Weekly#352

Alexa’s voice can now express disappointment and excitement
QZ: The World In 50 Years
Pi-rate Radio
Farmers Put Cows in VR So They Can Chill
Yes, electric vehicles really are better than fossil fuel burners
How does a Brain-Computer Interface Work?
Scientists hit 21.6% perovskite cell efficiency using concentrator PV
Elon Musk: Tesla Cybertruck already has 200,000 pre-orders
Deutsche Telekom looking into a possible merger with Orange: Handelsblatt
Google is going to deploy Loon balloons in rural Peru…Loon’s solar-powered balloons reach altitudes of more than 12 miles (19.3 kilometres) above Earth and can cover areas within a 25-mile radius. Over the last decade, the company has improved the balloons’ life span to an average of 150 days (the record so far is 223 days).
How heat from the sun could help clean up steel and cement
Uber’s Shared Driver Accounts (paywall)

Weekly#351

VTEX, an e-commerce platform used by Walmart, raises $140M led by SoftBank’s LatAm fund
Time: Best Inventions of 2019
Storing Energy in Hydrogen
To cut down on bugs, Apple is changing how it develops its software
Google is killing Google Cloud Print
Why a robot pizza startup could be worth $4 billion
“Knowledge workers” could be the most impacted by future automation
Disney says its new Disney+ streaming service is so popular you can’t stream it
10 lessons for Disney, Apple, and all the new streaming companies trying to take down Netflix
Google guesses what your political leanings are—but it’s a secret

Tesla will unveil its ‘Cybertruck’ electric pickup on November 21st
Travis Kalanick’s Secret Startup, CloudKitchens (paywall)
Whatsapp is introducing Catalogs for Small Businesses
Alipay launches international e-wallet, giving foreigners access to mobile payment platform in first for China
Apple Eyes 2022 Release for AR Headset, 2023 for Glasses
More than 90% of large publishers use the Google ad server, DoubleClick for Publishers (paywall)
Next in Google’s Quest for Consumer Dominance—Banking (paywall)
Will Tesla and Google Kill the German Car?
New NASA app puts you in the pilot’s seat of Boeing’s Starliner or SpaceX’s Crew Dragon
The Curiosity rover detects oxygen behaving strangely on Mars
Disney+ has already attracted over 10 million subscribers
Dell Unveils Subscription Model to Counter Amazon, Microsoft
SpaceX launches another 60 Starlink satellites while setting two rocket reuse records
Google wants Chrome to offer instantaneous and native app-like experiences
The Science Is Extremely Clear: You Need to Prioritize Sleep
It Takes Two: How to Turn Job-Sharing Into a Promotion…and Another

Elon Musk says building the first sustainable city on Mars will take 1,000 Starships and 20 years
Yandex has built a fleet of self-driving food-delivery robots
researchers from the University of Oxford recently determined that the probability of our entire species going extinct in any given year is as high as one in 14,000.
Electric cars are changing the cost of driving
Canso spaceport partners with U.S. company to recycle rockets in space…including hotels, research parks, fuel depots and storage centres.
Netflix, HBO and Cable Giants Are Coming for Password Cheats
Kepler achieves a world-first for satellite broadband with 100Mbps connection to the Arctic
OpenAI has published the text-generating AI it said was too dangerous to share
Microsoft Hololens 2
SoftBank Reveals $6.5 Billion Loss From Uber, WeWork Turmoil

Massive, AI-Powered Robots Are 3D-Printing Entire Rockets
Google’s got a chief decision scientist. Here’s what she does
Ikea Catalog Covers | Argos Catalog
The five keys to a successful Google team
1.5 Million Packages a Day: The Internet Brings Chaos to N.Y. Streets
McDonald’s delivery is now available across 950 of its sites across the UK and accounts for just over 10% of all its UK business
Google is acquiring Fitbit for $2.1 billion
Small satellite startup Kepler opens sign-ups for its IoT developer kits
Blade Runner: How well did the film predict 2019’s tech?
Google Introduces Huge Universal Language Translation Model: 103 Languages Trained on Over 25 Billion Examples