience may struggle to retain loyal customers.

Soulier said: "[Restaurants] need to choose between delivery and the restaurant experience. The restaurants that will survive and do well will focus on decoration, the experience. On the other hand I think restaurants that do deliveries need to go all the way and do that."

The second major trend is that cooking will become more of a hobby, rather than an economic necessity.

The thinking here is that takeaway food will become so cheap, varied, and ubiquitous that it will be easier for most (middle-class) people than cooking from fresh.

Analysts at UBS were early to this trend, predicting in a research note last year that the kitchen would be dead by 2030.

Deliveroo CEO Will Shu has taken up the same line, saying recently: "I do see a world where, in maybe five or 10 years, cooking is purely a hobby."

Marcy Scott Lynn was one of the brains behind Facebook's famous feature that allows people to tag themselves as safe during disastrous events — and she remembers its inception vividly.

A group of Facebook engineers in Japan were originally responsible for the idea following the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami. One of the biggest earthquakes ever recorded, it killed 19,000 and caused a meltdown at the Fukushima nuclear power plant that displaced more than 100,000 others.

The trouble was, the engineers' brainwave came after the worst of the devastation. It was not until a Facebook hackathon that the idea came to resemble something like what we know now as Safety Check.

A two-person team made up of an engineer and project manager took inspiration from the work of their Japanese colleagues, presenting a more sophisticated iteration of the tool at the event. They got "a lot of love from the crowd," recalls Lynn, now Facebook's director of global impact partnerships.

Lynn was working on the policy team at the time, and got pulled onto the project along with a designer. She remembers the first time the feature got deployed as if it were yesterday. Three years after the 2011 Tōhoku disaster, Typhoon Ruby swept through the Philippines — and Lynn's team sprung into action.

"It's burned into my brain — I remember it, it was typhoon Ruby in the Philippines. We were prepared, we knew it was coming, we were watching the weather reports." Typhoon Ruby, also known as typhoon Hagupit, hit the Philippines in December 2014 forcing the evacuation of one million people.

Children sitting on a downed coconut tree following typhoon Ruby. VINCENT GO/AFP/Getty Images

"We had a meeting on [the] Friday... I just remember sitting in my home office with my daughter on my lap, we had all these people on video con, some people went into the office like 'is this gonna be it?'"

The team had painstakingly developed a set of criteria around which disasters would qualify for "mark yourself as safe," such as the number of people impacted, but actually setting the feature in motion required manual activation. "It literally required if it was in the middle of the night — which eventually it was — waking the on-call engineer to turn it on."

Scott says that until Facebook was able to automate the system, decisions on whether to activate the feature remained a "group effort." In its early days, the teams deciding whether to activate were cautious about overuse.

"Honestly I think originally we were probably biased towards fewer activations because we didn't want to inundate people. We didn't want Facebook to turn into a place where all that ever happened on there was 'disaster of the day,'" she explains.

Over time, however, the team gradually applied the feature to more disasters, including those created by humans, like the 2015 terror attack in Paris, France.

"We were able to really refine our thinking, we got a lot of help from outside experts in the humanitarian space to help us think through our criteria — especially as we tried to build a more automated product."

Since its inception, Safety Check has been activated for 1,400 crises, a Facebook spokesman says. It is one of a number of projects Lynn has been involved with aimed at making Facebook a force for good.

Lynn was promoted to director of global impact partnerships in July 2018. The department was totally new, and a year on, it's still in the process of figuring out what its role in the company is going to be, Lynn told Business Insider.

"We are talking to organisations like Unicef, like Save the Children about strategic partnerships. It's not normally money, this is not a philanthropy programme per se, but it's more about creating programmes," says Lynn, who answers to Facebook's VP of partnerships Ime Archibong.

Ime Archibong, Facebook's VP of partnerships. Getty

Lynn took up her new post as negative press about Facebook was starting to snowball. Since then, public sentiment towards the company has undoubtedly soured, and BI asked Lynn whether her job might be seen as whitewashing, pointing to worthy causes while problems like graphic content run rampant on its platform.

She describes the good Facebook can actively do in the world as the company's "handprint," whereas the passive effects of broad structural problems constitute its footprint. Lynn says the company is working hard to address both. "I don't see how we credibly operate in the social impact space without thinking about our footprint... I'm not sure we should only be doing one or the other," she says.

A concrete example of the kind of handprint Lynn wants to leave behind is Facebook's disease prevention maps, which the company announced in May. The maps use anonymised location data from the African continent to build up detailed maps of population density, which can then be used by rescue and medical officials during natural disasters or disease outbreaks. The data can be narrowed down to specific demographics, such as women or elderly people.

This map shows the population density of elderly people in Mozambique. Facebook

Facebook developed the maps in collaboration with the UN, which in turn led to Facebook joining 2030 Vision, a tech partnership whose members include the UN, Microsoft, and ARM. The stated aim of 2030 Vision is to deliver on the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals as laid out in 2015. It is not to be confused with Vision 2030, the name of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman's economic drive in Saudi Arabia.

Lynn hopes to come up with lots more ways for her team to improve Facebook's handprint on the world. "We've done a bunch of smaller projects as we try to figure out what makes sense," she adds, although she feels joining Vision 2030 is her team's first really big step.

"We are still feeling our way," Lynn says.

In May this year, Russia passed a law to create its own parallel mirror version of the web that would allow the country to cut its web connections with the rest of the world but stay online internally. The measure is officially intended to safeguard Russia's ability to keep its internet running in the event of an attack. But it is widely regarded as a tool through which the Russian government will be able to take down part, or all, of the internet as traffic is funneled through points that the Russian government controls.

It turns out that ending internet service — web, email, social media, mobile phone data, apps — for an entire country is easier than you'd think. It happens frequently. And not just in corrupt dictatorships like Russia.

Hackers in the US once managed to take America's entire Eastern Seaboard offline for several hours.

Last year, there were 196 large-scale internet shutdowns in 25 countries, according to Access Now. India was the worst offender. It shut down the internet 134 times.

Here are all the recent occasions where someone has taken an entire country offline (or a major section of one), and why it happened.

A scene from Angel Track’s first cohort

LOS ANGELES, CA – MARCH 29: Confetti falls as Lyft CEO Logan Green (C) rings the Nasdaq opening bell celebrating the company’s initial public offering (IPO) on March 29, 2019 in Los Angeles, California. The ride hailing app company’s shares were initially priced at $72. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)

First Round partner Phin Barnes

First Round’s Angel Track cohort 3