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

Weekly#355

  • 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

Weekly#354

  • Pandora launches interactive voice ads
  • DataRobot is acquiring Paxata to add data prep to machine learning platform
  • Robot bartending company is handing out cash to the people it is replacing
  • Google Assistant’s interpreter mode is coming to iOS and Android
  • Blue Origin has now flown – and landed — the same rocket six times
  • Salesforce promotes Bret Taylor to president and COO
  • Chrome now warns you when your password has been stolen
  • NASA releases Martian water map for future astronauts

Weekly#353

  • Spotify’s Daniel Ek Has a Plan to Harness Hollywood for Podcasts and Create “the World’s No. 1 Audio Platform
  • Rocket Lab launches 10th Electron mission with successful rocket booster re-entry
  • Media Landscape
  • How Amazon’s Ring is creating a surveillance network with video doorbells
  • The first computer chip with a trillion transistors (paywall)
  • Waymo robotaxi app arrives on the App Store
  • 41 Cart Abandonment Rate Statistics
  • Amazon pushes cloud revolution into its second phase…AWS offers to put its cloud into the datacentres of its customers (paywall)
  • AWS speeds up Redshift queries 10x with AQUA
  • AWS Launches & Previews at re:Invent 2019 – Tuesday, December 3rd
  • AWS Launches & Previews at re:Invent 2019 – Wednesday, December 4th


Weekly#352

  • 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)

Weekly#351

  • 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