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Weekly#114

  • Google Says Driverless Cars Involved in 11 ‘Minor’ Accidents in 6 Years (WSJ)
  • Tesla Motors Inc. is looking at the good old-fashioned turn signal as a potential solution to a liability debate associated with driverless vehicle technology.

    The Palo Alto, Calif., electric-car maker soon will begin activating semiautonomous features, including the capability to pass other cars without driver intervention, in its Model S sedans. A driver can trigger the passing function by hitting the turn signal, according to people familiar with the technology. That action not only tells the car it can pass, but also means the driver has given thought to whether the maneuver is safe. (WSJ)

  • Uber is positioning itself as a logistics company. The goal is to deliver people and things within cities as quickly as possible — relying heavily on Google’s Maps in the process…Uber has submitted a bid for Here (Nokia Digital Mapping Service) (Nytimes)

  • Uber Fund-Raising Points to $50 Billion Valuation (Nytimes)
  • Robots, Hungry for Power, Are Too Weak to Take Over the World
    “Even the best ones are roughly 10 times less energy dense than the sugar and fat [humans eat],” Gill Pratt, Darpa’s program director for the robotics contest said on a media call.

    Worse, the robots ungainly movements consume a lot of energy.

    “Robots are also much less efficient than animals,” said Dr. Pratt, using as much as 100 times more energy to complete the same task. “You should expect to see a lot of robots fall down,” he added. (WSJ)

  • Long-Range Iris Scanning : An engineering professor at Carnegie Mellon says he’s invented technology that can identify someone from across the room with the precision of a fingerprint. (The Atlantic)
  • Carl Icahn Takes $100 Million Stake in Lyft (WSJ)
  • Dropbox has acquired Umano, a startup that provides voice actors who can read content for recordings that can be added to websites and applications. Umano announced the news today in a posting on its website. The service is shutting down. (Venture Beat)

  • Nasdaq OMX Group Inc. is testing a new use of the technology that underpins the digital currency bitcoin, in a bid to transform the trading of shares in private companies.

    The experiment joins a slew of financial-industry forays into bitcoin-related technology. If the effort is deemed successful, Nasdaq wants to use so-called blockchain technology in its stock market, one of the world’s largest, and potentially shake up systems that have facilitated the trading of financial assets for decades. (WSJ)