October 2016

There were 5 posts published in October 2016 (this is page 1 of 1).

Weekly#190

  • Ikea uses 1 percent of the planet’s lumber (The Weird Economics Of Ikea)
  • “Friday, the American Academy of Pediatrics validated my experiment, recommending that children younger than 18 months get zero screen time, and those ages 2 to 5 be limited to one hour a day—half of its prior recommendation.”
  • IT Industry Outlook Holds Steady, Software vendors and other IT firms say they’re on track to meet or surpass revenue goals this year
  • Uber’s Self-Driving Truck Makes Its First Delivery: 50,000 Beers
  • AT&T Undercuts Cable TV With $35 Internet Streaming Service
  • Microsoft Surface Studio PC announced for $2,999
  • Audi’s legendary Le Mans program to end in 2016
  • Microsoft could be unveiling Teams, its Slack competitor, next week, Previously known as Skype Teams, Microsoft has built a Web-based chat system.
  • This week, Apple will announce a new Apple TV feature that allows people to discover new TV shows from a single app, USA Today reports.
  • Scientists want to send a team of robots into space to build a telescope
  • The Japanese car manufacturer reports that the number of charging points in the country has surged past 40,000, compared to fewer than 35,000 petrol stations.
  • From Atlanta to Beijing, these are the world’s busiest airports
  • VR cafe in Seoul
  • Soon you’ll be able to play ‘Minecraft’ on your Apple TV
  • Qualcomm to Buy NXP Semiconductors for $39 Billion
    Biggest chip deal adds the top supplier of automotive chips to the San Diego company
  • Twitter to Cut 9% of Workforce as Revenue Growth Slows
  • An economic history of the world in 1 minute, 5 seconds

Weekly#189

  • The Global Competitiveness Index 2015–2016 Rankings (World Economic Forum)
    Top 10 (Switzerland, Singapore, United States, Germany, Netherlands, Japan, Hong Kong, Finland, Sweden, United Kingdom)
  • Comcast’s NBCUniversal Invests Another $200 Million in BuzzFeed
  • Facial-recognition apps use smartphone snapshots to verify identity of customers
  • ‘Grand Theft Auto’ is so influential, the company’s stock just exploded after teasing a new game
  • Netflix posted robust subscriber growth for the quarter, adding 370,000 net memberships in the U.S. and 3.2 million internationally, for a total of about 3.6 million. 86.7 million subscribers worldwide.
  • Lessons Learned From Scaling Uber To 2000 Engineers, 1000 Services, And 8000 Git Repositories
  • A recent CityLab report suggests that driverless car technology for evacuations might be a good solution for minimizing loss of life and the amount of destruction that occurs during hurricane season.
  • Meet the Giant Robot That Builds Boeing’s Airplane Wings
  • Airbus delivered the 10,000th plane.
  • “… But as Schadt has learned, it’s not enough to plumb the depths of an individual’s DNA. It requires a universe of data—exabytes worth—to detect patterns in a population, apply machine learning, find the network of mutations responsible for disease, and do something about it. The bigger these data sets become, the more accurate and powerful the models and the predictors become…”
  • Tesla Motors Inc. said it plans to charge buyers of its newest cars $8,000 to activate autonomous-driving technology (WSJ)
  • Video : Full Self-Driving Hardware on All Teslas
  • Microsoft Corp.’s cloud-computing businesses kicked into high gear as sales of the software giant’s Azure service more than doubled.
  • AT&T Inc. is in advanced talks to acquire Time Warner Inc (CNN,HBO, Warner Bros), according to people familiar with the matter, a deal that would create a new hallmark in the rapidly converging realms of media, communications and the internet.
  • Nintendo’s next console, Switch, is a console/tablet hybrid coming in March
    Tablet system docks to connect to HDTV, comes with detachable controllers.
  • Nissan’s autonomous chairs commence a public trial in Japan 2017
  • A group of Japanese scientists from Kyushu University has successfully turned mouse skin cells into baby mice without the use of egg cells.
  • Facebook Live broadcasting up 4X since May, gets TV and outdoor promo
  • Microsoft Fiscal Year 2017 First Quarter Earnings Conference Call, Slides
  • Researchers are using 3D motion capture to document kung fu before it disappears
  • Who Should a Startup Hire First?

Weekly#188

 

  • Netflix is 12 times as popular as its streaming competitors among younger viewers
  • Microsoft open-sources P language for IoT
  • Larry Ellison says Oracle’s new cloud will crush Amazon — but the rest of the world isn’t so sure
  • AWS is 10-times bigger than its next 14 competitors combined
  • New Q2 data from Synergy Research Group shows that Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft, IBM and Google combined control well over half of the worldwide cloud infrastructure service market.
  • Within 24 hours of plugging in her Amazon Echo, Carla Martin-Wood says she felt they were best friends. “It was very much more like meeting someone new,” she says.
  • The Three Software Stacks Required for IoT Architectures [PDF]
  • Kindergarten. For robots.
  • Panasonic’s new prototype TV can hide in plain sight
  • Planet Earth II: Official Extended Trailer – BBC Earth
  • 5 Japanese innovations that changed the world
  • Here’s Arianna Huffington’s Recipe For A Great Night Of Sleep
  • DeepMind’s new computer can learn from its own memory
  • Rogue One: A Star Wars Story Trailer #2
  • SoftBank and Saudi Arabia Team Up for $100 Billion Tech Fund

 

 

 

 

 

Weekly#187

Facebook
How Facebook Is Dominating the 2016 Election
 …100,000 different webpages, each micro-targeted at a different segment of voters…
…the firm has a database of 220 million U.S. adults with 4,000 to 5,000 data points on each…
…the value of targeting lies in making campaign spending more efficient…
Facebook  is in talks with several countries for trial broadcasts of internet content from highflying drones to provide bandwidth to poorly connected parts of the globe.
Facebook  launched  “Facebook Marketplace,” Craigslist & eBay competitor to allow individual users to easily buy and sell a range of items, such as clothing electronics, household goods, furniture, jewelry, art and cars.
VR
PlayStation VR Review: The Best Way to Bring Virtual Reality Home
After Stumbles, Oculus Tries to Regain Its Footing in Virtual Reality
Facebook’s Oculus Working on Stand-Alone Virtual-Reality Device, won’t require a personal computer
Google
On October 4, Google  announced several new hardware products, ranging from smartphones to speakers to a new intelligent router.
  • Google’s Pixel and Pixel XL phones start at $649 and $769
  • Google’s “Daydream View” VR headset is smartphone-powered VR for $79
  • The Chromecast does 4K: Google announces the $69 Chromecast Ultra
  • Google Wifi: Google’s second attempt at a home router
 
Space
 
Elon Musk: A Million Humans Could Live on Mars By the 2060s
Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket lands in the Texas desert after a successful escape system test
Blockchain
J.P. Morgan Created Transactions Platform based on Ethereum Blockchain. The platform called Quorum will enable the multinational banking company located in New York to use a publicly available system for confidential transactions.
Self Driving Cars
Google’s head of self-driving tech: We’re not building a car, we’re building the driver
10 million self-driving cars will be on the road by 2020
50 Mind-Blowing Implications of Self-Driving Cars (and Trucks) / What to expect from the next 3–20 years of autonomous vehicles
After two million miles, Google’s robot car now drives better than a 16-year-old
AI
Salesforce Agrees to Buy Marketing-Data Startup Krux $ 700 million…Krux uses AI  to analyze trillions of signals to better identify audience segments…
The UCL team has written what it calls an Intelligent Autopilot System that uses ten separate ANNs (Artificial Neural Networks). Each is tasked with learning the best settings for different controls (the throttle, ailerons, elevators and so on) in a variety of different conditions. Hundreds of ANNs would probably be needed to cope with a real aircraft, says Dr Bentley. But ten is enough to check whether the idea is fundamentally a sound one…the new autopilot will probably find its first uses in drones.
Other
Snap Inc. is working on an initial public offering
Techstars to Launch Accelerator for Music-Industry Tech Startups
Program will accept 10 participants for funding and mentoring
Software maps immune system in 17 days
The possible variation of immune receptors far exceeds the number of genes in our genome, at roughly 10 million times more than the number of stars in the Milky Way galaxy, notes Adam Buntzman, a research assistant professor and immunologist at the University of Arizona.
Financial Times hopes faster website will boost readership. The London-based publication, which is expected to unveil its new website Tuesday, has halved the time it takes a story to load on desktop to slightly over one second. Mobile devices can now load a story in a little over 2 seconds, down from 6 seconds.
Nobel Prize in Chemistry Awarded to Three Scientists for Design, Synthesis of Molecular Machines, in a first stage, the technology can lead to the creation of new smart materials able to adapt themselves to their environment, and minuscule sensors that can be controlled remotely.
Under Neil Hunt, chief product officer of Netflix, the effort includes overhauling the company’s algorithm for recommendations
Netflix
2012 Catalog : close to 11,000 movies and TV shows.
Current Library has about 5,300 titles.
Tesla delivers 24,500 vehicles in the third quarter
Reports
Car-generated data may become a USD 450 – 750 billion market by 2030 (McKinsey)
Gaming Industry Overview (PDF)
Video
Watch some of Steve Jobs’s best interviews

Weekly#186

  • Pay-TV providers could lose nearly $1 billion in revenue as 800,000 customers cut the cord during the next 12 months, according to a new study from the firm cg42.(WSJ)
  • How to Make Sure Your Uber Doesn’t Drive Past You
    Avoiding the pin drop can help you get door-to-door service that is actually door-to-door (WSJ)
  • Gartner Cape Town: 10 strategic tech trends for 2017
    1. Conversational systems
    2. Augmented and virtual reality
    3. Digital twin
    4. Artifical intelligence and machine learning
    5. Intelligent applications
    6. Intelligent things
    7. Adaptive security
    8. Blockchain and distributed ledger
    9. Mesh app and service architecture
    10. Digital technology platforms
  • Drew Houston CEO of Dropbox, if he had a cheat sheet he could give himself at 22, it would have three things on it: “a tennis ball, a circle, and the number 30,000. (BI)
  • Spotify launches in Japan, As Billboard noted in an earlier article, physical formats such as CDs and LPs are still popular in Japan — more than 80 percent of music sales were on physical formats in 2015. (Mashable)
  • Salesforce.com to Press Regulators to Block Microsoft-LinkedIn Deal
    Company says Microsoft’s $26.2 billion acquisition of social network would be anticompetitive (WSJ)
  • Google spent $9 billion on cloud business in past 12 months. (Bloomberg)
  • Amazon Eyes Living Rooms by Adding Gaming Features to Prime (Bloomberg)
  • A Japanese Company Wants to Build a Space Elevator by 2050
  • Microsoft forms new 5,000-person AI division
  • Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced that it plans to launch a French datacentre region which will be open for customer use in 2017.
  • Google’s Got a Plan to Unify the World’s Wi-Fi Hotspots
  • iPhone 8 rumors: All glass everything with an OLED display
  • According to this VAB report, which aims to address the relationship between streaming, TV and advertisers, just 6 percent of the U.S. population does 87 percent of the streaming.
  • Why Siri, Alexa And Cortana Will Destroy SEO
  • The Google of product search is…Amazon.
  • WinTel market cap, 1995: $105bn GAFA, 2016: $1.9tr