Nintendo has finally released its very own adjustable charger, fixing the kickstand issue, and the problem with faulty third party peripherals.
Source: CNET
Versatility has also been on of the Switch’s best features. The latest Nintendo system is a fascinating hybrid device that skirts the line between home and portable gaming. Still, there are some in-between scenarios the console didn’t get quite right out of the box.
The kickstand problem has plagued the otherwise well-received device since its earliest days. It falls over often, it’s puts the device at a weird angle, and worst of all, the charging port is on the bottom, so you can’t play the system in table top mode while it’s plugged it.
Just ahead of E3, the company’s showing off a $20 solution. The simply named Adjustable Charging Stand props the system, while keeping it plugged in, via an AC adapter port on the side.
An adjustable kickstand on the back, meanwhile, means you can change the viewing angle, depending on the height of the surface it’s on. That’s good news for those times when you don’t have a TV set to plug into, but still want to pull out the Joy-Cons to get the full experience — be it on a desk or an airport tray table.
The peripheral hits stores July 13.
Source: TechCrunch
Amid a pile of crises and slow Model 3 production, one investor is calling for a shakeup of Tesla’s board of directors—and for more oversight over CEO Elon Musk.
Source: Wired
I’m not quite sure why this wasn’t a feature from the get-go, but you can now launch movies from your Google Play collection with Google Home.
Source: CNET
Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi spoke briefly of what’s been going in the world of Uber’s self-driving cars in light of the fatal accident in Tempe, Arizona in March. At Uber Elevate today in Los Angeles, Khosrowshahi said Uber will bring back its self-driving cars “within the next few months, I don’t know.”
To be fair, Khosrowshahi didn’t sound the 100 percent confident in his answer. That’s just to say I wouldn’t be surprised if it takes Uber longer than a few months.
He went on to say that when Uber does bring its cars back on the road, “it’s going to be in as safe of a way as possible.”
Uber pulled its self-driving cars off the roads following the March fatal crash. Later that month, Uber decided not to reapply for a self-driving car testing permit in California. Uber’s previous permit expired March 31.
If Uber wants to continue its tests in California, it will need to apply for a new permit, as well as “address any follow-up analysis or investigations from the recent crash in Arizona,” DMV Deputy Director/Chief Counsel Brian Soublet wrote in a letter to Uber in March. Uber may also need to set up a meeting with the DMV.
In response to a question about how the investigation is going with the National Transportation Safety Board, Khosrowshahi said it’s ongoing. Unlike Tesla being quite vocal about the fatal crash involving its Autopilot system, and damaging its relationship with the NTSB, Khosrowshahi said, “We will not be tweeting ahead of their findings.”
But that doesn’t mean there won’t be leaks. Earlier this week, The Information reported Uber’s software was at fault. Specifically, it was reportedly the fault of the software that determines which objects to ignore and which to attend to.
Following the report, Uber said it’s actively cooperating with the NTSB and can’t comment on the specifics of the accident.
“In the meantime, we have initiated a top-to-bottom safety review of our self-driving vehicles program, and we have brought on former NTSB Chair Christopher Hart to advise us on our overall safety culture,” an Uber spokesperson said in a statement at the time. “Our review is looking at everything from the safety of our system to our training processes for vehicle operators, and we hope to have more to say soon.”
Source: TechCrunch
Uber’s flying taxis are taking off, as the transportation upstart looks for new ways to shorten trips made long because of distance or traffic congestion. Flying cars were once nearly the exclusive domain of tech aphorisms (“You promised us flying cars, but instead we have x.”), but now they are actually being put into gear in the form of electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) vehicles. Over the last couple of days at the Uber Elevate summit in Los Angeles, the company further laid out its own ambitious plans to develop and commercially deploy air taxis by 2023.
Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, who has been at the helm for less than one year, admitted he wasn’t initially 100 percent on board for Elevate, he said at the Uber Elevate Summit in Los Angeles. It took a couple of sessions and some reviews of the math for him to be sold on it, he said.
“For me the aha moment came when I started understanding that Uber isn’t just about cars,” Khosrowshahi said. “Ultimately, where we want to go is about urban mobility and urban transport, and being a solution for the cities in which we operate.”
Uber Elevate is Uber’s all-encompassing term for its initiative to launch uberAIR, which is the its aerial electric ride-hailing service, as well as any other initiatives (think food delivery) that may benefit from air transport. Elevate is also the name of the two-day conference Uber held in Los Angeles. Once Uber’s vision is fully implemented, Uber says the service will be cheaper than the cost of owning a car, on a per-passenger, per-mile basis, and autonomous. At launch, however, pilots will be required.
In the U.S., Uber is aiming to launch first in the Dallas-Fort Worth and Frisco, Texas, areas and Los Angeles. Last year, Uber said it would also aim to start testing in Dubai by 2020, but that’s no longer the case. Instead, Uber now has an open call out to interested international cities to describe the clear need for aerial transit, the enabling conditions of the city and local government commitment.
In order to launch uberAIR, Uber needs the actual vehicles, skyports for them to land on, as well as batteries. The company won’t be developing and producing its own vehicles. Instead, it’s relying entirely on its aerospace partners — some of which have been developing aircrafts for decades.
“There’s a lot that has to come together,” Khosrowshahi said about partnerships. “We absolutely know that we cannot make this happen ourselves.”
At the summit, Uber announced a new partnership with Karem to develop eVTOLs. Karem Aircraft, which has patented Optimum Speed Tiltroter technology for military and commercial applications, has been working with Uber for about a year to create the Butterfly concept. This type of vehicle is supposed to be a passenger-friendly adaptation of Karem’s core technology. And some of Uber’s previously announced partners also showed off what they’ve been working on over the past year. Embraer, for example, unveiled its first eVTOL concept.
At this point there are more than 70 companies working on eVTOLs for deployment in Uber’s air taxi network.
The company also needs skyports to enable people to board and exit these eVTOLs, which is where partners like Gannett Fleming and Corgan come in. On day two, these partners showed off their skyport designs as part of a skyport competition Uber ran.
Since Uber wants its offering to be all-electric from the start, it’s working with a number of battery partners. One of them is E-One Moli, a newly announced partner that will put its battery technology in the first eVTOL prototypes from Uber’s Elevate vehicle partners. With these batteries, uberAIR vehicles could travel up to 84 miles on a single charge, compared to just 60 miles. That also means Uber needs a way to charge these vehicles, which is where partners like ChargePoint come in.
Mega Skyport
On day one of the summit, Uber Head of Aviation Eric Allison spoke about how certain skyports could handle hundreds or even thousands of landings per hour. In order to manage the skies and ensure uberAIR doesn’t simply replicate the horrendous traffic patterns we already have on the roads, Uber is working to develop systems that enable the ecosystem to function in what will be a more complex version of standard air traffic control, Allison told TechCrunch earlier in the day.
There are many ways to conceive of this, but one way is something Uber Director of Engineering for Airspace Systems Tom Prevot calls Dynamic Skylane Networks. He said you can think of them as a virtual network of lanes, overpasses, on-ramps and off-ramps in the sky that dynamically adjust to where the air traffic needs to flow.
But that’s a bit down the road. At the beginning of this process, Prevot said, Uber wants to work in parallel with what exists today and be “extremely cooperative, interoperable and transparent for safety and efficiency reasons. But we also need to protect, obviously, privacy information.”
He added that cybersecurity is a “first-class citizen and we need to bake that in from the beginning.”
Although Uber could theoretically create, own and control its own air traffic control system for eVTOLs, Uber says the intention is not to own it. Instead, the idea is to make it an open standard that other companies can work with, and therefore, enable interoperability.
“We don’t own airspace,” Holden said. “We’re just trying to make sure airspace is managed in an extremely safe and efficient way.”
To try to achieve this goal, Uber is working closely with the FAA and NASA. At the Summit, Uber announced it has signed a second space act agreement with NASA to model and simulate airspace requirements for urban air mobility applications. As part of the agreement, Uber will share its plans for implementing its air-based rideshare network.
Using data from Uber, NASA plans to simulate a small passenger-carrying aircraft flying through the Dallas-Fort Worth area. The idea is to identify potential safety issues in an already-crowded air traffic control system.
Simulation of 50 aircrafts in the Dallas-Fort Worth area
“We’re designing our flight paths essentially to stay out of the scheduled air carriers’ flight paths initially,” Prevot said at Elevate. “We do want to test some of these concepts of maybe flying in lanes and flying close to each other but in a very safe environment, initially.”
All of these eVTOLs, of course, must comply with regulation from aviation authorities. At Elevate, FAA Acting Administrator Dan Elwell said he’s excited about everything that’s happening. But while Uber aims to start testing in 2020 and deploy commercially in 2023, all Elwell would say is, “We’ll see.”
“Everything is changing, but remember it’s changing within the construct that we’ve built, that we know,” Elwell said in a conversation with Uber Chief Product Officer Jeff Holden. “We have to adapt.” He added, whatever happens, the FAA is going to do this right. If you were to ask him what his reaction is to the idea that “it has to happen and this date is certain, my answer is, ‘well, we’ll see.’”
But Khosrowshahi said he’s confident in the 2020 testing timeframe. That’s because of the partners Uber has in place and the team on board, Khosrowshahi said.
“I think that’s something we can get to,” he said.
In tandem with ensuring uberAIR operates in ways that are safe and consistent with current FAA standards, sound regulation is key to community acceptance. For the purpose of uberAIR, Uber has tapped David Josephson, a noise and acoustics consultant at Josephson Engineering. At the Elevate summit, Josephson explained how urban air mobility noise will be different from the noise of a conventional aircraft. Part of that is due to the fact that airports are not located within city centers. With uberAIR, however, these skyports are going to be within city limits.
“We’ve decided to develop an entirely different set of metrics for this purpose,” Josephson said.
Those measurements entail looking at how many people are going to be affected by any given flight. More specifically, that means looking at how many people are going to be able to hear the noise emissions from the eVTOLs.
Uber is ultimately presenting AIR as a way to increase access to transportation. In an ideal world, uberAIR would be able to reach neighborhoods that are traditionally underserved by transit agencies, Uber Head of Policy of Autonomous Vehicles and Urban Aviation Justin Erlich told me back in February. But in order to do that, Uber needs to remain conscious of the fact that it’s a goal it’s trying to achieve. That means ensuring the right policy infrastructure is in place and that’s where Erlich comes in.
“We’re thinking about what this looks like for making things wheelchair accessible and so we’re having ongoing conversations with folks in that community,” Erlich said. “We’ll really need to be thoughtful long-term about where the routings are to make sure that we’re serving underserved communities in transit, and to make sure that this technology is made available to everybody.”
In addition to reducing the cost of aerial transit, it’s important to note where the skyports will be located and what areas they will serve, World Economic Forum Head of Drones and Tomorrows Airspace Timothy Reuter said at Elevate.
“One of the causes of inequality in this country is, it’s very difficult for people to live in low cost areas but get access to high wages,” Reuter said.
And as Uber continues to scale and move further into autonomy, it will be worth paying attention to who is going to be tapped to handle the more monotonous, low-wage jobs.
“What we bring to the table here,” Khosrowshahi said, “is building this to not be a service for the few but a service that is ultimately available for mass market.”
Source: TechCrunch
Messages sent on the popular chat app are supposed to disappear, but default app settings may void that.
Source: CNET
We spoke with Dima Sytnyk, CEO of software maker, Skylum, on how the company prioritized performance over new features in the latest update to Luminar, its photo-editing app.
The post How Skylum increased speed of Luminar photo-editing software on older hardware appeared first on Digital Trends.
Source: Digital trends
What is WiGig? This wireless technology has been in development for a while, but we’re finally starting to see the benefits. The 60Ghz standard can attain incredible wireless data speeds in very limited environments. This FAQ explores what you need to know about this new tech, and where it’s going in the future.
The post What is WiGig? appeared first on Digital Trends.
Source: Digital trends
Selected local authorities can use drones for defibrillator deliveries, runway inspections, and mosquito control.
Source: Wired