The Pimax team updated its Kickstarter post, reporting that preproduction models of its 8K VR headset will ship this month to 10 participants in the closed beta. If approved, the headset will go into production and ship to backers in June.
The post First preproduction units of the Pimax ‘8K’ VR headset to ship to testers in May appeared first on Digital Trends.
Source: Digital trends
The bizarre recent tale of ZTE is getting another wrinkle. Earlier today, a bipartisan House Appropriations Committee unanimously voted to accept an amendment to uphold sanctions against the company.
The amendment to the 2019 Commerce, Justice, and Science Appropriations bill is, of course, being viewed as a rebuke of the president, whose tweets over the weekend appeared to suggest a softening on the seven-year ban imposed by the Department of Commerce last month.
In fact, the amendment’s author, Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger of Maryland, called out Trump by name on social media, adding in a press release tied to the news, “This amendment, which passed with the unanimous support of my colleagues on both sides of the aisle, shows that, when the United States enacts sanctions, we stand behind them.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the release name checks not just the sanctions violations that led to the export ban, but also claims of spying that have put the company in the crosshairs of U.S. intelligence agencies. It’s a complicated series of events that I went into a bit more detail over here.
Trump, meanwhile, surprised the world by suggesting that he was working with the Chinese president to help ZTE find a way around the seven-year ban that has threatened to wipe the company off the map. The president cited job losses in China as his major motivator. That statement was met with bipartisan disapproval and Trump appeared to walk it back yesterday in another tweet, accusing The Washington Post and CNN of writing “false stories.”
It’s clear, however, that ZTE is being viewed as an important stumbling block as trade tensions increase between the two superpowers. The bill carrying the new amendment will come under consideration by the House of Representatives next month.
Source: TechCrunch
Cada vez más gente camina por la calle con su móvil en la mano aunque no lo esté usando. Esta investigación revela que las mujeres son mucho más propensas a este nuevo fenómeno que los hombres, pero las razones podrían variar entre la seguridad, el estatus y las relaciones románticas
Source: MIT
Encontrar al compañero de piso perfecto, sugerir vinos en función de sus gustos… el mercado de los test de ADN para el consumidor no para de crecer, pero la mayoría de la oferta no tienen ninguna ciencia sólida detrás. Le ofrecemos algunas pautas para detectar cuándo le están vendiendo humo
Source: MIT
El poder de los ordenadores cuánticos amenaza con destruir la criptografía que garantiza la seguridad de cualquier cadena de bloques. Para solucionarlo, esta investigación propone crear una versión cuántica de la tecnología capaz de entrelazar la información del pasado con la del presente para hacerla incorruptible
Source: MIT
An IoT-enabled lab for cannabis farmers, a system for catching drones mid-flight and the Internet of Cows are a few of the 17 startups exhibiting today at Alchemist Accelerator’s 18th demo day. The event, which will be streamed live here, focuses on big data and AI startups with an enterprise bent.
The startups are showing their stuff at Juniper’s Aspiration Dome in Sunnyvale, California at 3pm today, but you can catch the whole event online if you want to see just what computers and cows have in common. Here are the startups pitching onstage.
Tarsier – Tarsier has built AI computer vision to detect drones. The founders discovered the need while getting their MBAs at Stanford, after one had completed a PhD in aeronautics. Drones are proliferating. And getting into places they shouldn’t — prisons, R&D centers, public spaces. Securing these spaces today requires antiquated military gear that’s clunky and expensive. Tarsier is all software. And cheap, allowing them to serve markets the others can’t touch.
Lightbox – Retail 3D is sexy — think virtual try-ons, VR immersion, ARKit stores. But creating these experiences means creating 3D models of thousands of products. Today, artists slog through this process, outputting a few models per day. Lightbox wants to eliminate the humans. This duo of recent UPenn and Stanford Computer Science grads claim their approach to 3D scanning is pixel perfect without needing artists. They have booked $40,000 to date and want to digitize all of the world’s products.
Vorga – Cannabis is big business — more than $7 billion in revenue today and growing fast. The crop’s quality — and a farmer’s income — is highly sensitive to a few chemicals in it. Farmers today test the chemical composition of their crops through outsourced labs. Vorga’s bringing the lab in-house to the cannabis farmer via their IoT platform. The CEO has a PhD in chemical physics, and formerly helped the Department of Defense keep weapons of mass destruction out of the hands of terrorists. She’s now helping cannabis farmers get high… revenue.
Neulogic – Neulogic is founded by a duo of Computer Science PhDs that led key parts of Walmart.com product search. They now want to solve two major problems facing the online apparel industry: the need to provide curated inspiration to shoppers and the need to offset rising customer acquisition costs by selling more per order. Their solution combines AI with a fashion knowledge graph to generate outfits on demand.
Intensivate – Life used to be simple. Enterprises would use servers primarily for function-driven applications like billing. Today, servers are all about big data, analytics and insight. Intensivate thinks servers need a new chip upgrade to reflect that change. They are building a new CPU they claim gets 12x the performance for the same cost. Hardware plays like this are hard to pull off, but this might be the team to do it. It includes the former co-founder and CEO of CPU startup QED, which was acquired for $2.3 billion, and a PhD in parallel computation who was on the design team for the Alpha CPU from DEC.
Integry – SaaS companies put a lot of effort into building out integrations. Integry provides app creators their own integrations marketplace with pre-boarded partners so they can have apps working with theirs from the get go. The vision is to enable app creators to mimic their own Slack app directory without spending the years or the millions. Because these integrations sit inside their app, Integry claims setup rates are significantly better and churn is reduced by as much as 40 percent.
Cattle Care – AI video analytics applied to cows! Cattle Care wants to increase dairy farmers’ revenue by more than $1 million per year and make cows healthier at the same time. The product identifies cows in the barn by their unique black and white patterns. Algorithms collect parameters such as walking distance, interactions with other cows, feeding patterns and other variables to detect diseases early. Then the system sends alerts to farm employees when they need to take action, and confirms the problem has been solved afterwards.
VadR – VR/AR is grappling with a lack of engaging content. VadR thinks the cause is a broken feedback loop of analytics to the creators. This trio of IIT-Delhi engineers has built machine learning algorithms that get smarter over time and deliver actionable insights on how to modify content to increase engagement.
Tika – This duo of ex-Googlers wants to help engineering managers manage their teams better. Managers use Tika as an AI-powered assistant over Slack to facilitate personalized conversations with engineering teams. The goal is to quickly uncover and resolve employee engagement issues, and prevent talent churn.
GridRaster – GridRaster wants to bring AR/VR to mobile devices. The problem? AR/VR is compute-intensive. Latency, bandwidth and poor load balancing kill AR/VR on mobile networks. The solution? For this trio of systems engineers from Broadcom, Qualcomm and Texas Instruments, it’s about starting with enterprise use cases and building edge clouds to offload the work. They have 12 patents.
AitoeLabs – Despite the buzz around AI video analytics for security, AitoeLabs claims solutions today are plagued with hundreds of thousands of false alarms, requiring lots of human involvement. The engineering trio founding team combines a secret sauce of contextual data with their own deep models to solve this problem. They claim a 6x reduction in human monitoring needs with their tech. They’re at $240,000 ARR with $1 million of LOIs.
Ubiquios – Companies building wireless IoT devices waste more than $1.8 billion because of inadequate embedded software options making products late to market and exposing them to security and interoperability issues. The Ubiquios wireless stack wants to simplify the development of wireless IoT devices. The company claims their stack results in up to 90 percent lower cost and up to 50 percent faster time to market. Qualcomm is a partner.
4me, Inc. – 4me helps companies organize and track their IT outsourcing projects. They have 16 employees, 92 customers and generate several million in revenue annually. Storm Ventures led a $1.65 million investment into the company.
TorchFi – You know the pop-up screen you see when you log into a Wi-Fi hotspot? TorchFi thinks it’s a digital gold mine in the waiting. Their goal is to convert that into a sales channel for hotspot owners. Their first product is a digital menu that transforms the login screen into a food ordering screen for hotels and restaurants. Cisco has selected them as one of 20 apps to be distributed on their Meraki hotspots.
Cogitai – This team of 16 PhDs wants to usher in a more powerful type of AI called continual learning. The founders are the fathers of the field — and include professors in computer science from UT Austin and U Michigan. Unlike what we commonly think of as AI, Cogitai’s AI is built to acquire new skills and knowledge from experience, much like a child does. They have closed $2 million in bookings this year, and have $5 million in funding.
LoadTap – On-demand trucking apps are in vogue. LoadTap explicitly calls out that it is not one. This team, which includes an Apple software architect and founder with a family background in trucking, is an enterprise SaaS-only solution for shippers who prefer to work with their pre-vetted trucking companies in a closed loop. LoadTap automates matching between the shippers and trucking companies using AI and predictive analytics. They’re at $90,000 ARR and growing revenue 50 percent month over month.
Ondaka – Ondaka has built a VR-like 3D platform to render industrial information visually, starting with the oil and gas industry. For these industrial customers, the platform provides a better way to understand real-time IoT data, operational and job site safety issues and how reliable their systems are. The product launched two months ago, they have closed three customers already and are projecting ARR in the six figures. They have raised $350,000 in funding.
Source: TechCrunch
EarthNow recently announced a $1 billion investment, perhaps the largest-ever Series A financing round, to build a global constellation of satellites. Ant Financial announced plans to raise $9 billion at an expected $150 billion valuation, making it the most highly valued privately held company. Last year, SoftBank embarked on a $100 billion investment fund, 30 times larger than any prior venture fund.
The venture industry is scrambling to respond. Several established funds, including Sequoia, Khosla, Norwest and Battery, have recently announced by far their largest funds raised to date. Valuations and round sizes have doubled on average in the past five years.
The speed and magnitude with which technology innovation is moving is mind-boggling, even for those of us who have worked at the center of it for decades. Staid industries for which technology seemed irrelevant are transforming themselves or being disrupted by the Connected World, innovation made possible by the confluence of cloud, mobile, sensor and artificial intelligent technologies. McKinsey has noted that the internet-impacted industries represent 15 percent of our economy. The Internet of Things will impact the rest with a potential economic impact of $11 trillion by 2025.
Technology innovation is now a global village. China has moved from a technology laggard to fast follower to leader within the span of two decades. This year, venture investment in China is likely to surpass U.S. venture investment for the first time. Europe is producing cutting edge technology and companies; the Spotify IPO ago is just the latest example. Venture investors in Silicon Valley used to apply the bridge rule: If an investment involved crossing a bridge, then it was out of scope. Now many of us apply the two-flight rule: Any investment is fair game if it can be reached within two flights.
And yet we are left to ponder: Has the market run amok? Otherwise, what fundamentals are driving the longest bull run in venture history? Brynjolfsson and McAfee from MIT offer some perspective in “The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies.”
First, they note that innovation is accelerating as we approach the “second half of the chessboard.” This analogy applies a parable to Moore’s Law. The game of chess originated during the sixth century in present day India during the Gupta Empire. As the story goes, the emperor was so impressed by the difficult, beautiful game that he invited the inventor to name his reward. The inventor said, “All I desire is some rice to feed my family,” and proposed to start with one grain of rice on the first square and double the grains of rice in each succeeding square.
Impressed with the inventor’s apparent modesty, the emperor replied, “make it so.” If the request were fully honored, the inventor would receive 1.8 x 10^19 grains of rice by the 64th square, more rice than has been produced in the history of the world. The midpoint of the board would receive 4 billion grains of rice, about one large field’s worth of rice. It was only as they headed into the second half of the chessboard that at least one of them got into trouble.
The range of possible innovations for aspiring entrepreneurs are broader than they have ever been.
Geoffrey Moore first proposed what has become Moore’s Law — the doubling of compute power every two years — in 1965. Moore initially indicated that he could foresee this pattern persisting at least 10 years. Moore’s “Law” is merely a guideline, yet it has proven to be reliable over the past 50 years, and experts indicate it is likely to persist for another 10-15 years. If applied from the invention of semiconductors in 1958, then we are currently on the 30th square — rapidly approach the second half of the chessboard.
Until recently, the implications of Moore’s Law have been predictable. I first extrapolated Moore’s Law out 10-15 years starting in the 1990s. One could readily envision the miniaturization of computers, the rise of smart phones and Dick Tracy watches, the proliferation of sensors, higher processing speeds, storage capacity, compute power that would permit robotics, augmented intelligence and edge network computing. As we project forward, implanted devices, self-healing operations and autonomous vehicles seem imminent.
But as compute power far exceeds human capacity, it is increasingly difficult to apprehend the future implications of Moore’s Law. Much as with the emperor and inventor, the acceleration of innovations and magnitude of change puts us in promising but murkier territory as we enter the second half of the chessboard.
The second concept that Brynjolfsson and McAfee highlight is the delayed impact of fundamental innovation adoption. Pervasive utilization of the steam engine, internal combustion engine, electricity and indoor plumbing took decades, often 30-60 years. These innovations were often not adopted until new manufacturing facilities were built decades later.
We observe a similar trend in adoption of computer and internet technology. The publishing industry for books and newspapers was the most obvious application of the internet, yet it took well over a decade for our reading habits and the industry to adjust. Many would say this is still a work in progress. The financial industry is fundamentally a digital business, yet many practices remain entrenched: cash and credit card-based payments are but one example. The auto sector is just beginning to grapple with myriad new technologies. Surely the manufacturing and industrial sector will take longer still.
So two innovation trends are coinciding. Increases in compute power empower artificial intelligence, smart sensors and edge computing for the first time. Meanwhile, many industries are grappling to adopt technology available in the market for decades. The range of possible innovations for aspiring entrepreneurs are broader than they have ever been. The potential to transform industries has never been greater. More capital than ever before is available for good ideas. It is a great time to be an entrepreneur.
Source: TechCrunch
PayPal is taking its biggest bet yet on point-of-sale transactions, small businesses and markets outside of the U.S. as it looks to raise its game against Square, Stripe and others in the world of payments: The company has confirmed that it is buying iZettle — the Stockholm-based payments provider commonly referred to as the “Square of Europe” — for $2.2 billion in an all-cash deal.
The deal — which is expected to close in Q3 2018 — will see iZettle’s co-founder and CEO Jacob de Geer stay on to lead iZettle. He will report to PayPal’s COO Bill Ready. Others in iZettle’s exec team will also stay on to run the business, which will become a “center of excellence” for in-store and offline payments in Europe, PayPal said.
The timing of the deal is notable: It comes on the heels of iZettle filing for an IPO earlier this month (just nine days ago, in fact) in its own bid to scale out its business: iZettle had planned to raise $227 million on the Stockholm Nasdaq exchange, which would have valued the company at around $1.1 billion.
From what I understand from sources, the two had been talking “for years.” I guess the IPO filing suddenly gave those talks a new kind of urgency. And maybe double so: The news was supposed to be announced on Friday, but after rumors started to leak out today the company has decided to come out with it officially.
PayPal itself has a market cap of around $94 billion and in its last earnings said it had $7.8 billion in cash, cash equivalents and investments — giving it ample funds for this deal.
iZettle becomes PayPal’s biggest-ever transaction. For some context, in 2015 PayPal acquired money-transfer startup Xoom for $890 million, and when it was still a part of eBay, in 2013, it acquired Braintree and its Venmo business for $800 million.
iZettle has operations in 12 markets, including several in northern Europe and Mexico in Latin America, where PayPal doesn’t have an extensive offline presence, such as Brazil, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Mexico, Netherlands, Norway, Spain and Sweden. (Its Latin American expansion was made by way of a strategic investment from the Spanish bank Santander.) iZettle is very strong also in the U.K., so will help PayPal strengthen its business in that market at a time when Square has finally emerged as a competitor there.
Like Square, iZettle has made a lot of headway in building out a point of sale business by way of a card-reading dongle that links up with a smartphone or tablet, working with smaller businesses that might have never used a card service in the past because of the prohibitive costs of taking card payments. From that, it has extended into other financial services for those business, from inventory management to loans.
For those who follow PayPal, you’ll know that the company has also been working hard to expand its own point-of-sale payments, both in the U.S. and globally, although some might argue that these have not been as much of a home run for the company as its legacy online payments operations.
iZettle’s de Geer has wanted to expand the company’s horizons in the future to encompass larger businesses and also companies that do not have brick-and-mortar presences of any kind, but it’s the size and reach of iZettle’s operations precisely in existing areas that was what attracted PayPal, as complements to its existing business.
“Small businesses are the engine of the global economy and we are continuing to expand our platform to help them compete and win online, in-store and via mobile,” said PayPal president and CEO Dan Schulman in a statement. “iZettle and PayPal are a strategic fit, with a shared mission, values and culture—and complementary product offerings and geographies. In today’s digital world, consumers want to be able to buy when, where and how they want. With nearly half a million merchants on their platform, Jacob de Geer and his team add best-in-class capabilities and talent that will expand PayPal’s market opportunity to be a global one-stop solution for omnichannel commerce.”
On the side of iZettle, this will give the startup a much bigger opportunity to scale out its business as part of a global payments giant.
“Combining our assets and expertise with a global industry leader like PayPal allows us to deliver even more value to small businesses to help them succeed in a world of giants,” de Geer said in a statement. “The combination of iZettle and PayPal will provide tremendous benefits to our merchants who will have access to an even wider range of tools to help them get paid, sell smarter and grow.”
In its IPO filing, iZettle noted that it’s still operating at a loss, although those losses appeared to be narrowing. In the first three months of 2018, the company reported negative earnings before tax, depreciation and amortization of SEK73 million ($8.3 million), slightly narrower than its negative EBITDA of SEK78 million ($8.8 million). It projects EBITDA profitability by 2020.
iZettle expects to generate gross revenues (its own cut, that is) of around $165 million in 2018, with approximately $6 billion of total payment volume expected to be processed on its platform, PayPal noted. Its revenues have been growing at a compound annual growth rate of 60 percent between 2015 and 2017.
Source: TechCrunch
This Dreamliner weighs 130,000 kg—but actually, even a human could pull a full-sized aircraft.
Source: Wired
Amazon has given a 10-episode, straight-to-series order to The Hunt, a show created by David Weil and executive produced by Get Out writer-director Jordan Peele.
The series follows a group of Nazi hunters living in New York City in 1977, who discover a broader Nazi conspiracy. As with other contemporary stories about fighting Nazis, I’m sure this will have absolutely no resonance with contemporary politics and culture.
Amazon is already the home of The Man in The High Castle, an adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s alternate history novel in which the Nazis won World War II.
Deadline reports that Sonar Entertainment (which is producing the series with Peel’s Monkeypaw Productions) was in talks with another network before Amazon jumped in.
This is Amazon’s first series pickup since hiring NBC executive Jennifer Salke to take over Amazon Studios in February, following the departure of Roy Price amidst sexual harassment allegations. It also comes after Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has reportedly pushed the studio to focus on bigger, more mainstream shows.
Peele, meanwhile, recently won the Best Original Screenplay Oscar for writing Get Out, he has a new movie in the works and is also producing Lovecraft Country for HBO.
“When David Weil first shared The Hunt with me, I immediately knew that we had to be involved,” Peele said in a statement. “It’s cathartic. It’s noir. It’s frighteningly relevant. It’s exactly what I want to see on television. I am thrilled to be working with Amazon in bringing this incredible vision to the world.”
Source: TechCrunch