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‘

• Box is releasing a tool to make it easier for large companies to shift workloads to the cloud
• The New York Times is expanding comments with the help of Google’s AI
  Until now, comments have been enabled on only 10 percent of articles. By the end of the year, the Times plans to get that up to 80 percent
• Snapchat quietly revealed how it can put AI on your phone
  With these tweaks, Snap claims to fit its algorithm into just 5.2 MB—about the size of a standard song in MP3—with accuracy that just edges out Google’s latest research attempt to scale down its mobile AI. With both networks taking that same 5.2 MB space, Snap scored 65.8% accuracy while Google scored 64.7% on a standard image recognition task, according to the paper.
• Forget Police Sketches: Researchers Perfectly Reconstruct Faces by Reading Brainwaves
  The values of each dial were so predictable that scientists were able to recreate a face the monkey saw simply by recording the electrical activity of roughly 200 brain cells
• New ‘Industroyer’ Virus Is Designed to Take Down Power Grids
• Chatbots are dumb, but wait until they learn how to negotiate for you
  “…According to a new study from TiVo out this morning, 77.3 percent now want “a la carte” TV service – meaning, they want to only pay for the channels they actually watch...”
• Google will  buy 300 apartment units from Factory OS, a modular-home startup, in a building likely to serve as short-term housing for Google employees, according to executives from both companies.
• Spending on paid enhancements most often encountered in free mobile games hit $71 billion in 2016
• How do you draw a circle? Analyzing 100,000 drawings to show how culture shapes our instincts
• More people now subscribe to Netflix than cable TV in the US (50,8 milion vs 48.61 million)
• Amazon Prime members can upload their outfits and get a fashion expert’s opinion — here’s what it’s like to use in person
• SpaceX is also ramping up hiring. It had 473 open positions in March and 487 as of this posting, and many are dedicated to the company’s Mars-exploration efforts.
• New Energy Outlook 2017
• Amazon might buy Silicon Valley darling Slack for $9 billion
• An Artificial Intelligence Developed Its Own Non-Human Language.
  When Facebook designed chatbots to negotiate with one another, the bots made up their own way of communicating.
• U.S. Invests $258 Million in Supercomputing Race With China
• “…Chinese scientists have succeeded in sending specially linked pairs of light particles from space to Earth, an achievement experts in the field say gives China a leg up in using quantum technology to build an “unhackable” global communications network…“
• Quantum Computing Technologies markets will reach $10.7 billion by 2024
• Spotify has guaranteed to pay big music labels billions over the next two years.
  The streaming service posted revenue of $3.3 billion last year.
• Lyft sets goal of 1 billion autonomous electric rides per year by 2025

• Recode summary : WWDC 2017: Everything important Apple announced at its big event
• SoftBank unit buys robotics businesses (Boston Dynamics and Tokyo-based Schaft)  from Alphabet Inc. Google acquired 9 robotics company in 2014.
• External Graphics Development Kit
  macOS High Sierra brings support for external graphics processors to the Mac for the first time. The External Graphics Development Kit enables you to develop and test demanding graphics-intensive apps, including VR content creation, on any Mac with Thunderbolt 3 connectivity.
• Siri is set to play a much larger role in the Apple’s products.
• Apple plans micro-LED displays for wearables: sources. The technology could cut reliance on Samsung and come as soon as 2018
• QR code changed China’s social habits, …It’s being used to encourage tipping at restaurants, receive cash gifts at weddings…
• Apple announced the future this week (VRKit, ARKit, HomePod)
• The U.K. has the fastest mobile speeds, with an average of 26 megabits per second, according to the latest State of the Internet Report by content delivery company Akamai.
• Pinterest raised another $150 million and is now valued at more than $12 billion
• Lyft is working with a third self-driving tech company
  …It’s a smart strategy for Lyft. Instead of spending money and time trying to build its own autonomous tech the way Uber is, Lyft is left with plenty of resources to pour into perfecting the efficiency of its network as well as user experience…

  The industry has yet to determine what will become the most important part of the self-driving ecosystem, though many experts have their thoughts. For Lyft, the ideal outcome is that the auto industry will eventually look a lot like airlines where customers know and make decisions based on the network — Delta, JetBlue, etc. — rather than the make and model of the plane itself…

• Snap just acquired Placed, a company that tracks whether online ads actually lead to offline purchases. Google also announced this feature last month.
• Domino’s Pizza shares have risen by around 1,500% since its IPO in 2004
• Apple finally made it easy to share WiFi passwords
• …today’s turbines are more cost-effective, more reliable, and generate vastly more electricity— 22 times more electricity than an average turbine installed in 1990…
• What Marketers Should Expect from Search in the Future
• IKEA to try selling through third parties
• Sony’s PlayStation VR headset sales top one million units
• Amazon Imagines a Future of Infinite Computing Power
  …When David Limp thinks about the future of Alexa, the AI assistant he oversees at Amazon, he imagines a world not unlike Star Trek—a future in which you could be anywhere, asking anything, and an ambient computer would be there to fulfil your every need.
• Amazon Patents A Shipping Label With Built-In Parachute For Dropping Deliveries From Drones
• Charlie Rose: Patrick Collison, the co-founder and C.E.O. of digital payment company, Stripe.
• iOS 11 can automatically delete apps to save space
• This Email Startup Wants You To Go Shopping In Your Inbox
• Consulting firm to Wall Street: Don’t worry about blockchain’s cost — just start working with it
• This Robot Can Complete a 2-Hour Brain Surgery Procedure in Just 2.5 Minutes

“…In 1979, General Motors employed more than 800,000 workers and made about
2:0511 billion U.S. dollars. In 2012, Google made about 14 billion U.S. dollars while
employing 58,000 people…”