Weekly#195

  • Rise of the robot music industry : AI is transforming music streaming, talent spotting, promotion and even composition
  • The Next Fashion Trend: Weather Forecasting
    At a recent class at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City, students were asked—and promised a Dunkin’ Donuts gift card for the right answer to—the question: When should a Los Angeles store stock swimsuits?
  • Twitter Names Keith Coleman as Product Chief
  • Fitbit Set to Acquire Smartwatch Maker Pebble (Fitbit interested in Pebble’s operating system, intellectual property, will likely shut down brand)
  • AWS re:Invent 2016 Keynote: Werner Vogels (Youtube)
  • AWS re:Invent 2016 Keynote: Andy Jassy (Youtube)
  • AWS re:Invent 2016: From Monolithic to Microservices: Evolving Architecture Patterns (ARC305)
  • AWS re:Invent 2016: How JPL Leverages Alexa to Further Space Exploration (ALX301)
  • GeekWire re:Invent Special Coverage
  • How Amazon Gets Its Holiday Hires Up to Speed in Two Days (Touch screens and robots help to prepare new hires for warehouse jobs)
    ... shrink the time it takes to train new hires to as little as two days, compared with up to six weeks for a conventional warehouse job …The shorter training period saves Amazon money, and could give the company room to offer higher wages as it seeks to expand its workforce about 40% by adding 120,000 temporary workers at its U.S. warehouses for the peak sales season that runs roughly from November through December.
  • Netflix Now Lets You Download, But Many Top Shows Are Off Limits
  • Atlassian has opened an engineering office in Mountain View in a bid to attract talent from the area’s tech giants.
  • Indian Startup Plans to Land on the Moon in January 2018
  • Meet Starbucks’ next CEO: Here’s what former colleagues say about tech vet Kevin Johnson (…$84 billion global coffee corporation prioritizes new technology opportunities at more than 25,000 stores in 75 countries…)
  • Starbucks has more customer money on cards than many banks have in deposits
  • Forget personal assistants, The real battle is for voice UIs
  • “We are as much a tech company as we are a pizza company,” he told the audience, pointing out that of the 800 people working at headquarters, fully 400 work in software and analytics“
  • Twitter: @justinshanes : Amazon thinks my recent humidifier purchase was merely the inaugural move in a newfound hobby of humidifier collecting.
  • On Writing Product Specs

Weekly#194

  • Between 2011 and the third quarter of 2016, the percentage of tech deals with Chinese investment grew from 1.7% to 4.1%
  • Airbnb in Talks to Buy China Rival Xiaozhu
  • Amazon in Talks to Buy Dubai’s Souq.com in $1 Billion Deal
  • Skyscanner acquired for £1.4 billion by China’s Ctrip
  • Twitter: The % of mobile-only shoppers is astonishing. 50%+ for many of the top 15 retailers.
  • Twitter: Two-thirds (CEOs) said they believe technology will create greater value in the future than their workforce will, and 44% believe that automation, artificial intelligence and robotics will make people “largely irrelevant” in the years to come.
  • Twitter: Friday through Dec 25, estimated 1,500,000,000 packages will be delivered in the US by UPS+FEDEX+USPS (source: @parcelpending via @CNBC)
  • Stripe Inc., whose software is used by businesses to accept and track digital payments, will be valued at $9.2 billion in a new funding round that is being completed, the company said.
  • Universities’ AI Talent Poached by Tech Giants (Google, Baidu, Facebook lure away top computer science researchers responsible for training students)
  • Google Brain AI is now using its own language to translate between languages
  • Apple raked in a record 91 per cent of all smartphone profits in the third quarter
  • Japan plans supercomputer to leap into technology future
  • In the future, will farming be fully automated?
  • Tesla hires HoloLens designer, second Microsoft employee from the augmented reality program
  • Voice search has created a huge vulnerability at the heart of Google’s business

Weekly#193

  • Samsung Charges Into Auto Tech With $8 Billion Deal for Harman
  • Jaguar Shows Its Concept for a Luxury Electric SUV
  • Siemens to Buy Mentor Graphics Amid Push to Digitize Heavy Industry
  • China Internet Giant Tencent’s Profit Jumps on Games Gains ($1.55 billion net profit in latest quarter)
  • Airbnb moves beyond accommodation into tours and immersive trips
  • Airbnb’s share of London lets triples in a year, agents say 7.6% of overnight stays in capital now via gig economy website
  • Skype Users Make Around 3 Billion Minutes Of Calls Every Day
  • You’re probably shopping for the most nutritious produce in the wrong aisle
  • Amazon is going to sell cars onlineAccording to Reuters, Fiat Chrysler will sell three models — the 500, the 500L, and the Panda — on Amazon’s Italian site at a price that is up to 30% cheaper than other dealerships. The service will only be available in Italy.
  • Tesla, SolarCity Merger Gets Shareholder Approval, Here’s everything you need to know about the solar roof Tesla plans to build with SolarCity
  • Amazon Challenges Netflix by Taking Video Service Global
  • Starry, an internet service provider (ISP) that promises to deliver super-fast internet access wirelessly, launched its first closed beta in the Boston area this week.
  • Apple has a secret team working to make the iPhone’s camera a portal to augmented reality
  • French technology group Sigfox, which is building a wireless network for connected devices, has launched a new funding round to raise €150m for further international expansion.
  • “The feeling when you realize the robots will steal your job.”

Weekly#192

  • These 3-wheeled nanocars are the size of just one molecule
  • Harvard University researchers have made the first entirely 3-D-printed organ-on-a-chip with integrated sensing.
  • From mobile first to mobile native
  • 2 billion active Chrome installs
  • Snapchat’s Spectacles go on sale via Minion-like vending machines
  • Amazon’s private label brands are taking over market share
  • A robot fight club
  • Five industries that should take a cue from Netflix and crowdsource parts of its tech
  • Rogue One: International Trailer #2
  • Enter the Digital Dragon, can you really learn karate on the internet? A second-degree black belt investigates
  • The Unicode Consortium on Thursday approved 51 new playful images for emoji
  • Tesla’s Autopilot chip supplier NVIDIA on new self-driving system: ‘It’s basically 5 yrs ahead and coming in 2017’
  • YouTube on TV or TV on YouTube? The Blurred Lines of Online Video Consumption
  • Fix iOS 10’s Confusing Email Thread Problem
  • How to Gamify Your Life to Quickly Accomplish Big Goals
  • Twitter traffic doubled, Facebook up by 30% on election night
  • Nintendowned: Amazon sells out of the NES Classic Edition in (null) seconds

Weekly#191

  • Sony Second-Quarter Profit Falls Nearly 86%
  • GoPro Reports Another Loss, 40% Revenue Drop
  • China’s ‘Artificial Sun’ achieves fusion breakthrough
  • Robotics and automation will reduce mining employment by about 50% by 2030
  • Jeff Bezos, Mayo Clinic back anti-aging startup Unity Biotechnology for $116 million
  • A new startup wants to turn drones into guardian angels for our homes.
  • OK, Alexa: A Google Home Versus Amazon Echo IQ Test
  • DeepMind and Blizzard to release StarCraft II as an AI research environment
  • Android just hit a record 88% market share of all smartphones
  • 1.79 billion people logged onto facebook at least once per month,
  • Another quarter, another $3.2 billion in revenue for Amazon Web Services.
  • The space industry’s new bet: putting an “app store” in orbit
  • Play-Doh Brings Kids’ Creations To Life In A Virtual World
  • REPORT : The Future of Automotive 
  • REPORT : Digital Transformation Playbook 

Weekly#190

  • Ikea uses 1 percent of the planet’s lumber (The Weird Economics Of Ikea)
  • “Friday, the American Academy of Pediatrics validated my experiment, recommending that children younger than 18 months get zero screen time, and those ages 2 to 5 be limited to one hour a day—half of its prior recommendation.”
  • IT Industry Outlook Holds Steady, Software vendors and other IT firms say they’re on track to meet or surpass revenue goals this year
  • Uber’s Self-Driving Truck Makes Its First Delivery: 50,000 Beers
  • AT&T Undercuts Cable TV With $35 Internet Streaming Service
  • Microsoft Surface Studio PC announced for $2,999
  • Audi’s legendary Le Mans program to end in 2016
  • Microsoft could be unveiling Teams, its Slack competitor, next week, Previously known as Skype Teams, Microsoft has built a Web-based chat system.
  • This week, Apple will announce a new Apple TV feature that allows people to discover new TV shows from a single app, USA Today reports.
  • Scientists want to send a team of robots into space to build a telescope
  • The Japanese car manufacturer reports that the number of charging points in the country has surged past 40,000, compared to fewer than 35,000 petrol stations.
  • From Atlanta to Beijing, these are the world’s busiest airports
  • VR cafe in Seoul
  • Soon you’ll be able to play ‘Minecraft’ on your Apple TV
  • Qualcomm to Buy NXP Semiconductors for $39 Billion
    Biggest chip deal adds the top supplier of automotive chips to the San Diego company
  • Twitter to Cut 9% of Workforce as Revenue Growth Slows
  • An economic history of the world in 1 minute, 5 seconds

Weekly#189

  • The Global Competitiveness Index 2015–2016 Rankings (World Economic Forum)
    Top 10 (Switzerland, Singapore, United States, Germany, Netherlands, Japan, Hong Kong, Finland, Sweden, United Kingdom)
  • Comcast’s NBCUniversal Invests Another $200 Million in BuzzFeed
  • Facial-recognition apps use smartphone snapshots to verify identity of customers
  • ‘Grand Theft Auto’ is so influential, the company’s stock just exploded after teasing a new game
  • Netflix posted robust subscriber growth for the quarter, adding 370,000 net memberships in the U.S. and 3.2 million internationally, for a total of about 3.6 million. 86.7 million subscribers worldwide.
  • Lessons Learned From Scaling Uber To 2000 Engineers, 1000 Services, And 8000 Git Repositories
  • A recent CityLab report suggests that driverless car technology for evacuations might be a good solution for minimizing loss of life and the amount of destruction that occurs during hurricane season.
  • Meet the Giant Robot That Builds Boeing’s Airplane Wings
  • Airbus delivered the 10,000th plane.
  • “… But as Schadt has learned, it’s not enough to plumb the depths of an individual’s DNA. It requires a universe of data—exabytes worth—to detect patterns in a population, apply machine learning, find the network of mutations responsible for disease, and do something about it. The bigger these data sets become, the more accurate and powerful the models and the predictors become…”
  • Tesla Motors Inc. said it plans to charge buyers of its newest cars $8,000 to activate autonomous-driving technology (WSJ)
  • Video : Full Self-Driving Hardware on All Teslas
  • Microsoft Corp.’s cloud-computing businesses kicked into high gear as sales of the software giant’s Azure service more than doubled.
  • AT&T Inc. is in advanced talks to acquire Time Warner Inc (CNN,HBO, Warner Bros), according to people familiar with the matter, a deal that would create a new hallmark in the rapidly converging realms of media, communications and the internet.
  • Nintendo’s next console, Switch, is a console/tablet hybrid coming in March
    Tablet system docks to connect to HDTV, comes with detachable controllers.
  • Nissan’s autonomous chairs commence a public trial in Japan 2017
  • A group of Japanese scientists from Kyushu University has successfully turned mouse skin cells into baby mice without the use of egg cells.
  • Facebook Live broadcasting up 4X since May, gets TV and outdoor promo
  • Microsoft Fiscal Year 2017 First Quarter Earnings Conference Call, Slides
  • Researchers are using 3D motion capture to document kung fu before it disappears
  • Who Should a Startup Hire First?

Weekly#188

 

  • Netflix is 12 times as popular as its streaming competitors among younger viewers
  • Microsoft open-sources P language for IoT
  • Larry Ellison says Oracle’s new cloud will crush Amazon — but the rest of the world isn’t so sure
  • AWS is 10-times bigger than its next 14 competitors combined
  • New Q2 data from Synergy Research Group shows that Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft, IBM and Google combined control well over half of the worldwide cloud infrastructure service market.
  • Within 24 hours of plugging in her Amazon Echo, Carla Martin-Wood says she felt they were best friends. “It was very much more like meeting someone new,” she says.
  • The Three Software Stacks Required for IoT Architectures [PDF]
  • Kindergarten. For robots.
  • Panasonic’s new prototype TV can hide in plain sight
  • Planet Earth II: Official Extended Trailer – BBC Earth
  • 5 Japanese innovations that changed the world
  • Here’s Arianna Huffington’s Recipe For A Great Night Of Sleep
  • DeepMind’s new computer can learn from its own memory
  • Rogue One: A Star Wars Story Trailer #2
  • SoftBank and Saudi Arabia Team Up for $100 Billion Tech Fund

 

 

 

 

 

Weekly#187

Facebook
How Facebook Is Dominating the 2016 Election
 …100,000 different webpages, each micro-targeted at a different segment of voters…
…the firm has a database of 220 million U.S. adults with 4,000 to 5,000 data points on each…
…the value of targeting lies in making campaign spending more efficient…
Facebook  is in talks with several countries for trial broadcasts of internet content from highflying drones to provide bandwidth to poorly connected parts of the globe.
Facebook  launched  “Facebook Marketplace,” Craigslist & eBay competitor to allow individual users to easily buy and sell a range of items, such as clothing electronics, household goods, furniture, jewelry, art and cars.
VR
PlayStation VR Review: The Best Way to Bring Virtual Reality Home
After Stumbles, Oculus Tries to Regain Its Footing in Virtual Reality
Facebook’s Oculus Working on Stand-Alone Virtual-Reality Device, won’t require a personal computer
Google
On October 4, Google  announced several new hardware products, ranging from smartphones to speakers to a new intelligent router.
  • Google’s Pixel and Pixel XL phones start at $649 and $769
  • Google’s “Daydream View” VR headset is smartphone-powered VR for $79
  • The Chromecast does 4K: Google announces the $69 Chromecast Ultra
  • Google Wifi: Google’s second attempt at a home router
 
Space
 
Elon Musk: A Million Humans Could Live on Mars By the 2060s
Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket lands in the Texas desert after a successful escape system test
Blockchain
J.P. Morgan Created Transactions Platform based on Ethereum Blockchain. The platform called Quorum will enable the multinational banking company located in New York to use a publicly available system for confidential transactions.
Self Driving Cars
Google’s head of self-driving tech: We’re not building a car, we’re building the driver
10 million self-driving cars will be on the road by 2020
50 Mind-Blowing Implications of Self-Driving Cars (and Trucks) / What to expect from the next 3–20 years of autonomous vehicles
After two million miles, Google’s robot car now drives better than a 16-year-old
AI
Salesforce Agrees to Buy Marketing-Data Startup Krux $ 700 million…Krux uses AI  to analyze trillions of signals to better identify audience segments…
The UCL team has written what it calls an Intelligent Autopilot System that uses ten separate ANNs (Artificial Neural Networks). Each is tasked with learning the best settings for different controls (the throttle, ailerons, elevators and so on) in a variety of different conditions. Hundreds of ANNs would probably be needed to cope with a real aircraft, says Dr Bentley. But ten is enough to check whether the idea is fundamentally a sound one…the new autopilot will probably find its first uses in drones.
Other
Snap Inc. is working on an initial public offering
Techstars to Launch Accelerator for Music-Industry Tech Startups
Program will accept 10 participants for funding and mentoring
Software maps immune system in 17 days
The possible variation of immune receptors far exceeds the number of genes in our genome, at roughly 10 million times more than the number of stars in the Milky Way galaxy, notes Adam Buntzman, a research assistant professor and immunologist at the University of Arizona.
Financial Times hopes faster website will boost readership. The London-based publication, which is expected to unveil its new website Tuesday, has halved the time it takes a story to load on desktop to slightly over one second. Mobile devices can now load a story in a little over 2 seconds, down from 6 seconds.
Nobel Prize in Chemistry Awarded to Three Scientists for Design, Synthesis of Molecular Machines, in a first stage, the technology can lead to the creation of new smart materials able to adapt themselves to their environment, and minuscule sensors that can be controlled remotely.
Under Neil Hunt, chief product officer of Netflix, the effort includes overhauling the company’s algorithm for recommendations
Netflix
2012 Catalog : close to 11,000 movies and TV shows.
Current Library has about 5,300 titles.
Tesla delivers 24,500 vehicles in the third quarter
Reports
Car-generated data may become a USD 450 – 750 billion market by 2030 (McKinsey)
Gaming Industry Overview (PDF)
Video
Watch some of Steve Jobs’s best interviews

Weekly#186

  • Pay-TV providers could lose nearly $1 billion in revenue as 800,000 customers cut the cord during the next 12 months, according to a new study from the firm cg42.(WSJ)
  • How to Make Sure Your Uber Doesn’t Drive Past You
    Avoiding the pin drop can help you get door-to-door service that is actually door-to-door (WSJ)
  • Gartner Cape Town: 10 strategic tech trends for 2017
    1. Conversational systems
    2. Augmented and virtual reality
    3. Digital twin
    4. Artifical intelligence and machine learning
    5. Intelligent applications
    6. Intelligent things
    7. Adaptive security
    8. Blockchain and distributed ledger
    9. Mesh app and service architecture
    10. Digital technology platforms
  • Drew Houston CEO of Dropbox, if he had a cheat sheet he could give himself at 22, it would have three things on it: “a tennis ball, a circle, and the number 30,000. (BI)
  • Spotify launches in Japan, As Billboard noted in an earlier article, physical formats such as CDs and LPs are still popular in Japan — more than 80 percent of music sales were on physical formats in 2015. (Mashable)
  • Salesforce.com to Press Regulators to Block Microsoft-LinkedIn Deal
    Company says Microsoft’s $26.2 billion acquisition of social network would be anticompetitive (WSJ)
  • Google spent $9 billion on cloud business in past 12 months. (Bloomberg)
  • Amazon Eyes Living Rooms by Adding Gaming Features to Prime (Bloomberg)
  • A Japanese Company Wants to Build a Space Elevator by 2050
  • Microsoft forms new 5,000-person AI division
  • Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced that it plans to launch a French datacentre region which will be open for customer use in 2017.
  • Google’s Got a Plan to Unify the World’s Wi-Fi Hotspots
  • iPhone 8 rumors: All glass everything with an OLED display
  • According to this VAB report, which aims to address the relationship between streaming, TV and advertisers, just 6 percent of the U.S. population does 87 percent of the streaming.
  • Why Siri, Alexa And Cortana Will Destroy SEO
  • The Google of product search is…Amazon.
  • WinTel market cap, 1995: $105bn GAFA, 2016: $1.9tr