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

Weekly#358

  • 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)

Weekly#357

  • 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

Weekly#356

  • Apple Has Secret Team Working on Satellites to Beam Data to Devices
  • Fjord 2020
  • SpaceX achieves key safety milestone for crewed flight with 10th parachute test
  • The Next Big Streaming Trend? Recommendations From Actual People
  • “…In 2016, researchers at Harvard and Syracuse University found that human cognitive function declined by about 15 percent when indoor CO₂ reached 945 parts per million, and crashed by 50 percent when indoor CO₂ reached 1,400 parts per million…”
  • Fintech’s next decade will look radically different
  • Amazon wants to patent technology that could identify shoppers by their hands
  • A.I. Is Making it Easier to Kill (You). | NYT
  • Elon Musk says Tesla will add Disney+ to its vehicles ‘soon’
  • The State of JavaScript 2019
  • Uniqlo’s Tokyo warehouse is 90 percent robotic and yes, the robots can even fold shirts
  • VW’s prototype charging robot can find your EV in the parking garage
  • ‘This is the farming of the future’: the rise of hydroponic food labs
  • Spotify will ‘pause’ political ads in early 2020
  • A new trend: customers caring about how their purchases affect the planet
  • Futuristic hotels for business travelers in China and Japan