cross pond high tech

Getaround, the peer-to-peer car-sharing startup that launched at TC Disrupt back in 2011, is making moves to become a global car rental service. Today, the SoftBank-backed startup announced its acquisition of Drivy, a Paris-headquartered car-sharing startup that operates in 170 European cities.

“We were obviously looking at what our European strategy was and how we would expand out of the U.S. and into other parts of the world,” Getaround CEO Sam Zaid told TechCrunch. “When we started looking at Europe, it became clear Drivy was the market leader. They also shared the same vision.”

This marks Getaround’s first expansion out of the U.S. As part of the deal, Drivy founder and CEO Paulin Dementhon will run the company’s operations in Europe as CEO for the continent.

“Getaround is an ideal partner for us because our companies are aligned in so many ways while being complementary on key aspects of our business, like geography or fleet acquisition,” Dementhon said in a statement. “I look forward to seeing what we can accomplish together.”

Combined with Drivy, Getaround now has more than five million users. Moving forward, Getaround has its eyes set on becoming a truly global company.

AI can generate storyboard animations from scripts, spot potholes and cracks in roads, and teach four-legged robots to recover when they fall. But what about adapting one person’s singing style to that of another? Yep — it’s got that down pat, too. In a paper published on the preprint server Arxiv.org (“Unsupervised Singing Voice Conversion“), scientists at Facebook AI Research and Tel Aviv University describe a system that directly converts audio of one singer to the voice of another. All the more impressive, it’s unsupervised, meaning it’s able to perform the conversion from unclassified, unannotated data it hasn’t previously encountered.

The team claims that their model was able to learn to convert between singers from just 5-30 minutes of their singing voices, thanks in part to an innovative training scheme and data augmentation technique.

“[Our approach] could lead, for example, to the ability to free oneself from some of the limitations of one’s own voice,” the paper’s authors wrote. “The proposed network is not conditioned on the text or on the notes [and doesn’t] require parallel training data between the various singers, nor [does it] employ a transcript of the audio to either text … or to musical notes … While existing pitch correction methods … correct local pitch shifts, our work offers flexibility along the other voice

SpaceIL's first attempt at a private Moon landing didn't go according to plan. However, that isn't deterring the team from giving it another shot. Founder Morris Khan has announced that the team will build another Beresheet lander and "complete the mission." The task force behind the new lander will start its work "first thing" on April 14th, he said.

As noticed by Bloomberg,

" Apple Inc. on Wednesday added mergers and acquisitions head Adrian Perica to its executive leadership page online, a promotion that suggests the technology giant is more focused on deals.

Perica joined Apple in 2009 and was instrumental in deals such as the 2014 purchase of Beats and the investment in China-based ride hailing service Didi Chuxing. He’s an under-the-radar operator who oversees the acquisition and integration of companies that Apple acquires as well as strategic investments.

Apple’s website describes Perica as the vice president of corporate development and lists him as reporting directly to Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook. That title is old, but reporting to the CEO is a move up in the company’s hierarchy. Previously, Chief Financial Officer Luca Maestri oversaw M&A.

The change comes as some Wall Street analysts are calling for Apple to consider larger acquisitions than it has in the past. Apple bought 18 companies in 2018, with none of them crossing the billion-dollar threshold.

"Cook knows it is time to get the deal engine ready," said Dan Ives, an analyst at Wedbush Securities, who has predicted that Apple will do a major media acquisition this year.

"They have to accelerate non-existent M&A going forward as we believe they can spend up to $100 billion on M&A over the next few years," Ives added. "Cook is taking much more oversight of deals and retail, and this is just another tea leaf."

An Apple spokesperson didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Perica is now one of fewer than 20 executives who report directly to the CEO. That group includes Chief Operating Officer Jeff Williams, Chief Design Officer Jony Ive and Maestri. Mike Fenger and Doug Beck, sales vice presidents, report to Cook despite not being featured on Apple’s executive leadership website."

-- https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-04-03/apple-m-a-chief-now-reporting-to-cook-as-calls-grow-for-big-deal

Volvo said on Wednesday it will use cameras installed inside its vehicles to monitor driver behavior and intervene if the driver appears to be drunk or distracted. It’s a risky move by an automaker, even one with a reputation for safety like Volvo, which could raise concerns among privacy advocates.

Apple shut down Google’s ability to distribute its internal iOS apps earlier today. A person familiar with the situation told The Verge that early versions of Google Maps, Hangouts, Gmail, and other pre-release beta apps stopped working alongside employee-only apps like a Gbus app for transportation and Google’s internal cafe app. The block came after Google was found to be in violation of Apple’s app distribution policy, and followed a similar shutdown that was issued to Facebook earlier this week.

TechCrunch and Bloomberg’s Mark Bergen reported late Thursday that the apps’ functionality had been restored; Apple appears to have worked more closely with Google to fix this situation. “We are working together with Google to help them reinstate their enterprise certificates very quickly,” an Apple spokesperson earlier told BuzzFeed.

APPLE BLOCKED FACEBOOK AND THEN GOOGLE
Apple’s move to block Google’s developer certificate comes just a day after Google disabled its Screenwise Meter app following press coverage. Google’s private app was designed to monitor how people use their iPhones, similar to Facebook’s research app. Google’s app also relied on Apple’s enterprise program, which enables the distribution of internal apps within a company.

In an earlier statement over Facebook’s certificate removal, Apple did warn that “any developer using their enterprise certificates to distribute apps to consumers will have their certificates revoked.” Facebook’s internal iOS apps have since resumed functioning, as the social network said this afternoon that Apple had restored its enterprise certificate.

Apple is clearly sticking to its rules and applying them equally to Facebook, Google, and likely many other companies that get caught breaking Apple’s rules in the future.

There’s growing evidence that a number of companies are using Apple’s enterprise program to distribute apps to consumers. iOS developer Alex Fajkowski has discovered that Amazon, DoorDash, and Sonos all distribute beta versions of their apps to non-employees. Apple may be forced to take action against these apps, or to even revamp its entire enterprise program in the future.

Update 1/31, 5:45PM ET: Article updated with comment from Google, Apple, and details on other companies using Apple’s enterprise program to distribute apps.

Update 1/31: 6:18PM ET: Updated with the news that Apple has resumed letting Facebook use internal iOS apps.

Update 1/31: 10:30PM ET: Updated with the news that Apple has restored functionality to Google’s apps.

Japan’s SoftBank has radically scaled back plans for fresh investment in WeWork, the loss-making, shared-office provider, following the recent tech stock rout and concerns among investors in its $100 billion Vision Fund.

SoftBank is in detailed negotiations to inject $2bn into WeWork this year, according to two people briefed on the deal, a much lower amount than the $16 billion that had been discussed towards the end of last year.

And the deal will now not include the participation of Softbank’s Vision Fund, which had been a major backer of Softbank’s existing investment of more than $8 billion in WeWork.

The funding could be announced as soon as this week, according to one of the people, who added that the deal had not yet been agreed and could still fall apart.

The scaling-back of the planned $16bn investment, which would have been the largest ever in a tech start-up, underlines the rapid shift in investor enthusiasm for technology shares that is now spilling into even the best-known privately held groups.

SoftBank has been instrumental in propping up private market valuations, investing billions of dollars in start-ups from ride-hailing group Uber to dog-walking app Wag.

WeWork has been one of the company’s largest bets, garnering billions from SoftBank as the group sought to dominate the fast-growing market for shared office space in cities such as New York and London even as its own losses have ballooned.

The negotiations over fresh funding have taken place against a backdrop of a sharp sell-off in equity markets that saw some of the world’s largest technology companies particularly hard hit in recent months.

Shares in SoftBank itself have fallen by 33 per cent in the past three months. The company also suffered an embarrassing start to trading for its newly-listed Japanese mobile phone business in late December after raising $23 billion from investors.

SoftBank will not gain a majority stake in the shared-office provider, which has become known for specialist coffees and fruit-infused water in its canteens and Instagram-ready art on its walls.

WeWork and SoftBank declined to comment.

If a deal is finalised, SoftBank will still have pumped more than $10bn into the company, marking one of the biggest bets on a start-up by SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son.

Elon Musk has unveiled a prototype underground tunnel in Los Angeles which is designed to transport cars at high speed around the city.

The tunnel is only a mile (1.6km) long at the moment but the goal is a network to ease chronic traffic congestion.

Modified electric cars would be lowered into the tunnel and travel at speeds up to 150mph (240km/h), Mr Musk says.

The tunnel has been built by Mr Musk's Boring Company, which boasts state-of-the-art engineering techniques.

Mr Musk, best known as the head of Tesla electric cars and the commercial SpaceX programme, arrived at the launch on Tuesday in a Tesla car modified to work on the "loop" system.

He was cheered by a small crowd as he emerged from the car at one end of the tunnel bathed in green and blue interior lights.

The plan envisages modified cars being lowered into the tunnel network by lifts and then slotted into tracks on the "loop".

"The profound breakthrough is very simple: it's the ability to turn a normal car into a passively stable vehicle by adding the deployable tracking wheels, stabilising wheels, so that it can travel at high speed through a small tunnel," Mr Musk said.

.../...

Alana Semuels, of The Atlantic, told the BBC World Service that Mr Musk had yet to unveil the technology that would allow vehicles to travel at such high speeds through the system.

"At first he said we're going have these tunnels and transport people in pods, now he's saying we're going to transport them in cars, so I'm not sure even he knows how it works," she said.

Apple has been expanding its development and use of custom chips over the last few years. Last month we first heard that Apple was looking to poach employees from Qualcomm on its home turf of San Diego to potentially create custom radio chips. Today, a new report from The Information says that Apple is indeed …

Now Apple has provided the clearest evidence yet that it is working on one of the most complicated and expensive hardware ingredients in its devices: a cellular modem. In a job listing posted a week ago, which hasn’t previously been reported, the company said it is looking for a cellular modem systems architect to work in its San Diego office.

And a person briefed on Apple’s plans confirmed that the company, indeed, has an an active project to build its own cellular modem chip, which connects Apple’s phones to the networks of wireless carriers. Due to the complexity of the chip, it could take Apple as long as three years to ship iPhones with them, analysts said.

Cleantechnica has compiled the event video plus tons of liveblogging highlights from the event : there is a trove of insight about where Tesla is going and how they are going there.

They have designed their own FSD (Full Self Driving system) that doesn't need a LIDAR and "learns" from shadow mode driving of the whole deployed Tesla fleet. This is how they will be able to deploy Robotaxi mode with just a software update.

For instance,

“Early testing of new FSD hardware shows a 21× improvement in image processing capability with fully redundant computing capability.

“This is all done at a modest cost while delivering a fully redundant computing platform to all of Tesla’s vehicles currently in production.”

General summary from Kyle: “Our shit is really, really fast and we built it better than anyone else.”

Elon notes that Tesla finished this design 1½–2 years ago and then started on the next system design. They are not talking about the next design now, but they’re about halfway through it.

Some additional technical notes from Chanan Bos:

“An enthusiast Intel desktop i7 processor with 8 cores has 3 billion transistors, Tesla’s new chip has 6 billion. But that is till less than some crazy 18 core Intel ships like Skylake-X which has 8.33 billion transistors. An iPhone has about 2 billion.

“So SRAM is much faster but is more expensive and has less storage compared to DRAM.

“Nvidia Xavier (available early 2018) had 30 TOPS (Tera Operations Per Second). Tesla’s FSD chip has 144 TOPS.”

How do assistants like Alexa discern sound? The answer lies in two Amazon research papers scheduled to be presented at this year’s International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing in Aachen, Germany. Ming Sun, a senior speech scientist in the Alexa Speech group, detailed them this morning in a blog post.

“We develop[ed] a way to better characterize media audio by examining longer-duration audio streams versus merely classifying short audio snippets,” he said, “[and] we used semisupervised learning to train a system developed from an external dataset to do audio event detection.”

The first paper addresses the problem of media detection — that is, recognizing when voices captured from an assistant originate from a TV or radio rather than a human speaker. To tackle this, Sun and colleagues devised a machine learning model that identifies certain characteristics common to media sound, regardless of content, to delineate it from speech.

A new highway in China is being built that will have dedicated lanes for autonomous vehicles. The lanes reserved for self-driving cars will be built on a new freeway connecting Beijing and the Xiongan New Area in Hebei province. The area is located about 60 miles southwest of Beijing.

The 100-kilometer (62 mile) freeway will be open to two-way traffic, with two of the eight lanes specially designed for autonomous vehicles, according to the Beijing Capital Highway Development Group Co. Construction on the project will begin this year. The speed limit on the highway will range from 62 to 74 mph.

The stretch of highway will also include intelligent road infrastructure and smart-toll facilities. This intelligent infrastructure system can acquire vehicle data and road information through wireless communication and internet technology, improving traffic flow and safety.

"It will be the most convenient freeway between Beijing and Xiongan," Zhou Xiaohong, deputy head of the group's department of technology and planning, was quoted as saying by Beijing Daily.

When the Beijing-Xiongan freeway is complete, travel time from the capital city of Beijing to Xiongan will be cut to one hour from the current two and a half hours, according to the outline.

The highway is one of several planned for the region. An outline for the Xiongan New Area lists four north-south freeways and three east-west expressways which will be built linking Xiongan with surrounding cities, including Beijing, Tianjin and cities in Hebei.

"In new research published today in NPJ Digital Medicine, scientists at Cornell University trained an off-the-shelf Google deep learning algorithm to identify IVF embryos as either good, fair, or poor, based on the likelihood each would successfully implant. This type of AI—the same neural network that identifies faces, animals, and objects in pictures uploaded to Google’s online services—has proven adept in medical settings. It has learned to diagnose diabetic blindness and identify the genetic mutations fueling cancerous tumor growth. IVF clinics could be where it’s headed next."

“We believe that machines and humans excel at detecting fundamentally different aspects of generated text,” Sebastian Gehrmann, a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science at Harvard, told Digital Trends. “Machine learning algorithms are great at picking up statistical patterns such as the ones we see in GLTR. However, at the moment machines do not actually understand the content of a text. That means that algorithms could be fooled by completely nonsensical text, as long as the patterns match the detection. Humans, on the other hand, can easily tell when a text does not make any sense, but cannot detect the same patterns we show in GLTR.”

Facebook last year grounded its ambitious plan to develop a solar-powered drone to beam internet across the world, but the company isn’t done with the concept, it seems. The social media giant is working with aeronautics giant Airbus to test drones in Australia, according to a new report from Germany’s NetzPolitik.

Using a request under Australia’s Freedom of Information Act, NetzPolitik got hold of a document that shows the two companies spent last year in talks over a collaboration with test flights scheduled for November and December 2018. The duo have collaborated before on communication systems for satellite drones.

Those trials — and it isn’t clear if they took place — involved the use of Airbus’ Zephyr drone, a model that is designed for “defence, humanitarian and environmental missions.” The Zephyr is much like Facebook’s now-deceased Aquila drone blueprint; it is a HAPS — “High Altitude Pseudo Satellite” — that uses solar power and can fly for “months.”

Ce ne sont pas moins de 381 start-up françaises qui ont traversé l'océan pour venir présenter leurs produits au CES cette année. 334 d'entre elles exposent dans l'Eureka Park, la partie du Salon dédiée aux jeunes pousses, ce qui fait de la délégation française la plus importante de cet espace.

Selon les calculs d'Olivier Ezratty, l'Hexagone représente 26 % des jeunes entreprises présentes, contre 25 % pour les Etats-Unis.

Alors que la France pointait depuis plusieurs années au deuxième rang, c'est la première fois qu'elle se place devant ses homologues locaux.