TikTok’s parent company ByteDance is developing a smartphone

ByteDance owns more than a dozen apps, including popular short video platform TikTok. Hong Kong (CNN Business) TikTok owner ByteDance wants more than just your viral short videos — it wants to help make the devices you watch them on. The Chinese tech firm said it is developing a smartphone after striking a deal with electronics company Smartisan. ByteDance isn’t trying to be the next big smartphone maker. A company spokeswoman said in a statement that the new device will be “a continuation of plans that were in place” before it began working with Smartisan. “The focus is on […] […]

Marty the grocery store robot is a glimpse into our hell-ish future

Attention shoppers: I’ve seen the future of grocery store technology, and let me tell you, we can do better. I’m no Marty McFly. I simply reside in a small Connecticut town, which means that in addition to doing Extremely New England things like commuting to the city on the Metro North, bragging about beaches, and the fact that the state inspired the picturesque fictional town in Gilmore Girls , I occasionally spend some time on the weekends shopping for groceries at a local Stop & Shop. Prior to 2019, the Stop & Shop shopping experience was similar to that […] […]

Facebook gets closer to letting you type with your mind

San Francisco (CNN Business)Elon Musk’s Neuralink isn’t the only company that wants to send your thoughts straight from your brain to a computer. More than two years ago, Facebook revealed it was working on a project for typing words onto a computer right from your brain, without requiring invasive surgery to make it work. The company has been working with several universities on the effort, including the University of California, San Francisco. Facebook helped pay for UCSF researchers to study whether electrodes placed in the brain could help us learn to “decode” speech from brainwaves in real time. As […] […]

​Vijf indrukwekkende innovaties in de (online) casino wereld

Binnen twee jaar is het zover: de online kansspelmarkt wordt vrijgegeven en de Nederlandse markt maakt voor het eerst kennis met een groot aantal online casino’s. De continue ontwikkelingen in dit gebied hebben niet alleen een positief effect gehad op de regelgeving maar ook op de technologie achter de (online) casino’s. Gokken en specifiek op spellen als online roulette is populairder dan ooit en hier mag dan ook enige technologische vooruitgang van worden verwacht. Dat zien we online en offline. Grote casino’s met een wereldwijd bereik als Caesars Entertainment en Wynn investeren in een multi-platform technologie. Online spelers zoals […] […]

The US pushes to build unhackable quantum networks

Researchers working on quantum teleportation A few years ago, Edward Snowden, a contractor working for the US National Security Agency, leaked documents that showed the ways in which intelligence agencies were spying on our data. One of the most striking revelations was that spies had tapped into fiber-optic cables to monitor the vast amounts of information flowing through them. Snowden’s revelations have spurred efforts to tap the almost mystical properties of quantum science to make such hacking impossible. Now there are signs of progress. A startup called Quantum Xchange says it has struck a deal giving it access to […] […]

A digital revolution is reshaping Democratic campaigns

Two weeks before the 2016 election, Bloomberg’s Joshua Green and Sasha Issenberg published a story about Trump’s brash, self-aggrandizing digital team. Democrats treated the story as evidence of the Trump campaign’s utter cluelessness, until he won. For months after, coverage of the Trump’s tech and digital strategy dominated headlines. Those stories had consequences: Facebook locked down its user data; Cambridge Analytica folded; and a wave of startups, including my own, emerged to help progressives mobilize online. A change is coming to the Democratic Party, and for some campaigns, it’s already here. I’ve seen it firsthand. As part of my […] […]

IoT: A roomful of conundrums

As the drive to bring any and all imaginable physical objects online continues full steam ahead, internet-enabled devices are increasingly part of our day-to-day routines. In our quest for more productive and enjoyable – or simply easier – lives, we cannot avoid jumping on the Internet-of-Things (IoT) bandwagon. Up to 30 billion devices are predicted to be online by 2020 , according to the Mozilla Foundation. To be sure, IoT is not just about our personal efficiency or enjoyment, and the class of products such as smart watches or smart light bulbs. Spurred by innovations in hardware, networking, cloud […] […]

Google Discover begins to replace the iconic search box on mobile

It’s not broke, but Google is fixing it. As it announced last month , Google is rebranding Google Feed, its news landing page on Android and in the Google app, to be called Google Discover. Throwing minimalism out the window, Google Discover will replace the iconically spartan Google.com homepage on mobile. Discover is rolling out now on Google.com across both iOS and Android devices. For Android users, Discover is already baked into the interface, accessible by swiping right from the home screen. Anyone using the Google app on iOS or Android will also be met with the Discover homepage, […] […]

IBM’s $34 billion purchase of Red Hat is a mega-bet on a coding revolution

Today The world’s biggest-ever deal for a software company points towards a significant change in how code is being developed for the computing cloud. The news: Big Blue is swallowing Red Hat , a company that has made its reputation in open-source software development. The open-source movement makes core code freely available so that a community of developers can keep updating it. Companies like Red Hat create services to help companies deploy and use that code. Not just a business deal: IBM is interested in Red Hat because of its infrastructure for managing various kinds of cloud platforms. But […] […]

Chevy’s Making an Electric Camaro to Dominate the Drag Strip

Chevy has created a vehicle that would hurt Dominic Toretto more than a treacherous family member: an all-electric Camaro. Punch ” Tesla drag race vs” into YouTube, and you’re offered a panoply of ways to complete your search. You can watch one of Elon Musk’s electric cars face off with Lamborghinis, Ferraris, Dodge Hellcats, McLarens, Corvettes, and just about any supercar or muscle machine you can think of. These videos are much the same: Again and again, the instant torque of the EV’s motors smokes the gas belcher off the line, leaving nothing but the squeal of the tires […] […]

How Google’s Night Sight Works, and Why It’s So Good

Reading all the gushing praise for Google’s new Night Sight low-light photography feature for Pixel phones, you’d be forgiven for thinking Google had just invented color film. In fact, night shooting modes aren’t new, and many of the underlying technologies go back years. But Google has done an amazing job of combining its prowess in computational imaging with its unparalleled strength in machine learning to push the capability past anything previously seen in a mobile device. We’ll take a look at the history of multi-image capture low-light photography, how it is likely used by Google, and speculate about what […] […]

Slimme speakers verkopen inmiddels als een malle, vooral in China

De slimme speaker wordt niet alleen steeds populairder, er komen er ook steeds meer van. Dat verklaart waarom het aantal verkochte Google Assistants, Alexa’s en vooral Chinese smart speakers bijna verdubbeld is in het afgelopen jaar. Er zijn inmiddels bijna 17 miljoen slimme speakers verkocht, alleen al in het tweede kwartaal van 2018! Marktonderzoek van Canalys heeft uitgewezen dat er wel een verschuiving gaande is op de markt. Waar eerst de globale slimme speaker-markt werd gedomineerd door Amazon met de Echo’s met een marktaandeel van meer dan 80 procent is het nu Google die voorop loopt. De verkopen van […] […]

Stanford Researchers Build AI Directly Into Camera Optics

Until recently, cameras were exclusively designed to create images for humans — for fun, for art, and for documenting history. With the rapid growth of robots as well as various other kinds of machines and vehicles that need to observe and learn from their environment, many cameras are dedicated to machine vision tasks. Some of the most visible of those, like autonomous vehicles , rely heavily on object recognition, which almost universally means neural networks trained on commonly found objects. One limitation on the deployment of machine vision in many embedded systems, including electric vehicles, is the necessary compute […] […]

Welcome to Checkout-Free Retail. Don’t Mind All the Cameras

Hotlittlepotato The shop has no sign. Or rather, the sign is obscured by some kind of bunting. The glass doors are papered over. You gotta know what’s back there, like a speakeasy. Venturing to open the door, I find I still can’t get inside. Between me and a cramped 180 square feet or so of convenience store-like shelves—yogurts, bags of exotically-flavored freeze-dried peas, refrigerators full of juice, and pre-packaged sandwiches—is a turnstile. It is a shop. I will shop. There’s a reader on the right. There’s an app. This is San Francisco, 2018. There is always an app. Get […] […]

The Self-Driving Startup Teaching Cars to Talk

Every element of Drive.ai’s exterior design—from the color scheme to the location and phrasing of the text—is carefully selected and tested. “We have a lot of opinions and ideas. They are not worth anything unless the user says so,” says design chief Bijit Halder.Drive.ai Horns honk. Hands wave. Lights flash. Fingers fly and eyes meet. This orchestra may seem a mess to anyone stuck in the pit at rush hour, but for the most part, it works. Humans may not excel as drivers when it comes to paying attention or keeping calm, but we’re masters of communication, even when […] […]

Self-Driving Cars Should Look Down, Not Just Ahead

WaveSense ground penetrating radar tech comes out of MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory, a defense R&D center, and was first deployed to help troops navigate in Afghanistan in 2013. Self-driving cars are like snowbird retirees. Given the freedom to live, or operate, anywhere in the country, they turn their backs on wintry states and flock to the sun. There’s a reason Waymo, Uber, and even grocery story giant, Kroger, are testing their shiny new autonomous vehicles in southwestern cities like Phoenix. Yes, Arizona’s regulations are friendly to them, but the year-round good weather is the major draw. As sophisticated as these […] […]

The “neuropolitics” consultants who hack voters’ brains

Maria Pocovi slides her laptop over to me with the webcam switched on. My face stares back at me, overlaid with a grid of white lines that map the contours of my expression. Next to it is a shaded window that tracks six “core emotions”: happiness, surprise, disgust, fear, anger, and sadness. Each time my expression shifts, a measurement bar next to each emotion fluctuates, as if my feelings were an audio signal. After a few seconds, a bold green word flashes in the window: ANXIETY. When I look back at Pocovi, I get the sense she knows exactly […] […]

Distributed teams are rewriting the rules of office(less) politics

When we think about designing our dream home, we don’t think of having a thousand roommates in the same room with no doors or walls. Yet in today’s workplace where we spend most of our day, the purveyors of corporate office design insist that tearing down walls and bringing more people closer together in the same physical space will help foster better collaboration while dissolving the friction of traditional hierarchy and office politics. But what happens when there is no office at all? This is the reality for Jason Fried, Founder and CEO of Basecamp , and Matt Mullenweg, […] […]

Google gebruikt Artificial Intelligence voor het koelsysteem in het datacenter

Datacenters moeten koel zijn, om de servers goed te laten functioneren. De afgelopen jaren werkte Google aan een Artificial Intelligence algoritme die zich kan aanpassen aan een koelsysteem. Koelsysteem Google Nu heeft het algoritme alles onder controle in Google’s datacenter. De AI heeft geleerd om de temperatuur zo optimaal mogelijk te houden, maar wel energie te besparen. De besparing is ongeveer veertig procent. In eerste instantie werden de aanbevelingen van het systeem eerst bekeken en daarna toegepast. Dat kostte veel tijd, en uiteindelijk hebben ze het systeem geautomatiseerd. Er zijn wel altijd opzichters die het systeem in de gaten […] […]

Een film die je kunt sturen met je brein

Aan de universiteit van Nottingham hebben ze iets voor elkaar gekregen wat in eerste instantie lijkt op een goed science fiction verhaal. Waar je normaal gesproken in de bioscoopzaal of op de bank een film kijkt waarvan de slotscène al lang en breed vastligt, kun je nu ook een film kijken die nog alle kanten op kan gaan. De film ‘The Moment’ vormt zich naar de toestand van je brein. Dit zit zo. De activiteit in je brein wordt gemeten met EEG, middels een headset die het hoofd is bevestigd. Hiermee kan gekeken worden of je bijvoorbeeld slaapt, ontspannen […] […]