- Virgin Orbit plans to launch first commercial small satellites to Mars
- Uber’s newest feature alerts drivers that pets will be joining the ride
- (Pivot) Dyson kills its electric car project and turns to solid-state batteries…Dyson said it will end its electric vehicle project after determining it could not make the car commercially viable or find a buyer…
- NASA Administrator ‘very confident’ SpaceX crew launch could happen in early 2020
- Steam will soon let you play local-only multiplayer games with far off friends
- Amazon Music arrives on Apple TV
- Get ready to see more looping videos on Spotify, as Canvas launches into beta
- Yandex introduces an Echo Dot-style smart speaker
- Chinese citizens will soon need to scan their face before they can access internet services or get a new phone number
- Elon Musk says that NASA is free to share all SpaceX IP with ‘anyone it wants’
- Autonomous vehicles won’t save cities without sharing
- Nanoscale 3D printing technique is 1,000 times faster
- Jeff Bezos’s Master Plan
- Robots to Replace 200,000 Banking Jobs: Report
Weekly#344
- NASA’s first all-electric experimental X-plane is ready for testing
- Maisie Williams’ startup Daisie is preparing for new partnerships, funding
- HTC stopped innovating on smartphones, new CEO admits
- NASA shares 3D Moon data for CG artists and creators
- PayPal is the first company to drop out of the Facebook-led Libra Association
- Amazon’s video app is back in Apple’s App Store. But get ready to see more streaming fights.
- 3D-printed rocket company to begin commercial launches in 2021
- The Netherlands Surpasses Wildest Predictions For Tesla Model 3 Sales
- Nasa invites bids from firms to build lunar lander for 2024 mission
- The rise of the financial machines (Paywall) “…Funds run by computers that follow rules set by humans account for 35% of America’s stockmarket, 60% of institutional equity assets and 60% of trading activity…”
- “…Rising precious metals prices are luring criminals to target catalytic converters which use platinum, palladium or rhodium…”
- Text-generating AI is getting better and better — but it’s not yet contest-winning good.
- Watch the Open Future Festival
Eating crabs ordered on your phone and delivered to your door in half an hour while scrolling through TikTok videos using the inbuilt gesture control on a Huawei phone. This is peak China 2019 pic.twitter.com/PL63fKQY2a
— Matthew Brennan (@mbrennanchina) September 30, 2019
Weekly#343
- Amazon launches Amazon Care, a virtual and in-person healthcare offering for employees
- The Guardian: The 100 best books of the 21st century
- Grammarly gets a tone detector
- “…companies all have multi-class stock structures, meaning that some of their stock — usually that which belongs to the founders — has much more powerful voting rights than others and therefore much more impact when it comes to company decisions…”
- Paperspace adds machine learning model development pipeline to GPU service
- Training a single AI model can emit as much carbon as five cars in their lifetimes
- Windows 10 is used on over 900 million devices
- How Amazon’s Ring is creating a surveillance network with video doorbells
- Car subscription service Cluno discloses €140M in debt financing
- Equinor wins opportunity to develop the world’s largest offshore wind farm
- Struggling Farmers See Bright Spot in Solar ($)…“…Farmers have two options for adding solar power on their farms: lease land for energy companies to generate power to funnel electricity into the grid, as the Nielsens are doing; or install their own solar panels to cut their electricity bills. Both methods can amount to more than $1,000 a month in improved margins, according to farmers and renewable-energy advocates…”
- Energy and food together: Under solar panels, crops thrive
- Generate income by generating power – Hong Kong homes close to selling solar power under new ‘feed-in tariff’ scheme
- Alibaba unveils self-developed AI chip for cloud computing services
- IKEA expects to offer home solar panels in stores across all its markets in 2025
- From Ben Evans
- Pinterest’s Lens can now recognize 2.5 billion home and fashion objects
- Facebook experiments with AI-powered styling program
- Amazon Changed Search Algorithm in Ways That Boost Its Own Products ($)
Weekly#342
- iOS 13 is now available to download
- CRISPR removes antibiotic resistance gene from bacterium
- Amazon orders 100K electric delivery trucks from Rivian as part of going carbon-neutral by 2040
- Airbnb says it will go public next year
- Automattic raises $300 million at $3 billion valuation from Salesforce Ventures
- The man behind Tesla’s Powerwall is now pitching an all-in-one power management system for homes
- Amazon is bringing a cash-based checkout option, Amazon PayCode, to the US
- IBM will soon launch a 53-qubit quantum computer
- Amazon launches Amazon Music HD with lossless audio streaming
- Amazon/food sales: perdition postponed (FT: paywall)
- …And now scientists believe the changing climate may put our brains at risk. A new analysis predicts that by 2100, increasing water temperatures brought on by a warming planet could result in 96 percent of the world’s population not having access to an omega-3 fatty acid crucial to brain health and function…
- Silent Skies: Billions of North American Birds Have Vanished…an overall decline of 29 percent from 1970.
- Mini Transformers: Scientists Have Created a Robot Made of Robots
- Fiat Chrysler will set up an experimental fleet of up to 700 electric cars to test vehicle-to-grid (V2G) technology, which allows power grids to use energy stored in car batteries to face demand during peak hours.
- Fintech Company Stripe Joins Silicon Valley Elite With $35 Billion Valuation (WSJ: paywall)