Radio frequency ID tags were supposed to revolutionize supply chain management. The dirt-cheap, battery-free tags, which receive power wirelessly from scanners and then broadcast identifying numbers, enable warehouse managers to log inventory much more efficiently than they could by reading box numbers and recording them manually.
But the scale of modern retail operations makes even radio frequency ID (RFID) scanning inefficient. Walmart, for instance, reported that in 2013 it lost $3 billion in revenue because of mismatches between its inventory records and its stock. Even with RFID technology, it can take a single large retail store three months to perform a complete inventory review, which means that mismatches often go undiscovered until exposed by a customer request. MIT researchers have now developed a system that enables small, safe, aerial drones to read RFID tags from tens of meters away while identifying the tags’ locations with an average error of about 19 centimeters. The researchers envision that the system could be used in large warehouses for both continuous monitoring, to prevent inventory mismatches, and location of individual items, so that employees can rapidly and reliably meet customer requests. Click here to read the full article.
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Delivering medical deliveries by drone has become almost routine in Rwanda since the California startup Zipline arrived in October.
Now, Zipline is expanding into neighboring Tanzania, establishing the world’s largest national drone delivery service. The Tanzanian government wants to make as many as 2,000 daily deliveries from four distribution centers serving an area roughly the size of Texas and Louisiana. Zipline has performed about 1,400 deliveries in Rwanda, about a quarter of them in emergencies. Its drones have clocked 60,000 , delivering blood to areas ground vehicles can’t reach quickly, or at all during the rainy season that turns roads to mud. For the new service, Zipline plans to fly upgraded versions of its fixed-wing drones, which have a 6-foot wingspan and can cruise at 70 mph. Each can carry 3 pounds of cargo (one unit of blood weighs roughly 1.2 pounds), and the batteries can make a round trip of 100 miles. Folded wax paper parachutes and cardboard cargo bays make the drones both durable and cheap to operate and repair. “The new vehicle is highly modular," says Rinaudo. "If a sensor is giving weird readings, it’s super fast to replace that." Tanzania's first distribution center is slated for Dodoma, the capital, and will be up and running early next year. Three more will follow initially, with an eventual plan to create a network to serve the nation's 55 million citizens. That’s a huge expansion over the operation in Rwanda, a much smaller country, where the drones currently reach around half of the population of 12 million.1 Each center will run a fleet of 30 drones, enough for 500 deliveries daily. In addition to blood, they’ll carry emergency vaccines, HIV medications, and supplies like IV tubes, to 5,640 public health facilities. Click here to read the full article. Researchers at the e-commerce juggernaut are currently working on several machine-learning systems that could help provide an edge when it comes to spotting, reacting to, and perhaps even shaping the latest fashion trends. The effort points to ways in which Amazon and other companies could try to improve the tracking of trends in other areas of retail—making recommendations based on products popping up in social-media posts, for instance. And it could help the company expand its clothing business or even dominate the area.
A number of forward-thinking retailers are already using social networks like Instagram and Pinterest to track the latest fashion trends and react quickly. And startups like the subscription service Stitch Fix already make personalized recommendations based on user preferences and social-media activity. Amazon, meanwhile, is making moves to bolster its apparel business, developing its own clothing brands, investing in high-quality photography for products, and launching Prime Wardrobe, which lets customers try on clothes before buying them. Its Echo Look app will even give you feedback on your outfits. An Amazon team at Lab126, a research center based in San Francisco, has developed an algorithm that learns about a particular style of fashion from images, and can then generate new items in similar styles from scratch—essentially, a simple AI fashion designer. The approach is crude and hardly ready for Project Runway, but it hints at the possibilities. Click here to read the full article. Google and Walmart are testing the notion that an enemy’s enemy is a friend.
The two companies said Google would start offering Walmart products to people who shop on Google Express, the company’s online shopping mall. It’s the first time the world’s biggest retailer has made its products available online in the United States outside of its own website. The partnership, announced on Wednesday, is a testament to the mutual threat facing both companies from Amazon.com. Amazon’s dominance in online shopping is challenging brick-and-mortar retailers like Walmart, while more people are starting web searches for products they might buy on Amazon instead of Google. The two companies said the partnership was less about how online shopping is done today, but where it is going in the future. They said that they foresaw Walmart customers reordering items they purchased in the past by speaking to Google Home, the company’s voice-controlled speaker and an answer to Amazon’s Echo. Walmart customers can also shop using the Google Assistant, the artificially intelligent software assistant found in smartphones running Google’s Android software. Walmart has also been trying to integrate its digital business with its vast network of more than 4,690 stores. Many brick-and-mortar retailers are struggling with what to do with their increasingly empty stores, but Walmart is partially repurposing its stores into e-commerce fulfillment centers. Click here to read the full article. In the latest tests, Microsoft reduced its error rate in “a series of improvements to our neural net-based acoustic and language models,” says Microsoft technical fellow Xuedong Huang in a post explaining the achievement.
This is part of a broader effort by Microsoft to advance the state of the art in artificial intelligence, and bring those new approaches to market. Under CEO Satya Nadella, Microsoft last year formed a new 5,000-person Artificial Intelligence & Research Group as a fourth engineering division inside the company, along with the Office, Windows and cloud groups. Microsoft says its speech recognition technology has achieved a new industry milestone, reducing its error rate to 5.1 percent, matching the error rate of multiple human transcribers in a widely recognized accuracy test. The new result, announced this evening by the company’s Artificial Intelligence & Research Group, beats Microsoft’s previous low of 5.9 percent, reported last year; and the 5.5 percent error rate announced by IBM earlier this year. Click here to read the full article. Disney set off a sonic boom in Hollywood by unveiling plans to start two Netflix-style services: For the first time in the streaming age, the world’s largest media company had decided that embracing a new business model was more important than clinging to its existing one.
Disney’s decision to better align itself with consumer trends — deemed “a rare and impressive pivot” by RBC Capital Markets — instantly reverberated through the entertainment industry. Disney’s cable channels, which include ESPN, have long been seen as the reason many viewers were refraining from cutting the cord entirely. If Disney was going all in on streaming, the impact would be felt by almost every television company and cable operator. Disney’s streaming plans call for the introduction early next year of a subscription service to be built around ESPN’s sports programming. It will be powered by BamTech, a technology company that handles direct-to-consumer video for baseball teams and HBO, among others. But this still-unnamed subscription service is designed to protect the cable bundle, at least initially. The service will offer only sports programming that is not available on ESPN’s traditional channels. Only people who also pay to receive ESPN the old-fashioned way (via a cable or satellite hookup) will be able to stream ESPN’s core offerings, including N.F.L. and N.B.A. games. Netflix, Amazon, HBO Now, CBS All Access and Hulu (part-owned by Disney) are all barreling ahead online. FX is dipping a toe in the water with Comcast. AMC has done the same. And now comes Disney with two services, which will undoubtedly prod other entertainment giants to move beyond niche direct-to-consumer offerings. Click here to read the full article. Skype has added PayPal integration to its Android and iOS mobile apps. 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, 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 add-ins from YouTube and Giphy. PayPal now joins the add-in list, as Microsoft seeks to expand Skype beyond its traditional video calling features. Click here to read the full article. Just weeks after Hyperloop One demonstrated a working, albeit slow, version of its levitating sled, the company has made another leap forward. This time around, the startup has successfully tested its XP-1 passenger pod, reaching speeds of up to 192 mph and levitating off the track as it accelerated.
XP-1 traveled for just over 300 meters before the brakes kicked in and it rolled to a gradual stop, hitting a top speed of 192 mph. That speed puts Hyperloop One's system a little bit ahead of Category 1 high-speed rail, which has a maximum running speed of 155mph, although it's not yet faster than Japan's bullet train. Then again, Hyperloop One's plan is to push its pods at speeds closer to 750 mph, but that's clearly going to be tough to test in a tube that's just 500 meters long. But the milestones, slow and steady, are being met, and it's clearly a demonstration of the company's strength that it is developing its prototypes for real. Internally, the company is describing this pod test as the culmination of Phase Two, demonstrating to the world that its concept is a workable one. Giegel says that Phase Three will not be about increasing the speed of the tests, but solving the practical issues of use. For instance, building an airlock system that will enable pods to enter and exit the vacuum tube without causing leaks. Giegel sees no need to extend the DevLoop tube beyond its current 500 meter length, at least not at the present time. Instead, future tests will be carried out in the countries that have expressed an interest in the technology. Presumably, because a test section can be built and, if approved, can be utilized for a full-scale loop connecting cities. Click here to read the full article. In a new world record, scientists at IBM have captured 330 terabytes of uncompressed data — or the equivalent of 330 million books — into a cartridge that can fit into the palm of your hand. The record of 201 gigabits per square inch on prototype sputtered magnetic tape is more than 20 times the areal density currently used in commercial tape drives. Areal recording density is the amount of information that can be stored on a given area of surface.
Tape drives were invented over 60 years ago and were traditionally used for archiving tax documents and health care records. IBM’s first tape unit used reels of half-inch-wide tape that could only hold about 2 megabytes. In order for researchers to achieve the 201 gigabits per square inch, IBM researchers had to develop several new technologies. IBM worked closely with Sony for several years, particularly on enabling increased areal recording densities. “The results of this collaboration have led to various improvements in the media technology, such as advanced roll-to-roll technology for long sputtered tape fabrication and better lubricant technology, which stabilizes the functionality of the magnetic tape.” Click here to read the full article. What Does The Bitcoin Split Mean?
After years of infighting over how Bitcoin’s software ought to change in response to the digital currency’s growing popularity, the community supporting the technology has suddenly split. It’s not yet clear what this means for Bitcoin and its users in the long run. To have any effect, though, the new currency, Bitcoin Cash, needs to attract miners. Miners are what make the Bitcoin world run. Their computers process the digital transactions people make using Bitcoin and add them to its cryptographic ledger, known as the blockchain. In return for this effort, miners are rewarded in bitcoins. A group of investors and entrepreneurs, many based in Asia, are the ones behind the “hard fork”—not miners. Peeved by what they see as a harmful lack of progress toward increasing the number of transactions the Bitcoin system can handle (seven per second, compared with thousands handled by conventional systems like Visa’s), they have taken matters into their own hands, and launched Bitcoin Cash. It’s meant to run just like Bitcoin, but no one knows if the mining community will buy into the newly created currency. For years, there has been agreement within the larger Bitcoin community that eventually the software would need an adjustment to handle the growing number of transactions. But it has struggled to find a way forward (see “Leaderless Bitcoin Struggles to Make Its Most Crucial Decision”). The programmers in charge of updating Bitcoin’s code have resisted campaigns to increase the “block size,” or the number of transactions that can be processed every 10 minutes. One argument against increasing the block size is that could shut out smaller players who can’t afford the hardware needed to mine bigger blocks, while making it easier for a few big players to gain control of the network. Its stable community of miners is crucial. To get traction, Bitcoin Cash (which at the time of writing is worth $220, compared with Bitcoin’s $2,771) will have to attract its own critical mass of miners. Click here to read the full article. |
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