Weekly#361

Facebook hits 2.5 B users
NASA finds real uses for VR and AR in astronomy and engineering
Self-driving company Waymo teams up with UPS for package delivery
SpaceX launches 60 new Starlink satellites
Will you still need a college education in 2040?
- Traditional colleges will be forced to adapt to meet the needs of employers
- We’re going to see more and more alternatives to traditional colleges
- Soft skills will continue to be important, but most jobs will require a high level of technological competence
- Specialists will be more valued than generalists
- Micro credentialing will become more prevalent
- Lifelong learners and companies that encourage a culture of learning will be the ones to thrive
Atari is opening eight video game hotels across the U.S.
Google’s tenth messaging service will “unify” Gmail, Drive, Hangouts Chat…The GSuite team already has a Slack clone, but now it’s making a second Slack clone.
AirPods: The New It Item Among the Playground Set (paywall)
Arvind Krishna will replace Ginni Rometty as IBM CEO in April
Amazon now has more than 150 million Prime members across the world
Corona Virus Map

Weekly#360

Nytimes: The Secretive Company That Might End Privacy as We Know It
World Economic Forum (Video)
More than 400,000 German jobs at risk in switch to electric cars
Apple acquires Xnor.ai, edge AI spin-out from Paul Allen’s AI2, for price in $200M range…The three-year-old startup’s secret sauce has to do with AI on the edge — machine learning and image recognition tools that can be executed on low-power devices rather than relying on the cloud…
Amazon Ring sales nearly tripled
Boston Dynamics appoints its first-ever new CEO
Scientists re-create voice of 3000-year-old mummy
NASA reveals the payloads for the first commercial Moon cargo deliveries… in total, there are 16 payloads
First space-baked cookies took 2 hours in experimental oven
Rolls-Royce plans mini nuclear reactors by 2029
Jira Software gets better roadmaps
What we can learn about robots from Japan
Tesla Surges Past $100 Billion Market Value, Eclipsing VW

US patents hit record 333,530 granted in 2019; IBM, Samsung (not the FAANGs) lead the pack
Facebook Backs Off Controversial Plan to Sell Ads in WhatsApp (paywall)
Visa is acquiring Plaid for $5.3 billion, 2x its final private valuation
Renewables will be cheaper than coal by 2026 in China – study
25% of users watching Netflix on their iPhones also watch Disney+
Grubhub sale rumors highlight the state of the struggling food-delivery industry
Twitch’s loss of top streamers impacts hours watched and streamed in Q4 2019, report says
Mojo Vision is developing AR contact lenses
Copilot is a subscription personal finance tracker aiming to kill Mint
JWT The Future 100: 2020 Report [PDF]
Michael Moritz backs Turkish grocery start-up ($40m funding into ultrafast delivery company Getir) (paywall)
Hyundai and Kia put over $110M into UK electric delivery vehicles startup Arrival
Alphabet Becomes Fourth U.S. Company to Reach $1 Trillion Market Value (paywall)
Germany to invest 86 bln euros to upgrade ageing railway network
DeepMind found an AI learning technique also works in human brains…An algorithm that learns through rewards may show how our brain does too
These living bricks use bacteria to build themselves
Here’s how just four satellites could provide worldwide internet

Here’s everything Google announced at CES 2020
California’s new privacy law, explained
Arduino launches a new modular platform for IoT development
In 2018, the oil and gas industries spent an estimated $1.75 billion on AI — a sum that is projected to balloon to $4 billion by 2025.
WSJ: Silicon Valley to Big Oil: We Can Manage Your Data Better Than You (paywall)
Amazon has sold more than 100 million Alexa devices
Google Assistant is now used by 500 million monthly active users
The new Bluetooth standard will be known as LE Audio and one of the biggest improvements it will include will be a feature called Multi-Stream Audio
Toyota will transform a 175-acre site in Japan into a ‘prototype city of the future’
The End of the Beginning
Uber is bringing audio recording, irregular ride checks and authentication code safety features to India
Huawei unveils openEuler, CentOS-based Linux distribution
Warner Bros. Signs Deal for AI-Driven Film Management System
A New Protein Source Made From Air Could Be A Planet-Saving Game Changer
Apple says its software business is booming
Bosch Deploys AI to Prevent Attacks on Cars’ Electronic Systems (paywall)

Samsung shipped more than 6.7 million Galaxy 5G smartphones in 2019
Grab and Singtel team up to apply for a digital full bank license in Singapore
Tesla battery researcher unveils new cell that could last 1 million miles in ‘robot taxis’
Tesla’s market cap is now double Ford’s, after being eclipsed by it eight months ago
Will Apple get rid of the charging port, too? All signs point to portless iPhones
How streaming and other data demands take a toll on the environment
Amazon’s Biggest Threat Isn’t a Huge Competitor but a Collective
These Breakthroughs Made the 2010s the Decade of the Brain