Weekly#145

  • Star Wars Nerd Designs Killer Flags for More Than 100 of the Saga’s Planets (Wired) (Scott Kelly)
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  • Samsung’s Bet on Biotechnology,  Its goal: to become the world’s biggest contract manufacturer of biologic drugs—which are made from living cells, blood components and tissue as opposed to chemicals—in order to treat ailments from cancer to arthritis. (WSJ)
  • The chief operating officer, now a No. 2 at the company, is Senior Vice President Jeff Williams, a longtime trusted lieutenant of Chief Executive Tim Cook. (WSJ)
  • The Secret History of World War II-Era Drones (Wired)

 

Trend Reports

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Weekly#144

  • Future of Apple (Business Insider Deck)
  • Bitcoin’s Creator Satoshi Nakamoto Is Probably This Unknown Australian Genius. (Wired)
  • Google’s Verily Is Spinning Off ‘Verb,’ a Secretive Robot-Surgery Startup collaboration with Johnson & Johnson, and it aims to make robots better surgical assistants. (Wired)
  • Lego’s Fantastic New Kits Let You Recreate Skylines Like NYC’s (Wired)
  • Beautiful NASA Visualization Predicts Space Weather Around Pluto (Wired)
  • Atlassian Closes Up 32%, Valuing The Company At $5.8B (TechCrunch)
  • Samsung joins the self-driving car race (Mashable)
  • Augmented Reality Company Magic Leap Raising $827 Million (TechCrunch)
  • tvOS App Store After One Month: 2,624 Apps in Total, Entertainment Apps Most Popular With Consumers (MacRumors)
  • Ford to Invest $4.5 Billion in Electrified Vehicles by 2020

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Weekly#143

 

  • Goodreads Choice Awards, best of 2015
  • NewYork Times The 10 Best Books of 2015
  • Samsung agreed to pay Apple $ 548 million in five-year-long patent dispute (WSJ)
  • Porsche is officially in the race to create a more mainstream electric car industry by the end of the decade. The German company—owned by Volkswagen—says it will spend $1 billion to create the Mission E, an electric that will go from zero to 100 km per hour (62 mph) in 3.5 seconds, travel 300 miles on a single charge, and recharge 80% of its battery in 15 minutes. (QZ)
  • Facebook has begun rolling out a new feature on its social network which allows users to stream live video.(BBC)
  • Google has launched its first wi-fi network in Uganda’s capital Kampala, in 120 key locations.Official statistics show Uganda has about 8.5 million internet users, making up 23% of the population. (BBC)
  • Fake LinkedIn profiles used by hackers (BBC)
  • Microsoft PowerApps, a set of applications that the company described in a job listing as the “next billion dollar business for cloud and enterprise,” is launched
    According to a press release, PowerApps gives developers the ability to build custom native apps that can run across mobile and web.The goal of the service is to let businesses find, and harness, data throughout the organisation — which includes both on-premise and Software-as-a-Service apps — without writing any code. (Business Insider)
  • The best science fiction, as picked by 20 A.I. experts (Business Insider)

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Weekly#142

  • 100 Notable Books of 2015 (nytimes)
  • Powerwall competitors in Germany. SMA Solar, Daimler Accumotive, Solarwatt (Reuters)
  • Bill Gates will launch a multi-billion-dollar clean energy research and development initiative on Monday (Reuters)
  • LG Display to invest $8.7 billion in new OLED plant (Reuters)
  • Sony’s PlayStation 4 sales top 30 million consoles (Reuters)
  • Samsung starts mass production of industry’s first 128-GB DRAM
  • Amazon Challenger Jet.com Announces $350 Million Investment (Bloomberg)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Weekly#141

  • Alphabet Inc.’s Google unveiled technology Wednesday that lets users search inside and use mobile apps without downloading them, its latest effort to extend its search-and-advertising machine on smartphones. (WSJ)
  • Fleets of incredibly large wind turbines could produce a third of all UK power by 2030 (QZ)
  • Sony Considers Making PS2 Games Playable on PS4 (WSJ)
  • Sprint to Get Cash Infusion With Deal to Sell and Lease Back Devices (WSJ)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Weekly#140

  • Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft said artificial intelligence will be crucial for the coming age in which speaking and texting will be “the new U.I.” for software. (WSJ)
  • Companies including Gap Inc., Starbucks Corp and Target Corp.have come under fire for turning workers’ lives upside down with unpredictable hours set by automated scheduling software. Now one of the largest vendors of such software aims to profit from a different approach: prioritizing employee satisfaction. (WSJ)
  • What do Alphabet Inc.’s self-driving cars and old folks have in common? They both get pulled over for driving too slowly. (WSJ)
  • Watchmaker Fossil Group Inc. has agreed to acquire startup Misfit Inc., a maker of wearable fitness trackers, for $260 million. (WSJ)
  • iPad Pro review: Mac-like speed with all the virtues and restrictions of iOS (ArsTechnica)
  • The direction of computing is only going in one way—to the cloud, just 16 years after it first formed.(ArsTechnica)
  • Microsoft Invented Google Earth in the 90s Then Totally Blew It (Motherboard)
  • Visa is exploring using the blockchain to power money transfers (VentureBeat)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Weekly#139

  • “If AWS were to grow at a 40%-45% clip near term and decelerate to 30% in the out years, and Amazon’s retail business was to grow gross profits by 15% over the longer-term, AWS would indeed be larger than Amazon retail (on a gross profit basis) in the year 2024,” said Keirstead and Sandler. (Business Insider) (Twitter link)
  • Qualcomm’s China Struggles Continue as It Fails to Reach Patent Deals (WSJ)
  • Satellite pictures of a remote and treeless northern steppe reveal colossal earthworks — geometric figures of squares, crosses, lines and rings the size of several football fields, recognizable only from the air and the oldest estimated at 8,000 years old. (Nytimes)
  • Nintendo on Friday is launching a popular Japanese videogame in North America, the next chapter for a franchise that has raked in more than $2 billion in sales of games, toys and more. (WSJ)
  • Researchers at Florida State University have developed a new artificial material that functions similar to the process of photosynthesis and can open up new avenues to create a sustainable energy source.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Weekly#138

  • Apple Inc. said Tuesday that quarterly profit rose 31% on demand for the iPhone, …
    the company said it sold 48.04 million iPhones, …
    Revenue rose  to $51.50 billion…
    The iPhone continues to do well in China, where it has become a premium brand akin to Prada bags or Rolex watches. (WSJ)
  • The social network on Tuesday launched “2G Tuesdays” to let its staffers experience the social network as if on a 2G connection. The idea is to simulate the experience of Facebook users in regions with sluggish networks – a major area of growth for Facebook – who might use the site differently. (WSJ)
  • The Weather Company Is in Talks With IBM About Sale of Digital Assets (Recode)
    related 2013 WSJ Article Weather Channel Now Also Forecasts What You’ll Buy (WSJ)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Weekly#137

  • WSJD Conference Videos
  • Why Attitude Is More Important Than IQ (Pulse)
  • Amazon Web Services cloud-computing unit, which rents out computing power to other companies, reported a 79% sales increase to $2.09 billion. (WSJ)
  • Microsoft’s combined cloud businesses are running at an annual revenue rate of $8.2 billion and are on track to hit a $20 billion target. (WSJ)
  • Microsoft Edge won’t get Chrome-like extensions until 2016 (ArsTechnica)
  • Android compatibility document mentions forthcoming car infotainment OS (ArsTechnica)
  • Amazon acquired Kiva Robots $775 mio USD in 2012 to automate the
    whole picking and packing process at large warehouses.  Amazon began using Kiva robots only last year, and by the end of 2014, said it had 15,000 bots working across 10 of its warehouses. At the end of Q3, 30,000 bots at 13 warehouses. (Business Insider)
  • 3 people have crossed the US in an Autopilot Tesla — in 58 hours – 2,995 miles across the US, from Redondo Beach in California to New York City.(Business Insider)
  • Apple is planning a big design change for its next iPhone that could include removing the home button, analyst says (Business Insider)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Weekly#136

  • Ex-CEO Steve Ballmer has 4% stake in Twitter (FastCompany)
  • French Studio created a mobile game only in binaural sound without graphics (FastCompany) (Ulule)
  • Stanford University’s endowment fund and Willett Advisors LLC, the fund managing Michael Bloomberg’s investments, now invest a combined $100,000 in every startup to go through YC (WSJ)
  • Alibaba bets big on video with $4.2B proposed acquisition of Youku (Tech in Asia)
  • System that replaces human intuition with algorithms outperforms human teams (Phys)