To ring in the new year, former Apple engineer Bob Burrough uploaded a new video to his fledgling YouTube channel to show off a new idea he has for a smartphone interface.

Burrough's "Project Erasmus" is a user interface (UI) implementation that renders the lighting in your immediate environment to light, shade, and reflect on the software elements in the device. The result is an incredible, immersive visual effect that will make you want to use your phone even more (as if that's possible).

Take a look.

Tesla announced fourth-quarter and full-year vehicle sales on Wednesday. They were a bit lighter than some analysts' projections, but the company still delivered close to 250,000 cars in 2018 — a milestone, and a miracle of sorts, given how much trouble the new Model 3 sedan caused as it made it way through what CEO Elon Musk termed "production hell."

The stock swooned, but that might have been due more to worries about demand for Tesla vehicles going forward, as the company also cut prices by $2,000 to make up for an expiring federal tax credit of $7,500 per car (it was chopped in half after Tesla sold 200,000 qualifying vehicles).

As I pointed out on Wednesday, a $2,000 Tesla price cut is roughly 50% below what the rest of the auto industry is offering, on average, to sell cars in the US right now; the GMs and Fords just call it an "incentive."

Tesla's cars are arguably a tad overpriced anyway, so trimming the sticker could actually be the right thing for the company to do, especially for less affluent consumers. It bears repeating: the tax credit is worthless if you don't actually owe the IRS anything for 2018. And the folks most likely to owe are, you know, rich.

Read more: Top tech analyst Gene Munster says Tesla's miss on deliveries and price cuts are 'psychological setbacks for investors,' but things aren't as bad for the automaker as they sound

Analysts have been fretting over Tesla demand for years. This has been due largely to the lack of a meaningful electric-car market; globally, EVs make up just 1% of total sales.

Still, Tesla was able to sell another 100,000 of its luxury Model S and Model X vehicles in 2018, repeating 2017's result. The other approximately 150,000 cars it sold were Model 3s — a car that didn't really exist in 2017 and that found an impressive number of buyers in 2018. By contrast, Chevy will likely sell 16-17,000 Bolt EVs in 2018.

The gaps between those vehicles' sales mean that Tesla has essentially created a new market for a near-luxury EV priced between $40,000 and $80,000 at the top end (and Chevy has shown that there is a consistent, if modest, market for a lower-priced EV.) That's a good thing in the short term because Tesla can gobble up all the sales. Longer term, the question is, "How big is that market?"

Tesla's factory. Benjamin Zhang/Business Insider

With something like 400,000 preorders for the Model 3, Tesla could argue that it's satisfied about half the initial demand for the car. A lot of buyers continued to wait for the $35,000 "base" Model 3, but at the moment it's probably good that Tesla isn't selling it because it would post much lower profit margin if it posts one at all. And Tesla needs profits to stay afloat.

As for overall Tesla demand in 2019, it looks to be holding up, if you use the metric of "days supply." Tesla has a few weeks of inventory, a rather low level of days supply compared to the rest of the car business. Ford, for example, has more than two months worth of F-150 pickups sitting around at the moment — something on the order of 200,000 vehicles. It has to maintain that much inventory to satisfy daily demand for 2,500 new trucks.

Plus, Tesla seems to be "conquesting" buyers from other luxury marques, such as BMW, Audi, and Mercedes. Right now, I'd call it curiosity conquesting. Only time will tell if longtime BMW 3-Series owners stick with their Model 3s.

Those are the nuts and bolts of Tesla's auto business as we commence 2019. So what about the stock? Why is it sliding?

Because it's a volatile stock as it has always been! My advice is to treat it as a gauge of how much unjustified optimism there is about Tesla becoming one of the world's biggest carmakers by sales. Tesla mega-bulls see Musk and his company delivering many millions of vehicles annually ... someday. Hence the $500-ish target prices from some boosters. Anything that threatens that growth narrative or that collides with the harsh realities of actually building those millions of vehicles will ding the stock.

How will we know if Tesla has a true demand problem? Much bigger price cuts, for starters, and if when the company unveils its Model Y compact SUV later in 2018, as anticipated, it doesn't rack up a lot of pre-orders. Until then, demand worries are overblown.

On New Year's Day, scientists flew NASA's nuclear-powered New Horizons probe past a mysterious, mountain-sized object.

The space rock is known formally as (486958) 2014 MU69, though it's more commonly referred to as "Ultima Thule" (a nickname that has garnered some controversy — see the editor's note below). It's located more than 4 billion miles from Earth and 1 billion miles beyond Pluto, making MU69 the farthest object humanity has ever explored up close.

New Horizons recorded hundreds of photos in a highly choreographed flyby at 32,200 miles per hour; it came within about 2,200 miles of MU69. On Wednesday, researchers giddily revealed the first photographic spoils of their unprecedented mission.

"It's a snowman," Alan Stern, who leads the New Horizons mission, said of the object's shape during a press conference on Wednesday.

Stern explained that MU69 appears to be what's technically called a contact binary, or "two completely separate objects now joined together."

A humorous comparison by New Horizons scientists shows what they think MU69 looks like. NASA

Jeff Moore, a planetary geologist and co-investigator on the New Horizons mission, said during the briefing that the two lobes of MU69 likely smooshed together at few miles per hour, or "the speed at which you might park your car."

"If you had a collision with another car at those speeds, you might not even fill out the insurance forms," he added.

The scientists also referred to MU69 as a bi-lobate (or two-lobed) comet that has never journeyed near the sun. They are currently called the larger lobe "Ultima," which is nearly 12 miles in diameter, and the smaller lobe "Thule," which is about 8.7 miles across.

Cathy Olkin, a planetary scientist and deputy project scientist on the New Horizons mission, said MU69's surprisingly round lobes and final shape is an exciting development in explaining how planets form.

"This is exactly what need to move the modeling work on planetary formation forward, because we're seeing evidence — right here — of accreting objects, and then having them combine," she said during the press conference.

An illustration showing how MU69 might have formed at the dawn of the solar system. NASA

Since MU69 is so distant, cold, and relatively unchanged, Moore said it's likely "the most primitive object that has yet been seen by any spacecraft."

"What we think we're looking at is the end product of a process which probably took place in only a few hundred thousand or few million years — the very beginning of the formation of the solar system," he added.

No one knew what MU69 looked like until this week. Fuzzy images captured before the flyby led some scientists to guess it was an elongated object, shaped like a bowling pin or peanut, or two objects caught in tight orbit with each other.

The first low-resolution pictures beamed to Earth from New Horizons show MU69 is one object formed from two separate ones and has reddish coloring. Scientists compared the hue with that of Pluto's moon, Charon.

A comparison of Pluto's moon, Charon, and 2014 MU69. NASA

"We can definitely say Ultima Thule is red," Carly Howett, a co-investigator of the New Horizons mission, said during the briefing.

Howett noted the color likely comes from billions of years' worth of radiation that has pummeled organic compounds on MU69's surface and converted them into complex chemicals called tholins (which are red-hued).

A low-resolution color image of MU69 (left), a high-resolution black-and-white image (center), and a merged version to show the object's color (right).NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI

Stern said the team would, using data it already has, begin writing its first scientific paper next week.

"This is going to revolutionize our knowledge of planetary science," Stern said.

An unprecedented bonus mission beyond Pluto

The mission to fly past MU69 was as surprising as it was ambitious.

When NASA launched New Horizons toward Pluto in 2006, nobody knew MU69 existed. There wasn't even a reliable way to detect the object until astronauts plugged an upgraded camera into the Hubble Space Telescope in 2009.

An illustration of the Kuiper Belt with New Horizons' flight path, Pluto, and Ultima Thule (or 2014 MU69).NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI/Alex Parker

New Horizons achieved the first-ever visit to Pluto in July 2015. Once the probe finished that main mission, it coasted farther into a zone called the Kuiper Belt.

In this cold and icy region, sunlight is about as weak as the light from a full moon on Earth. Frozen leftovers of the solar system's formation, called Kuiper Belt objects (KBOs), lurk in vast numbers.

Pluto is one of them, but MU69 is the most pristine yet encountered. It might have been a comet with a brilliant tail, had it been tossed toward the sun, but instead it has stayed in its distant, freezing-cold orbit for billions of years.

"Any time we see comets, we have to remember that they're post-toasties; they've been fired, crackled, and crunched by the sun. They're badly damaged examples of former Kuiper Belt objects," Moore said. "Being able to go out and see a pristine Kuiper Belt object tells us now that, indeed, contact binaries really do form — and maybe when we see comets, we're looking at smaller versions of very badly damaged contact binaries."

The unprecedented data acquired by New Horizons will likely reveal new clues about how the solar system evolved to form planets like Earth.

"Ultima is the first thing we've been to that is not big enough to have a geological engine like a planet, and also something that's never been warmed greatly by the sun," Stern previously told Business Insider. "It's like a time capsule from 4.5 billion years ago. That's what makes it so special."

He compared the flyby to an archaeological dig in Egypt.

"It's like the first time someone opened up the pharaoh's tomb and went inside, and you see what the culture was like 1,000 years ago," he said. "Except this is exploring the dawn of the solar system."

An artist's rendering of an asteroid swarm.NASA/JPL-Caltech

Another analogy: Stern said he thinks of MU69 as a "planetary embryo" since it's a building block of larger planets that never became one.

"In that sense, it's like a paleontologist finding the fossilized embryo of a dinosaur," Stern said. "It has a very special value."

The long wait for more unprecedented data

A photo of 2014 MU69, or Ultima Thule, taken by NASA's New Horizons probe just 30 minutes before its closest approach on January 1, 2019. At left is a raw spacecraft image, and at right is a sharpened version.NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI

As with New Horizons' flyby of Pluto several years ago, researchers on the mission must now play a waiting game for more images and scientific data.

According to Stern, the first pictures New Horizons captured during the flyby each took two hours to transmit. Each bit of data, moving at the speed of light as radio waves, then took about six hours to reach antennas on Earth.

Although the first images are now public, they are low-resolution versions. It will take much longer to receive the most detailed, full-resolution images because of physical limitations of the New Horizons spacecraft and its location. In fact, it may take 20 months to download all of the probe's data.

Part of the reason it will take so long is because the output of the spacecraft's radio antenna is now about 15 watts — or one-quarter of a standard light bulb's power — and it's broadcasting from 4 billion miles away.

Most immediately, New Horizons will also have to wait until January 10 before beaming back more data because the sun will come between it and Earth, blocking the spacecraft's feeble transmissions.

Stern added during a press conference on Thursday that the researchers would be analyzing the data they have in the meantime. New Horizons team members expect to see the highest-resolution color photos in February.

"We are guardedly optimistic that those highest-res images will cover a massive amount of the surface," Stern said on Thursday. "Stay tuned for February."

One thing researchers have learned so far is that MU69 rotates on its axis about once every 15 hours.

On Thursday, the team released the above animation of two images taken by New Horizons about eight minutes apart, revealing some of MU69's shape. The team also released a red-blue stereo image that shows it in 3D.

"What is striking home with me is that we can build a spacecraft on Earth, and we send it out billions of miles away from Earth, and it sends us back all this wonderful data that we get to look at and learn more about our world, our solar system," Alice Bowman, the New Horizons mission operations manager, said during a press conference on Tuesday.

'10,000 times harder than reaching Pluto'

This flyby was dramatically more difficult to pull off than New Horizons' Pluto visit, Stern said.

"Rendezvousing with something the size of a large, filthy mountain covered in dirt, a billion miles away from Pluto, and honing in on it is about 10,000 times harder than reaching Pluto," Stern previously told Business Insider. "That's because it's about 10,000 times smaller. The achievement of getting to it is unbelievable."

An image composite of Pluto (right) and its moon, Charon, (left).NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI

Pinpointing exactly where MU69 would be in space when New Horizons could fly near it required a "two and a half week odyssey" of telescopic observations around the world, mission scientist Simon Porter said on Twitter.

To see MU69 block the light of a distant star — a way to confirm the space rock's precise orbit — the researchers had to fly an airplane-mounted telescope called SOFIA and deploy dozens of telescopes in Argentina.

The New Horizons team is already plotting and scheming to make a flyby of an even more distant object.

"New Horizons is a very healthy spacecraft. In fact, all of the systems on board are redundant, and we're not using any of the backup systems because we haven't had any systems failures in 13 years of flight," Stern told Business Insider during Wednesday's press conference.

The New Horizons spacecraft before its launch in 2006. NASA

The probe's power supply — a system that converts the heat emitted by decaying plutonium-238 into electricity — has about 15 to 20 years of life left in it. Stern said this could power all of the spacecraft's electronics out to a distance of about 10 billion miles, or about 2.5 times its current distance.

Where the team might go next is still up in the air.

"I can't give you the answer today because we don't know," Stern said. "We've been very careful, during this period of three years, where we were planning every detail of this flyby, to stay focused on that — and not get distracted by the next shiny thing, if you know what I mean."

He added that by the summer of 2020, the team will make a formal pitch to NASA to look for another object to fly past, perhaps at the very edge of the Kuiper Belt (and a decade from now).

"There's plenty of time to go find other targets — if we're in the position of having a still-healthy spacecraft and an accepted proposal," Stern said.

Editor's note: After a public campaign, the New Horizons team selected Ultima Thule as a nickname for (486958) 2014 MU69. However, we've de-emphasized it here because the Nazi party used the word "Thule" as a tenet of its ideology.

This story has been updated. It was originally published at 2:40 p.m. ET on January 2, 2019.

BERND THISSEN/AFP/Getty Images

Someone mentioned that Apple stock is having a difficult time right now, along with their Q4 performance, China strategy, and “let’s just raise the price on iPhones to make up for lower demand” strategy.

I’m not really interested in Apple stock (I don’t own any.) I’m more concerned with the Apple Dock. My MacOS Dock to be more specific.

Here’s the one from my laptop.

Here’s the one from my desktop, which is in a room about 25 feet away.

Why in the world are they different? Many things sync via iCloud already and even though the UX is obtuse to get it set up correctly across machines, when it’s finally set it, it works pretty well.

But the Dock? Seriously?

In contrast, following are the two Chrome ribbons on my two machines.

Shockingly similar, like you’d expect.

It’s fascinating to me that even in this “all cloud, all the time” era, Apple still is struggling with the dichotomy between a “computer-centric” view of the world and a “user-centric” view of the world. Sync across machines is simply not a new idea. I get that there is endless complexity everywhere, but this is one of those examples that I think of every day.

Also published on Medium.

A lot of people are predicting that 2018 was the peak and the beginning of a downturn / recession / whatever-you-want-to-call-it.

I’m not a predictor so I have no idea. I try not to pay attention to the macro (as I’ve said many times), but I do think it is important to have a frame of reference about it.

My frame of reference has a few components.

First, it’s going to be incredibly noisy out here on planet Earth. The year 2018, especially in the United States, was full of endless, chaotic noise that carried very little signal. It was either noise for noise’s sake (and page views), or misdirection (like in the movie Swordfish).

This isn’t just politics. It’s everything. And it’s going to get noisier. So, the search for signal gets harder, more complicated, and more important.

Next, the indicators are trailing, not leading. By the time people are prognosticating on the direction of things, the prices of crypto, interest rates, IPOs, the stock market, P/E multiples, and everything else, it’s too late – you have already missed the moment you are probably searching for. So, put all this stuff in the noise category. This is really difficult, especially given our natural human tendency to try to anticipate and react to things in order to win (or believe we are winning.)

The core of my frame of reference is that I’m playing a very long game. At 53, I’ve already been through a lot of downturns – both large and small ones. Some of the big ones impacted the things I was involved in directly (like the collapse of the Internet bubble) and were incredibly brutal to my world. Others, like the global financial crisis, were adjacent to my world. I didn’t even notice many others. But, in all cases, the downturn ended. And, with the benefit of hindsight, there were huge opportunities even in the downturn.

Ultimately, we all die. I’m currently reading Tolstoy’s A Calendar of Wisdom: Daily Thoughts to Nourish the Soul (I’m on January 31st – I read it in the bathroom.) One thing is clear when reading between the lines – the downturn doesn’t care about us.

Also published on Medium.

Three of my colleagues at USV have first day of the new year posts up this morning that inspired me. Two are macro-related (Fred’s and Albert’s) but one is personal (Bethany’s). Take a look at all three – they are a good way to get ready for what is to come.

Fred’s punchline is “It is going to be a doozy” and I agree. But from my frame of reference, every one of my 53 years on this planet has been a doozy. So, while the macro will for sure be another doozy, I’m focused on what my @bfeld v53.0 goals are and how I’m doing a month into the v53 journey (v53.1).

Curious: I only read five books in December, but the one I’m reading now, Number One Chinese Restaurant, definitely fits in the curious category. I read 113 books in 2018 and have a goal of 100 books again in 2019. However, I had way too many “predictable” books in my 2018 reading list, so 2019 will be much more unpredictable as I skip over the obvious stuff to read and instead indulge my curiosity. If you have non-business, non-tech books that you think will stretch my mind, put them in the comments for all to see.

Healthy: I’m off to a great start on this front. My running is going well – last week was 4:31 running over five days for a total of 21.6 miles and a TSS of 579. This has been a steady build since I started running again in mid-September with a week of two runs, 1:21 for 4.94 miles and a TSS of 52. I’ve lost seven pounds since v53.0 and that feels good. I’ve signed up for the 2019 Cowtown Marathon (Fort Worth) in February and the Covenant Health Knoxville Marathon (Knoxville) at the end of March. If you want to join my Knoxville Marathon team, drop me an email and I’ll send you an invite.

Calm: The metabolizer is in good shape. It managed to not get damaged over the holidays, which is a dangerous time for it.

Present: I’m doing “ok” here but could be a lot better. Amy has noticed that I’ve been distracted and I periodically feel a bunch of external nonsense sneaking into my brainspace. I’d like to blame Twitter or news.google.com, but ultimately this is a discipline I need to keep working on.

Supportive: Each day I’ve thought of a person to reach out to who I know needs some support for some reason. I’ve been doing this by email, but I’m going to play around with physical letters, phone calls, and meals.

Boundless: This aspiration now anchors everything I do. It’s 8 degrees outside. I’m looking forward to my run today. Later today I’ll wander over to the Carriage House (where my writing space is) and put in two hours on The Startup Community Way which I’m getting pretty excited about. I expect I’ll spend some time on the couch with Amy and the dogs reading this afternoon. And, I know we’ll watch at least another episode of The Americans (we are halfway through Season 3 and loving it.) Whatever else happens, happens …

Happy new year. 

Also published on Medium.

From massive, multibillion dollar acquisitions to boardroom shake-ups and disturbing scandals, the tech industry had an eventful 2018.

Business Insider's team of tech journalists was first to report some of the most important developments, from the surprise departure of Google Cloud CEO Diane Greene to the internal turmoil at augmented-reality (AR) pioneer Magic Leap and the problems leading up to Uber's fatal autonomous-car crash.

As the tech world moves ahead into 2019, we decided to distill the year's catalog of exclusive stories and investigations into a list of the nine most important reports. Check out the list below for some great reads you may have missed, or to refresh your perspective and challenge your assumptions as you prepare for the new year in tech.

Bill Gates is urging the United States to invest in nuclear power research.

In his annual year-in-review Gates Notes blog post, Gates noted that, despite the consequences of climate change that people face around the globe, "global emissions of greenhouse gases went up in 2018."

Because burning fossil fuels (oil, coal, and natural gas) releases carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere, Gates wrote that we need breakthroughs in clean energy in order to curb the rise of global temperatures. Generating energy from sunlight and wind does not emit CO2; the same goes for nuclear energy.

"The world needs to be working on lots of solutions to stop climate change," Gates wrote. "Advanced nuclear is one, and I hope to persuade US leaders to get into the game."

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the world will face catastrophic effects of climate change if global temperatures climb to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. We are on track to hit that 1.5-degree threshold by 2040, though the IPCC said a huge shift in global energy and economic systems could still reverse the trend.

Read more: The scariest parts of the new climate change report: The goals the world set are inadequate, and the track we're on is disastrous

Solar and wind energy are becoming much cheaper— which Gates said he was "glad to see" — but he wrote that these energy sources alone are not enough. That's because solar and wind energy are not viable when the sun doesn't shine or the wind doesn't blow. Nuclear power, on the other hand, is available 24 hours a day.

This is not the first time Gates has sought to improve the world's energy options. Gates, along with Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and other billionaires, leads a fund called Breakthrough Energy Ventures that invests in startups that focus on renewable energy. In 2018, the group announced the first companies to get that funding.

"The companies we chose are run by brilliant people and show a lot of promise for taking innovative clean-energy ideas out of the lab and getting them to market," Gates wrote in his end-of-year note.

As far as nuclear power is concerned, Gates said he is confident that further innovation can eliminate concerns about the risk of accidents.

"The United States is uniquely suited to create these advances with its world-class scientists, entrepreneurs, and investment capital," he wrote. "Unfortunately, America is no longer the global leader on nuclear energy that it was 50 years ago. To regain this position, it will need to commit new funding, update regulations, and show investors that it's serious."

As an example of a promising approach to nuclear energy, Gates pointed to the company TerraPower that he started 10 years ago. TerraPower is working on creating a traveling-wave reactor, which Gates said is safe, produces minimal waste, and can't be used in nuclear weapon production.

A TerraPower facility. TerraPower

TerraPower was trying to building a pilot project in China, Gates wrote, but recent moves by the Trump administration have "made that unlikely."

Gates said there may be a chance for the project to move forward in the US. But regardless, he plans to continue drawing more attention to energy issues in 2019.

"Next year I will speak out more about how the US needs to regain its leading role in nuclear power research," Gates wrote.