Digital Feed - A2D Consulting

Uber Launches Monthly Subscription Service

10/31/2018

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Source: The Verge

Yesterday, Uber launched Ride Pass, a monthly subscription service that will be available in five cities across the United States: Austin, Denver, Los Angeles, Miami, Orlando. The price of the subscription will be $14.99 a month in all cities except Los Angeles, where it will cost $24.99 a month. Buying into Ride Pass will allow Uber riders to lock in flat rates on all UberPool and UberX trips they take over that month, without being subjected to price increases from surge pricing, traffic or other external factors. Uber joins Lyft, another American ride hailing company who also released its subscription service this month, as ride hailing companies look to create incentives to prevent users from jumping to other apps searching for shorter wait times or cheaper fares.

For riders, Uber is trying to make this decision as easy and simple as possible with features such as auto-renewal and savings tracking, where riders who subscribe to Ride Pass will be able to see their savings (from locked in fares) in real time through the app. For drivers, Uber will cover the difference between the cost of the driver's time and distance driven and the locked in fares Ride Pass users receive ensuring that the savings riders receive have no effect on driver earnings.

Lyft's subscription service, called All-Access Plan, was rolled out nationally in the middle of October with a price of $299 per month. All-Access Plan provides subscribers with 30 rides with a cost of up to $15. If the ride happens to cost more than $15, the subscriber pays the difference. Lyft's announcement of the subscription service indicated that the service was intended to help its users get rid of their personal cars and rely solely on Lyft for the majority of their daily travel.

Lyft and Uber are both expected to go public in 2019.

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Breakthrough Technologies Of This Year

10/29/2018

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MIT Technology Review has released its yearly list of 10 breakthrough technologies that will have a profound effect on our lives. This year's list includes: 3-D Metal Printing, Artificial Embryos, Sensing City, AI for Everybody, Dueling Neural Networks, Real Time Translation Earbuds, Zero-Carbon Natural Gas, Perfect Online Privacy, Genetic Fortune-Telling and Materials' Quantum Leap.

10 Breakthrough Technologies of 2018:

3-D Metal Printing - while 3-D Printing has been around for years, it is now becoming more and more accessible. Because of its ability to create complex parts that are stronger and lighter than more traditional manufacturing methods, wide spread adoption of the technology promises to change how manufacturers produce parts, even at mass-production levels.
Artificial Embryos - As advances in stem-cell research continue to unfold and show promise, the next step for some researchers is the creation of an artificial embryo. Scientists could use these artificially created embryos to study and investigate the earliest events of development.
Sensing City - Numerous smart city developments are underway including Toronto's Quayside project that brings together the Canadian government and Alphabet's Sidewalk Labs. The project's ambitions include using sensors to gather data and assist in technology, design, and policy decision making.
AI for Everybody - Amazon, Microsoft and Google are bringing machine learning tools based in the cloud within reach of a much broader audience. As AI transitions out of the technology industry it primary exists in now and into other industries, the transformation it will bring with it promises to result in huge economic boosts.
Dueling Neural Networks - Artificial intelligence has become very good at identifying things, such as people and objects, but providing them with the imagination to create new images has been much harder to solve. GAN, generative adversarial network, takes two neural networks trained on the same data set and pits them against each other to enable one to create images that are realistic enough that the second can no longer distinguish if the new image is a fake (generated by the other neural network) or real (similar enough to the data set it was trained on). Advances in this area of AI will give AI a deeper, independent understanding of the world.
Babel-Fish Earbuds - Google's Pixel buds can work with the Google Translate app and Google Pixel smartphones to allow communication between languages in close to real time.
Zero-Carbon Natural Gas - a company in Houston is testing a technology that generates power from natural gas while also capturing all the carbon dioxide that the process releases resulting in cheap (as cheap as current natural gas plants), carbon-free energy.
Perfect Online Privacy - Zero-knowledge proof is a tool that uses cryptographic protocols to allow users to prove personal details, such as being older than 18 years old, without having to reveal their actual birthday. The tool has a lot of promise within the financial industry, where it could allow users to transact anonymously.
Genetic Fortune-Telling - New DNA tests, known as polygenic risk scores, may be able to provide a prediction of the likelihood that a baby will have cancer or suffer a heart attack.
Materials' Quantum Leap - The power of quantum computing may give scientists enough computing power to more precisely design molecules. This ability could lead to innovations such as more efficient batteries or solar cells, and more effective drugs.

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New Google Shortcuts

10/26/2018

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Source: Google

Google has now made it incredibly easy and quick to create documents using its G suite - users can now use the domain .new to make a new Google Doc, Slide, Sheet, Site, or Form. If you need a new document, you can just type the type of the document followed by .new into your browser. Here are a couple of the options for each G Suit app: "doc.new," "slide.new," "form.new," "site.new," "sheet.new."

Here is a list of all the shortcuts for each G Suite document:
Form-

form.new
forms.new

Site-

site.new
sites.new
website.new

Document-

doc.new
docs.new
document.new

Sheet-

sheet.new
sheets.new
spreadsheet.new

Slides-

slide.new
slides.new
deck.new
presentation.new

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Apple Plans To Launch Global TV Subscription Service

10/25/2018

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Apple will launch a TV subscription service at the beginning of next year according to a report from The Information, a technology news website. The new TV subscription service will be available in over 100 countries worldwide and will offer access to both original content and network subscriptions such as Showtime and HBO. Apple has been investing heavily in original content over the past year, and its new TV subscription service will put it in direct competition with services like Netflix and Amazon Prime Video. Current market leaders are HBO and Netflix, who have 140 million and 125 million subscribers respectively.

Other rumors also indicate that Apple's new TV subscription service may be offered free of charge to Apple device owners.

Click here to read the full article.

Uber Works

10/19/2018

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Source: The Verge/ Alex Castro

After initial testing in Los Angeles, Uber will begin testing an on demand staffing service called Uber Works in Chicago. The service will provide business partners with the ability to recruit short-term workers such as security guards, waiters and other temporary staff for according to the Financial Times. The new business unit, although still in trial mode, is one of many service expansions Uber is exploring outside of ride-hailing including food delivery, electric scooters, and freight hauling as prepares for its IPO next year.

Uber has diversified into several new service offerings in the last couple of years. Uber Eats, one of its new business units, was launched in 2014 and is already being valued at $20 billion by itself. Uber CEO, Dana Khosrowshashi, stated in May that Uber Eats is located in 250 cities around the world and brings in $6 billion per year in total bookings.

Uber is expected to IPO in the second half of 2019.

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Volkswagen Targeting Online Sales By 2020

10/17/2018

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Volkswagen, in partnership with dealerships, will build a new sales platform by 2020 that "will handle the entire purchasing process through to contract conclusion, including financing, payment and even used car trade-ins." The new platform will allow Volkswagen to sell directly to customers online for the first time and will also enable over-the-air software updates for their electric "ID" family of vehicles. Volkswagen expects to launch mass production of new electric cars built using its new MEB platform by 2022 and has stated that it believes the "online business will make a key contribution to the development of the new sales model."

The new sales platform will work together with Volkswagen's current dealership network according to Volkswagen. In November, European dealerships are expected to sign a contract that will allow Volkswagen to launch these new services.

Rivals, like Tesla, are already offering over-the-air updates and direct online sales.

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AI Can Spot Advanced Breast Cancer More Effectively Than Humans

10/15/2018

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Source: Google

Google researchers have developed a deep learning tool called LYNA (Lymph Note Assistant) that can recognize the difference between non-cancer pathological slides and cancer slides 99% of the time. When pathologists used the AI system to assist them in simulated diagnoses, the AI system helped cut inspection time in half and also decreased the rate of missed micro-metastases by half. LYNA was trained to spot metastasis using two sets of pathological slides and delivers more evidence of artificial intelligence's promise in assisting in cancer detection.

Although the system has not yet been used in real-life diagnoses and has only been trained to look for late-stage breast cancer, scientists have noted that it could be adapted to detect other tumors as metastasis is found in most forms of cancer. AI has shown incredible promise in healthcare applications such as cancer detection due to its effectiveness at pattern recognition. When tools such as LYNA are ready for practical use, they will no doubt assist doctors in making more reliable diagnosis as well as give them more freedom to focus on patient care.

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Waymo Cars Drive 10 million Miles A Day Inside Simulated Version of Reality

10/12/2018

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Source: Waymo

Waymo, the autonomous driving subsidiary of Alphabet, announced this week that its self-driving cars have driven more than 10 million miles on the road since 2009. Waymo also announced that their software is now driving the same distance every 24 hours inside of a simulation of the real world, where engineers are able to train the software using test scenarios that might be too dangerous to run in the real world. Waymo has clocked more than 6 billion miles in this virtual simulation of the real world and became the first company last October to remove safety drivers from inside some of their self-driving vehicles.

Autonomous cars rely on data rather than knowledge of the real world like human drivers so it is essential to provide the machine learning systems with vast amounts of training data. Waymo uses "fuzzing," which adds random variations to the same simulation to test and train the machine learning system's response to confusing situations. There are currently close to 400 people using Waymo's autonomous vehicles as taxis in Arizona.

There is a big gap however, between the driving environment in Phoenix, Arizona and cities like San Fransisco or Boston. Being able to address the unexpected situations that arise from more chaotic or less temperate places is the next hurdle for Waymo and other autonomous driving companies.

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Nasa Is Using AR To Build Spacecraft

10/10/2018

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Source: Lockheed Martin

Instead of relying on thousand-page manuals to assemble the new crew capsule Orion, Lockheed Martin is now using Microsoft's HoloLens headsets to build the spacecraft faster. Lockheed Martin employees currently use the augmented reality headsets to check directions or learn a task and Lockheed Martin will look to expand the use of AR after testing showed technicians needed far less time to understand, perform or get familiar with a new task when using the headsets. The results are so promising that the company is expanding its ambitions to one day using AR in space to help astronauts maintain spacecrafts.

Lockheed Martin's head of emerging technology, Shelly Peterson, explained "What we want astronauts to be able to do is have maintenance capability that’s much more intuitive than going through text or drawing content."

Immediate next steps are to increase the devices' ease of use and wearability so that employees can begin to wear them for longer periods of time. Another hurdle that will need to be tackled is how easily content for the headset is created. Lockheed Martin however sees these obstacles as quickly surmountable. In fact, Brian O'Connor, vice president of manufacturing at Lockheed Martin, explained that "If you were to look five years down the road, I don’t think you will find an efficient manufacturing operation that doesn’t have this type of augmented reality to assist the operators."

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Softbank and Toyota Target Self-driving Car Services

10/8/2018

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Source: REUTERS/Issei Kato - Toyota President Akio Toyoda, Toyota Executive Vice President Shigeki Tomoyama, Softbank Group Corp Chairman and CEO Masayoshi Son, Softbank Corp Representative Director and CTO Junichi Miyakawa

Softbank Group Corporation and Toyota Motor Corporation will work together to build a platform to operate self-driving vehicles based on Toyota's "e-Palette" concept. Japan's most influential tech firm and its biggest automaker's joint venture will be called MONET (short for mobility network) and envisions a future where people don't own as many cars and instead use its multi-purpose, autonomous mobility service as pay-per-use mobile restaurants, shops, hospitals, hotels and other services. The joint venture is a one of many recent automotive and technology deals as companies look to share expertise and costs in the global pursuit of autonomous driving technology.

Softbank Group Corp will own more than half of MONET, which will begin with an initial capital amount of $17.5 million. Toyota plans to product the hardware and software for the vehicles, while Softbank will provide the analysis of transportation data to make sure vehicles are sent to the right places at the right times.

Honda Motor announced last week that it would take a 5.7% stake in General Motors Co's Cruise self-driving vehicle unit with an investment of $2.75 billion.

Renault SA and Daimler AG also announced last week that they may look to broaden their cooperation to mobility services and self-driving vehicles.

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