Interest in blockchains is at an all-time high, but there are still plenty of technical issues to solve, especially for enterprises. For them, issues like throughput, latency, governance and confidentiality are still major stumbling blocks for using blockchains. With its new Coco Framework, Microsoft wants to solve these issues and make blockchains more suitable for the enterprise. Read More
It was always a bit weird to wait for your Uber driver and then suddenly receive a text from an unknown number. “Where are you?” Often the driver would skip the anonymous text altogether and just honk their horn until you got the hint. (Literally while I’m writing this, a black car driver is leaning on their horn outside my apartment.) Like all tech companies desperately trying to smooth out modern life’s rough edges, Uber has a new solution: in-app messaging.
To send a message to your driver, riders can select “contact” then “chat” in the feed section of the Uber app. There, they can shoot a quick text to their driver about their exact location, or whatever else helps facilitate a smooth pickup.
Consumer Reports is stripping its “recommended” badge from Microsoft’s entire lineup of Surface PCs because the hardware was found to be “significantly less reliable than most other brands.”
In a survey of 90,000 tablet and laptop owners, Consumer Reports found that roughly 25 percent of Surface users have encountered “problems by the end of the second year of ownership.” Those problems include freezing, unexpected shutdowns, and touchscreen response issues. Reuters reported on the latest Consumer Reports reliability study, which was published on Thursday.
“These conclusions are based on our breakage rate estimates for laptops by the end of the second year of ownership, gathered from subscribers' experiences with 41,304 laptops...
A federal class action lawsuit filed last week in California alleges that the Walt Disney Company is violating privacy protection laws by collecting children’s personal information from 42 of its apps and sharing the data with advertisers without parental consent.
The lawsuit targets Disney and three software companies — Upsight, Unity, and Kochava — alleging that the companies created mobile apps aimed at children that contained embedded software to track, collect, and then export their personal information along with information about their online behavior. The plaintiff, a San Francisco woman named Amanda Rushing, says she was unaware that information about her child, “L.L.,” was collected while playing mobile game Disney Princess...
Here's the thing: you have to go back to school. Acer made another Chromebook, and so now it's official. The existence of the new rugged Chromebook 11 C771, and its touchscreen variant, the C771T, imply to me that school is good for you and you'll learn things, even if sometimes it’s hard.
The Chromebooks are on the mid-to-high end of Acer's Chromebook line, with a $279.99 starting price for the non-touch version. In school you learn about math! You'll get a late 2015 Intel Celeron processor, 32GB of storage, and 4GB of RAM. The touchscreen model offers the same specs for $329.99. If you go to college, you'll have a better shot at understanding why the Intel Celeron 3855U is preferable to the older Celeron chips in Acer's other...
Ring has made a name for itself in the smart home world with its lineup of connected doorbells that can record video. Ring doorbells make it easy to add a security camera to the outside of your home, and its latest model makes it even easier to keep an eye on your visitors.
The company’s latest product, the $199 Ring Video Doorbell 2, was released earlier this summer, and it improves upon the original product in a number of ways. It provides higher-resolution video output — 1080p verses the 720p of the original — and makes it easier to recharge the unit’s internal battery if you don’t have it hardwired into your home’s electrical system.
Ring has a number of other video doorbells in its lineup, but while the Video Doorbell Pro and Video...
JetBlue is teaming up with Gladly to create a new customer service system.
JetBlue is also investing in Gladly through JetBlue Technology Ventures.
Gladly's customer service platform is designed to revolutionize the airline customer service experience by streamlining communications.
On Tuesday, JetBlue and Gladly announced their partnership that could revolutionize the way airlines interact with its customers.
"We are an enterprise software and services company and our mission is to reimagine and reinvent how customer service can be delivered by creating a platform that puts the customer back at the center of the process," Gladly CEO Joseph Ansanelli told Business Insider in an interview.
Not only will JetBlue adopt Gladly's customer service platform, the airline is also sinking cash into the tech firm to help make it happen.
"We are fortunate enough to be working so closely with Gladly that we are co-creating this [platform]together," JetBlue vice president of customer support Frankie Littleford told us. "In fact, not only are we implementing this technology, we are investing in the company through our venture capital arm, JetBlue Technology Ventures."
Although neither party publicly disclosed the value of the deal, sources familiar with the matter peg JetBlue's investment at $2.5 million of the $63 million Gladly has raised thus far.
As with all matters in business, knowledge is power and the ace in Glady's hand is its ability to efficiently deliver a wide variety of essential customer information to the airline representative. According to Ansanelli, Gladly's technology will allow JetBlue crew members to see the complete history of a customer's interactions with the airline across all mediums of communication.
It's a feature not available under JetBlue's existing customer service system.
Currently, a customer's interactions are siloed within each particular means of communications. For instance, the team on the phone can't see the interactions a customer has had with representatives on Twitter, Littleford said.
"The goal is to give these amazing crew members enough information so that in about five seconds they can have enough understanding of who this customer is so they can engage with them on a much more personal level," Ansanelli explained.
Through Gladly, JetBlue's entire team will now have access to a customer's complete dossier with contact information, past and upcoming flights, along with any and all communication he or she has had with the airline.
This way, the customer service personnel has a better idea of what the customer needs from the get go without the customer having to go through the aggravation of re-explaining his or her situation repeatedly. For example, if a customer tweets at JetBlue about his lost bag, the crew member on the phone will already know about the bag at the start of the call.
The Gladly platform is expected to reach far beyond phone- and email-based communications. The system will eventually be available on handheld devices issued to terminal staff and flight attendants as well. For example, if cabin crew notice a passenger behaving in an unusual manner, they can look up that person's past communications and interact with that customer accordingly.
Littleford, who was the 8th employee hired at JetBlue and a member of the airline's founding management team, believes Gladly's platform fits perfectly with the airline's long-held mission of bringing humanity back to flying.
"We really look at ourselves as a customer service company that happens to fly airplanes and I think all along, even back to April of 1999 when we created our mission to bring humanity back to air travel, we looked at the industry and thought we really have to raise the bar," Littleford said.
"I think that everybody wants to be treated great and having our journeys be a little less stressful and more personal, helpful, and simple is what it's all about."
JetBlue will debut the email portion of Gladly's platform this fall with the rest of the features rolling out in phases over the next year.
The ten largest tech companies in the US have only made 35 acquisitions in the first half of this year, according to CB Insights. If things continue at this rate, big tech will have made 61 acquisitions total in 2017— a full 25 % less than last year.
Across the board, mergers and acquisitions have slowed since they peaked in 2013, at which point these same players accounted for 119 acquisitions total.
Since then, Google has been by far the most active acquirer, making a full 100 acquisitions since 2013.
Yahoo, on the other hand, was a big player in 2013 but had dramatically changed strategies by 2015. This year it was Yahoo which got acquired. The former tech giant is now combined with AOL to form Oath — a subsidiary of Verizon.
Intel — while only one acquisition deep so far this year — takes the cake for most money spent. The company bought the Israeli autonomous vehicle company Mobileye for $15.3 billion in March.
Despite the original failure of Google Glass, companies like VMware and Intel are still full steam ahead in creating wearable glasses for the enterprise.
When it comes to screen real estate on Android devices, Facebook and its family of apps rule the roost. As seen in this chart from Statista, Facebook is far ahead of the competition in Android app downloads. The top 4 most downloaded apps are all owned by Facebook. Combined, these Facebook apps racked up 297 million downloads last month.
According to Priori Data, WhatsApp is the breakaway star of the group with 103.64 million downloads. Facebook acquired the messaging service in February of 2014 for $19 billion. The app has grown even bigger since the acquisition. In a blog post from July 26, WhatsApp said that it had 1 billion daily active users sending 55 billion messages every day.
Samsung is single-handedly keeping my flip phone dreams alive. After already releasing one new flip phone in Asia this year, the company announced today what is essentially its flagship flip phone: the Leader 8. It's only available in China. What were you expecting?
The top-of-the-line device includes:
Two 4.2-inch Full HD displays, one on the outside of the device and one inside
Qualcomm Snapdragon 821 processor
A fingerprint sensor
2,300mAh battery that supports wireless charging
4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage with option for expandable storage
12-megapixel rear-facing camera; 5-megapixel front-facing camera
Users won't be forced to use Bixby (woo), and will instead have the option to use S Voice (alright). It also supports Samsung...
Verizon has a new rewards program out this week, called Verizon Up, which awards users a credit for every $300 they spend on their Verizon bill that can be redeemed toward various rewards.
Customers will be able to get rewards such as “Device Dollars toward your next device purchase, discounts on an accessory, or partner rewards,” along with other surprise offerings and first-come, first-serve ticket opportunities, which all seems like a nice occasional thing to get for regularly paying your cellphone bill.
But, as noted by Brandon Robbins on Twitter, the new program comes with a pretty big catch: you have to enroll in Verizon Selects, a program that allows the company to track a huge chunk of your personal data. That includes web...
Samsung’s massive flagship 88-inch Q9 TV is available to purchase at BestBuy for $19,999.99. It’s the first time we’ve been given any indication about the price, and as expected, it’s a huge one. The TV features a 2,160p (4K) resolution, HDR, and built-in Wi-Fi. BestBuy also offers a “geek-squad protection” for a meager $2,099.99, which provides insurance coverage for five years.
The Q9 is part of Samsung’s new QLED TV series the company announced at CES in January, touting it as the next step in TV evolution. Samsung says the QLEDs are brighter with better color reproduction compared to regular OLEDs. However, in real-world testing, CNET’sDavid Katzmaier gave the Q7 QLED TV a 3.5 star review, noting that “the expensive Q7's overall...
Skype is adding PayPal integration to its Android and iOS mobile apps today. The partnership will work in 22 countries, including the US, UK, Canada, and a number of European markets. PayPal’s integration into Skype will work just like it does in Slack and iMessage, with the ability to send peer-to-peer payments with PayPal to friends and family on Microsoft’s messaging platform.
Microsoft and PayPal are enabling the support in Skype today, and you’ll just need the latest version of the Android and iOS app to send money. The new PayPal integration comes just two months after Microsoft unveiled an overhauled version of Skype mobile. The redesigned app focuses on a new Snapchat-like Highlights feature and messaging, but it also includes...
Ikea is now offering solar panels and home batteries to its customers in the UK. The Scandinavian furniture chain is partnering with solar firm Solarcentury for the venture, with prices for solar battery storage starting at £3,000 (about $3,970 USD).
The home batteries are designed to work with existing solar panels, or as part of a new combined home solar panel / battery storage system that Ikea is selling. Ikea says an average UK home with solar panels will typically consume around 40 percent of the solar electricity it generates. The remaining 60 percent of unused solar electricity is sold back to the National Grid, though at a loss compared to its value.
The batteries will allow users to store electricity generated by the sun from...
There have been a host of double-ended USB thumb drives in the past. Some have legacy USB Type-A on one end and USB-C on the other, some have Micro USB for using with an Android phone, and even one or two support Apple’s proprietary Lightning connector. But Silicon Power’s Mobile C50 thumb drive might just take the cake for port options on a single USB stick. It supports a verifiable alphabet soup of USB Type-A, USB Micro-B, and USB-C all in a single, mostly compact form factor (via AnandTech).
Do I have some doubts about the stability of the integrated USB Type-A / Micro USB connector? Yes. But Silicon Power claims that the drives are designed to be pretty durable, with protection against dust, water, and extreme temperatures (plus a...
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is once again the world’s second richest person, after a brief stint earlier today as the wealthiest individual on Earth. Amazon reported its second quarter earnings today, showing a profit of just $197 million on strong sales of $38 billion. The dip in profit, a drop of 77 percent from $857 million this time a year ago, is mainly due to Amazon’s aggressive investments in its own business.
It does mean, however, that Bezos’ personal fortune, given his roughly 80 million shares in Amazon, will take a sizable enough hit to keep him from climbing back to the top. Bezos was already back at second place at the time of market close today, but strong enough earnings would have clinched him the crown going into tomorrow....
Sometimes combining two companies that compete in the same market provides a quick way to leapfrog your market share. That was likely the thinking behind Mitel’s decision to buy ShoreTel this morning for $430 million. Combining the two companies catapults Mitel to number two in the Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) market, according to the company. As for ShoreTel, while it… Read More
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is now far ahead Bill Gates as the world's richest person.
With a net worth of $105 billion, Bezos is likely to retain the title for the foreseeable future, and it could upend how billionaires view charity.
Unlike Bill Gates, who has focused on long-term projects, Bezos could focus more on the short-term.
Jeff Bezos was just named the top billionaire on the Forbes annual list, with a net worth of $112 billion. This makes him far and away the world's richest person.
Bezos displaced Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates, whose net worth is $90 billion, according to Forbes. The new distinction could fuel Bezos's interest in furthering human progress through for-profit companies — efforts that could shift how the world's wealthiest think about philanthropy.
"I think his activities to date suggest he looks at some of his business investments as opportunities to advance social change," Jane Wales, CEO of the Global Philanthropy Forum, previously told Business Insider.
Amazon's agreement to buy Whole Foods, announced in June of 2017, initially sent the online retailer's stock skyrocketing. It also increased Bezos' net worth by $1.8 billion, to $84.6 billion. At the time, that was $5 billion behind Gates. His net worth briefly eclipsed Gates' in July of that year, after the second-quarter earnings were released.
Bezos' plan for business investments to double as forms of social change was evident in his buying The Washington Post in 2013. He quickly turned it into a lean, digital journalism powerhouse — something other large news organizations have struggled to do. Similarly, the Whole Foods purchase may hint at Bezos' desire to reinvent the food industry's supply chain. (At the very least, he has the opportunity to do so.)
Wales says Bezos' business plays offer a window into how he could cement his status as one of the most influential players in the philanthropy world, independent of the Bezos Family Foundation that's run by his parents. In fact, Bezos may already be looking to take on more projects. Recently, he asked his nearly 300,000 Twitter followers for ways to generate a lasting impact with quick, decisive action.
"I'm thinking about a philanthropy strategy that is the opposite of how I mostly spend my time — working on the long term," Bezos wrote. "For philanthropy, I find I'm drawn to the opposite end of the spectrum: the right now."
That approach could encourage more short-term solutions to problems typically thought of as systemic, Wales said, and that could be a good thing. She pointed to the ongoing migrant crisis as one example.
"That requires action now. Governments are overwhelmed, and policy is not solving it," Wales said. "The Bezos Family Foundation, which is mostly long-term in its thinking, is also giving to the International Rescue Committee, to Save the Children, to CARE — to organizations that address the immediate as well as the long term."
But Bezos is new to the philanthropy world — he isn't involved with his parents' foundation — and people just starting out in the field often take a year or two to get the lay of the land and form a strategy. Judging by Bezos' past business moves, his style of philanthropy might involve private investments in startups looking to do social good, or acquisitions of other companies.
Not everyone in the philanthropy community is optimistic about Bezos' influence, however.
Larry Brilliant, the acting chairman of the Skoll Global Threats Fund, criticized Bezos' crowdsourcing approach.
"The denominator of ideas you will get in, the vast majority of ideas which are not good, not viable, will flood this process," Brilliant told The New York Times in June.
And in an open letter to Bezos in Forbes, the philanthropy adviser Jake Hayman took issue with the notion that focusing on short-term goals can yield lasting impact.
"It's the business equivalent of looking for 'safe, proven investments' with imminent 10-fold returns," Hayman wrote. "It doesn't happen."
Bezos is not participating in The Giving Pledge, a pact among 16 billionaires (including Warren Buffett and Zuckerberg) to give away at least half of their fortunes before they die. But Wales contends that Bezos still can send a strong signal to wealthy Silicon Valley types that philanthropy matters.
"He is young, he is in the midst of his career, and he's already seen as bold," she said. "What that tweet says to me is: 'I do not want to ignore today's problems.'"
Apple updated its iPod lineup on Thursday and discontinued the iPod Nano and iPod Shuffle.
They were the last two iPods that didn't run iOS, the same software that runs on the iPhone.
"Today, we are simplifying our iPod lineup with two models of iPod touch now with double the capacity starting at just $199 and we are discontinuing the iPod shuffle and iPod nano," an Apple spokesperson told Business Insider in an email.
The iPod Shuffle and iPod Nano have been removed from Apple's website and online store.
The iPod Touch, which is essentially an iPhone without cell service, has been given a price cut, and now comes with 32GB of storage space for $199 and 128GB of storage space for $299.
The elimination of the two last iPods that essentially only played music has been predicted for a long time, even within Apple. Neither iPod model discontinued on Thursday had been updated in years.
Both the iPod Nano and iPod Shuffle were first introduced in 2005.
Apple has also previously said that the iPhone, which comes out of the box with a music app pre-installed and was called in its early days the "iPod phone," would lead to the decline of standalone music players.
In fact, when the iPhone first came out, the music app was called "iPod." Most people now simply listen to music on their smartphone.
But the original hardware iPods have a special place in Apple's history. The iPod was the first device Apple made that was more consumer electronics than computer. The iPod clearly paved the way for the iPhone.
The iPod name isn't being phased out completely. Apple's new audio products are named "AirPods" and "HomePod," and the iPod touch was by far the bestselling iPod recently. One reason Apple may be phasing these devices out is that they don't have Bluetooth, which means they don't work with Apple's latest wireless headphones, like the AirPods. They also don't support Apple Music, Apple's online streaming service for audio and video.
Regardless, it's the end of an era as Apple no longer sells any traditional music players.
This winter, Woody Allen’s Wonder Wheel is scheduled to open in theaters. It will be the first film by Amazon Studios released without the help of a distribution partner, Variety reports.
Although Amazon has bought and produced several films since 2015, like the Oscar-nominated Manchester by the Sea and this year’s Landline, it has always partnered with a studio for theatrical distribution in the past. Manchester by the Sea was distributed with help from Roadside Attractions; Landline was through Magnolia Pictures.
Amazon doesn’t need help anymore
As Variety points out, this move makes Amazon more similar to a traditional film studio than its streaming competitors like Netflix. Netflix has expressed mild interest in theatrical...
The first wave of China-based internet startups adapted Western business models, sprinkled them with some extra touches, and leveraged the world’s largest base of online consumers to build huge businesses. Baidu, Tencent and Alibaba have become huge companies, dominating China’s market for internet search, social networking and e-commerce.
The most recent wave of fast-growing Chinese tech companies has taken an entirely different path. Rather than copy Western business models, Chinese entrepreneurs are experimenting with new business models, creating companies that have no analog in the West.
Room for experimentation
Chinese authorities are showing surprising tolerance for business model innovation, often allowing young companies to grow unencumbered by regulatory pushback for much longer periods of time than in other countries.
Consider, for instance, China’s booming bike sharing industry: over the course of just a few years, Chinese bike sharing companies like Mobike and ofo have deployed millions of bikes in cities across China, creating a new industry worth billions in a flash.
Bike sharing is not a new idea. New York’s Citi Bike system was installed in 2013 - and there are similar programs in many U.S. and European cities. In China, however, the idea has taken a new direction: Chinese bike sharers use apps on GPS-capable phones to find the nearest GPS-enabled bikes wherever they might be parked around the city, not just at designated kiosks. They then pedal to their destinations and log out, leaving the bikes more or less anywhere and making them available again to other riders.
The model is wildly successful. Ofo, which has more than 6 million bikes in 100 cities across China, recently raised $700 million in a round led by Alibaba. Mobike, which is only 15 months old, has a fleet of more than 5 million shared bikes, adding more than 100,000 a day to the system. Mobike customers are taking 25 million daily rides – and the total keeps growing.
In mid-June, Mobike announced a $600 million venture round, boosting total funding to date to over $900 million. Part of that will fuel international expansion – on June 30, Mobike started operating in Manchester, the company’s first move outside China.
Filling the entertainment vacuum
It also helps entrepreneurs that Chinese consumers are eager to experiment with new tech products and services. That’s especially true in entertainment. Offline, China is dominated by state-run entertainment options – and in rural areas, there isn’t even much of that. The result is an insatiable hunger for new forms of digital entertainment.
There’s no better example of this than live streaming video, which in China has emerged in ways that have no match in Europe or the U.S. On live streaming platforms like Yizhibo and Huajiao Live, celebrities and pseudo-celebrities are offering online streams of themselves speaking, singing, or even eating in return for voluntary payments from users using virtual currency. China now has more than 150 live streaming platforms, which together have more than 50 million paying customers. Revenues from the live streaming sector hit $3 billion last year according to iResearch - and the trend is just getting started.
China’s e-commerce players – including Alibaba’s Taobao and JD.com – are integrating live streaming functions into their core platforms. Users can watch live broadcasts of sellers doing product reviews and interact with celebrity endorsers.
On June 18, JD.com featured more than 30 celebrities in a 12-hour live shopping spree. In one prime time slot, 10 million users on JD.com watched and interacted with singers and actors endorsing hot and spicy crayfish, a popular snack in China. JD.com said it sold 450,000 crayfish (about 15,000 boxes) in five minutes.
Chinese consumers are also paying for online education courses and lectures. Just a year old, Zhihu Live has 70 million registered users and 20 million daily active users who pay for one-on- one live streaming with experts on everything from how to become a securities trader to UI and product design. On iGet, also known as De Dao, users pay $30 a year to take classes on business, career development, parenthood, art history, music and other subjects.
Speed addicts
China’s rapid pace of innovation, relentless spirit of experimentation and the country’ thirst for novelty and new experiences has turned the country into the biggest competitor for Silicon Valley in the marketplace of ideas. There’s an intense spirit of competition – China’s startups have developed a “9-9- 6” work schedule, with staff working 12 hours a day, six days a week.
Chinese consumers are enthusiastic early adopters, even if some emerging technologies aren’t quite ready for prime time. Goldman Sachs estimates that mainland China accounts for a third of virtual reality headset sales globally this year. According to EY, China is the leading country for consumer adoption of fintech products and services. China remains the largest smartphone market in the world – and it has by far the largest population of Internet users.
In China’s fast evolving startup and investing ecosystem, trends, hits, and flops emerge on a weekly basis. Savvy investors and entrepreneurs globally should pay attention, because China’s entrepreneurs are spawning new ideas that will serve China’s 1.4 billion people – and the rest of the world as well.
Fan Bao is Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of China Renaissance, an international financial institution that combines investment banking, sales and trading, research and investment management businesses. China Renaissance is Mobike's exclusive financial advisor; the firm also acted as joint book runner for JD.com’s IPO in 2014
USB-C has long been touted as the universal standard that will save us all, a single port that can charge your phone, your laptop, your tablet, your Bluetooth speaker, and even your Nintendo console, all through a single common port.
Sadly, the future of charging isn’t quite that simple, with different voltage requirements, specifications for data transfer and power, and more all making it vastly more complicated to ensure that when you plug something into a USB-C port it will actually work the way you want it to.
Another USB-C specification
With that in mind, the USB 3.0 Promoter Group — which counts Apple, HP, Intel, Microsoft, Texas Instruments, and others among its members — just announced another USB-C specification: USB 3.2. It...
President Trump says he’s finally gotten somewhere in his years-long crusade to get Apple to build more products in the US. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal today, Trump said that Apple CEO Tim Cook called him and committed to build “three big plants, beautiful plants” in the United States.
For now, there’s no detail beyond that. Apple declined to comment to the Journal and hasn’t responded to our own request for comment.
If Trump’s statement is correct, that’d be a big investment on Apple’s behalf and a significant change of pace. Right now, Apple only has Mac Pros manufactured in the US, and it hasn’t even committed to continuing that. Apple also generally prefers to work with outside suppliers, so it can source parts from...
Zoho is looking to become a business operating system for everyone from individual contractors and small businesses and up the food chain for more than 35 apps at $30 per month per employee.
One wouldn't think that giving away your best product is a winning business strategy, but for Nvidia, it's one that's working.
The graphics processing unit (GPU) maker arrived at a gathering of the top researchers with gifts. Nvidia gave 100 of its first "Volta" based GPUs to artificial intelligence researchers at the CVPR conference in Hawaii this week, according to a company press release.
Volta is the new GPU architecture Nvidia revealed earlier this year. The new chips were promised to be such an improvement over current models that shares of the company jumped 17.8% in a single day after their announcement.
AI research requires training a computer program to be as efficient as possible before it works well. This training requires multiplying matrices of data, which normally would have to be done single numbers at a time. The new Volta GPU architecture is able to multiply entire rows and columns of matrices data at once, rapidly speeding up the AI training process. Nvidia claims the new Volta architecture is 12 times faster at processing matrix multiplication than its previous "Pascal" architecture. It reduces the duration of an AI training task that used to take 18 hours to 7.4 hours, according to company data.
Nvidia gave away 15 of its Volta-based Tesla V100 chips to top researchers attending the conference. The chips were some of the first ones available outside of the company, and were signed by CEO Jensen Huang.
“It’s exciting, especially to get Jensen’s signature,” Silvio Savarese, an associate producer of computer science at Stanford, said in a Nvidia press release. “My students will be even more excited.”
Giving its chip to researchers who get excited about the technology and begin using it in their research is only the latest move in Nvidia's strategy of courting strong relationships with researchers.
The move also demonstrates the company's strong culture of innovation. MIT named Nvidia the smartest company in the world, in part, because the company's culture is geared toward increasing adoption of its GPUs in every aspect of applicable computing.
AMD, Nvidia's biggest rival in GPU manufacturing, is geared toward addressing the low-end market, while it seems like Nvidia's ambitions are much larger. In addition to AI research, the company has addressed the self-driving car and cryptocurrency mining markets with specialized chips.
Is it counterintuitive to predict that one of the impacts of virtual reality will be better indoor maps of the reality we are already in? I don’t think it’s such an outlandish idea, as software developers, device manufacturers and technology firms are already looking to map every nook and cranny of your planet.
The robots are coming
Look at the popular Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner. The device already gathers all kinds of data—room dimensions, furniture position and distances between items—data that could help inform next-generation IoT devices.
Interest in blockchains is at an all-time high, but there are still plenty of technical issues to solve, especially for enterprises. For them, issues like throughput, latency, governance and confidentiality are still major stumbling blocks for using blockchains. With its new Coco Framework, Microsoft wants to solve these issues and make blockchains more suitable for the enterprise. Read More
JetBlue is teaming up with Gladly to create a new customer service system.
Although neither party publicly disclosed the value of the deal, sources familiar with the matter peg JetBlue's investment at $2.5 million of the $63 million Gladly has raised thus far.
Through Gladly, JetBlue's entire team will now have access to a customer's complete dossier with contact information, past and upcoming flights, along with any and all communication he or she has had with the airline.
Littleford, who was the 8th employee hired at JetBlue and a member of the airline's founding management team, believes Gladly's platform fits perfectly with the airline's long-held mission of bringing humanity back to flying.
Sometimes combining two companies that compete in the same market provides a quick way to leapfrog your market share. That was likely the thinking behind Mitel’s decision to buy ShoreTel this morning for $430 million. Combining the two companies catapults Mitel to number two in the Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) market, according to the company. As for ShoreTel, while it… Read More
Not everyone in the philanthropy community is optimistic about Bezos' influence, however.
In mid-June, Mobike announced a $600 million venture round, boosting total funding to date to over $900 million. Part of that will fuel international expansion – on June 30, Mobike started operating in Manchester, the company’s first move outside China.
China’s rapid pace of innovation, relentless spirit of experimentation and the country’ thirst for novelty and new experiences has turned the country into the biggest competitor for Silicon Valley in the marketplace of ideas. There’s an intense spirit of competition – China’s startups have developed a “9-9- 6” work schedule, with staff working 12 hours a day, six days a week.
