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…
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
Over 1,500 Ring passwords have been found on the dark web
Uber’s ride-hailing business hit with ban in Germany
Abu Dhabi leads $167 million investment in Spanish delivery app Glovo
Broadcom Looks to Sell Unit That Could Fetch $10 Billion | Credit Suisse helping chip maker find a buyer for its RF wireless-chip unit (paywall)
The Earth’s magnetic North has moved 1,400 miles since it was discovered in 1831
Amazon will establish a new headquarters for its Kuiper satellite broadband project
SpaceX successfully launches Kacific 100Mbps satellite…The satellite will provide connectivity to remote areas across 25 countries in the Asia-Pacific region.
Amazon Logistics division was on track to deliver 3.5 billion packages globally in 2019 — which accounts for approximately half of all of its worldwide orders, according to a spokesperson. (For comparison, UPS, which was founded 112 years ago, delivered 5.2 billion packages and documents for all of its customers in 2018.)
Nvidia unveils Orin, its next-gen SOC for autonomous vehicles and robots
The Machines Are Learning, and So Are the Students…[1]
Airbnb is a platform not an estate agent, says Europe’s top court