• Tesla said Wednesday it is on track to begin production in July on the car, and announced plans to ramp up to 5,000 vehicles a week in the fourth quarter.
• Researchers at Alphabet unit, Dutch institute demonstrated ‘collision attack’ on cryptographic technology known as SHA-1, Google publicly broke one of the major algorithms in web encryption, called SHA-1. The company’s researchers showed that with enough computing power — roughly 110 years of computing from a single GPU — you can produce a collision, effectively breaking the algorithm. We’ve known this was possible for a while, but nobody has done it, in part because of the possible fallout.
• Google’s Waze Plans Expansion of Ride-Sharing Service
• Facebook is starting to put ads in the middle of its videos
• Around 40 light-years away, seven Earth-sized planets have been spotted orbiting closely around a small, ultra-cool star. It’s one of the largest solar systems that’s ever been discovered outside of our own, and it’s a particularly enticing find in the ongoing search for extraterrestrial life.
• Tesla will double the number of Supercharger locations in North America in 2017, the company revealed today in its quarterly letter to shareholders. The company currently has 2,636 Superchargers at 373 locations across the United States, Canada, and Mexico, and plans to have twice as many locations open by the end of 2017.
• Rogue One: A Star Wars Story is getting a digital release on March 24th
• WhatsApp Adds Snapchat-Like Story Feature Called Status
  Messaging app is latest Facebook property to crib popular feature from upstart rival, Snap Inc.
• Telegram hits 100m users
• Serious Cloudflare bug exposed a potpourri of secret customer data
• One vaccine to wipe out ALL mosquito-borne diseases? It’s in clinical trials
• Bees learn to play golf and show off how clever they really are
• The hidden new business opportunity in autonomous cars
• Amazon today announced that there are now more than 10,000 Alexa skills available on devices like the Amazon Echo. By comparison, there were roughly 130 skills available last January, and Amazon surpassed the 5,000 mark just last November.
• 40 years of personal computing
• Tesla wants to sell future cars with insurance and maintenance included in the price
• Bill Gates: the robot that takes your job should pay taxes
• An email fail made Google suspect Uber was copying its self-driving-car technology
• 7 amazing technologies we’ll see by 2030
• China Is Developing its Own Digital Currency

• 99.6% of new smartphones run iOS or Android; RIP Windows and Blackberry
• Google’s training AI to catch diabetic blindness before it’s too late
• Mark Zuckerberg wrote a nearly 6,000-word letter about the future of Facebook — here are the key points
• Project Loon : …it has implemented new algorithms powered by machine learning techniques to guide the balloons into clusters, taking advantage of wind pattern data and other factors. Project Loon balloons can now be sent to an area that needs internet access within weeks instead of months, X says.
• Spotify-backed startup has raised $22 million to crack open a new music streaming market
• Google built an AI that will play piano duets with you, video
• Recode : Video : Eddy Cue, SVP, internet software and services, Apple
• Monzo’s more than 100,000 users get access to a pre-paid Mastercard and accompanying iOS and Android app.
• The Alps could lose as much as 70% of snow cover by the end of the century
• Kenyan banks have joined forces to launch a mobile money rival to M-Pesa
• Kraft Heinz wants to buy Unilever to create the world’s largest food giant
• Available for free, Data Selfie is an open-source Chrome extension that helps you discover how machine learning algorithms track and process your Facebook activity, and gain insights about your personality and habits.
• Pixar teams up with Khan Academy for a free course on the art of storytelling
• Verizon just acquired a drone company
  The telecom giant announced last year that it would start providing data plans for drones, too.
• Former Cisco CEO John Chambers invests in counter-drone security firm Dedrone
• Now you can buy things from Costco, Whole Foods and other stores via Google Home
• Dubai is planning to launch autonomous, one-passenger drone taxis this summer
• What News-Writing Bots Mean for the Future of Journalism
• Walt the bot is here to paint your walls, and it can do it 30 times faster than humans
• Have your MVP Running in Prod within 15 Minutes with Serverless

• NBA, Take-Two to Create Professional Videogame League (‘NBA 2K eLeague’)
• Twitter added 2 million new users in the quarter, and now claims 319 million monthly active users.
• Snap has a $1 billion cloud services deal with Amazon, too
• Consumer Watchdog asks California to take Uber’s self-driving trucks off the road
• Airbnb reportedly in talks to acquire luxury rental startup (which offers short-term rentals at villas, mansions and other ultra-luxe homes)
• The man building flying cars for Larry Page wants to reinvent the way you prepare dinner
• Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos sees the music industry’s next ‘gigantic growth’ coming from devices like Echo
• Netflix dominates Saturdays — here’s how it stacks up against TV networks the rest of the week
• The Next Big Blue-Collar Job Is Coding
• Forget Coding—Here’s The Skill You Need Most When You Start Your Career
• Spotify analyzed a year’s worth of data to create your perfect playlist for snow, sun, and rain
• Sony’s TVs Will Be the First With Google Assistant Inside
• …Using these mashups, the idea is that scientists will be able to take a few of your skin cells, grow miniature versions of all your major organs, and put them on a chip. Then doctors can test out the best compounds for whatever disease you might have—not in a mouse, but in a mini-you. “This will enable a new era of personalized medicine…
• UPS drivers don’t turn left—and it saves them 10 million gallons of gas a year
• The code that took America to the moon was just published to GitHub, and it’s like a 1960s time capsule
• Floating train at 2000 km/h set to store 10% of Dutch electricity
• These “Smart Glasses” Adjust To Your Vision Automatically
• Scientists Discover How To Make Tires From Trees, Grass
• Bank of America tests totally automated, employee-free branches
• ING’s agile transformation

• Facebook Tunes Into Television’s Market (The social network is developing an app for television set-top boxes, hoping to tap more ad dollars, $70 billion TV ad market)
• Mozilla kills off open source IoT project
• Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk Endorse 23 Principles for AI
• A little-known part of Amazon is growing fast — and directly competes with Google and Facebook
• PayPal’s CEO reveals the 2 key trends that are driving the fintech revolution
• Snapchat files for a $3 billion IPO
• The State of Sales & Marketing at the 50 Fastest-Growing B2B Companies
• Scientists have invented paper that you can print with light, erase with heat, and reuse 80 times
• The Booming Demand for Commercial Drone Pilots
• PSA: The PlayStation 4 will get external HDD support with firmware 4.50
• iPhone 8 concept reimagines the home button with a Touch Bar-like interface
• Disposable drone could one day save your life
• Smart Cities, How 5G can help municipalities becomes vibrant smart cities [PDF]
• The Most Innovative Companies 2016
• Spurious Correlations
• Competing in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
• The voice-first user interface has gone mainstream
• The UX of Voice: The Invisible Interface
• Working from home? Google wants to create a drone to go to meetings for you
• Snap has a $2 billion contract with Google for cloud services
• Facebook’s AI now lets you search for photos by their content
• Google is killing its experimental Hands Free payment app

• Toshiba to Sell Part of Its Chip Business
• Google Parent Alphabet Finds New Growth Beyond Search
• Amazon Expands Into Ocean Freight
• Digital in 2017 Global Overview
• Xiaomi executive Barra joins Facebook to lead virtual reality business
• Google sales poised to overtake Microsoft in changing of the guard
• Comcast mobile phone service coming in 2017 with wireless/cable bundles
• Microsoft HoloLens: sales figures are in the ‘thousands‘
• Hydrogen turned into metal in stunning act of alchemy that could revolutionise technology and spaceflight
• A Challenge to the ‘Secular Stagnation’ Theory, A new paper argues aging populations have not had a negative effect on growth—and one reason may be robots
• Google brings AI to Raspberry Pi
• Details on Snap’s $25 billion IPO are expected to be revealed next week
• Netflix and Amazon dropped millions on these Sundance movies everyone will be talking about

• Three New Predictions for Automation and Jobs
• Tesla Boosts Range of All-Electric Model S to 335 Miles
• Google Uses Its Search Engine to Hawk Its Products
• Amazon is crushing Walmart, eBay, and Target in the growing mobile shopping space (…Amazon’s mobile app is increasing its penetration rate in the US, with 50% of US online shoppers now on its app…)
• Amazon just launched virtual ‘Dash’ buttons for one-click buying from the homepage
• Video is the new HTML
• Report Digital Transformation Initiative Professional Services Industry [PDF]
• Apple files a billion-dollar royalty suit against Qualcomm
• Machines that are capable of making precise operations inside the human eye will make it possible to perform entirely new procedures.
• Tesla’s second generation Autopilot could reduce crash rate by 90%, says CEO Elon Musk
• Top 20 Growth Hacking Articles from Issues 1–4 of growth.email
• Google’s former king of search is joining Uber to lead the engineering team
• Google Maps may soon tell you how bad the parking is at your destination
• 10 million self-driving cars will be on the road by 2020
• World Economic Forum Videos
• Strategic Update: The Future of Innovation
• Artificial Intelligence

• Atlassian to Buy Trello for $425 Million
• Facebook to Test Mid-Roll Video Ads
• Amazon Echo -> 4% of American households… Apple’s Siri handles over 2bn commands a week, and 20% of Google searches on Android-powered handsets in America are input by voice (Economist)
• 7 bot trends to watch in 2017
• Just one autonomous car will use 4,000 GB of data/day.. vehicles will generate and consume roughly 40 terabytes of data for every eight hours of driving.
• All electric trains in the Netherlands now run on wind energy
• Google quietly shut its internet drone project last year
• Fitbit reportedly held talks to acquire Jawbone
• iOS revenue to surpass $1 trillion this year
• Why Norway is killing FM radio
• Deep Learning at Gilt
• Amazon Web Services has opened a London region
• Netflix’s content boss explained the reason he bet big on ‘The Crown,’ its Golden Globe winner
• Apple captures more than 40% of wireless headphones market in the US.
• An average of 2,700 (!) apps were released daily in the Google Play Store, compared with 1,800 in the Apple App Store.
• Amazon Web Services quietly buys cybersecurity startup Harvest.ai to bolster cloud protections
• An Essential Guide to WeChat Mini Apps
• For Non-Tech Companies, if You Can’t Build It, Buy a Start-Up
• Good Product Manager, Bad Product Manager
• The mobile app gold rush may be over

 

• The Robotic Grocery Store of the Future Is Here
• 5 Big Predictions for Artificial Intelligence in 2017
• Apple Confirms $1 Billion Investment in SoftBank’s $100 billion Vision Fund
• Tesla sold a total of 76,230 cars and sport-utility vehicles last year.
• A Third Of Consumers Say They Would Exchange Personal Info For Content
• Holiday Spending on Mobile Games Nears $1 Billion
• Hyundai Shows Off Wearable Robots to Help Paraplegics, Elderly
• SpaceX Launch Video : Team, Passion, Culture (Youtube)
• Google’s A.I. is training itself to count calories in food photos
• Bose is building ride-smoothing tech for autonomous cars
• PlayStation 4 sales surpass 53M, Uncharted 4 moves 8.7M
• Alexa: Amazon’s Operating System
• Amazon delivered over 2 bn items globally in 2016
• Minecraft has now sold over 25 million copies on PC and Mac
• A.I. Downs expert human fighter pilot in dogfight simulation
• Insurance firm Fukoku Mutual Life Insurance is making 34 employees redundant and replacing them with IBM’s Watson Explorer AI
• Ford plans to take Amazon’s Alexa for a ride
• Apple’s App Store Sales Top $28 Billion
• Amazon Brings Fire TV Experience to Third-Party TV Sets
  (In a move mirroring Roku TV, Amazon is partnering with lower-priced TV brands including Seiki and Westinghouse)
• Wind power overtakes coal for first time in UK

Twitter

• Transparent Video
• The avg Web page size today is equal to installing Doom back then

• Amazon patents show flying warehouses that send delivery drones to your door
• 14 busy tech leaders share their tips for managing everyday work and life
• Volkswagen acquires PayByPhone, a parking payment app used by 12.5M users in 300 cities
• Tencent invests in mapping company to serve driverless cars (Autonomous cars requires centimeter detailed maps)
• Five industries under threat from technology
  (Travel agents, manufacturers, insurers, advisers and car repair garages face strain)
• The Best Podcasts for Self-Improvement
• AT&T Blocks Robocalls Before They Ring, If You Have the Right Phone
• A pre-CES 2017 look at the state of autonomous vehicles
• Volvo integrates Skype for Business in its 90 series vehicles
• The new Microsoft under Satya Nadella is still looking good on Wall Street
• This Robot Is Better Than Most Humans At Foosball (Twitter)
• Mining 24 Hours a Day with Robots
• The 2016 WeChat Data Report