• Ford unveils its new electric truck made with DHL
• Gartner’s Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies, 2017 Adds 5G And Deep Learning For First Time
• China will use blockchain tech for tax collection and invoicing
• Angry Birds’ Maker Rovio Plans IPO
• Pandora Names Sling TV’s Lynch as New CEO
• Amazon’s Alexa can now steer exoskeletons
• A 21-Year-Old Developer’s Robotic Arm could be the future of prosthetics
• Quantum Internet is 13 years away.
• Andrew Ng is raising a $150M AI Fund
• Apple is bringing a billion dollar checkbook to Hollywood and wants to buy 10 TV shows
• Uber’s product manager of its developer platform, Chris Saad, is leaving the company
• You can now make free phone calls with your Google Home
• Amazon’s private label business is booming thanks to device sales, expanded fashion lines
• Spectacular Eclipses in the Saturn System
• Pirates 2.0: How hackers target shipping
• AI creates fictional scenes out of real-life photos
• The World’s Biggest Tech Companies Are No Longer Just American
• Memories of fear could be permanently erased, study shows

• Ofcom Communications Market Report (3 August 2017) UK Stats
  • 3h32minutes spent watching broadcast TV per day
  • 183 minutes spent listening to radio per day (among radio listeners)
  • 25.3 million : Number of fixed broadband connections
  • 10.8 million:  Number of superfast broadband connections
  • 36.2 Mbit /s : Average actual fixed broadband speed
  • “…While 91% of UK adults watched live TV in an average week in 2016, data from BARB show that the amount of me UK adults spend watching has fallen since 2010, with a decline in average daily viewing me of 36 minutes (-14%) to 3 hours 51 minutes per adult (16+) per day in 2016…”
• Korea takes first step to introduce ‘robot tax‘
• Nvidia Once Ruled Video Games, Now It May Rule Self-Driving Cars
• By Buying Mobileye, Intel Jumps Firmly Into Driverless Car Race
• There’s a Plan To Rebuild the Colossus of Rhodes
• GM is beta testing a ride-hailing app for autonomous EVs
• Disney wants to make a huge shift in its business model — but it’s not ready to do it yet
• SoftBank is pumping $1 billion into the online sports apparel retailer Fanatics
• SoftBank leads $1bn investment in US biotech group…”…The investment in Roivant Sciences, which is developing experimental medicines for a range of illnesses spanning Alzheimer’s to rare diseases…“
• RBC Capital’s Mark Mahaney believes Snap will report ARPU of $1.19 per user in Q2, growth of 138 percent year over year.
• Michelin’s 3D-printed tire is as stunning as it is futuristic
• Fintech in China
• How can creative industries benefit from blockchain?
• SoftBank’s running list of deals show it’s the biggest, craziest investor in tech right now
• TV is moving to the internet faster than you probably think
• Facebook Watch and the reinvention of TV

• Google reportedly offered $30 billion to acquire Snapchat
• Ethereum miners are renting Boeing 747s to ship graphics cards…AMD’s strong earnings due to digital currency mining demand for its graphics cards…
• Spotify has more than 60 million subscribers now
• The hyperloop just had its fastest test yet, nearly hitting 200 mph
• California Goes All In – 100 Percent Renewable Energy By 2045…It would set in place a goal to produce 50 percent renewable energy by 2030 and 100 percent renewable energy by 2045…
• Ikea now sells solar panels and batteries in the UK
• The BBC just built an experimental iPlayer that knows who you are by your voice
• “…Apple sold 41 million iPhones during the quarter, up slightly from 40.4 million a year earlier, while Mac sales rose slightly to 4.29 million units from 4.25 million units in the year-ago quarter following the introduction of a number of updated Macs in June…”
• Game of Thrones script reportedly obtained by hackers
• “...Instagram is most popular for people younger than 25, who the company says spend an average of more than 32 minutes a day on the photo-sharing app…“
• Alexa AI Hack Allows For Remote Eavesdropping
• Mozilla launches experimental voice search, file-sharing and note-taking tools for Firefox
• The Makers of Roomba Want to Share Maps of Users’ Homes With Smart Tech Companies
• Tesla saw about 63,000 cancellations of Model 3 preorders. The company had a total of 518,000 preorders but 455,000 net orders at last count.
• Jack Dorsey wants Wall Street to know that Square Cash can be a real business. Square Cash, the company’s free, digital money-transfer service.
• Tesla is worth more than Ford and GM, despite having just 1 percent of their sales
• Since the iPhone launched, Apple has made as much as Microsoft and Alphabet combined
• Blockchain-Enabled Electric Car Charging Comes to California.”…the company launched a beta test of a distributed, peer-to-peer charging marketplace in California that lets drivers pay each other for use of their home chargers…“
• Data Science Simplified: Principles and Process
• First human embryo editing experiment in U.S. ‘corrects’ gene for heart condition
• Why the death of the iPod nano is also the end of a gadget era
• Developing product management disciplines that drive digital transformation
• TED Talk : Tristan Harris

• TED Talk : Marc Raibert, founder of Boston Dynamics : Meet Spot, the robot dog that can run, hop and open doors

Curation of the news and articles I read this week

• Finnish breakthrough: Making protein out of thin air and electricity
• Google now blasts autoplay videos straight into your Search results
• Adobe is ending Flash support in 2020, tells everyone to jump ship
• Nearly 40 million Americans use Roku, beating out Google’s Chromecast
• Alphabet has nearly doubled its headcount since 2013 to more than 75,000
• Google leads the world in digital and mobile ad revenue
• Even with 45,000 robots, Amazon is working hard to find human warehouse labor
• Softbank Said to Take Stake in Roomba Maker iRobot
• “…Musk’s master plan is to help owners add their vehicles to a shared fleet at the touch of a button. Instead of sitting unused 22 hours a day, the car will be able to drive itself and passengers, to earn money for you while you sleep, work, or go on vacation…”
• The Biggest Facial Recognition System in the World Is Rolling Out in China
• Amazon Hub: A package delivery locker specifically for blocks of flats
• SpaceX now valued at $21 billion as launch market dominance looms
• “…The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) has approved institutional bitcoin derivatives platform Ledgerx LLC as the first federally-regulated bitcoin options exchange and clearinghouse. Ledgerx plans to start trading bitcoin options in the fall and ether options a few months after that….”
• “…How Blockchain Can Make Identification Borderless and Immutable…a blockchain platform for digital identification called BanQu…Banqu estimates 2.7 billion people around the world lack an economic identity. But of those 2.7 billion, 60 percent have mobile phones…”
• Google Has Started Adding Imagination to Its DeepMind AI “…One of the ways they tested the new algorithms was with a 1980s video game called Sokoban, in which players have to push crates around to solve puzzles. Some moves can make the level unsolvable, so advanced planning is needed, and the AI wasn’t given the rules of the game beforehand.The researchers found their new ‘imaginative’ AI solved 85 percent of the levels it was given, compared with 60 percent for AI agents using older approaches…”
• LinkedIn data can predict how likely you are to quit, and it’s being sued to keep it public
• Bitcoin explained in emoji (part1) (part2)
• Amazon reportedly acquired GameSparks for $10M to build out its gaming muscle… “…GameSparks is a “backend as a service” for game developers to build various features like leaderboards into games, and then manage them, all in the cloud…”
• Facebook active users 2.01 B, Whatsapp 1.3 B, Messenger 1.2 B, Instagram 700 M
• WhatsApp is building out its business team to start bringing in revenue
• Oculus, the virtual reality company owned by Facebook, has created its first VR movie
• AWS, $16 billion annual revenue run rate “…A recent report from the startup CB Insights showed 5,600 open job listings for the AWS unit…”

• Amazon Spark is a product discovery social network that looks like Instagram “…Tucked into the “Programs and Features” section of the Amazon iOS app is the Spark social network, in which Prime members can post photos to an Instagram-like feed…”
• Netflix surges to record high as company adds non-US subscribers. The company also passed the symbolic goal of having 100 million paying subscribers. Outside the US (52.03 million) vs US (51.92 million).
• “Thrones” had on average 25.7 million viewers last season according to HBO, which says 26 percent of those views come from HBO Go and HBO Now, the company’s online streaming services. Budget : $10 million per episode last season
• We could build a galactic internet but it may take 300,000 years
• Citymapper will offer actual paid bus service in London this year “…The inaugural route is a nighttime one, running between 9 PM and 5 AM on weekend nights in East London, which Citymapper identified as underserved by current public transit options using its app and data analysis tool…”
• Drones are our noisy future: People find their buzzing more annoying than cars or trucks
• Microsoft 4Q17: Office 365 revenue surpasses traditional licenses, Microsoft is super close to the $20 billion cloud milestone it set for itself in 2015
• Alexa is coming to the Amazon app on Android, starting this week
• YouTube TV triples its footprint with launches in 10 more U.S. markets
• SoftBank’s Son Finally Explains How All Those Deals Fit Together
• This chart shows where robots are going to replace humans on Wall Street
• Google Street View is now in outer space too
• How ARKit will deliver the future of maps
• Scientists are now using Wi-Fi to read human emotions

• Shell Plans to Spend $1 Billion a Year on Clean Energy by 2020…as the transition toward renewable power and electric cars accelerates…
• First Object Teleported from Earth to Orbit…Researchers in China have teleported a photon from the ground to a satellite orbiting more than 500 kilometers above…
• A new study out of the University of California in San Francisco found the Apple Watch may be able to detect a heart condition that causes over 100,000 strokes every year.
• “…Tech giants including Baidu and Google spent between $20B to $30B on AI in 2016, with 90% of this spent on R&D and deployment, and 10% on AI acquisitions…” McKinsey’s State Of Machine Learning And AI, 2017
• Hyperledger releases its first production ready blockchain
• eBay ‘millionaire’ sellers in Germany and UK grow 50 percent in four years.”…Fresh data published on Tuesday by eBay shows the number of million euro businesses selling on eBay grew to 1,095 from 731 in Germany last year since 2013 while million pound-plus businesses rose to 663 from 443 in Britain over the same time period…“
• Amazon is quietly rolling out its own Geek Squad to set up gadgets in your home
• Facebook says all advertisers can soon buy ads inside Messenger
• WeChat Search is yet another brick in Tencent’s walled garden strategy…”…From the minute you wake up,” says Kiki Fan, GM of Planning & Implementation Department at Tencent, “we have Tencent News for you, the number one news site in China; social apps like QQ and WeChat, also dominating China;  music streaming services like QQ Music and KuGou, which make up 60% of market share; Tencent Video, the number one streaming platform equivalent to Netflix; not to mention the many brothers we have like Dianping, Didi and China’s number two e-commerce, JD…”
• Wirecard brings WeChat Pay to Europe…”…European retailers can target over 938 million monthly active WeChat and Weixin users…“
• How Harley-Davidson Used Artificial Intelligence to Increase New York Sales Leads by 2,930%
• Hyperloop One successfully tested its hyperloop technology on Thursday.
• Facebook-owned Oculus VR plans to release a much cheaper virtual-reality headset priced at roughly $200 in 2018, according to a new report from Bloomberg.
• Uber is merging its ride-sharing business with search giant Yandex in Russia
• Bill Gates made these 15 predictions in 1999 — and how accurate he was
• Shopify Merchants Will Soon Be Able to Sell Through EBay
• a $100 million venture capital unit, Toyota AI Ventures, that will invest in startups specializing in artificial intelligence, self-driving vehicles, robotics, data analytics, and cloud computing technology.
• “…ING warned that with battery-powered vehicles accounting for 100% of registrations in 2035 across the continent, European carmakers would lose out to their rivals in the US and Asia who already lead on battery production…”
• Stash, now valued at $240 million, lets anyone start investing in the stock market with just $5
• High-speed Hyperloop project ready for key test in Nevada
• AT&T planning organizational changes, including new role for CEO: Bloomberg
• The free robot lawyer that appealed $3 million in parking tickets is now available in the US. video

• Google is funding a robot journalism project in which computers will write 30,000 stories a month for local media.
• Use of WhatsApp in NHS ‘widespread’, say doctors
• Volvo will only make electric and hybrid cars starting in 2019 “…Between 2019 and 2021, Volvo will roll out five battery electric models, along with a cavalcade of plug-in hybrids and “mild hybrids,” which supplement internal combustion engines with batteries and motors…”
• Electric cars will be as cheap as gasoline models by 2025 & battery manufacturing capacity will triple in the next four years
• Google shows off Blocks, a 3D modeling tool made for VR (…Google wants to simplify content creation in VR so that people have more pretty things to look at and build…)
• Amazon isn’t developing its own wines…yet
• Alphabet’s latest spinoff uses the earth’s warmth to heat people’s home instead of burning oil “…The company inserts plastic pipes 300 to 500 feet underground where temperatures stay a near-constant 50°F (10°C) during the winter and summer. A pump at the surface circulates water through the U-shaped pipes, and a heat pump, similar to a refrigerator that can operate in reverse, exchanges warm or cold air in the home. Heat from the ground is transferred indoors during the winter (electricity adds extra warmth), while the process is reversed in the summer to tap relatively cooler ground temperatures…”
• Japanese designers created an extra set of hands you can control with your feet
• South Australia announces Tesla as backer of world’s largest battery
• Ohio is now the fifth U.S. state to permit delivery robots on sidewalks
• Recode Interactive Map : complex web of relationships as Detroit and Silicon Valley try to reinvent the car
• AI is making it extremely easy for students to cheat “…But today’s students have smarter tools at their disposal—namely, Wolfram|Alpha, a program that uses artificial intelligence to perfectly and untraceably solve equations…”
• As of late June, 85 million people in the US were signed up for Amazon Prime
• World Economic Forum Technology Pioneers 2017
• Tencent Dominates in China. Next Challenge Is Rest of the World
• Charlie Rose : Jack Ma

• Meet the first cell phone that needs no battery to make calls
• Elon Musk’s First Boring Machine Has Begun Tunneling
• How AI and IoT must work together
  ..AI will also be able to help IoT in two important under the hood areas: system design and security. The IoT includes everything from very basic sensors to sophisticated devices that have basic intelligence programmed in… 
• Swedish health startup KRY has raised €20 million for its video consultation app
• The massive ‘Petya’ cyberattack has hit 64 countries so far and there’s no kill switch this time.Cyber-attack was about data and not money, say experts
• Aquila, Facebook’s Connectivity Drone, Completes Second Test Flight–This Time Without Crashing (…a Boeing 737-sized autonomous aircraft that weighs about the same as a car…)
• Ocado is testing self-driving vans that can deliver groceries in London
• Uber crosses 5 billion trips
• High-tech dashboards signal big changes for auto parts suppliers
  “…What’s at stake is a piece of the $37-billion cockpit electronics market, estimated by research firm IHS Market to nearly double to $62 billion by 2022. Accounting firm PwC estimates that electronics could account for up to 20 percent of a car’s value in the next two years, up from 13 percent in 2015…“
• Inmarsat’s European short-haul wi-fi spacecraft launches…Airline passengers will soon be able to connect to the internet either through this spacecraft or a complementary system of cell towers on the ground…
• Facebook now has two billion monthly users
•  In five years, the app economy will be worth $6.3 trillion, up from $1.3 trillion last year, according to a report released today by app measurement company App Annie.
• The Economy Needs Amazons, but It Mostly Has GEs
• How AI Is Streamlining Marketing and Sales
• BT’s new “1Gbps” free Wi-Fi digital kiosks start appearing in London
• Instagram is now a potent job hiring tool
• AI will boost global GDP by nearly $16 trillion by 2030—with much of the gains in China
• Global IoT Security Market Size Will Reach USD 464 Million by 2020
• AWS Greengrass Announcement – 6 Key Takeaways

• Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service, Worldwide (June 2017) (Amazon and Microsoft are the leaders)
• How An Entire Nation Became Russia’s Test Lab for Cyberwar (Wired)
• Exoskeletons don’t come one-size-fits all yet…”An idealized exoskeleton needs to be both easily accessible and personalized…From a data standpoint, humans are noisy, says Katherine Poggensee, a biomechatronics researcher at Carnegie Mellon. Plus, “they have brains, so they adapt over time.” And although humans generally find the easiest way to do any motion, very few people have the physical and spatial awareness to explain why one stride feels easier than another. That’s why researchers are turning to algorithms to make exoskeletons more efficient…”
• How Scott Forstall Selected The People Who Would Create The iPhone’s Software
  “The key attribute that was required for acceptance into “Project Purple?” The ability to do new things rather than do the same thing over and over…Your boss, Steve Jobs, has ordered you to assemble a team of software engineers to create–in a matter of months–what would become the first iPhone. Quick! How do you pick the right brains for the project?…During all the interviews for the team, we screened for people who were growth mind-set,” Forstall told me…”  Video link
• Tesla is talking to the music labels about creating its own streaming service
• The industrial robotics market will nearly triple in less than 10 years
• Amazon’s Nike deal took a billion dollar bite out of competing retailers
• YouTube TV expands to 10 more U.S. markets, adds more YouTube Red series
• Venmo is testing its own physical debit card
• SpaceX successfully launched and landed its second recycled rocket
• Amazon’s idea for a massive drone dock looks like a cross between a beehive and a spaceship
• McDonalds Is Replacing 2,500 Human Cashiers With Digital Kiosks: Here Is Its Math
• World’s First Cable-Free Elevator Zooms Horizontally and Vertically Using Maglev Tech
• How Do Genome Sequencing Centers Store Such Huge Amounts of Data?
• Stephen Hawking Proposes Nanotechnology Spacecraft to Reach ‘Second Earth’ in 20 years
• One coder recreated the first level of ‘Super Mario Bros’ in augmented reality and played it in Central Park
• Facebook has a new mission statement: ‘to bring the world closer together‘