It might not be the most complicated build, but it’s still fun, and the result is a looker.
Source: CNET
Two launches are planned from both coasts of the US in the next four days as SpaceX ramps up on its long road to Mars and beyond.
Source: CNET
Andrew “Boz” Bosworth wrote about “the ugly truth” in connecting people in a 2016 memo. Boz now says he was trying to be “provocative.”
Source: CNET
One of a handful of high-end EV startups that plans stunning performance and looks.
Source: CNET
Under Armour announced a hack of its MyFitnessPal exercise application, saying that as many as 150 million user accounts were compromised. The breached data includes names, email addresses, and passwords but no financial data.
The post Under Armour: 150 million MyFitnessPal accounts were hacked appeared first on Digital Trends.
Source: Digital trends
The streaming video service iQiyi, a business owned by China’s online search giant Baidu, dropped 13.6% in its first day of trading on the Nasdaq — closing at $15.55, or down $2.45 from its opening price of $18.
The company still managed to pull off one of the largest public offerings by a Chinese tech company in the past two years raising $2.25 billion — the only Chinese technology company to make a larger splash in U.S. markets is Alibaba — the commercial technology juggernaut which raised $21.5 billion in its public offering on the New York Stock Exchange in 2014.
“It’s a special day and an exciting day for iQiyi, and I will say it’s also an exciting day for the Chinese internet,” said Baidu chief executive Robin Li of the iQiyi public offering.”Eight years ago, when we got started, we were not the first one, we were not the largest one, but we gradually worked our way up, and caught up and surpassed everyone. It has been not an easy journey, but finally we are public. We surpassed everyone. That’s because we have a very strong team. I have a full confidence on Gong Yu and on the whole iQiyi Team.”
Over its eight year history there’s no doubt that iQiyi has gone from laggardly to lustrous in the Chinese streaming video market. Baidu’s offering and Tencent’s video service have both managed to overtake the previous market leader Youku Tudou, which was acquired by Alibaba in 2016.
Tencent leveraged its 980 million monthly active users on the WeChat mobile messaging app, the 653 million monthly active users on its older QQ messaging platform and the company’s attendant social network (think Facebook) to juice growth of its video streaming offering, according to analysis from The Motley Fool.
For Baidu, the company’s pole position for online search became critical to the growth of iQiyi — along with a partnership to China’s ubiquitous hardware manufacturer and technology developer Xiaomi . The company also locked in early content licensing deals with big Hollywood studios like Lions Gate and Paramount — and a deal with Netflix to juice its subscriber base in China. By the end of 2017, Baidu was claiming more than 487 million monthly active users for the service.
The former leader in China’s video streaming market, Youku Tudou, seems to have wilted under the weight of its acquirer’s platform. Alibaba’s ecommerce was never a natural fit with online video streaming.
For all of their massive user bases each of China’s leading video streaming services face a profitability problem. For its part, iQiyi went to market with substantial losses of $574.4 million for the last fiscal year.
Source: TechCrunch
Under Armour learned on Sunday that information from 150 million accounts had been scooped up late last month.
Source: CNET
Roam, a San Francisco-based robotics startup, has just debuted a lower-body robotic exoskeleton aimed firmly at skiers. The company’s first product doesn’t stray too far from nearby Ekso Bionics, where CEO and founder Tim Swift worked previously — though the simply titled Robotic Ski Exoskeleton trades warehouse work and mobility assistance for the admittedly more exhilarating world of downhill skiing.
The product is essentially a pair of braces that strap on the wearer’s thighs, connecting to ski boots on one side and a small backpack on the other. The braces absorb shock, provide support and generally make you look like some crazy cyborg sent back from the future to punish snow.
A combination of built-in sensors and software adjust the system’s fabric and air actuators, providing additional support to the quadriceps. That all happens automatically, though users can also opt to control the thing manually, as well.
In spite of only announcing this week, the company says its “first releases are already spoken for,” meaning interested parties will have to join a waiting list to get their hands on it. And that’s honestly probably perfectly fine as they’re only available in the U.S. for now, and spring is finally upon us.
When they are more widely available, they’ll run somewhere in the ballpark of $2,000 to $2,500. Pricey, but no one ever said skiing — or being a robot — was going to be an affordable hobby.
Source: TechCrunch
Tax cuts might be the name of the game for the Trump administration, but the president has no intention of letting Amazon’s Jeff Bezos off easy. With a tweet early Thursday following an Axios report that the president is “obsessed” with the company, Trump’s anti-Amazon sentiment bubbled up once more.
Trump’s Amazon ire is nothing new, but seeing it surface through tweets means that going after the company might again at the top of his mind. Still, historically, that doesn’t indicate a policy shift is in order.
As Politico reported, the White House Deputy Press Secretary Raj Shah dismissed the assumption that Trump vs. Bezos is a war of personalities or an issue entangled with the president’s distaste for the Bezos-owned Washington Post.
“You have a huge company that’s done amazing things, in Amazon, spring up in a very short amount of time, and, really, tax policy and other policy has to catch up to that so that way, those who are competing with Amazon are on a level playing field,” Shah said.
“A lot of people have made this, with respect to Amazon, about personalities and the CEO at Amazon — we’re talking about Jeff Bezos here. But this is really about policy.”
Trump’s tweets reveal a different story, one that conflates Amazon, Bezos and the Washington Post and frequently rails against all three.
Remarkably, if you go back far enough, Trump seemed to implicitly praise Bezos’s business acumen by quoting him.
The criticisms didn’t really ramp up until 2015, after which time he became preoccupied by Amazon’s deal with the USPS and the financial relationship between Bezos, Amazon and the paper.
While the USPS/Amazon deal has reportedly come up with Trump plenty of times, the president appears to be sticking with his impression of the situation. “It’s been explained to him in multiple meetings that his perception is inaccurate and that the post office actually makes a ton of money from Amazon,” a source told Axios.
In reality, although Amazon could exit the deal and make arrangements with other delivery services, the deal is likely more essential for the USPS. The postal service loses money every year (and continues to do so) but parcel post deliveries (i.e. Amazon orders) are one revenue stream on its way up into 2017. In 2017, revenue from package deliveries went up 11.8% as first-class mail, historically the real money maker, declined.
As a source told Axios, Trump could leverage antitrust or competition law to go after Amazon, but that policy has yet to materialize. Until then, his recent volley toward Amazon appears to be just another verbal rant against a perceived enemy, this one just happens to own the sometimes second most valuable company in the world.
Source: TechCrunch
If you own a Model S built before April 2016, you’re probably going to want to swing by a dealer and get it checked out..
Tesla has just issued a voluntary recall for 123,000 Model S vehicles, having found that the power steering bolts in some were displaying “excessive corrosion”. Model X and Model 3 vehicles aren’t affected here, nor are Model S built after April 2016.
The company says that the corrosion is primarily occurring in cars driven in particularly cold climates, but isn’t limiting the recall to those cars (because, well, who knows where you’ll be driving it a few years from now.)
In an email outlining the recall to affected owners, Tesla notes that swapping out the bolts will “take around an hour,” and that no accidents or injuries are believed to have been caused by this issue.
This isn’t the first time Tesla has issued a recall, but it’s their biggest recall to date. It recalled around 53,000 Model S and Model X vehicles in April of last year due to parking brakes that could potentially get stuck in the ‘on’ position; a few months later, it recalled 11,000 Model X because of a faulty cable in the second-row seating.
Source: TechCrunch