Mission Everywhere

It's no secret that Google Chrome is often the culprit behind a slow computer, even if your computer is relatively new. Open enough tabs in Chrome and you can easily eat up all your RAM, which doesn't leave much for other things you might be doing on your computer. Extensions can use up your computer's processor, too. One way to check whether Chrome is to blame for slowing down a perfectly good computer is to check your computer's processes. On Macs, that means checking Activity Monitor. For Windows PCs, check the Task Manager. If you're seeing that Chrome is hogging a bunch of your resources like RAM and CPU, you could go one step further and check exactly which tabs, websites, and extensions are causing the biggest slowdowns on your computer. Check it out: SEE ALSO:  The 20 best smartphones in the world In Chrome, click the button with the three dots toward the top right of the Chrome window > More tools > Task Manager. The Chrome Task Manager show...

The   Insider Picks   team writes about stuff we think you'll like. Business Insider has affiliate partnerships, so we get a share of the revenue from your purchase. Google makes several smart speakers and many well-known audio companies also put the Google Assistant in their smart speakers.  We've rounded up the best smart speakers with the Google Assistant onboard to help you find the one that's right for you. The original Google Home is our top pick because it is a top-notch Assistant-powered speaker that looks good, sounds great, and has a reasonable price tag. Google Assistant is one of the best digital assistants along with Alexa. If you own an Android phone and you use other Google products and services, there’s plenty of reason to buy into the Google ecosystem and get a smart speaker that's powered by the Google Assistant. The Assistant boasts excellent voice recognition, access to a huge range of third-party services, the power of Google's searc...

The Internet of Things is helping to make commercial buildings more energy efficient. One solution is doing so by monitoring usage carefully —where, when, and how much. 5G will make it easier to create smart, efficient buildings. Many of today's commercial buildings predate modern energy-saving tools and techniques. That means they waste a lot of energy — up to 30% of it , according to the US Environmental Protection Agency. With climate change becoming more and more of a reality, and the cost of commercial electricity up 43% from 2000 to 2017 , it's time to think about how to make our buildings smarter. Thanks to the Internet of Things, we can. One company is tackling commercial building efficiency on several levels, and it starts with understanding energy usage. The system uses sensors in office buildings and factories to monitor data including occupancy, temperature, lighting, and energy use. It allows executives to monitor how much energy they're using, where, a...

Millennial startup Mic sold itself to Bustle Digital Group for a reported $5 million, a fraction of the $60 million it raised, after financial problems including the impact of Facebook canceling a video show. But the Mic situation reveals broader challenges with the Facebook-funded shows, and the ongoing relationships between publishers and the social-media giant. Mic was one of eight publishers, along with the likes of CNN, ABC News, and Fox News, that Facebook picked to produce its first slate of news shows for its YouTube rival Facebook Watch. Facebook was reportedly spending $90 million to fund Watch shows to signal it was taking news seriously after coming under fire for letting fake news spread on the platform. The first shows were announced in June and rolled out during the summer. Click here to read more about what Mic's canceled Facebook Watch show reveals about other Facebook-funded news shows. In other news: The holidays are looking like a happy time for digital ...

Longtime Accel partners Philippe Botteri, Sonali De Rycker, Luciana Lixandru, and Harry Nelis took the stage at Disrupt Berlin earlier today, and unlike many London-based investors, who have downplayed how much Brexit could hurt their local economy, the team was frank about their sundry concerns over what happens if the U.K. leaves the European Union as is currently scheduled to happen, beginning March 29, 2019. Though they reiterated that no one can no for certain what Brexit’s impact might be, Botteri raised a handful of things that have the firm worried, beginning with “immigration and hiring talent and the movement of talent,” which could be meaningfully hampered by Brexit. “Even companies that don’t move their headquarters to London will often at some point begin to build a team,” he noted, questioning whether that will continue to happen. There’s also the nontrivial issue of what happens to fintech companies, which have been thriving in London as a gateway between the U.S. an...

Jason Brown, cofounder and CEO of personal-finance app Tally, asks every potential hire, "As a human, are you happy?" It's Brown's way of finding out if the applicant is aligned with Tally's mission and has personal motivations for wanting to work there. Applicants who can pinpoint the things that drive their happiness tend to also have better reasons for wanting to work at the company, Brown said. A company runs smoother when all of its employees are aligned with its mission. For Jason Brown, the cofounder and CEO of personal-finance app Tally , that means determining at the interview stage where a potential hire's priorities lie. And Brown has a unusual way of finding that out. Whenever someone interviews for a job at Tally, he makes sure he asks them if they're happy. "One question I ask people is, 'As a human, are you happy?'" Brown told Business Insider. The point of the question, Brown said, isn't to assess an applica...