Ideaforge

Daimler has been granted a license to test self-driving vehicles on public roads in Beijing, making it the first international automaker to receive such permission.

The owner of the Mercedes-Benz brand was given the test permit by the Chinese government after extensive closed-course testing, the company said in a statement, adding that it marks a milestone in its research and development efforts in China.

Daimler, which also has licenses in Germany and the U.S., said it will now begin road tests in Beijing.

There are other companies testing autonomous vehicles in China, notably Baidu, which has been on public roads since at least 2016. For Daimler to qualify, the company said it had to add to its Mercedes-Benz test vehicles technical applications from Baidu’s Apollo platform. Daimler had to undergo testing at the National Pilot Zone (Beijing and Hebei) for Intelligent Mobility, with test drivers receiving rigorous automated driving training.

Daimler has also deepened its relationship with Baidu, specifically in R&D efforts focused on safety and autonomous driving. The goal is to understand the special requirements for automated driving in China, and to develop an early intuition regarding local technical trends, Daimler said.

Earlier this week, Baidu announced an update to its Apollo autonomous driving system, which is capable of Level 4 operations, a designation by automotive engineering association SAE International that means the vehicles take over all driving in certain conditions.

The Apollo program is an open-source autonomous driving platform that has been under development for years. Baidu isn’t interested in making the actual car — just the software that drives it. And it wants as many companies as possible to use its Apollo platform. Some 116 partners are now on the Apollo platform, including new partners Jaguar Land Rover, Valeo, Byton, Leopard Imaging and Suning Logistics.

Source: Tech Crunch

The blockchain revolution is coming, but you might not see it. That’s the view of Brian Behlendorf, executive director of the Linux Foundation’s Hyperledger Project.

Speaking at the TC Sessions: Blockchain event in Zug, Switzerland, Behlendorf explained that much of the innovation that the introduction of blockchains are primed to happen behind this the scenes unbeknownst to most.

“For a lot of consumers, you’re not going to realize when the bank or a web form at a government website or when you go to LinkedIn and start seeing green check marks against people’s claims that they attended this university — which are all behind-the-scenes that will likely involve blockchain,” Behlendorf told interviewer John Biggs.

“This is a revolution in storage and networking and consumers.”

As for where blockchain might make a big impact, Behlendorf said he believes that the area of online identity is particularly ripe for change. Rather than relying on central systems such as Facebook or Twitter to hold information, blockchain solutions can potentially store information more securely and with more utility thanks to self-sovereign ID systems.

“That’s what gets me up in the morning more than almost every other use case,” Behlendorf said. “I think we’ve got something of a solution but’s only going to work if the end user experience of managing your identity and your personal data is made easy and made fluid. It [has to] feel something like your wallet when you pull out your driver’s license and show it.”

Hyperledger is providing the framework and tools that the foundation hopes will enable innovation in the blockchain space, and Behlendorf said that it currently has around 10 code bases, of which two are in production use with eight additional frameworks to build blockchains. He added that there are more options coming, thanks to Hyperledger focus on “organic” development ideas.

It might seem like an irony that blockchain projects, which can raise enormous amounts of money via token sales, are basing the technologies that power their businesses on open source tools, but Behlendorf said there’s nothing new in that situation versus how the Linux Foundation traditionally operates.

“There might be a few developers who get involved to improve their skills and reputation but the vast majority work on it because their business is investigating it, wants to use it or to do a pilot, so they have a responsibility to make sure it works,” Behlendorf explained.

“For them, knowing other companies are using it and making a profit is fine,” he added. “In fact, it’s a good thing.”

Community spirit is very much the focus, and Hyperledger has had to intervene in the rare cases that members have taken things too far.

“What you want to protect against is any one company benefitting from the brand or reputation that the community creates in a way that is unfair. So we do things like we protect the trademark… because that confuses the marketplace,” Behlendorf said.

“But we want to see companies building services on top of this. In fact, it’s essential to make this a virtuous circle.”

Source: Tech Crunch

With long summer evenings comes the perfect opportunity to dust off your old boxes of circuits and wires and start to build something. If you’re short on inspiration, you might be interested in artist and engineer Dan Macnish’s how-to guide on building an AI-powered doodle camera using a thermal printer, Raspberry pi, a dash of Python and Google’s Quick Draw data set.

“Playing with neural networks for object recognition one day, I wondered if I could take the concept of a Polaroid one step further, and ask the camera to re-interpret the image, printing out a cartoon instead of a faithful photograph.” Macnish wrote on his blog about the project, called Draw This.

To make this work, Macnish drew on Google’s object recognition neural network and the data set created for the game Google Quick, Draw! Tying the two systems together with some python code, Macnish was able to have his creation recognize real images and print out the best corresponding doodle in the Quick, Draw! data set

But since output doodles are limited to the data set, there can be some discrepancy between what the camera “sees” and what it generates for the photo.

“You point and shoot – and out pops a cartoon; the camera’s best interpretation of what it saw,” Macnish writes. “The result is always a surprise. A food selfie of a healthy salad might turn into an enormous hot dog.”

If you want to give this a go for yourself, Macnish has uploaded the instructions and code needed to build this project on GitHub.

Source: Tech Crunch

Years ago – six years ago, to be exact – a toy called Buckyballs came under attack by government officials intent on destroying fun. The Consumer Product Safety Commission banned the toys, which we noted were tiny rare earth magnets that were good for play but bad for a snack, because a few overzealous children swallowed one or two and found themselves in gastrointestinal distress.

The lawsuit against ZenMagnets, creators of Buckyballs, began as a “recall prior to record of injury,” something unprecedented in this space. That meant the company had to stop selling its magnets before anyone was actually injured, an odd position for a small company to be in.

Now, after six years of battle, Buckyballs are back. The company is now able to sell its biggest set, the Mandala and notes that the sets are not toys. They could cause intestinal pinching, writes the ZenMagnets team, and they recommend not leaving them around animals or small children. However, these odd and wonderful little toys are finally available for purchase. The kit now even comes inside a lockable box to ensure little hands can’t accidentally grab and eat them.

“We remain willing to work with the CPSC to develop the magnet safety standards for which we’ve already petitioned, and which will be more effective and reasonable than the all-ages, nationwide ban we succeeded in vacating in the Tenth Circuit,” wrote founder Shihan Qu. “As we’ve already been doing, Zen Magnets looks forward to providing not just the highest quality magnet spheres on the market, but also the safest in terms of sales methods and warnings. Now that the war on magnets is over, hopefully we can all focus towards the war on magnet misuse.”

“Magnets must be respected, but need not be feared,” he said. Truer words – besides these – were never spoken.

Source: Tech Crunch

In what amounted to one of the most far-reaching and interesting conversations at TC Sessions in Zug, Ethereum masterminds Vitalik Buterin, Justin Drake, and Karl Floersch spoke openly – and often candidly – about a bright future for Ethereum scaling and, more interestingly, their way to build teams that work.

“There’s definitely changes that we could have made into the protocol,” said Buterin when asked whether or not he would have changed anything if he could start Ethereum again. But, he said, “there are ways in which that the problem is fundamentally hard.” In other words, growth was the only option.

“The demand for using public blockchains is high and we need to up the stability in order the meet that demand,” he said.

Floersch discussed the problems associated with Ethereum in the context of “adversarial networks.”

The network, he said, should “penalize people who don’t provide guarantees” and he felt that the tools available to simulate economic actors – including bad actors – are still weak.

“We come up with ideas, try to formalize them, and implement them,” he said. But, he said, the simulations still aren’t available.

The team expects aspects of Ethereum 2.0 – namely the Casper upgrade and the addition of sharding – to begin rolling out in 2019. After that, said Floersch, Ethereum 3.0 would enable quantum secure systems i.e. systems that can withstand the power of quantum computers.

“We’ll push quantum secure updates before there are commercial quantum computers,” he said.

Ultimately, said Buterin, Ethereum runs because the team is so tightly knit thanks to a clear roadmap. He said Bitcoin has many heads and the gridlock created was dangerous.

“Can they agree? No. You have gridlock,” he said.

“Part of the reason is that the Ethereum community early on [continued] to promote the idea of the Ethereum roadmap,” he said. “I feel that the roadmap is part of the social contract.”

“People who buy into ethereum buy in knowing that these are the things that people are going to want to push it forward. There may be deadlock on what specific path the community should take,” he said. But, he noted the roadmap keeps everyone on the same path. Given the expansive popularity and reach of the technology, it’s a fascinating bit of team-building that should inform other open source and blockchain projects over time.

You can watch the entire panel below:

Source: Tech Crunch

It’s certainly understandable that Samsung wanted to follow Apple, Amazon and Google into the smart assistant game. But Bixby has been anything but a rousing success. The AI has added voice functionality and a smattering features in subsequent releases, including the S9’s Google Lens-style capabilities, but it’s yet to live up to its full potential. 

Today, TheScore announced that it’s bringing live sports scores news from the gamut of top sports leagues, including the NBA, MLB, NFL, NHL and EPL soccer, starting next month. In August, the feature will arrive in Bixby Home, bringing with it customizable notifications based on sports or specific teams.

It’s a small addition in the larger scope of what these assistants have to offer, but I know that regular sports scores are one of my most frequently used features on Google Assistant and Alexa — especially as someone who lives outside all of my teams’ broadcast range.

Third-party functionality was one of Samsung’s primary Bixby selling points since launch, leaving the heavy lifting up to third parties who specialized in such things. Of course, Bixby’s failed to catch fire, even as the company has gone out of its way to make it front and center through things like a devoted button on the Galaxy S9 and Note 8.

With the Note 9’s arrival just around the corner, perhaps Samsung will have more to show on that front next month.

Source: Tech Crunch

There is perhaps no firm that has done as much to promote the adoption of Ethereum as the dominant cryptocurrency platform for actual product development as Consensys.

Founded by Ethereum Foundation co-founder Joe Lubin, Consensys has emerged as an investor, accelerator, educator and product developer in its own right in little more than three years that it has been in existence.

A Princeton-educated roboticist and autonomous vehicle researcher, Lubin has become a billionaire through his bet on Ethereum as the cryptocurrency that would win the hearts and minds of developers.

And with Consensys he’s built an empire that spans the globe. From its headquarters in Brooklyn, Consensys now has operations, offices and partnerships in Ireland, Israel, and Singapore, and the global expansion shows no sign of slowing down.

That’s why we’re absolutely thrilled to have Joe Lubin, Chief Marketing Officer Amanda Gutterman, and Chief Strategy Officer Sam Cassatt join us on the Disrupt SF stage.

Nothing summarizes Lubin’s ambitions for Ethereum better than this comment on the transformative power that he sees in the cryptocurrency.

Lubin, Gutterman and Cassatt join a world-class agenda, with speakers like Brian Armstrong, Kirsten Green, Reid Hoffman, and Marty Chavez. Tickets to the show, which runs September 5-7, are available here.

Source: Tech Crunch

MoviePass subscribers were just greeted with a special Fourth of July surprise from the company, but it’s not good news. Surprise!

The company’s plan to introduce summer surge pricing goes into effect today. In an email to subscribers introducing “peak pricing,” MoviePass tried to spin this like a new feature introduction rather than a notification that its monthly service had again worsened.

In an FAQ on its site, MoviePass explains its new dynamic pricing plan and the accompanying surcharges in more detail, but not a lot of detail. The company fails to really explain what exactly will determine price fluctuations beyond stating that “movies that are high in demand for title, date, or time of day will be impacted.” It doesn’t provide guidelines for what those surcharges will look like, though a screenshot it provides suggests we might pay $3.43 more to see Avengers: Infinity War at 7:00 PM.

Now, movies in the app will display a red lightning icon when they are in peak pricing and a gray icon when they are approaching peak pricing status. Subscribers will be able to waive one peak pricing fee per month, which is some relief for the thing you paid for now providing less value and convenience but also just makes the whole system more complicated.

Peak pricing will gradually roll out across geographic areas starting on July 5. If it hasn’t hit your local screen yet, rest assured that no MoviePass subscribers will escape the company’s latest effort to bend its unsustainable business model toward realism.

Source: Tech Crunch

Some more consolidation is afoot in the world of enterprise mobility. Today, Zebra Technologies — a company that makes handheld scanners, printers and other portable hardware, and develops the technology to tag things to be read by them — is acquiring Xplore Technologies, one of the older and bigger makers of ruggedised tablets and other hard-wearing hardware. Both companies are publicly listed and Zebra says it will be paying $6 per share in cash for Xplore, which works out to about $90 million — a premium on the company’s current market cap of about $65 million.

Zebra’s market cap is just under $8 billion.

The deal will give Zebra deeper inroads into the retail, manufacturing, transportation, logistics and healthcare verticals and also give the company avenues to sell into further markets where Xplore already has customers such as the energy sector, government and public safety, Zebra said. Xplore booked $87 million in revenue in the 12 months that ended March 31.

Xplore generated revenue of $87 million in the 12-month period ended March 31, 2018, but it’s never been massively profitable. In the fourth quarter, which the company reported earlier today, Xplore scraped out a net profit of $300,000 (compared to a loss of $2.6 million a year ago).

As with a lot of enterprise consolidation, which sees smaller companies coming together or bigger fish gobbling up smaller but promising fish, the idea will be to bring together its hardware business into a wider operation to create more manufacturing efficiencies and to sell more services to Xplore customers to improve margins on those deals, which Zebra says is in line with how businesses are looking to operate today anyway.

“In today’s on-demand economy, investments to digitize operations are central to our customers’ strategies. The acquisition of Xplore enhances our product lineup and gives Zebra a complete rugged tablet portfolio that enables our customers to gain a performance edge,” said Anders Gustafsson, chief executive officer of Zebra Technologies, in a statement. “We’d previously outlined potential areas of expansion that are a natural fit for Zebra and its Enterprise Asset Intelligence vision, and this acquisition is aligned with that strategy. The addition of Xplore provides access to a great team and great products in an attractive market and should enable us to grow the category double digits going forward.”

Zebra has carved out a place for itself as a buyer of operations that need more scale to see their potential realised, making around 14 since 1998. Perhaps most notably, it acquired the enterprise business of Motorola Solutions for $3.5 billion in a big Internet of Things play. Xplore’s emphasis on devices complements that with a set of hardware for when machine-to-machine communications may not be enough.

“We are excited to join Zebra, the worldwide leader in enterprise mobility and visibility. This acquisition validates the incredible work our team does every day to develop innovative solutions and serve our customers,” said Tom Wilkinson, chief executive officer of Xplore Technologies, in his statement. “Our products are a natural fit for Zebra, creating a comprehensive rugged mobility portfolio that stands against any competitor.”

The companies say the deal is expected to close in Q3 2018.

Source: Tech Crunch

A number of top executives are out at ZTE as the phone maker works to fulfill the requirements of U.S.-imposed restrictions. Among the big changes up top is new CEO Xu Ziyang, who formerly headed up the company’s operations in Germany. A new CFO, CTO and head of HR have been named, as well, according to The Wall Street Journal.

The move comes a few days after company slowly began to resume some business operations on a one-month waver, following a seemingly D.O.A. seven-year export ban. The ban was announced back in April, after the company failed to appropriately punish top employees over Iran/North Korean trade violations.

Trump, however, was quick to toss the company a lifeline, citing potential job loss in China. The President’s willingness to bail out ZTE has been met with staunch criticism by many, including members of his own party. A bipartisan push in Congress to reinstitute the ban began in Congress last month. Many of the issues appear to stem from ties to the Chinese government that also put Huawei in hot water with U.S. security orgs.

For now, however, the company appears to be springing back to life, as it rushes to comply with the most recent laundry list of restrictions. The moves come in the wake of a $1 billion fine and the effective freeze on operations as the company mulled a way forward without relying on products from U.S. businesses like Google and Qualcomm.

In that time, ZTE has lost billions, and grappled with other…inconveniences. Of course, even with these changes, the company isn’t out of the woods just yet. In addition to on-going financial issues, security and other concerns could be enough to put consumers in the U.S. and other countries off the company altogether.

Source: Tech Crunch