Weekly#368

  • McKinsey: COVID-19: Implications for business
  • How execs at Twitter, Slack and Box decided to send everyone home
  • Amazon to Hire 100,000 Warehouse and Delivery Workers Amid Coronavirus Shutdowns
  • Nokia adds 5G to worldwide IoT network, lets carriers test new sensors
  • “Microsoft Corp’s Teams chat and conferencing app gained more than 12 million daily users in one week, a 37.5% jump as more people worked from home during the coronavirus outbreak, the company said on Thursday…Teams had 44 million users as of March 18, Microsoft said, more than double the 20 million daily active users that the software maker reported in November. Teams users grew from 32 million to 44 million in the period between March 11 and March 18 alone, as many more U.S. companies asked employees to work from home, Microsoft said.”
  • Netflix urged to slow streaming to prevent breaking the internet
  • Ford releases a data set to accelerate autonomous car development
  • iPadOS 13.4 lets iPads use trackpads
  • Here’s everything new in Android 11 Developer Preview 2
  • Can Astronauts Use GPS to Navigate on the Moon? NASA Scientists Say Yes
  • PlayStation 5 will feature a 10.2-teraflop GPU and a speedy custom SSD
  • E-commerce sales surpassed 10% of total (US) retail sales in 2019 for the first time
  • WSJ: Square Gets Green Light to Open a Bank (paywall)
  • Closer than ever: It is 100 seconds to midnight
  • Italian hospital saves Covid-19 patients lives by 3D printing valves for reanimation devices
  • Pandemic Erodes Gig Economy Work
  • Coronavirus will change the grocery industry forever…”A third of consumers said Sunday that they had purchased groceries for online pick up or delivery in the past seven days, according to a survey by analysts at Gordon Haskett Research Advisors. Around 41% said they were buying groceries online for the first time.”

Weekly#367

  • OECD AI Policy Observatory
  • Why you sometimes need to break the rules in data viz
  • Harvard to Make All Classes Online March 23, President Says
  • 2014: Sequoia’s Investment Memo on YouTube
  • Huawei expects 20% drop in Android smartphone sales this year
  • Amazon is now selling its cashierless store technology to other retailers
  • Amazon is secretly working on a cure for the common cold
  • What Office Life Might Look Like in the Year 2030 (paywall)
  • Coronavirus Conference Gets Canceled Because of Coronavirus
  • Augmented-reality startup Magic Leap reportedly considering selling itself
  • Hackers are jumping on the COVID-19 pandemic to spread malware
  • AT&T Suspends Broadband Data Caps During Coronavirus Crisis
  • Gsuite 2 billion monthly active users
  • Europe’s Deliveroo and Glovo switch on contactless delivery during COVID-19 pandemic
  • Coronavirus Forces World’s Largest Work-From-Home Experiment

Weekly#366

  • Amazon makes its same-day delivery service faster in select U.S. cities
  • “…British online grocer Ocado warns of “exceptionally high demand” as coronavirus spreads…Ocado suggests placing grocery orders two to three days in advance and booking a weekday delivery slot…Ocado’s stock rose more than 6% in late afternoon trading on Monday…”
  • Facebook Messenger on iOS is now twice as fast and a quarter the size
  • Alibaba says AI can identify coronavirus infections with 96% accuracy within 20 seconds
  • Apple now lets apps send ads in push notifications…Apple single sign-on coming next month
  • Google’s self-driving biz Waymo eyes expansion with $2.25B cash injection…this is the first time the company has welcomed external investment. Investors included VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, auto part maker Magna, and American auto retailer AutoNation
  • Alipay owner Ant Financial takes minority stake in Klarna…”…Klarna said its technology is being used by more than 200,000 retailers and e-commerce platforms globally at this point, including AliExpress, H&M, ASOS,  Expedia Group, IKEA, Farfetch, Adidas, Spotify, Samsung and Nike…Last year it said it added over 75,000 new merchants …It claims a base of 85 million shoppers...”
  • Nvidia’s GPU Technology Conference will now be online only due to coronavirus concerns
  • Earth may have been a ‘water world’ 3bn years ago, scientists find
  • FT:Operators will spend about $1tn on kit to enable them to offer the latest generation networks (paywall)
  • GM reveals ‘Ultium,’ the heart of its EV strategy…Using a single architecture for such a wide variety of vehicles provides much-needed scale and capital-efficiency to what has been a small-volume and profitability-challenged EV market
  • NASA accepts applications for astronauts for the first time in four years
  • Clearview AI is operating a sister entity called Insight Camera that’s been experimenting with live facial recognition
  • Electric vehicles are changing the future of auto maintenance…Tires and glass emerge as dominant consumables of the EV era
  • Nvidia acquires data storage and management platform SwiftStack…a software-centric data storage and management platform that supports public cloud, on-premises and edge deployments.
  • Sequoia Capital sent a memo to its portfolio companies on Thursday.
  • Twitter is testing ephemeral tweets in Brazil and calling them ‘fleets’

Weekly#365

  • “…Google is placing new restrictions on which Android apps can track your location in the background, with a new review process that will check whether an app definitely needs access to the data…”
  • Intuit confirms that it is buying Credit Karma for $7.1B in cash and stock
  • Revolut raises $500 million at a $5.5 billion valuation
  • “…Amazon will open the doors to a 10,000 square-foot Amazon Go Grocery store in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighbourhood, less than a mile from the tech giant’s downtown Seattle headquarters. It’ll be stocked with 5,000 different products…”
  • Global telcos join Alphabet, SoftBank’s flying cellphone antenna lobbying effort
  • WSJ: Teens Are Deleting Instagrams Almost as Fast as They Post Them (paywall)
  • FT/LEX: Tier/e-scooters: ride at your own risk…Competition in the sector is as crowded as the cities catered for — expect consolidation (paywall)
  • FT: Mastercard announces new chief executive (paywall)
  • PDF: The Future of the Last-Mile Ecosystem (World Economic Forum)
  • The a16z Marketplace 100: Index and analysis
  • YouTube has more than two billion monthly users around the world, and 500 hours of video uploaded every minute.
  • Softech 2020 Tech Report (in Turkish) 
  • Walmart is quietly working on an Amazon Prime competitor called Walmart+
  • The first protein to be discovered in a meteorite.
  • Gmail: Improving Malicious Document Detection in Gmail with Deep Learning

Weekly#364

  • AWS acquired Datarow
  • Morgan Stanley Is Buying E*Trade, Betting on Smaller Customers…Investment bank will pay $13 billion for the e-broker (paywall)
  • In 2020, Amazon will deliver more packages in the United States than FedEx…Amazon to deliver 3.5 billion packages through own network in 2019
  • Apple is considering letting users change default email, browser, music apps in iOS
  • Battery charging meets machine learning
  • DoorDash, Grubhub and others are weighing tie-ups or looking for funding…“…DoorDash Inc., Postmates Inc. and Uber Technologies Inc.’s Eats have each discussed merging in various combinations last year, according to people familiar with those talks. None resulted in a deal…” (paywall)
  • Elon Musk’s Boring Company Finishes First Tunnel for 155mph Vegas Loop
  • China Turns to Health-Rating Apps to Control Movements During Coronavirus Outbreak…Tech giants such as Alibaba and Tencent tapped to develop color-coded systems to classify people based on their health conditions and travel history (paywall)
  • Twitch to top 40 million US viewers next year, forecast says
  • Why DNA tests are suddenly unpopular
  • Google launches the first developer preview of Android 11…Currently, the release schedule calls for monthly developer preview releases until April, followed by three betas and a final release in Q3 2020.
  • Etsy Accelerates AI Experimentation Thanks to Cloud (Paywall)
  • How ‘The Mandalorian’ and ILM invisibly reinvented film and TV production
  • Powerful antibiotic discovered using machine learning for first time
  • A group of ex-NSA and Amazon engineers are building a ‘GitHub for data’
  • Almost half of connected medical devices are vulnerable to hackers exploiting BlueKeep

Weekly#363

  • GSMA cancels Mobile World Congress due to coronavirus concerns
  • Our phones can now detect health problems from Parkinson’s to depression. Is that a good thing?
  • Microsoft’s game streaming service Project xCloud launches in preview on iOS
  • Blue Origin’s new rocket engine production facility opens on Monday
  • Rocket Lab will launch a satellite to the Moon for NASA to prepare for the Lunar Gateway
  • Shopify Annual Report PDF [2019]
  • The making of Mojo, AR contact lenses that give your eyes superpowers
  • Tesla owner says remotely disabled Autopilot features have been restored
  • Apple might use its own 5G antenna in its 2020 iPhones
  • Britain sets new daily record for wind generation, topping 44% of country’s electricity consumption
  • Online-only platforms are going offline with permanent spaces
  • YouTube says it paid the music industry more than $3 billion last year
  • WhatsApp hits 2 billion users, up from 1.5 billion 2 years ago
  • Is a $1000 Aftermarket Add-On as Capable as Tesla’s Auto­pilot and Cadillac’s Super Cruise?

Weekly#362

  • Spotify Q4 reports 271M total MAUs on revenues of $2B, podcast listening grows 200%
  • Jeff Weiner will step down as CEO of LinkedIn June 1, product head Ryan Roslansky steps up
  • Disney+ is up to 28.6 million subscribers…Disney added 10 million the first day it launched. 
  • Spotify is buying Bill Simmons’s The Ringer to boost its podcast business…It’s the fourth podcast deal Spotify has done in a year.
  • Scientists have discovered that a longtime fungal resident of the Chernobyl complex could actually “eat” radiation.
  • YouTuber uses neural networks to upscale 1896 short film to 4K 60 fps
  • IMF: Oil-rich Gulf Arab states may spend savings in 15 years
  • SpaceX ‘likely to spin out’ and pursue an IPO for Starlink satellite internet business
  • Good at StarCraft? DARPA wants to train military robots with your brain waves
  • YouTube makes $15 billion a year from ads — and pays more than half of that to video makers
  • Netflix begins streaming in AV1 on Android
  • 7-Eleven is the next retailer to test cashierless stores
  • Apple Watch Outsells the Entire Swiss Watch Industry in 2019
  • Exclusive: China’s mobile giants to take on Google’s Play store – sources
  • Academics steal data from air-gapped systems using screen brightness variations
  • Microsoft now sees Amazon and Google as its main gaming threats
  • How to Approach Industry 4.0 – Your 2020 Checklist

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

Weekly#359

  • 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