How 3M Plans to Make More Than a Billion Masks By End of Year…The company has in two months doubled global production of N95 masks to about 100 million a month, and it’s planning to invest in new equipment to push annual mask production to 2 billion within 12 months.
Duke University uses vaporized hydrogen peroxide to clean N95 face masks for reuse
How the Pandemic Will End…“…We realized that her child might be one of the first of a new cohort who are born into a society profoundly altered by COVID-19. We decided to call them Generation C…”
WSJ: A Real Digital Infrastructure at Last (Eric Schmidt) (paywall)
WSJ: Europe Tracks Residents’ Phones for Coronavirus Research (paywall)
Parenting in 2019: stop staring at that screen.
Parenting in 2020: have you done your online math, science, art, reading, writing, and music classes? Ok, now go FaceTime with your friends.
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, Microsoftsaid.”
Netflix urged to slow streaming to prevent breaking the internet
Ford releases a data set to accelerate autonomous car development
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.”
China's #WechatPay generates 1 billion+ payment transactions per day. That's more than Visa and Mastercard combined 🤔
Verizon says that video gaming traffic was up 75% week over week across its network.
General traffic was up 20% WoW. Video streaming up 12% WoW. Social media usage was flat.
The increase is primarily due to lockdowns and self isolation keeping people at home due to COVID-19 pic.twitter.com/Bbb1ehmPhY
Amazon makes its same-day delivery service faster in select U.S. cities
“…British online grocer Ocado warns of “exceptionally high demand” as coronavirusspreads…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’
“…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)
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
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
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
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…
