Intel is slated to talk about topics including client computing, 5G, artificial intelligence, data center, and more during its CES 2019 keynote. We’ll show you how to tune in live on January 7 to watch Intel’s press conference.
The post Here’s how to watch today’s Intel press conference at CES 2019 appeared first on Digital Trends.
Source: Digital trends
No need to worry about what’s behind your trailer, because you can see straight through the thing.
Source: CNET
Ahead of its announcements of new TV partnerships at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Roku today shared some new numbers about the growing traction of its overall platform. The company said the number of active accounts grew 40 percent year-over-year in 2018, to top 27 million by year-end. In addition, its total streaming hours grew 61 percent year-over-year to 24 billion hours of movies, TV shows, sports and more being streamed across its devices.
In Q4 2018 alone, Roku users streamed an estimated 7.3 billion hours, up about 68 percent year-over-year.
Roku’s decision to release new numbers about active users and hours streamed comes at a time when the company itself is becoming more competitive with streaming services themselves, instead of just offering a platform on which their apps can run. In fall 2017 Roku began to aggregate the free content from the various channels across its platform in its own Roku Channel, then combined that with content it licensed directly from studios. This free, ad-supported content has given Roku a way to further grow its advertising revenues.
Since its launch, the channel has added more types of content, including sports, news and entertainment from both traditional and digital studios, and just last week launched its own set of premium subscriptions where it gets a cut of customers’ purchases.
Some analysts now believe The Roku Channel’s average revenue per user is now the fastest-growing contributor to overall revenue growth at Roku
Now Roku is working with more manufacturers to get its Roku OS – and therefore its Roku Channel – in front of more people.
At CES this week, Roku announced the Westinghouse Electronics was joining the Roku TV licensing program.
It also announced a partnership with TV brand TCL. The two companies will work together to make 8K TCL Roku TVs that will become available to consumers in late 2019. As a result of catering to TV makers, Roku said it’s updating its 4K and HDR hardware reference design to include far-field microphones for voice search and control. TCL will be the first to deliver these TV models in 2019.
Source: TechCrunch
Uber is expected to raise $10 billion later this year in one of the largest U.S. initial public offerings in history. The float will value the ride-hailing giant somewhere between $76 billion — the valuation it garnered with its last private financing — and $120 billion — a sky-high figure assigned by Wall Street bankers that’s had even early Uber investors scratching their heads.
A new report from The Information pegs Uber’s initial market cap at $90 billion. To develop the estimate, the site analyzed undisclosed documents Uber provided creditors in 2017 “in which the company projected it would double net revenue to $14.2 billion by 2019,” ran revenue multiples and compared Uber to GrubHub, which investors say is the business’s closest comparison.
Uber declined to comment on The Information’s analysis.
Uber confidentially filed for its long-awaited IPO last month, marking the beginning of a race to the stock markets between it and U.S. competitor Lyft, which filed just hours before, according to a source with knowledge of the situation. Founded in 2009 by Travis Kalanick, Uber has brought in about $20 billion in a combination of debt and equity funding. It counts SoftBank as its largest shareholder in a cap table that also lists Toyota, T. Rowe Price, Fidelity, TPG Growth and many more. As for the skepticism surrounding Uber’s lofty $120 billion valuation, the eye-popping figure seems unachievable considering the company isn’t profitable and has and continues to burn through cash.
An IPO that large would certainly make its investors happy. First Round Capital, for example, seeded Uber with $1.6 million in the company’s first two funding rounds in 2010 and 2011, according to The Wall Street Journal. At a $120 billion valuation, First Round’s shares would be worth some $5 billion. The venture capital firm, however, sold some of its shares to SoftBank alongside Benchmark, which itself would otherwise own shares worth about $14 billion.
Bradley Tusk, an early Uber investor who signed on to help the company surmount political and regulatory barriers in 2011, own shares said to be worth $100 million, though he too gave up 42 percent of his equity in a secondary sale to SoftBank, he recently told TechCrunch.
“I’m quite happy with the 120 number,” Tusk said. “But … I am a little surprised by [it], it does seem to be a really aggressive number.”
“Any investment in Uber is obviously a long-term bet on the future, like someone who invested in Amazon in the early days,” Tusk added. “One thing [Uber chief executive officer Dara Khosrowshahi] is doing well is really expanding Uber into a mobility company as opposed to just a ride-hailing company.”
Dara Kowsrowshahi, chief executive officer of Uber, looks on following an event in New Delhi, India, on Thursday, Feb. 22, 2018. Photographer: Anindito Mukherjee/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Uber has opted to go public in a year poised to see the most high-flying unicorn IPOs in history. As we’ve reported in great detail on this site, both Lyft and Uber are planning to float, as are Slack and Pinterest . Many of these companies, however, made the call to make their public markets debut before the stock market took a quick turn south. Poor performing stocks may discourage unicorns from emerging from their cozy VC-protected stalls.
Uber will garner increased scrutiny from Wall Street investors as they begin to parse out its true value. Fortunately the company, which like Amazon has long prioritized growth over profit, has “’clear levers’ it could pull in order to turn on the cash spigots if it wanted to, by reducing its marketing spending both in the U.S. and developing markets and by finding partners to help finance its self-driving car development,” according to The Information. “Pulling those levers would slow revenue growth by a third—from a 33% growth in net revenue to 22 percent growth in net revenue in 2019 [but] it would save Uber $2 billion annually.”
In its third quarter 2018 financial results, Uber posted a net loss of $939 million on a pro forma basis and an adjusted EBITDA loss of $527 million, up about 21 percent quarter-over-quarter. Revenue for Q3 was up five percent QoQ at $2.95 billion and up 38 percent year-over-year.
“We had another strong quarter for a business of our size and global scope,” Uber chief financial officer Nelson Chai said in a statement. “As we look ahead to an IPO and beyond, we are investing in future growth across our platform, including in food, freight, electric bikes and scooters, and high-potential markets in India and the Middle East where we continue to solidify our leadership position.”
We can speculate on Uber’s valuation for days but ultimately Wall Street will determine just how high Uber will go. For now, all we can do is sit and wait for the company to relinquish its S-1 to the masses.
Source: TechCrunch
Let’s hope you’re not afraid of dogs, because if Continental gets its way, autonomous robot dogs are going to be delivering your packages. At the Consumer Electronics Show today, Continental unveiled its Black Mirror-esque vision for how driverless vehicles can autonomously deploy bots to facilitate last-mile deliveries.
But it’s not just to look cool while also horrifying you — it’s designed to increase availability, efficiency and safety in the realm of package delivery. The first part is the driverless vehicle itself, called the Continental Urban Mobility Experience (CUbE). Its specific purpose is to carry delivery robot dogs and deploy them to handle the last yards of the goods. So, imagine one of these CUbE pods dropping off a robot dog, and then seeing that robot dog run up to your door with your package.
“With the help of robot delivery, Continental’s vision for seamless mobility can extend right to your doorstep. Our vision of cascaded robot delivery leverages a driverless vehicle to carry delivery robots, creating an efficient transport team,” Continental Head of Systems and Technology, Chassis & Safety division Ralph Lauxmann said in a press release. “Both are electrified, both are autonomous and, in principle, both can be based on the same scalable technology portfolio. These synergies create an exciting potential for holistic delivery concepts using similar solutions for different platforms. Beyond this technology foundation, it’s reasonable to expect a whole value chain to develop in this area.”
It’s not clear if and when these will be deployed, but it’s undoubtedly an intriguing vision of the future. Segway is also at CES this week, showing off its new autonomous delivery bots. The idea is to use the bot to make autonomous deliveries for food, packages and other items.
Source: TechCrunch
The international electronics and medical device giant Philips is pushing further into pregnancy and childcare services by leading a $6 million early stage investment in the pregnancy-focused app-developer and device manufacturer, Babyscripts.
The Washington, DC-based company works with hospitals and healthcare providers to distribute a medical device and mobile app for monitoring blood pressure and providing neonatal care information for expecting mothers.
According to Babyscripts co-founder and President Juan Pablo Segura, typical neonatal care follows a standard script with women seeing an obstetrician typically fourteen times over the course of the pregnancy. And most of those visits are just to monitor a woman’s weight and blood pressure during pregnancy.
Babyscripts can adjust the frequency and scope of treatment required through its blood pressure and pregnancy monitoring application, Segura said.
Using remote-monitoring devices to monitor blood pressure and weight, the company claims it can tailor treatments to risk profiles and allow healthcare providers to manage up to 90% of pregnancies virtually.
The company is already being used to monitor 160,000 pregnancies across 20 states. In the U.S. there are roughly 4 million pregnancies per year.
“This funding will help us continue to acquire market share while also allowing us to focus on building even more products for patients in pregnancy,” says Babyscripts CEO and Co-founder, Anish Sebastian.
As part of the investment, Babyscripts will partner with the mother and baby unit of Philips healthcare to build more virtual care obstetric and pediatric services.
“Babyscripts historically has focused all of its efforts in creating a trusted channel between the patient and OBGYN throughout the pregnancy,” said Segura, in a statement. “It’s only natural that we begin to expand that relationship through postpartum care and early stage pediatrics. On average, our patients use our app and remote monitoring service 6 times a week.”
Source: TechCrunch
And ‘Aquaman’ continues to rule the box office.
Source: Wired
Amazon today announced a significant partnership with Telenav, a connected car and location-based services provider. As part of the collaboration, Amazon’s voice assistant, Alexa, will now be part of Telenav’s in-car navigation systems.
As it stands, Alexa lacks a lot of information that is pertinent to drivers. This collaboration should massively help to change that. The partnership is also designed to enable carmakers to bring Alexa inside more of its vehicles.
“Navigation is among the most popular use cases for in-car technology, and we’re excited to be working with Telenav to make it easier for automakers and suppliers to support voice-first navigation through Alexa,” Amazon Alexa Auto VP Ned Curic said in a statement. “Using the Alexa Auto SDK, Telenav is helping make Alexa a truly integrated part of the in-car navigation system, and providing customers with a more useful, consistent experience at home and on the go.”
Back in September, Amazon announced Echo Auto, an in-car accessory that enables consumers to install Alexa into their cars themselves. Amazon had also previously made Alexa available through certain cars from the BMW Group.
What’s different about this announcement is that Amazon now has the ability to bake in Alexa from the start.
Amazon also today announced a partnership with HERE Technologies to bring a voice-first in-vehicle navigation system into the more than 100 million vehicles today that are equipped with HERE. With this collaboration, announced at the Consumer Electronics Show, people will be able to plan their trips while at home and then, once they get in the car, the navigation system will already know what to do and where to go.
Based on the looks of these two announcements, it’s clear Amazon is ready, more than now than ever before, to be inside your car.
Source: TechCrunch
Non-tracking search engine DuckDuckGo has denied a claim made in a forum post suggesting it’s using browser fingerprinting as “absolutely false”. The post has been shared on social medium by some security professionals.
Browser fingerprinting is a common but controversial technique. Many websites — and their advertisers — try to track you by collecting as much information about your browser, including its plugins and extensions, and your device, such as its make, model, and screen resolution, to create a “fingerprint” that’s unique to you.
That fingerprint is used to track you across websites to figure out which sites you visit — and which targeted ads to serve up.
No wonder some users were surprised.. We checked the site using CanvasBlocker, a popular privacy extension used to block trackers from fingerprinting your browser, and obtained the following readout:
(Screenshot: TechCrunch)
DDG has carved out a small but growing space for itself in the search market as a pro-privacy Google alternative by saying it does not track or profile users — but instead displays ads based on basic keyword search.
If it was using browser fingerprinting to track users, that would very clearly go against long-stated non-tracking principles.
But founder and CEO Gabe Weinberg assures us it is not, saying this is a case of a false positive.
He told TechCrunch: “Fingerprinting-detection libraries unfortunately create false positives because they don’t anticipate good actors using some browser APIs for non-nefarious purposes for which they were designed. We know this not only because we’re falsely identified here (and have been elsewhere) but because we are building this type of detection into our mobile app and browser extension and don’t similarly want to make false claims.”
Asked which browser APIs might be triggering the flag Weinberg said DDG uses getBoundingClientRect() to “determine size of browser and how to layout the page”, adding: “I think that is the one that set this one off in particular.”
CanvasBlocker’s default setting is to not block fingerprinting but to return “fake readouts,” which returns a new random value each time a website tries to fingerprint. In this case, it seems that the site’s browser resizing code was triggering the plugin.
The company’s head of search, Brian Stoner, has also responded to the forum claim via Reddit, writing: “We are absolutely NOT doing any fingerprinting whatsoever. Please see our privacy policy, it’s pretty clear on this: ‘We don’t collect or share personal information’.”
“We use a variety of browser API’s to deliver a search experience that is competitive with Google’s. Many “fingerprint” protection extensions take a scorched earth approach, blocking any browser API that could be exploited by a bad actor.”
DuckDuckGo said late last year that it’s now processing 30 million daily searches, up by more than 50 percent year-over-year.
Source: TechCrunch
Lovot has all kinds of sensors, but it’s really just made for cuddling and it will cost an arm and a leg.
Source: CNET