Weekly#165

  • If you have a computer running Windows 7 or 8, mark July 30 on your calendar. That’s the day that upgrading your PC to Windows 10 will no longer be free. Once the operating system passes its one-year anniversary, Microsoft Corp. will start charging $120 to move over to Windows 10. (WSJ)
  • Basically, Microsoft built a “self-capacitive touch screen,”a phone that can sense when your fingers are nearby and display the controls you need, right when you need them. (BI Insider)
  • Microsoft acquires Solair (Microsoft)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Weekly#164

  • More than a third of Snapchat’s daily users create “Stories,” broadcasting photos and videos from their lives that last 24 hours, according to people familiar with the matter. Now users are watching 10 billion videos a day on the application, up from 8 billion in February. Snapchat on Thursday confirmed the number of video views. (Bloomberg)
  • China will launch a core module belonging to its first space station around 2018, …The construction of space station is expected to finish in 2022, Wang said. (Space Daily)
  • Microsoft is buying 10 million strands of long oligonucleotides — laboratory-made molecules of DNA — from San Francisco startup Twist Bioscience, the companies announced today…It seems that Microsoft is exploring the idea of using DNA molecules as a way to store massive amounts of data. Unlike hard drives, Blu-Ray discs, or pretty much any current storage technology, DNA stays intact and readable for as long as 1,000 to 10,000 years. (Business Insider)a
  • Google is building a new hardware division under former Motorola chief Rick Osterloh …
    A Google rep confirmed that Osterloh has joined the company as its newest Senior Vice President, running the new hardware product line and reporting to CEO Sundar Pichai…
    The new division includes:Nexus
    Chromecast
    Consumer hardware (Chromebook laptops and the new Pixel C device, which runs on Android.)
    OnHub ( The wireless home router)
    ATAP
    Glass(Recode)
  • Intel turned down an opportunity to provide the processor for the iPhone, believing that Apple was unlikely to sell enough of them to justify the development costs. (Vox)

    … But, oh, what could have been! Even Otellini betrayed a profound sense of disappointment over a decision he made about a then-unreleased product that became the iPhone. Shortly after winning Apple’s Mac business, he decided against doing what it took to be the chip in Apple’s paradigm-shifting product.

    “We ended up not winning it or passing on it, depending on how you want to view it. And the world would have been a lot different if we’d done it,” Otellini told me in a two-hour conversation during his last month at Intel. “The thing you have to remember is that this was before the iPhone was introduced and no one knew what the iPhone would do… At the end of the day, there was a chip that they were interested in that they wanted to pay a certain price for and not a nickel more and that price was below our forecasted cost. I couldn’t see it. It wasn’t one of these things you can make up on volume. And in hindsight, the forecasted cost was wrong and the volume was 100x what anyone thought.”

    It was the only moment I heard regret slip into Otellini’s voice during the several hours of conversations I had with him. “The lesson I took away from that was, while we like to speak with data around here, so many times in my career I’ve ended up making decisions with my gut, and I should have followed my gut,” he said. “My gut told me to say yes.” (The Atlantic)

  • The first rule of pricing is: you do not talk about pricing (Medium)
  • The Behavioral Psychology of Netflix’s Plan to Charge Higher Prices (The Atlantic)

AWS Summit Series 2016 | Chicago

    • Dr. Matt Wood

 

    • Getting Started with AWS IoT

 

    • Getting Started with Amazon Machine Learning

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Weekly#163

  • Sean Parker, the Napster Inc. co-founder and early investor in Facebook Inc. and Spotify AB, believes social media isn’t intimate enough. Which is why on Thursday, he relaunched his old video service—Airtime—with a new mission, to bring friends closer together online. (WSJ)
  • Revenue from Microsoft’s Intelligent Cloud segment, which includes its Azure on-demand computing services as well as its older server software sales, grew 3% to $6.1 billion. The gain was 8% in constant currency, and the company said that Azure grew 120% in constant currency.But just one quarter earlier, the same segment grew 5%, or 11% in constant currency, and Azure was up 140%(WSJ)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Weekly#162

  • Facebook F8 Summary
  • Project: Raspberry Pi + Alexa Voice Service (Github)
  • The Doomsday Seed Vault [video]
  • Chatbots — the name for robots that simulate human conversation — have been thrust into the spotlight in recent weeks amid a flurry of new experiments in how they might be used to shape the future of shopping. Retail heavyweights Sephora and H&M recently launched bots on messaging app Kik that help shoppers browse and buy their products. Taco Bell showed off its TacoBot, a way to use the messaging app Slack to place a meal order. And on Tuesday, Facebook announced it has created a platform that allows companies to develop bots that run within its Messenger app, which has some 900 million users worldwide. (Washington Post)
  • Facebook’s bots are an ‘existential threat’ to Apple, says Wall Street analyst (Business Insider)
  • Apple could stop the new Facebook Messenger before it’s even begun (Business Insider)
  • Netflix says Geography, Age, and Gender are “Garbage” for Predicting Taste
    “Geography, age, and gender? We put that in the garbage heap,” VP of product Todd Yellin said. Instead, viewers are grouped into “clusters” almost exclusively by common taste, and their Netflix homepages highlight the relatively small slice of content that matches their taste profile. (Fortune)

 

Weekly#161

  • The best part of the 3.50 update is the ability to play all your PS4 games remotely on a Windows or Mac device. (Gizmodo)
  • Google is said to be considering Swift as a ‘first class’ language for Android (TNW)
  • Your next car will need a firewall (TNW)
  • The first company to start making drone deliveries at a commercial, high-volume scale won’t be Amazon or DHL, but a startup sending medical supplies to remote hospitals in Rwanda to save lives. (FastCoExist)
  • Twitch users can now live stream Android games from their PC (TechCrunch)
  • Amazon releases API to add more smart home capabilities to Alexa (BI)
  • Mobile users spend about 30 minutes a day on Facebook. Nobody else is even close
  • Yahoo’s patents could be worth $4 billion (BI)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Weekly#160

  • Tesla’s Model 3 Electric Car Secures 135,000 Reservations on First Day of Ordering, Vehicle is expected to get at least 215 miles of range from a single charge (WSJ)
  • T-Mobile quietly offers a plan that includes unlimited data and texting without the ability to make cellular calls (except for dialing 911). It costs as little as $20 a month, $30 less than the equivalent smartphone plan. (WSJ)
  • Android users will soon be able to reply to texts from their Windows 10 PCs (Business Insider)
  • Microsoft Build 2016 Keynote Summary
  • Linux’s Bash shell is coming to Windows, courtesy of a collaboration between Microsoft and Ubuntu-creator Canonical. Type bash into Windows 10’s Start menu, and you’ll be able to instantly get a full Linux command-line environment. (PCWorld)
  • Drone company Airware raises $30 million and adds Cisco’s John Chambers to its board (Business Insider)
  • Oculus could make up about 10 percent of Facebook’s revenue in four years
    They estimate Facebook will sell 600,000 Rift units this year and more than two million in 2017, generating over $1.6 billion in revenue from hardware and royalty fees from game sales. (Business Insider)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Weekly#159

  • Learning machine learning (Ben Evans Blog)
    …Have you built HAL 9000 or have you written a thousand IF statements?…
  • Craig Venter report engineering a bacterium to have the smallest genome—and the fewest genes—of any freely living organism, smaller than the flower’s by a factor of 282,000. Known as Syn 3.0, the new organism has a genome whittled down to the bare essentials needed to survive and reproduce, just 473 genes. (Science)
  • A new report concludes that 48 percent of all mobile games spending comes from a miniscule 0.19 percent of users. (Wired)
  • After nearly four years of crowdfunding, developer kits, an acquisition by Facebook and seemingly endless hype, the finished Oculus Rift headset is shipping to its first customers. (Engadget)
  • Retro gaming fans rejoice: Atari Vault is on Steam with 100 games (Tech Crunch)
  • Google’s $150 Nik Collection of Photo Editing Software is Now 100% Free (PetaPixel)
  • Meet the largest science project in US government history—the James Webb Telescope
    Precision? The Webb can detect heat generated by a bumblebee as far away as the Moon. (ArsTechnica)
  • Report: “YouTube Connect” will be a livestreaming Periscope competitor (ArsTechnica)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Weekly#158

  • The Epic Story of Dropbox’s Exodus From the Amazon Cloud Empire
  • Volkswagen’s Audi (VOWG_p.DE), Daimler’s (DAIGn.DE) Mercedes-Benz, BMW (BMWG.DE) and car industry suppliers Bosch and Continental (CONG.DE) are all working on technologies for autonomous or semi-autonomous cars.Earlier on Friday, Germany’s Manager Magazin reported that Uber had placed an order for at least 100,000 Mercedes S-Class cars, citing sources at both companies.The top-flight limousine, around 100,000 of which Mercedes-Benz sold last year, does not yet have fully autonomous driving functionality.Another source familiar with the matter said no order had been placed with Mercedes-Benz. Daimler and Uber declined to comment. (Reuters)
  • Domino’s has announced the world’s first pizza delivery robot (QZ)
  • It’s been a week of extremes for Google’s artificial intelligence efforts, as the company luxuriates in the afterglow of winning a board game tournament against one of the world’s top players, while it privately tries to sell one of its most visible robotics efforts.
    Google’s decision to try to shed its Boston Dynamics robotics group highlights a fundamental research problem: software is far easier to develop and test than hardware. That’s especially true when dealing with artificial intelligence and robotics….To develop robots, you have two options: You can either simulate an environment and robot with software and hope the results are accurate enough that you can load it into a machine and watch it walk. Or you can skip the simulation and tinker directly on a robot, hoping you can learn things from the real world– but that’s awfully slow. (Business Week)
  • Ikea’s Newest Product Introduces Hydroponics To Mainstream America
    (Hydroponics is a plant-growing method that involves no soil.) (FastCoDesign)
  • Facebook’s Messenger Bot Store could be the most important launch since the App Store (Tech Crunch)
  • The study from the National Foundation for American Policy, a non-partisan think tank based in Arlington, Va., shows that immigrants started more than half of the current crop of U.S.-based startups valued at $1 billion or more. (WSJ)
  • Spotify is using 50,000 anonymous hipsters to find your next favorite song (QZ)
  • Earlier this week, Sony announced that its PlayStation VR would be available for the low price of just $399. Given that competing VR headsets like the Oculus are at least $200 more expensive, people were pretty excited about it. In fact, purchases of the PlayStation camera went up 3000 percent on Amazon (Move controllers went up 1000 percent), according to Ars Technica. (TechCrunch)

 

Weekly#157

  • Amazon, the world’s largest online retailer says it’s going to operate its own air cargo network in the US, a move that points to its larger ambitions to build out a comprehensive factory-to-doorstep delivery system to serve its customers. Amazon signed a five- to seven-year lease with Ohio-based Air Transport Services Group for twenty Boeing 767 freighter aircraft, the company says (Wired)
  • With AI Scry, you’ll never have to wonder how your iPhone would describe the world around you if it was capable of autonomous thinking.Available for iOS, AI Scry is a new app that generates automatic descriptions of whatever appears in front of your phone’s camera.(TNW)
  • Snapchat has a secret team possibly building a pair of smart glasses
  • An AI expert says Google’s Go-playing program is missing 1 key feature of human intelligence…
    …But when it comes to big-picture intelligence, Sutton said, AlphaGo is missing one key thing: the ability to learn how the world works — such as an understanding of the laws of physics, and the consequences of one’s actions….
    “There’s a 50% chance we figure out [human-level] intelligence by 2040 — and it could well happen by 2030,” he said.
  • At this year’s World Economic Forum at Davos, Marc Benioff, founder and CEO of American cloud computing firm, SalesForce, argued that every country should have a minister of future.“As a society,” Benioff said, “we are entering uncharted territory, a new world in which governments, business leaders, the scientific community and citizens need to work together to define the paths that direct these technologies at improving the human condition and minimising the risks.” (WEF)
  • The Seven Lessons Of Marissa Mayer’s Loss Of Command At Yahoo

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Weekly#156

  • It has long been rumored that Medium would let you monetize your posts on the service, and a new interview with Evan Williams, Medium’s CEO, confirms that the company plans to launch that very soon.Williams told the BBC that the company plans to launch monetization by the end of this quarter, which includes advertising but won’t allow banner ads, instead focusing on ‘sponsored content. (TNW)
  • The Italian soccer club AS Roma  has won six out of its last seven games, a result that has thrilled fans.One reason for the winning streak, according to Chris Pallotta, an investment officer at Raptor Capital Management, is the club’s relationship with a San Francisco-based analytics startup called Tag.bio.

    Spun out of the University of California San Francisco, which is the UC system’s health sciences school, and founded by two amateur soccer players, Tag.bio has created software that helps AS Roma scout players, group players and analyze before a game how the opposing team is expected to perform. (WSJ)

  • In 2015, Netflix accounted for about half of the overall 3% decline in TV viewing time among U.S. audiences, according to a new study by Michael Nathanson of MoffettNathanson. The analyst calculated that based on an estimate that Netflix’s domestic subs streamed 29 billion hours of video last year (Netflix said members worldwide watched 42.5 billion hours in 2015). That would represent 6% of total American live-plus-7 TV viewing reported by Nielsen (up from 4.4% in 2014). (Variety)
  • The Cult of Done Manifesto (source)
  • The Future of Jobs (World Economic Forum) (pdf)
  • The Robot Renaissance Map (pdf) (source)
  • Multitasking is Killing Your Brain (Medium)
  • What’s Next in Computing? (Medium)
  • IOT for Smart City (Slideshare)
  • Türkiye’de Mobilin Gücü (Slideshare)