Weekly#339

Netflix tests human-driven curation with launch of ‘Collections’
Sphero has acquired littleBits
Time: World Greatest Places: 2019 including Troy Museum
Microsoft Azure’s cloud regions in Switzerland are now open for business
UPS invests in autonomous trucking company
Rwanda to phase out gas motorcycle-taxis for e-motos
Eero updates subscription plans.
Fitbit is launching a $10 premium subscription service
Lego is piloting audio and braille building instructions
Duolingo is now offering a beta version of Latin courses
Utility death spirals and energy communities
What most Americans are looking for in a new home: solar panels
Kids are becoming emotionally attached to robots
Why the Guardian is changing the language it uses about the environment…”…From now, house style guide recommends terms such as ‘climate crisis’ and ‘global heating’…”
Vaping-linked lung disease cases jump from 94 to 153 in 5 days, CDC says
Australian Government invest 15 million in Evie ultra-fast EV charging network
Coursera makes its first acquisition, Rhyme Softworks, to power new Coursera Labs offering
SpaceX’s Starhopper Successfully Completes Final Test Flight…”Starhopper will never see space, but SpaceX CEO Elon Musk hopes its successor, called Starship, will eventually transport up to 100 people (and roughly 150 tons of cargo) to far-off destinations such as the Moon or Mars…”

Weekly#338

Steam balloons could be used to launch satellites
Mobile gaming is a $68.5 billion global business, and investors are buying in…Global gaming has seen $9.6 billion in investments
Splunk acquires cloud monitoring service SignalFx for $1.05B
Porsche invests in ‘low visibility’ sensor startup TriEye
China’s satellite tests pulsar navigation for future deep space exploration…The positioning accuracy in the experiments reached 10 km,
Starbucks, monetary superpower
Android ditches desserts as Q becomes 10
German city offers $1.1M to whoever proves it doesn’t exist
Matrix 4’ Officially a Go With Keanu Reeves, Carrie-Anne Moss and Lana Wachowski
Flawed Algorithms Are Grading Millions of Students’ Essays
Nasa mission to Jupiter moon Europa moves step closer to launch…Mission that could shed light on possibility of life on icy rock is expected to lift off in 2025

Weekly#337

Lumineye helps first responders identify people through walls
Google discloses its acquisition of mobile learning app Socratic as it relaunches on iOS
Y Combinator-backed Holy Grail is using machine learning to build better batteries
Facebook is starting to sell streaming video subscriptions — but not from HBO or Showtime
UPS Has Been Delivering Cargo in Self-Driving Trucks for Months And No One Knew
Inside the effort to print lungs and breathe life into them with stem cells
The world’s first solar road has turned out to be a colossal failure that’s falling apart and doesn’t generate enough energy, according to a report
Free and open-source tools for analog filmmaking
A hotter planet will make solar power less efficient
The energy transition is underway: 10 charts tell the story

Weekly#336

With warshipping, hackers ship their exploits directly to their target’s mail room
John Fallon explains why the education company is pivoting to digital textbooks
BCG Decoding Digital Talent (Thanks to Can)
LightSail 2, Pushed by Sunlight, Raises Its Orbit by 10,500 Feet in Just Two Weeks
Finland, Solar Foods, is planning to bring to market a new protein powder, Solein, made out of CO₂, water and electricity. It’s a high-protein, flour-like ingredient that contains 50 percent protein content, 5–10 percent fat, and 20–25 percent carbs.
Hyundai’s first car with a solar roof is available in Korea…The solar panels are expected to charge 30 to 60 percent of the battery per day. With six hours of daily charging, it could theoretically increase drivers’ travel distance by an extra 1,300 km (about 807 miles) per year.
Xiaomi Is Developing A Smartphone With Solar Panel
Tokyo offers $1 billion research grant for human augmentation, cyborg tech…Artificial hibernation is also of interest to the Japanese government.
Apple rolls out Apple Card Preview to select users
Apple expands its bug bounty, increases maximum payout to $1M
Samsung is bringing PC game streaming to the Note 10
GitHub gets a CI/CD service
Slack, Zoom, Dropbox, Office: Which US presidential campaigns are using what

Weekly#335

TikTok-parent ByteDance is getting into mobile search
Revolut launches stock trading in limited release
Amazon acquires flash-based cloud storage startup E8 Storage
Amazon develops a new way to help Alexa answer complex questions.. related blog post
Prodly announces $3.5M seed to automate low-code cloud deployments
Spotify hits 108M paying users and 232M overall, but its average revenue per user declines
Apple’s services revenue grows 13% year-over-year
Consumer internet companies are easy to understand, but hard to create
Vizio rolls out its Apple AirPlay and HomeKit integrations to its SmartCast TV platform
Hello Heart raises $12 million for at-home monitoring and behavioral treatment for hypertension
DeepMind creates algorithm to predict kidney damage in advance (paywall)
News consumption in the UK
Artificial intelligence is quietly disrupting the fragrance development process
A Wikipedia for Generation Z…Famous Birthdays has become a go-to database of teen culture—and is ushering in a whole new generation of stars.
AI’s new workforce: the data-labelling industry spreads globally (paywall)
The Hottest Phones for the Next Billion Users Aren’t Smartphones…First-time internet consumers are connecting to the web on a new breed of device costing about $25
Digital Platforms Inquiry [PDF]
The $60 Gadget That’s Changing Electronic Music
LightSail 2 becomes first spacecraft to change orbit using sunlight
How Robots Change the World, Oxford Economics [PDF]
How to prepare children for the jobs of the future
Physical factors such as natural light, temperature and air quality can increase the learning progress of primary school pupils by as much as 16% in a year.
Amazon as experiment