• 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)

• 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

• AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data (paywall)
• Google Claims a Quantum Breakthrough That Could Change Computing
• Tesla Returns To Profitability, Smashes Analyst Estimates
• “The Last of Us Part II” is now scheduled to arrive on PlayStation 4 on May 29, 2020
• Some of the universe’s heavier elements are created by neutron star collisions
• Netflix launches Rs 199 ($2.8) mobile-only monthly plan in India
• An Uber boss insists its flying taxis will be fully functional by 2023, and says the company is talking with NASA to find a way to manage air traffic
• The think tank Carbon Tracker Initiative reported that four in five coal plants in the European Union were unprofitable and utilities faced losses of nearly 6.6 billion euros this year.
• Apple Pay Overtakes Starbucks as Most Popular Mobile Payment Platform in the US
• No one expected The Athletic could get people to pay for sports news. Now it has 600,000 subscribers.
• ‘Whoa, it worked!!’: Elon Musk successfully tweeted using a Starlink satellite for the first time…SpaceX plans to start offering Starlink broadband services in 2020
• “If you’re creating a paid-for product, you have to start charging from day one.”
• AI Weekly: In China, you can no longer buy a smartphone without a face scan
• Archive of memos
• Gartner’s top 10 strategic predictions for 2020

• SpaceX seeks permission to launch 30,000 more satellites
• Rocket Lab successfully launches fifth Electron rocket this year
• Generation Z doesn’t always want to hear from you, they’re less likely than millennials to be okay with being reachable at all times.
• University of Artificial Intelligence launched in Abu Dhabi
• Few aeroplanes land automatically but new systems could make this the norm
• Netflix Q3 earnings exceed estimates, despite disappointing US subscriber growth
• Volvo unveils its first electric car, the XC40 Recharge
• Canva, now valued at $3.2 billion, launches an enterprise product
• Google Maps adds more Waze-like features, including driving-incident reports
• Nintendo announced Thursday that they had sold 15 million units of Switch console in North America
• HBO Max scores all 21 Studio Ghibli films

• Virgin Orbit plans to launch first commercial small satellites to Mars
• Uber’s newest feature alerts drivers that pets will be joining the ride
• (Pivot) Dyson kills its electric car project and turns to solid-state batteries…Dyson  said it will end its electric vehicle project after determining it could not make the car commercially viable or find a buyer…
• NASA Administrator ‘very confident’ SpaceX crew launch could happen in early 2020
• Steam will soon let you play local-only multiplayer games with far off friends
• Amazon Music arrives on Apple TV
• Get ready to see more looping videos on Spotify, as Canvas launches into beta
• Yandex introduces an Echo Dot-style smart speaker
• Chinese citizens will soon need to scan their face before they can access internet services or get a new phone number
• Elon Musk says that NASA is free to share all SpaceX IP with ‘anyone it wants’
• Autonomous vehicles won’t save cities without sharing
• Nanoscale 3D printing technique is 1,000 times faster
• Jeff Bezos’s Master Plan
• Robots to Replace 200,000 Banking Jobs: Report

• NASA’s first all-electric experimental X-plane is ready for testing
• Maisie Williams’ startup Daisie is preparing for new partnerships, funding
• HTC stopped innovating on smartphones, new CEO admits
• NASA shares 3D Moon data for CG artists and creators
• PayPal is the first company to drop out of the Facebook-led Libra Association
• Amazon’s video app is back in Apple’s App Store. But get ready to see more streaming fights.
• 3D-printed rocket company to begin commercial launches in 2021
• The Netherlands Surpasses Wildest Predictions For Tesla Model 3 Sales
• Nasa invites bids from firms to build lunar lander for 2024 mission
• The rise of the financial machines (Paywall) “…Funds run by computers that follow rules set by humans account for 35% of America’s stockmarket, 60% of institutional equity assets and 60% of trading activity…”
• “…Rising precious metals prices are luring criminals to target  catalytic converters which use platinum, palladium or rhodium…”
• Text-generating AI is getting better and better — but it’s not yet contest-winning good.
• Watch the Open Future Festival

Eating crabs ordered on your phone and delivered to your door in half an hour while scrolling through TikTok videos using the inbuilt gesture control on a Huawei phone. This is peak China 2019 pic.twitter.com/PL63fKQY2a

— Matthew Brennan (@mbrennanchina) September 30, 2019