Amazon is launching a program that would give a specific team of employees a 30-hour work week, The Washington Post reports. The employees will be a subset of Amazon's technical team, and would earn 75 percent of what their 40-hour counterparts earn, but with the same benefits package. The group will consist of "a few dozen" employees, according to the Post.
First rule about being bought by an advertising company: You’re probably going to end up selling advertising.
2012 WhatsApp: We don’t sell ads because ads are bad.
2014 WhatsApp: You want to buy our company for $22 billion, Facebook? Deal.
2016 WhatsApp: We’re going to use WhatsApp data to help Facebook sell ads.
Things change, perspectives evolve, and sometimes things you said a couple years ago aren’t what you think today. Happens all the time.
Just ask Mark Zuckerberg, who used to have a problem with ads that tracked what you did on the Web, but doesn’t anymore.
Now WhatsApp CEO (and Facebook board member) Jan Koum appears to be on a similar evolution.
In 2012, Koum kicked off a blog post called “Why we don't sell ads” by quoting Tyler Durden, the fictional, anti-advertising “Fight Club” anarchist, and then ramped up the rhetoric from there.
“Advertising isn't just the disruption of aesthetics, the insults to your intelligence and the interruption of your train of thought. At every company that sells ads, a significant portion of their engineering team spends their day tuning data mining, writing better code to collect all your personal data, upgrading the servers that hold all the data and making sure it's all being logged and collated and sliced and packaged and shipped out .... And at the end of the day the result of it all is a slightly different advertising banner in your browser or on your mobile screen. Remember, when advertising is involved you the user are the product.”
Koum also explained that “Your data isn't even in the picture. We are simply not interested in any of it.”
Now, a couple years into his Facebook time, Koum’s thinking has changed. He will share WhatsApp data with Facebook for several reasons. One of them: That way, Facebook can show WhatsApp users better ads.
“Facebook can offer better friend suggestions and show you more relevant ads if you have an account with them. For example, you might see an ad from a company you already work with, rather than one from someone you've never heard of.”
Standard stuff, and inevitable once Facebook acquired the company. Facebook is in the enviable position of not having to turn its $22 billion acquisition into a money-maker overnight. But it’s impossible for Facebook to see a giant user base like WhatsApp and not try to ... turn it into a product.
Meanwhile, WhatsApp still doesn’t show ads to its users, and it still promises not to show them “third-party banner ads and spam.”
Which is different from pledging to never show its users any ads at all. I asked a WhatsApp rep if they could make that promise. They declined to comment.
The Internet of Things (IoT) is touted as a future source of huge revenues, but concerns are mounting that Return on Investment (ROI) expectations are too aggressive.
An article on IDG’s ARNnet discusses a report by Current Analysis that raises the topic of sky-high expectations surrounding IoT. And it suggests that in some cases lackluster ROI is making it difficult for businesses to justify IoT deployments.
This report comes amid news that IoT and data analytics are driving a major surge in technology mergers and acquisitions, in part because of high ROI expectations for the technology.
The study found that many businesses had aggressive, short-term expectations for IoT generated revenues. Specifically, more than 50% of those surveyed were expecting to see ROI from their IoT deployments in under a year.
“The speed with which many organisations require IoT implementations to at least pay for themselves is eye-popping, but also a clear sign that IoT in the enterprise is well beyond hype and into the realm of the actual,” said Jerry Caron, senior vice president of Current Analysis.
“Businesses have no patience for projects that don’t pull their weight, and clearly many believe that they are not just take a speculative gamble with their IoT plans.”
Yet worries about cost considerations remained the number one reason companies chose not to pursue IoT projects. The other leading reasons that IoT projects were passed over were the lack of compelling use cases and security concerns.
Interestingly the study found that, despite widespread security concerns among surveyed firms, many organizations are jumping into the planning phase of IoT projects without implementing security mechanisms.
But for Caron, it all comes back to the question of whether IoT can live up to revenue expectations.
“Where justifying a project will depend on RoI timescale goals, it’s telling that more than 50 percent of enterprises hope for a payoff in under a year,” he said.
“For many projects, this may well be overly optimistic or otherwise unrealistic.”
And though these high expectations for IoT revenues are often overly aggressive, the report did find that in many cases such high ROI targets were exceeded.
Nearly 70% of businesses with deployed IoT technology reported that the project in question has already met their ROI targets, regardless of the initial goals.
The post Are IoT return on investment expectations over-hyped? appeared first on ReadWrite.
Cadillac's newest car, the CT6, is loaded with impressive technology, but one of the best features is its 360 degree video recording system.
The CT6 is decked out with a lot of cameras, seven exterior cameras to be exact. Those video cameras are used to support different safety and convenience functions, like lane keeping assist and night vision.
But CT6 owners can also use four of those cameras as a built-in surveillance system.
For example, when the car is armed, cameras located in the front grille, trunk lid, and on both of the side mirrors will automatically begin filming if someone tampers with the car. This gives the owner a 360 degree view of everything happening around the car and provides solid evidence if someone causes damage or tries to break into the vehicle.
All of the footage is stored on a standard SD card that is located in the trunk of the vehicle, so owners can remove the card to upload footage to their personal computer whenever they want.
The cameras located in the front and the back can also be activated while you are driving so that you can record your trip, which is a pretty nifty feature if you are a fan of dashcams.
Lyndon Lie, General Motors' chief engineer for premium luxury cars, told Business Insider that he expects the recording feature to be especially useful for drivers that might be involved in a traffic accident because it helps clearly capture who is at fault.
Now, cameras built into cars is not a new idea. Lots of automakers include multiple cameras on newer vehicles. These cameras enable safety features and help give the driver a better view while reversing or parallel parking.
In fact, the Mercedes-Benz S Class and BMW 7 Series, which are both in direct competition with the CT6, are equipped with multiple video cameras. But neither of these vehicles offer the driver the ability to record footage all around the car. In fact, Cadillac's surround-view recording function is an industry first.
However, considering how clever the new feature is, we're betting it won't be long before we begin to see competitors roll out a similar feature in future vehicles.
SEE ALSO: 10 features that make Cadillac's CT6 so luxurious
Join the conversation about this story »
NOW WATCH: Cadillac's new CT6 luxury sedan is a direct challenge to BMW and Mercedes
The average American spends 38 hours a year stuck in traffic — or 90 hours a year if you live in LA.
Those numbers get worse in the world's megacities: Commuters in Mexico City, Moscow, and Beijing can sit in traffic for hours every day. Here are a few gripping images of those journeys.
Drake Baer and Alex Davies contributed to an earlier version of this article.
SEE ALSO: 10 of the most incredible home libraries around the world
Some of the shine is starting to come off Xiaomi, with the Chinese smartphone maker overtaken by domestic rivals in recent sale figures. However, the company's latest handset — the Redmi Note 4 — is sticking with a familiar playbook, offering slick design and plenty of specs without breaking the bank.
The Note 4 goes on sale in China tomorrow from Mi.com, with prices starting at RMB 899 (around $135) for 2GB of RAM and 16GB storage, or RMB 1,199 ($180) for the version with 3GB of RAM and 64GB storage. Other specs include:
Amazon launched a new page designed for car fanatics Thursday — and it's making me wish I were a gear head.
Called Amazon Vehicles, the webpage lets you browse thousands of different car models. You can't buy the car directly from the website, but you can view its specs and read customer reviews. You can even look up the car's strengths, value, and how it's changed from previous models.
Amazon Vehicles features cars ranging from a 2014 Tesla Model S to a 1965 Ford Mustang. It's easy to browse through the massive vehicle database using the toolbar that lets you sort by model, make, and year or something more general like the body style or seating capacity.
But the page doesn't only aggregate cars, it also shows trucks and motorcycles. You can also buy auto parts and accessories, which offers several options ranging from a new brake kit to smartphone adapters.
Amazon Vehicles also functions as a forum in a lot of ways. Customers can submit car reviews and upload images and video. They can also ask car owners questions about their cars.
Amazon has always sold automotive parts through its Amazon Automotive store, which has more than 35 million customers to date, according to a press release.
It's a cool website that makes it easy to learn about different cars and collect any products you want to fully deck out the one you own. The only thing that could potentially make it better is if you could buy the car through the website.
Whether that's something Amazon is planning for down the road is still unclear. A spokesperson told CNET "We have nothing more to share at this time" when asked about potential future car sales.
SEE ALSO: Tesla just announced a huge upgrade for the Model S and Model X
Join the conversation about this story »
NOW WATCH: Amazon has an oddly efficient way of storing stuff in its warehouses
 |
| source: Gartner |
Uber is rolling out self-driving cars in Pittsburgh, which is cool — but it means that the way we think about maps and addresses is about to get really complicated. For example, here is something that happens to me several times a week: I call an Uber to my apartment building, and the driver gets lost because they can’t find the door.
See, the address of my building is on a main street, but the actual entrances are on the sides of the building — and when I drop a pin at those locations, Uber maps them to nonexistent addresses. So the drivers either pull up to the correct building address and don’t see a door, or they pull up to a door that has a wildly different address on it.
welcome to the egress problem
A few months ago, the CEO of...
Thousands of dead fish have washed up onto the Waackaack Creek and a nearby beach in Keansburg, New Jersey since Monday, making the area's coast smell like a sewer.
Wildlife officials are calling it a natural occurrence, suggesting that unusually high water temperatures and a lack of water movement in the creek led to low oxygen concentrations there. The fish likely were fleeing from predators when they got stuck in stagnant waters, where they suffocated.
Thousands of dead fish wash ashore in Keansburg,New Jersey. Whole town smells like a sewer @CarrascoTV pic.twitter.com/SN849R6Hnu
— Eric Anderson (@Skipfliggins) August 23, 2016
Pollution was also to blame.
"This is primarily a natural phenomenon, but it is exacerbated by polluted runoff, including fertilizers from lawns, which is why preserving stream corridors and buffers is important,” Greg Remaud, deputy director of the NY/NJ Baykeeper told PIX11, a local news channel. That runoff promotes algae growth, which also makes water less oxygenated.
Bob Considine, a spokesman for the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, told Reuters that the fish kill is the second to occur in the waterway this week.
Most of the fish that washed up are Atlantic menhaden — also known as peanut bunkers when they're young — which are often used in bait or fertilizer. As eggs, the fish are carried to estuaries via ocean currents. They spend their first year in the estuary, then move back to the ocean, according to the South Atlantic Fishery Management Council.
Officials say the fish should be washed out of beaches in two tide cycles, and response teams are currently clearing them out.
SEE ALSO: A lengthy stretch of the Yellowstone River is closing after 20,000 or more fish suddenly died
Join the conversation about this story »
NOW WATCH: This fisherman caught a massive 400-pound fish while straddling a paddleboard
With Aloft's new system, you'll never need to get out of bed to change the thermostat or switch off the lights again.
With Aloft's new system, you'll never need to get out of bed to change the thermostat or switch off the lights again.
Here's my pet peeve when staying at hotels: I hate having to get up in the middle of the night to adjust the thermostat. But the thing is, I really need the room to be the right temperature to get a good night's sleep. Between a cold room and thick, fluffy blankets, it's easy to be off by a few degrees. Then I'm wide awake, fiddling with various knobs on the wall or calling the receptionist to figure out why it's so darn chilly in here.
Health services around the globe still struggle with mental health disorders, relying on a patient to provide documentation of mood changes in a journal or be open with a doctor or psychiatrist.
Both solutions are not seeing excellent results, which is why U.K. based Cambridge Cognition and Ctrl Group have announced Cognitive Kit, a software platform that lets patient express their mood and improve memory, attention, and reaction on a wearable.
See Also: Is Apple launching a fitness tracker alongside Watch 2?
The platform is built into the Apple Watch and Microsoft Band 2, which both feature heart-rate sensors. Other wearable devices will receive support in the future.
For now, patients are able to select six different mood faces and send them to a doctor or psychiatrist. Patients will also be able to play a variety of games throughout the day, which may show patterns in mood and memory or reaction deficiency.
Cognitive Kit, similar to Apple’s ResearchKit, will be open source. That means scientists and research will be able to dig into the data, find patterns, and hopefully improve mental health treatment.
In a two week trial, Cambridge Cognitive said over 30 million data points were recorded on wearables. If the kit was provided to every mental health patient that approves, we could see hundreds of millions more data points.
Cambridge Cognitive is looking to partner with healthcare and pharmaceutical providers to launch the Cognitive Kit. Alzheimer’s is one of the disorders it wants to tackle first, after presenting the platform to the Alzheimer’s Association International Conference.
The post New mental health technology tells your doctor what you won’t appeared first on ReadWrite.
Pokémon Go is unquestionably this season's hit game. But whether it has any staying power is a very open question, and early signs suggest it's already trailing off.
Bloomberg has published some charts by Axiom Capital Management that show daily users and engagement dropping. One chart, using data from analytics firm Apptopia, shows Pokémon Go peaking at around 45 million users in mid-July, during the week or so following its launch. It then begins a decline to somewhere above 30 million daily users last week.
The company is buying Genee and shutting down the service.
The buying spree of machine intelligence startups continues, with Microsoft announcing Monday that it is acquiring automated calendaring service Genee.
Genee, which launched in 2014, uses artificial intelligence to help automatically schedule meetings based on the participants’ schedules.
Microsoft plans to shut down Genee’s existing service as of Sept. 1 and was vague on just how the technology will be incorporated into Office and Office 365, though scheduling meetings seems a natural fit for Outlook.
The move is at least the third time this month that a big-name tech company has bought an AI startup. Intel is paying $400 million to buy Nervana Systems and Apple quietly scooped up Seattle-based Turi.
King’s Health Partners, an academic health science center in the U.K., will trial a wearable and mobile app program that tries to prevent patients from developing type 2 diabetes.
The program will take place in Lambeth and Southwark, two London boroughs. 200 patients, who are the most at-risk of developing type 2 diabetes, will trial the wearable and app combo for a year.
See Also: Research suggests sleep wearables could reduce PTSD risk
Activity will be tracked through the Buddi wearable, another U.K. company, but most of the interaction will take place on the mobile app. Patients will receive encouraging messages to try and get them active, alongside exercise programs tailored to user preferences. If a user is unable to stick to a regime, the app may offer alternatives.
The app will also monitor eating behaviors, to ensure that patients are not foods high in sugars or fat too often. Buddi’s wearable lets users get in contact with King’s Health Partners if they fall ill.
It is one of the first NHS-backed trials that involve wearables and mobile applications, according to Buddi CEO and founder Sara Murray. Innovate UK, the government’s public body for investment in startups, is also backing the program.
“In the face of the explosive growth of the obesity and type 2 diabetes epidemic, not only in London but globally, continued innovations in clinical services are required and the NHS is in need of new cost effective tools,” said King’s Health Partners lead researcher, Professor Khalida Ismail.
“Current intensive and expensive methods are not sustainable given the projected growth of the disease and we have a duty to develop new solutions to help tackle the problem.”
The national health service is looking for ways to reduce the amount of hospital visits and provide patients with optimal and cost effective solutions to healthcare problems, as its budget continues to suffer under the Conservative government. If the trial goes well, we may see further deployment across the U.K. for prediabetes patients.
The post Can this wearable prevent type 2 diabetes? appeared first on ReadWrite.
The buying spree of machine intelligence startups continues, with Microsoft announcing Monday that it is acquiring automated calendaring service Genee.
Genee, which launched in 2014, uses artificial intelligence to help automatically schedule meetings based on the participants’ schedules.
Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield doesn't believe in long working hours.
It's why one of Slack's internal mantras is "work hard, go home."
"The most productive employees from my experience are those who go home at 5:30PM, but are hyper-focused at work," Butterfield said at a press gathering on Friday. "People can only think really hard for 6 to 8 hours a day."
But it's not so easy to be productive at all times in today's work environment. A lot of files are spread across different software and it's not always easy to find answers to simple questions like where's the latest version of a certain file. Slack, for instance, uses 80 different pieces of software even though it only has about 350 employees.
Butterfield wants to fix this. And he believes he has an answer in Slack, the work communication app that's helped his startup get to a $3.8 billion valuation in a little over two years.
At the center of his idea is a chat bot, the technology that lets users access third-party app content right within chat programs like Slack, bypassing the need to open up another app to see it. For example, users can use Slack to find sales data from Salesforce or submit expense reports for Concur right within Slack's interface. Butterfield sees a future where Slack becomes smarter and more intelligent as it gathers more data, eventually automating some of the most repetitive tasks, like finding who's leading what project.
"It’s an opportunity for us, where Slack becomes the browser and the command line for the enterprise," he says.
Butterfield of course doesn't see this happening overnight. Slack only recently surpassed 3 million daily active users, and most of its customers are small teams or businesses. That makes it hard to build an automated system like the way Google does simply because it doesn't have enough data.
But a lot of people believe in Butterfield's vision as he's been able to raise almost all of the $540 million in VC funding over the past 2 years. And he thinks Slack will end up making everybody smarter and more efficient over time.
"Having a bot allows you to immediately answer those questions," Butterfield says. "It’s incredibly powerful."
SEE ALSO: Salesforce continues its startup buying spree in a push to make more 'intelligent' software
Join the conversation about this story »
NOW WATCH: Forget the gross factor: There are serious health reasons for why you shouldn't pick your nose
The notion of smart dust sounds like a work of science fiction but scientists at University of California Berkeley have developed a “neural dust” that can be implanted into the body, to monitor internal nerves, muscles or organs in real time.
The sensors are about the size of a large grain of sand contain a piezoelectric crystal that converts ultrasound vibrations from outside the body into electricity to power a tiny, on-board transistor that is in contact with a nerve or muscle fiber. A voltage spike in the fiber alters the circuit and the vibration of the crystal, which changes the echo detected by the ultrasound receiver, typically the same device that generates the vibrations. The slight change, called backscatter, allows them to determine the voltage.
See also: For new e-skin products, plastics are the future
The research could one day lead to brain machine interfaces for controlling prosthetics and robotics as well as faciliate a new biohealth industry of “electroceuticals.”
“The original goal of the neural dust project was to imagine the next generation of brain-machine interfaces, and to make it a viable clinical technology,” said neuroscience graduate student Ryan Neely. “If a paraplegic wants to control a computer or a robotic arm, you would just implant this electrode in the brain and it would last essentially a lifetime.”
Contemporary implantable electrodes degrade within 1 to 2 years, and all connect to wires that pass through holes in the skull. Wireless sensors could be sealed in stopping unwanted movement of the electrodes and prevention of infection.
Research by Gartner into ‘hype cycles’ within emerging technology predicts that Smart Dust will become trend within 5 to 10 years. It’s a field that has been developing within research laboratories since the late 1990’s, with funding by the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to create applications of military relevance, their work involving “evolutionary and revolutionary advances in miniaturization, integration, and energy management.”
As early as 2003, researchers were working on applications for smart dust, which they characterised “tiny wireless microelectromechanical sensors (MEMS) that can detect everything from light to vibrations”. Commercial applications considered included serving as traffic sensors in congested urban areas and monitoring the power consumption of household appliances to determine whether they’re operating at peak efficiency. However, scientific advances have moved the smart dust motes from everyday sensor technology applications to implanted wearable devices.
According to neuroscientist Jose Carmena:
“The beauty is that now, the sensors are small enough to have a good application in the peripheral nervous system, for bladder control or appetite suppression, for example. The technology is not really there yet to get to the 50-micron target size, which we would need for the brain and central nervous system. Once it’s clinically proven, however, neural dust will just replace wire electrodes. This time, once you close up the brain, you’re done.“
The team at work to miniaturize the device further, find more biocompatible materials and improve the surface transceiver that sends and receives the ultrasounds, ideally using beam-steering technology to focus the sounds waves on individual motes. They are now building little backpacks for rats to hold the ultrasound transceiver that will record data from implanted motes.
They’re also working to expand the motes’ ability to detect non-electrical signals, such as oxygen or hormone levels.
“The vision is to implant these neural dust motes anywhere in the body, and have a patch over the implanted site send ultrasonic waves to wake up and receive necessary information from the motes for the desired therapy you want,” said Dongjin Seo, a graduate student in electrical engineering and computer sciences. “Eventually you would use multiple implants and one patch that would ping each implant individually, or all simultaneously.”
The biggest barrier to the mainstreaming of smart dust is perhaps the reality that at present, it requires surgical implanting. Will it be possible in the future to swallow or inhale the dust? Our digestive system makes it highly questionable, but it’s an interesting idea. At any rate, as the dust gets smaller, it’s entry into the central nervous system and brain could lead to life changing interventions for people with particular health conditions and disabilities. It’ll be a way off, but if the research so far is anything to go by, it’s inevitable.
The post Is smart dust the IoT vector of the future? appeared first on ReadWrite.
Atlassian's popular workplace chat app HipChat, used by companies like Uber and Expedia, is getting team video chatting and screen sharing, starting today.
It might seem small, but it speaks to a big trend in tech. And it's beating its rivals to the punch in a big way.
If you grabbed a random Silicon Valley entrepreneur by the shoulders and asked them the next big thing, they'd probably tell you "video."
(Well, they'd probably tell you to let go of them. But I digress.)
For instance:
Which leaves one place in the world that's been relatively untouched by the video phenomenon: The workplace. Your office might have a conference room that has an expensive telepresence rig, but when it comes to day-to-day, in-the-moment collaboration, it comes down to e-mail and chat.
This trend presents big opportunity to relatively small players in the workplace chat market, especially $6 billion publicly traded Atlassian and its rival, the $4 billion startup darling Slack. If they can take the chat services that millions of workers are already using and add the video chat capabilities that are hot right now — boom.
That's why, back in 2015, both Slack and Atlassian snapped up video chat startups ScreenHero and Jitsi, respectively, with the promise of building video straight into their chat apps. Back in March 2016, Slack announced that it was ready to start testing video chat, but so far, it's only delivered audio.
Today, Atlassian is officially the quickest on the draw, with the announcement that HipChat for PCs, Macs, and the browser is getting real, on-the-fly video conferencing that you can activate from your desk, based on the tech it got from Jitsi. It takes HipChat's existing 1-to-1 video chat capabilities and adds support for multiple participants.
"Video is the most important frontier in chat right now," says Steve Goldsmith, general manager of Atlassian's HipChat chat software.
This is so important, Goldsmith says, because the rise of the remote workforce means you lose the ability to just spin around in your desk chair and ask a coworker a question. With HipChat's new video chat capabilities, you get a "one-click escalate to face" that can gather a whole team for quick video check-ins or brainstorm sessions.
"The people in your office aren't in your office anymore," Goldsmith says.
And while products like Microsoft Skype and Google Hangouts both offer the same kind of video chat for the business user, Atlassian's stance is that people spend the workdays already sitting in group chatrooms. Having to leave your chat app to go fumble for a Skype login breaks your workflow and simplifies everything.
.jpg)
The ultimate goal of the HipChat/Jitsi integration is both straightforward and ambitious. The same way that the smartphone made most of the stuff you can buy at RadioShack obsolete, Atlassian is looking to use HipChat to make complicated teleconferencing systems so cumbersome that companies will no longer need it.
That "Radioshacking," as Goldsmith calls it, would put a lot of pressure on companies like Cisco, which do big business in selling those teleconferencing systems, alongside the complicated and expensive PBX phone systems that support them.
After all, stuff like the landline and the laptop, which used to be the pinnacles of executive excess in their own heyday, were eventually "democratized then replaced," as Goldsmith puts it.
SEE ALSO: Uber ditched Slack for its employees and went to its chief rival instead
Join the conversation about this story »
When you think of high-tech cars, you probably think Tesla or BMW.
But there’s another automaker that is quietly becoming one of the industry’s most tech-centric brands: Volvo.
For years, the Swedish car company has been at the forefront of introducing the latest safety tech into its vehicles.
But the car company’s tech savviness extends beyond just its safety systems. Volvo is also investing in technology and partnerships that will make its cars more convenient, efficient, and autonomous.
The company's latest move includes a partnership with Uber to develop a new base vehicle for autonomous driving.
Here’s a closer look at how Volvo is quietly becoming one of the leading car companies in auto tech.
SEE ALSO: These 19 companies are racing to put driverless cars on the road by 2020
The company’s Pilot Assist II, which will become available in Volvo's new vehicles next year, will do all of the steering and braking at speeds of up to 80 miles per hour.
Currently, the company's semi-autonomous system only handles steering and braking for speeds up to 30 miles per hour on the highway and it must have a car in front of it to follow. So it's really only useful when you are in stop-and-go traffic.
Next year, the updated system will be much closer to what Tesla offers, allowing the car to do the steering and braking on the open road up to 80 miles per hour. It will also no longer need a car to follow to work.
The updated system will, however, still need clear lane markings to work properly.
The system will come standard in Volvo's S90 and be available as an option in the 2017 XC90.
Volvo and Uber have teamed up to develop base vehicles that work compatibly with all of the latest autonomous driving technology.
Both companies are investing $300 million in the project. Volvo will build the new base vehicles and Uber will then purchase the cars from the automaker.
However, Volvo will also use the new base vehicle for the next stage of its own self-driving car strategy, which includes fully autonomous driving.
Volvo will launch its pilot program, called DriveMe, in 2017 in select cities.
During the pilot program, drivers will still need to supervise their vehicle while it's in autonomous mode. However, data collected during the pilot will be used to improve the system so the company can eliminate human supervision in just a few years.
"We will design and test for real outliers because just building and demoing a self-driving car, is not very difficult," Eric Coelingh, Volvo's senior technical leader for safety and driver support technologies, told Business Insider.
"But building a self-driving car and saying that an ordinary customer can get behind the steering wheel, that means that the car should be able to deal with all thinkable traffic scenarios that occur on the road — extreme conditions in terms of weather and traffic scenarios, but also technical flaws in the system."
Give up any hope of ever getting an unlimited data plan from your wireless carrier.
It's over. Consumers have lost, and the carriers have won. There will never be an option for you to get unlimited data like you had in the early days of the smartphone.
That hasn't stopped carriers from trumpeting so-called unlimited data plans. But if a carrier says you'll get unlimited data, it's leaving out an important part of the story.
Let's dive into the latest example. On Thursday, T-Mobile announced a unified, unlimited data plan. It costs $70 per month for a single user and $40 per line for a four-line family plan. Unlimited data, texts, and voice calls. One price.
Sounds great, right?
It is. At least until you read all the caveats:
And now for the caveats to the caveats:
But while it's technically correct that you're getting unlimited data with this plan, it's not correct in spirit. Mobile data is useless if you can't use it at full speed. It'd be more accurate to say this is a 26 GB plan, not an unlimited plan.
Also, that $70 per month for one line is $5 more expensive than T-Mobile's current 6 GB plan, which is more than enough data for most people. As of September 6, T-Mobile customers who sign up are essentially paying more for a bunch of data they'll never use. That's great for T-Mobile, but bad for you.
I could go on and on. There are caveats to the caveats, which also have their caveats.
And to complicate things further, AT&T and Sprint countered T-Mobile's announcement with moves of their own on Thursday. AT&T says it won't charge if you go over your data cap, but it will throttle speeds on some plans. Sprint has a new "unlimited" plan of its own. There are so many moving parts to this that there is no good, concise answer.
So instead of wasting your time, here's the TL;DR: You will always have to pay for high-speed wireless data. If you go over a certain limit, you'll have to pay more or deal with painfully slow speeds. There is and never will be such a thing as an unlimited data plan, at least until someone creates a revolutionary way for us to wirelessly connect to the internet.
Today, "unlimited" just means you won't be charged more for going over a certain data cap. It doesn't mean you're guaranteed full-speed, unlimited data.
SEE ALSO: The Galaxy Note 7 review
Join the conversation about this story »
NOW WATCH: We tried Samsung’s answer to the MacBook
These days, many projects rely on cloud based file-sharing tools like Dropbox, Google Drive, iCloud and OneDrive. These solutions often sport a user friendly interface and offer a huge storage quota, but they are ‘free with limitations’. The lack of control and integration into existing infrastructures can drive organizations towards alternatives, many of which are found in the open source realm.
Twitter is trying to keep bad guys off its service.
Twitter has suspended hundreds of thousands of terrorist-related user accounts over the past six months in an ongoing effort to eliminate terrorist propaganda online.
The company announced Thursday that it has suspended 235,000 accounts since February that violated Twitter’s “policies related to promotion of terrorism.” That’s almost double the number of accounts it suspended in the six or so months prior.
Social media platforms — Twitter in particular — have become places for terrorist groups like ISIS to both recruit and preach. One of the challenges Twitter faces that competitors like Facebook don’t is that accounts can be anonymous, which means that once an account is taken down its creator can usually turn around and make a new one.
Twitter didn’t provide details on how it was doing it, but said in its blog post, “We have also made progress in disrupting the ability of those suspended to immediately return to the platform.” So there’s that.
Offensive or abusive content on Twitter ranges far beyond terrorist activity and promotion. But Twitter clearly wants people to know it’s trying, and apparently succeeding, in keeping (some) bad guys off its platform.
Google is set to open a physical YouTube store in London where popular YouTubers will be able to sell their merchandise to members of the public.
The "Creator Store", due to open within the next four weeks, will be part of the new YouTube Space, which launched this week on the ground floor of Google's 11 storey office in King's Cross.
The store will sell t-shirts, books, mugs, photo frames, and other items that have been dreamt up by designers and branding teams working with some of the most popular creators on YouTube.
It will also be used for book signings and product releases.
Darlington Howard, a YouTube senior programme strategist at Google, told Business Insider that all profits from the store will go to the creators.
The YouTube Space also contains three studios for popular YouTubers to use, as well as a barista bar and a community area that can be accessed by the public.
The space is designed to help YouTubers improve the quality of their videos, be it by offering them access to workshops or giving them access to equipment they wouldn't otherwise be able to get their hands on.
Join the conversation about this story »
NOW WATCH: Amazon has an oddly efficient way of storing stuff in its warehouses
NBC’s Olympics nightmare has come true: Primetime viewership for Rio is down 17% from the London games in 2012.
At a conference in June, NBC CEO Steve Burke explained what would constitute an Olympics “nightmare,” Bloomberg reports. “We wake up someday and the ratings are down 20%,” he said. “If that happens, my prediction would be that millennials had been in a Facebook bubble or a Snapchat bubble and the Olympics have come, and they didn’t know it.”
That nightmare is basically here, as the Olympics saw a sharp viewership dip for the first time since 2000. Among 18-49 year olds, the damage is even greater than that 20% “nightmare” number, sitting at negative 25%, according to Bloomberg Intelligence.
That’s bad news for NBC, which paid $12 billion to lock up the Olympics rights till 2032.
There is, however, a slight silver lining.
About 24% more people have streamed the Rio Olympics through NBC's app and website than streamed the London games. NBC told Bloomberg that up to Tuesday, 78 million unique users had streamed the games. And NBC has actually been able to charge 50% higher ad rates for internet ads than for those on TV because of the younger audience, NBC Sports chairman Mark Lazarus told Bloomberg.
But that good news should be put into harsh perspective: 98% of people still watch the Olympics on TV, the medium that has seen its audience plummet.
SEE ALSO: There's a specific reason why Netflix doesn't include movie or TV show trailers
Join the conversation about this story »
NOW WATCH: Olympians aren’t even close to running the fastest marathon that’s humanly possible
Amazon is rolling out a new way for businesses to use its cloud-based virtual desktop service, Amazon WorkSpaces. Instead of paying monthly for access to an always-on WorkSpace you can connect to at any time, companies can now choose to pay and use WorkSpaces on an hourly basis. The new billing system is designed to appeal to those businesses with part-time employees, traveling employees who… Read More
Springbone Kitchen in New York City is helping customers keep cool while staying healthy with bone broth popsicles. Bone broth products have become a recent health craze promising a wide range of benefits, from improved joint function to collagen infusion in bones.
Read more: http://on.mash.to/2b1Ttl2
Additional reporting by The Associated Press Read more...
More about Mashable Video, Healthy Eating, Health, Popsicles, and Food And Wine
Mattress startup Casper has gone to the dogs.
The e-commerce company, known for shipping mattresses in ultra-compact boxes, rolled out a new canine-focused product line this week.
The beds come in three sizes to accommodate different breeds and range in price from $125 to $225.
That's a bit expensive as far as dog beds go, but Casper says the pets' comfort level was not taken lightly. The startup's product team spent nearly two years analyzing canine sleeping patterns, working with dog psychologists and even studying the interaction between dog fur and different textiles under a microscope. Read more...
More about Startup, Dogs, Casper, and Business
Microsoft has declared HoloLens, its augmented reality headset, “open for business” with the launch of its commercial suite.
Aimed at enterprise, the suite has additional security and management features that won’t make it to the consumer model. These include:
That’s quite an impressive lineup of enterprise features, but we shouldn’t be surprised, considering Microsoft has already begun preliminary tests of HoloLens with government organizations like NASA.
Microsoft may also be attempting to pull businesses away from Google Glass, which has seen some success in the market, thanks in part to startups like APX Labs pushing new enterprise software to the device.
See Also: Are Apple, Google, Microsoft making the right bets on wearables?
HoloLens is still in development, so the current version shipping to developers and enterprise customers is far from finished. That said, some businesses may want to get ahead of the curve by deploying AR early, or at least testing it to see the advantages.
Microsoft sells the developer edition for $3,000, but doesn’t say how much the enterprise version will cost. It does however mention that HoloLens can be purchased in bulk, a signal to large businesses that Microsoft is capable of large deployments.
The post Microsoft’s HoloLens sells out, goes commercial appeared first on ReadWrite.