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Weekly#158

  • The Epic Story of Dropbox’s Exodus From the Amazon Cloud Empire
  • Volkswagen’s Audi (VOWG_p.DE), Daimler’s (DAIGn.DE) Mercedes-Benz, BMW (BMWG.DE) and car industry suppliers Bosch and Continental (CONG.DE) are all working on technologies for autonomous or semi-autonomous cars.Earlier on Friday, Germany’s Manager Magazin reported that Uber had placed an order for at least 100,000 Mercedes S-Class cars, citing sources at both companies.The top-flight limousine, around 100,000 of which Mercedes-Benz sold last year, does not yet have fully autonomous driving functionality.Another source familiar with the matter said no order had been placed with Mercedes-Benz. Daimler and Uber declined to comment. (Reuters)
  • Domino’s has announced the world’s first pizza delivery robot (QZ)
  • It’s been a week of extremes for Google’s artificial intelligence efforts, as the company luxuriates in the afterglow of winning a board game tournament against one of the world’s top players, while it privately tries to sell one of its most visible robotics efforts.
    Google’s decision to try to shed its Boston Dynamics robotics group highlights a fundamental research problem: software is far easier to develop and test than hardware. That’s especially true when dealing with artificial intelligence and robotics….To develop robots, you have two options: You can either simulate an environment and robot with software and hope the results are accurate enough that you can load it into a machine and watch it walk. Or you can skip the simulation and tinker directly on a robot, hoping you can learn things from the real world– but that’s awfully slow. (Business Week)
  • Ikea’s Newest Product Introduces Hydroponics To Mainstream America
    (Hydroponics is a plant-growing method that involves no soil.) (FastCoDesign)
  • Facebook’s Messenger Bot Store could be the most important launch since the App Store (Tech Crunch)
  • The study from the National Foundation for American Policy, a non-partisan think tank based in Arlington, Va., shows that immigrants started more than half of the current crop of U.S.-based startups valued at $1 billion or more. (WSJ)
  • Spotify is using 50,000 anonymous hipsters to find your next favorite song (QZ)
  • Earlier this week, Sony announced that its PlayStation VR would be available for the low price of just $399. Given that competing VR headsets like the Oculus are at least $200 more expensive, people were pretty excited about it. In fact, purchases of the PlayStation camera went up 3000 percent on Amazon (Move controllers went up 1000 percent), according to Ars Technica. (TechCrunch)