Beijing will be introducing "bio-id" technology to help speed up the flow of passengers through the subway system at peak times. The transport system will implement facial recognition scanners and palm scanners this year to speed up the movement of the more than 10 million passengers who use the Beijing subways system each day. China has been a pioneer globally in the application of surveillance technology, where it is already being used for everything from fast-food checkout to domestic security purposes.
Facial recognition will be used to recognize citizens' faces as they pass through the transport system and may allow for them to eventually travel without needing to go through normal ticketing channels. Palm scanners, which are already being used on the Shanghai subway system, would let citizens travel through ticket turnstiles with just the swipe of their hands. Click here to read the full article.
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Instagram is launching IGTV today, a new service which will allow users to upload videos of up to 1 hour in length. IGTV will be available through the Instagram home screen or as a standalone app and will put Instagram in direct competition with YouTube. Instagram has 1 billion monthly active users and 500 million daily users, and is growing at around 5 percent a quarter. Described as the next evolution for video, the IGTV app will begin to roll out today globally on iOS and Android.
IGTV will allow everyone except new or smaller accounts to upload videos and become a creator, with that ability expanding eventually to include all accounts. Creators will be able to build Instagram Channels of different videos that other users will be able to subscribe to. IGTV will initially launch without advertising, but it is widely expected that ads will be added eventually. Instagram Chief Executive Kevin Systrom also explained that IGTV may look to share revenue with video creators in the future. IGTV is the second effort this week from Facebook that targets luring users away from YouTube after Facebook itself opened up the ability to make money off the Facebook app on Tuesday. Instagram was founded in 2010 and was soon bought by Facebook in 2012 for $1 billion. It began as a photo-sharing platform but added messaging and video (short) features as it grew in popularity. Click here to read the full article. Google has decided to invest $550 million in JD.com, a Chinese e-commerce giant as the company seeks to strengthen its presence in Asian markets and stay competitive with Amazon. The investment has been described as a piece of a larger partnership between the two companies that will include a range of strategic initiatives such as the promotion of JD.com products on Google Shopping. For JD.com, the deal demonstrates its intent to build up its growth outside of China as it continues its battle at home against Chinese e-commerce leader Alibaba. The goal for the two is to ultimately merge Google's expertise in data analytics, marketing, and customer reach with JD.com's logistics capabilities to create new kinds of online retail in the U.S, Europe, and Southeast Asia.
Although Google's main service offering is currently censored in China due to their refusal to censor certain search result in accordance with local laws, Google continues to invest in the market. They have opened up offices, including an AI hub, and continue to release products in the Chinese market. JD.com is currently valued at around $60 billion, and is backed by major Chinese internet player Tencent who is valued at around $500 billion. Click here to read the full article. This week in the latest partnership between grocery retailers and technology companies, Carrefour announced it is teaming up with Google to help boost its ecommerce business. The global grocery retail industry has been estimated to be worth $5.9 trillion, and online sales of food and drink is expected to become an increasingly larger part of the industry as ecommerce adoption grows. Traditional grocers are allying with tech partners to receive help with AI, shopper subscriptions, voice technology, digital assistants, and the automatic replenishing of products. The offline and online worlds are continuing to merge as retailers see the tremendous value in partnering with technology companies whose expertise also includes translating data (which retailers have a lot of) into personalized experiences and offers.
The partnership makes sense for both partners as many grocers need the expertise offered by technology partners to set up efficient and digitally advanced operations and technology players can build off of the logistics expertise, supplier relationships, and distribution networks. Historically, many retailers trying to be pure online players haven't had much luck earning profits from storing and delivering food - especially in markets like the UK. Because grocery is such a high frequency purchase for consumers, establishing a logistics path through which other categories can eventually be targeted is key. Food purchases make up from one third all the way to half of all spending in numerous developed countries. Here are some of the other recent partnerships between grocery retailers and technology companies. 2018
Click here to read the full article. Three French graduates have created a virtual reality program to help relax, distract and and curb a patience experience of pain and anxiety. The program, which takes patients into a three-dimensional world of Japanese zen gardens or snowy hillsides, increases the patient's tolerance for pain without having to resort to the use of drugs. The VR pain relief program can help patients undergoing procedures such as getting burns treated, cuts stitched, or a dislocated shoulder pushed back into place. Doctor Olivier Ganansia, head of the emergency department in the Paris hospital where the VR project is being tested, has stated that he expects VR to be used in hospitals routinely within 10 years.
The use of VR as a tool to combat phantom pains and distract patients at the dentist is well documented, so it shouldn't serve as a surprise that its use has moved into the emergency room. Additionally, although the use of VR in the medical profession is still experimental and generally intended to just distract the user from what ails them, there has been research that suggests that VR can also affect how the nervous system in a user responds to pain in general. The three founders have received a monetary prize from a university in Australia for their work, and will next present their project in Seattle at Microsoft's headquarters. Click here to read the full article on the recent use of VR in Paris, and here to read about how VR might reprogram how a person responds to pain. Britain is still the European Hub for international technology investors according to a study released today. Technology companies in Britain over the last two years have received almost 3x more investment from venture capital compared to any other country in Europe. Technology companies attracted more than 5 billion pounds since the 2016 referendum vote, which is more than Germany (2.15 billion pounds), France (1.55 billion pounds) and Sweden (644 million pounds) combined. Technology firms in London have been the destination of much of the investment with 80% of all UK venture capital funding over the same period.
The study performed by London & Partners, which is London Mayer Sadiq Khan's official promotional agency, explained that investors were attracted to London's cutting edge technology sectors such as Artificial Intelligence, cyber security, and Fintech. The news comes in the same week as Portugal's Outsystems was evaluated at more than $1 billion after a combined investment round of $360 million from Goldman Sachs and KKR. The news of Portugal being the home to its second unicorn level start up (Farfetch reached unicorn status in 2015) should inject some fire into the Lisbon start-up scene. Click here to read the full article. Microsoft has confirmed that it has purchased Github, an open source coding website, for $7.5 billion in Microsoft stock. The purchase is Microsoft's biggest acquisition since the acquisition of LinkedIn for $26 billion in 2016. Github is the largest host of source code in the world and its last valuation was at around $2 billion in 2015. Microsoft's purchase is a big bet on the company's cloud business Azure (which just posted a 93% increase in revenue last quarter), hoping to lure the code developers on Github towards Azure and away from Amazon and Google's own cloud offers. Github's community as of March of 2018 consisted of 28 million developers and 85 million code repositories.
Microsoft offers a robust group of services for developers including the Visual Studio Code and the open source .NET programming framework. The purchase of Github will complement the current strategy of providing tools that gently steer developers towards Microsoft Azure cloud. Github allows developer to share and work on software products by hosting them, however, developers still need to run the software - which is where complex open source tools built by developers usually turn to large public cloud services provided by Amazon, Google or Microsoft. The opportunity ahead for Microsoft lies in providing seamless integration between Github and Azure to give developers an easy way to get their open source projects up and running. Some Github users have already begun discussed doubts about whether the acquisition will lead to Github eventually favoring Microsoft products over others, leading to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella responding to those concerns by saying that Github would continue to be an open platform that would work with all public clouds. Microsoft Corporate Vice President Nat Friedman, previously CEO of Xamarin, will become the new CEO of Github following the purchase. Github's former CEO and Founder Chris Wanstrath will transition into a Microsoft technical fellow position and will begin working on strategic software initiatives. The acquisition reflects the ongoing change in Microsoft's stance regarding open source under Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. Nadella has explained that Microsoft sales team will look to increase the speed of adoption of Github from their current big business customers. Click here to read the full article. A government strategic review in Japan announced today described how the country is intending to drive economic growth by investing in new technologies. The review discussed plans to develop a virtual power plant by 2022 and a driverless car system by 2020. The driverless car system is expected to begin testing on public roads this year and the government wants to launch the service for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics and commercialize it by 2022.
Japan has typically struggled to keep up with the US, Europe and China's innovation practices related to technology implementations in the workplace such as autonomous vehicles and AI. Since taking office in 2012, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has introduced many initiatives aimed at growing the economy, which has seen its first contraction in the first quarter of this year after experiencing eight straight quarters of growth. Some of Abe's previous initiatives aimed at narrowing the pay gap between contract and regular employees and introducing more women into the workforce. The strategy this year has shifted its focus to promoting technologies such as changing regulations in order to allow students acquire the multi-disciplinary degrees required to work in AI. Virtual power plants, another of the review's plans, work by connecting small energy-storage and energy-generating systems in order for them to work collectively similarly to a conventional power plant. The benefits of such a system, although recognized, can only be realized if regulations enable the systems to distribute energy across the power grid easily. Click here to read the full article. Alphabet Inc's appointment booking tool, Reserve with Google, has received very positive early results and many schedulers explained that the monthly growth in clients has won them over. Reserve with Google partnered with 25 large software suppliers of booking software for spas, restaurants and other businesses to give Google the schedules of tens of thousands of shops across 13 countries. Using that data, Google built one portal for users are able to discover, book, and pay for their classes/appointments. The tool is one of many that have emerged recently that attempt to commercialize online bookings outside of travel and restaurant and sources indicate that users will be able to make Reserve bookings via voice through Google Assistant by the end of the year.
Reserve with Google attracted close to 15,000 diners and $270,000 in a couple of weeks to Buenos-Aires based Restorando, one of the scheduling software companies located in Latin America. Two other software providers have disclosed that Reserve with Google reservations came from new clients over 50% of the time (one reported that 75% of reservations came from new customers). Google does not currently pay for access to the suppliers data, who instead receive value from the booking tool making their clients more attractive in Google results. Amazon Home Services launched a scheduling tool for landscapers, TV installers and other similar home-related services. Facebook's Instagram partnered with 11 of the same 25 large booking software suppliers as Google recently. As competition in this area increases, analysts expect the use of voice-activated booking to be an important differentiating feature. One explained that if Google is able to deliver a seamless integration with its Google Assistant, it will be hard to beat. Click here to read the full article. |
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