After the horrors of a war in the north, everyone’s picking up the pieces and moving south in a tense preview for Sunday’s episode.
Source: CNET
The Battle of Winterfell was epic and all, but viewers couldn’t always grasp what the heck was going on.
Source: CNET
Addressing a New York Times report, Apple said it spiked some apps because they utilized mobile device management software on kids’ devices.
Source: CNET
Apple is recalling certain three-prong AC wall plug adapters shipped with Mac and some iOS devices, and also sold as part of the Apple World Travel Adapter Kit. It said that in rare cases it could pose an electric-shock risk.
The post Apple is recalling faulty plug adapters over safety risk appeared first on Digital Trends.
Source: Digital trends
Apple is defending its removal of certain parental control apps from the app store in a new statement.
The company has come under fire for its removal of certain apps that were pitched as tools giving parents more control over their children’s screen-time, but that Apple said relied on technology that was too invasive for private use.
“We recently removed several parental control apps from the App Store, and we did it for a simple reason: they put users’ privacy and security at risk. It’s important to understand why and how this happened,” the company said in a statement
The heart of the issue is the use of mobile device management technologies in the parental control apps that Apple has removed from the app store, the company said.
These device management tools give control and access over a device’s user location, app use, email accounts, camera permissions and browsing history to a third party.
“We started exploring this use of MDM by non-enterprise developers back in early 2017 and updated our guidelines based on that work in mid-2017,” the company said.
Apple acknowledged that the technology has legitimate uses in the context of businesses looking to monitor and manage corporate devices to control proprietary data and hardware, but, the company said, it is “a clear violation of App Store policies — for a private, consumer-focused app business to install MDM control over a customer’s device.”
The company said it communicated to app developers that they were in violation of App Store guidelines and gave the company 30 days to submit updates to avoid being booted from the App Store.
Indeed, we first reported that Apple was warning developers about screen-time apps in December.
“Several developers released updates to bring their apps in line with these policies,” Apple said in a statement. “Those that didn’t were removed from the App Store.”
Source: TechCrunch
Autonomous vehicles will soon be ubiquitous on city streets. Before this happens, we should ask ourselves: Will they whisk us quickly through cities or make traffic worse?
A car is a car, whether self-driving or people driven—taking up a great deal more space than busses, streetcars, or trains—so let’s make sure the cost is right. Traffic has already increased in many cities due to widespread ride-hailing. Once Uber further rolls out autonomous vehicle fleets, calling a car will be cheaper, more competitive—and a potential burden on our streets.
A new study by UC Santa Cruz Professor Adam Millard-Ball in the Journal of Transportation Policy makes a convincing case that self-driving cars will dramatically increase traffic further. Millard-Ball forecasts that the number of cars on the street could grow exponentially as more people are able to take their hands off the steering wheel and just sit back and ride.
Furthermore, when not in use, autonomous vehicles need to go somewhere. There are three options: go back home, park somewhere, or circle around. Most likely, these cars will endlessly circle the streets rather than parking and paying fees.
The rise in ride-hailing speaks to the need to think about congestion pricing — even more so in light of autonomous vehicles potentially circling the city aimlessly in the years to come — in more dynamic terms.
Image courtesy of Getty Images
Existing congestion pricing schemes work a few different ways. Most programs either identify a core part of the city or specific zones within the city to institute a flat or variable rate fee on vehicles that drive into the specified areas. The systems monitor compliance through gantry and camera systems that record license plates, or some version of transponders in vehicles. All congestion pricing systems attach a price to road usage.
Particularly, variable pricing that captures usage throughout the city could lead to different decision-making by autonomous vehicles. Rather than ghosting through the streets waiting to pick up passengers, these cars could instead choose to park in either the core of the city or on the periphery, helping to unclog streets rather than adding to traffic.
Variable pricing increases as traffic increases, thereby pushing some drivers—or in the future self-driving vehicles—off the road and making cars glide more smoothly. In the US, we are most familiar with variable tolling schemes implemented on highways, but congestion pricing systems like those in Singapore and Stockholm include a variable nature to them throughout the congestion zone.
Image courtesy of Getty Images
Congestion pricing could directly counteract an increase in vehicle usage, and ensure self-driving cars pay full freight for the impact they create. New York City will be implementing a congestion zone starting in 2021 that will affect all drivers south of 60th Street entering Manhattan. While the final structure is still to be determined, experts say it could bring in more than $1 billion a year to support public transit upgrades.
Across the pond, London’s policy — first implemented in 2003 — covers a core eight mile square zone and currently costs around $15. From 2002 to 2014, private cars entering the central zone dropped 39%. However, with the rapid increase in ride-hailing brought about by Uber and other companies, congestion has again increased.
In the Washington, D.C., and LA regions, variable pricing — just not in a downtown congestion zone — already provides highway drivers with the option to pay to drive in a free-flowing lane. The cost to consumers is anything but free, because the cost must line up with demand to keep traffic moving. In the Washington, D.C., region, the charges to drive from the city from far-out suburbs peaked near $40. But that was what it cost to keep traffic moving.
Singapore, on the other hand, extends this logic to the core of its city with its congestion pricing model. The city has over 50 points within the designated area in and around the central business district, and each of these points charges between $0 – $3, depending on the time of day and traffic conditions. Stockholm follows a similar logic to Singapore’s system with a total cap of around $11.30 per vehicle per day.
Good, responsive public policy can help us make the right choices. Congestion pricing can serve as a market-based regulator that gets the right number of cars on the street at a given time. At the same time, depending on the fuel mix of cars with gas versus electric, these systems can improve air quality and public health. And the funds from these plans can help support and improve transit systems.
When you ask city leaders what kind of cities they and their residents are trying to build, the resounding answer is cities for people, not cars. Let’s make sure self-driving vehicles help make cities better for everyone.
Source: TechCrunch
As we head into the summer tourist season, one of the bigger travel startups in Europe has allegedly bagged a significant round of funding. German blog Deutsche Startups is reporting that GetYourGuide, which lets tourists search for and book tours and other experiences in their destinations of choice from a catalog of some 35,000 activities, has raised €500 million from investors including SoftBank at a valuation of €1.6 billion ($558 million at a valuation of $1.78 billion at current dollar rates).
We’ve reached out to GetYourGuide and SoftBank — which is reportedly making the investment from its Vision Fund — to confirm the news and hopefully provide more details and will update this post as we learn more. Prior to this, Sky in the UK (via tech.eu) reported that GetYourGuide was raising $300 million and that Singapore’s Temasek was also in the round, so that is another potential investor in the mix. If accurate, this latest Series E would be a big leap in funding for the company, which had raised $170 million up to now.
The deal would also be notable as the second big investment out of Europe for SoftBank within the space of a week. Days ago, the mega-investor — which has been taking a leading role in large growth rounds for startups globally through its $100 billion Vision Fund — put $1 billion (€900 million) into German payments provider Wirecard as part of a wider fintech partnership.
GetYourGuide was launched in 2009, and since then it has sold some 25 million tickets — a figure that speaks to a significant acceleration in its activities in the last two years. In 2017, when it last announced funding — a Series D of $75 million led by Battery Ventures — GetYourGuide had said it had passed 10 million tickets sold. (In 2017 it had 15 million active users; it’s not clear how many it has now.)
The success of Airbnb — and observations of its acquisitiveness as it continues to scale — has led to a surge of interest among investors in other fast-growing startups in the travel sector. Just last week, Selina, which runs a network of hostel-style work/live accommodations around the world for digital nomads, raised of $100 million at an $850 million valuation. Other recent fundings in the travel sector have included another travel activities platform, Klook, raising $200 million; AI-based travel platform Hopper raising $100 million; and TripActions raising $154 million.
The growth of all these has also helped to build a market and consumer demand for digital-first, new takes on travel services.
“The major trend here is that it’s not the same tourists than the tourists that you had 10 to 20 years ago,” GetYourGuide’s CEO and co-founder Johannes Reck told TechCrunch in 2017. “[Then] there were these old school tour operators. Really bad reputation. They would all show you the most touristy parts of town… Now because we have so much content around the activity and customer reviews etc it’s becoming much harder for the tour operators to do a bad job… So essentially we’re in a new age of tour supplier, all of which have really tremendous customer satisfaction.”
But at the same time, Airbnb also represents a competitive threat to the smaller fish.
While Airbnb built itself first as a marketplace for people to list and rent out rooms and homes for casual travel accommodation, in its quest to continue building out its business and grow its revenues per user by having more touchpoints with customers beyond simply providing a link to finding a place to stay, Airbnb has in more recent years expanded into more areas such as business travel and travel-related “experiences” to suggest (and sell) activities to tourists once they are staying in their Airbnbs (and even to those who are resident in cities and just looking for things to do).
GetYouGuide’s advantage up to now has been is that activity booking is currently all that it does, making it less of an afterthought and more of the primary purpose of the platform. One key question is whether this new round of funding will now take it into new directions, or whether that focus will be enough for the next stage of growth.
Source: TechCrunch
Un nuevo y sencillo sistema de imágenes en 3D ha logrado este hito gracias a un par de sencillos trucos de iluminación y procesamiento. El avance ofrece una solución prometedora para la inspección industrial en remoto rendimiento y la detección automática de pilotos de la futura sociedad de la información
Source: MIT
Durante décadas, la robótica y la inteligencia artificial han evolucionado en paralelo, y todavía resulta difícil incorporar los avances algorítmicos en las máquinas físicas. Este nuevo brazo robótico de bajo coste podría lograr que los autómatas adquieran inteligencia de forma más fácil y rápida
Source: MIT
Parece que los vehículos sin conductor están a la vuelta de la esquina, pero cada experto tiene una idea distinta de cuándo sucederá. Para aclararlo, hemos hablado con uno de ellos para que explique los obstáculos reales que hay por delante. En su opinión son el coste, la tecnología y la regulación
Source: MIT