Axios

United Technologies is breaking up. General Electric is a shadow of its former self. The great conglomerates of the past, names like ITT and Gulf + Western and Hanson Trust, are dim memories at best.

The bottom line: Maybe the big cloud providers — Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, Oracle — are in some way the new conglomerates. They don't own the companies they power, but they deliver impressive and valuable synergies all the same.

Colin Kroll, the 35-year-old CEO and co-founder of HQ Trivia and co-founder of Vine, was found dead in his New York City apartment early Sunday from an apparent drug overdose, reports TMZ.

Details: Kroll was elevated to become CEO of HQ Trivia in September. There were reports earlier this year that some venture capital firms had passed on investing in HQ because of alleged "bad behavior" by Kroll when he worked at Twitter that included allegations of sexual harassment. He later apologized for what he called "poor management."

Amazon has trained us "to buy everything from major appliances to daily staples online. Now it is having second thoughts about some of those sales because they don’t make money," according to the Wall Street Journal's Laura Stevens, Sharon Terlep and Annie Gasparro.

"Inside Amazon, the items are known as CRaP, short for 'Can’t Realize a Profit.' Think bottled beverages or snack foods. The products tend to be priced at $15 or less, are sold directly by Amazon, and are heavy or bulky and therefore costly to ship — characteristics that make for thin or nonexistent margins."

BusinessWeek put bitcoin on the cover of its magazine this week, wondering whether "crypto [has] hit the fan." We'd say that still remains to be seen, but in the meantime, here are other important news from this week.

Catch up quick: Bain-backed crypto startup Basis closed; Facebook’s blockchain group is on a hiring spree to reinvent money; and the Securities and Exchange Commission’s crypto czar signaled some flexibility on token offerings.

For millennia, technology, in terms of its big-picture impact, was, well, meh. Look at the straight line in the chart — that includes every major invention since the year 1 AD, including the printing press.

• Then James Watt triggered the Industrial Revolution by reinventing the steam engine, and before you knew it we all owned iPhones.

The big picture: It's all come too fast. We are saturated with life-rattling new technologies, yet more is on its way — artificial intelligence, quantum computing, robots and greater use of cyber weapons.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai refuted conservative claims of search bias in front of Congress this week. Here are five other stories in tech you may have missed.

Catch up quick: YouTube took down more than 58 million videos that violated its policies; nearly half of cloud databases aren't encrypted; Facebook wants to become a streaming destination; Apple courts publishers for new Apple News bundle; and Bitcoin spammers sent bomb threats to businesses and schools worldwide.