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>>> Palantir Technologies -- Shares of Palantir Technologies (NYSE: PLTR) are up 63% over the last year due to growing demand for its enterprise AI software platform. A growing number of U.S. companies are turning to Palantir to use AI models with their data, which could be the start of a long stretch of high growth.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/2-monster-stocks-could-create-080500097.html
Palantir is used for a variety of use cases, including military operations, supply chain analysis, and investigating financial crimes. The U.S. government made up over half the company's revenue last quarter, which validates the capabilities of Palantir's technology, but government spending can also be a two-edged sword considering the potential for budget caps.
However, Palantir is starting to see momentum in diversifying away from the government. U.S. commercial revenue grew 40% year over year last quarter to $150 million and accounted for nearly a quarter of Palantir's business. Management expects U.S. commercial revenue to be up 45% in 2024 over 2023 and expects this segment to remain a significant growth driver over the long term.
Another positive indicator is that management is seeing a significant shortening in deal cycles. Some customers are signing deals just days after trying the product. To capitalize on the growing demand, management wants to broaden the market for its offering outside the U.S., in addition to state and local governments, researchers, and academic institutions.
It's clear Palantir has only just begun to tap its potential. The company reported a record net profit of $106 million in Q1 on $634 million of revenue, and Wall Street analysts currently expect the company to grow earnings at an annualized rate of 22% over the next several years.
As demand for AI software takes off over the next decade, Palantir shares should be a very rewarding holding for patient investors.
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>>> Palantir Technologies (NYSE:PLTR) has finally broken free from its sub-$25 trading range and renewing its meme stock status in some cases. However, those following the company know that Palantir has always been a strong contender among tech stocks, despite its price volatility, which makes short-term trading challenging.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/3-tech-stocks-could-grow-143000673.html
One of Palantir’s key strengths today is its rapid diversification beyond government contracts. While these contracts provide reliable revenue and long-term stability, relying heavily on a few clients is risky. Recognizing this, Palantir has successfully expanded its reach into the corporate sector. Its impressive client list now includes Tampa General Hospital, United Airlines , AARP, and Wendy’s, among others.
This expansion into the corporate world is creating a snowball effect for Palantir. As it delivers substantial value to diverse private firms, its reputation and client base continue to grow. The company’s operational model fosters a certain client stickiness that leads to high switching costs, making it difficult for customers to transition to competitors once they’ve integrated Palantir’s solutions.
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>>> Google scraps plan to remove cookies from Chrome
Reuters
7-22-24
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/technology/google-scraps-plan-to-remove-cookies-from-chrome/ar-BB1qr9ml?OCID=ansmsnnews11
(Reuters) - Google is planning to keep third-party cookies in its Chrome browser, it said on Monday, after years of pledging to phase out the tiny packets of code meant to track users on the internet.
The major reversal follows concerns from advertisers - the company's biggest source of income - saying the loss of cookies in the world's most popular browser will limit their ability to collect information for personalizing ads, making them dependent on Google's user databases.
The UK's Competition and Markets Authority had also scrutinized Google's plan over concerns it would impede competition in digital advertising.
"Instead of deprecating third-party cookies, we would introduce a new experience in Chrome that lets people make an informed choice that applies across their web browsing, and they'd be able to adjust that choice at any time," Anthony Chavez, vice president of the Google-backed Privacy Sandbox initiative, said in a blog post.
Since 2019, the Alphabet unit has been working on the Privacy Sandbox initiative aimed at enhancing online privacy while supporting digital businesses, with a key goal being the phase-out of third-party cookies.
Cookies are packets of information that allow websites and advertisers to identify individual web surfers and track their browsing habits, but they can also be used for unwanted surveillance.
In the European Union, the use of cookies is governed by the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which stipulates that publishers secure explicit consent from users to store their cookies. Major browsers also give the option to delete cookies on command.
Chavez said Google was working with regulators such as the UK's CMA and Information Commissioner's Office as well as publishers and privacy groups on the new approach, while continuing to invest in the Privacy Sandbox program.
The announcement drew mixed reactions.
"Advertising stakeholders will no longer have to prepare to quit third-party cookies cold turkey," eMarketer analyst Evelyn Mitchell-Wolf said in a statement.
Lena Cohen, staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said cookies can lead to consumer harm, for instance predatory ads that target vulnerable groups. "Google's decision to continue allowing third-party cookies, despite other major browsers blocking them for years, is a direct consequence of their advertising-driven business model," Cohen said in a statement.
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>>> Tesla to unveil robotaxi self-driving car in August, Elon Musk says
by Anthony Robledo
USA TODAY
4-5-24
https://www.msn.com/en-us/autos/news/tesla-to-unveil-robotaxi-self-driving-car-in-august-elon-musk-says/ar-BB1l9DpE?OCID=ansmsnnews11
Elon Musk announced that Tesla will unveil its robotaxi this summer.
The X owner and Tesla CEO unveiled the Aug. 8 release date on a post Friday.
The entrepreneur has previously discussed efforts to create Tesla cars without human controls and for existing vehicles to gradually improve its Full Self-Driving Capability, which are not fully autonomous.
The technological feat has been a longtime goal for Musk, who has said autonomous taxis could revolutionize modern transportation by becoming more popular than human-driven cars and that automaker would be "worth basically zero."
Musk wanted to release robotaxis in 2020
In April 2019, Musk revealed that he expected Tesla robotaxis to be fully operating by 2020.
The company predicted that driverless vehicles would withstand 11 years and 1 million miles, earning the company $30,000 in annual profit. He also shared that the cars would would be accompanied by a ride-share app similar to both Uber and Airbnb.
U.S. and Chinese regulators have currently only approved self-driving cars in limited and experimental instances on public roads.
The automotive company faces lawsuits and investigations related to crashes with its existing autopilot and Full Self-Driving driver-assistance systems, which the company has Tesla has explained were the result of inattentive drivers.
Tesla shares down after low-cost EV plans are scrapped
Musk's announcement comes after a Reuters report revealed that Tesla has scrapped plans for its long-promised inexpensive car, according to three sources familiar with the matter and company messages.
Investors have been relying on the project to drive its growth into a mass-market automaker, according to Reuters.
Musk has often described affordable electric cars for the masses as a primary mission. In 2006, he said his "master plan" had to prioritize manufacturing luxury models before financing a "low cost family car."
Tesla shares closed down $6.21, or 3.63%, at $164.90 on Friday.
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SoundHound AI - >>> Nvidia Just Bought 5 Artificial Intelligence (AI) Stocks, and 1 Is Up 142% Already
by Anthony Di Pizio
Motley Fool
April 6, 2024
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/nvidia-just-bought-5-artificial-095900069.html
Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) was a $360 billion company at the beginning of 2023. It has added $1.8 trillion in value since then, and it's now the third-largest company in the world behind only Apple and Microsoft.
The heightened interest in artificial intelligence (AI) is the primary driver of that value creation. Nvidia makes the industry's most powerful graphics processing units (GPUs) for data centers, which developers use to build, train, and deploy their AI models. Those chips drove Nvidia's data center revenue to more than triple in fiscal 2024 (ended Jan. 28), and the momentum looks set to continue in fiscal 2025.
Nvidia is now using some of its newly acquired wealth to invest in other AI companies, which could hint at where the next wave of AI value is created.
Nvidia bought five AI stocks at the end of 2023
Nvidia filed its first-ever 13-F with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Feb. 14, and it publicly revealed new holdings in five different stocks:
SoundHound AI (NASDAQ: SOUN), which develops voice recognition and conversational AI technologies.
Arm Holdings, which designs processors for the world's largest chip companies. This was Nvidia's largest investment with a value of $147 million at the end of 2023.
Nano-X Imaging, which is improving patient outcomes by using AI to enhance medical imaging. This stock was Nvidia's smallest investment with a value of less than $0.4 million at the end of 2023.
Recursion Pharmaceuticals, which is using AI to help with drug discovery.
TuSimple Holdings, which developed an autonomous driving platform for the trucking industry.
SoundHound AI stock has been the best performer of the bunch so far, with a 142% gain in 2024 already. It values Nvidia's stake at around $8.7 million, which doesn't sound like much, but SoundHound is only a $1.5 billion company.
So should investors follow Nvidia into the conversational AI specialist?
SoundHound has a growing portfolio of AI products
Most of us are familiar with AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude. They were originally designed to ingest text-based prompts, and they are capable of generating text content, images, videos, and computer code on command. SoundHound focuses on conversational AI, which is designed to recognize voice-based prompts and respond in kind.
That opens up a range of possibilities, especially in use cases where hands-free functionality is required. For example, restaurant chains use SoundHound's Employee Assist technology to help workers get fast answers to questions in high-pressure situations, like when they might be serving customers or completing operational tasks.
Similarly, SoundHound's technology is popular with automotive manufacturers like Mercedes-Benz and Stellantis, which use it to power their in-car virtual assistants. It means drivers can instantly retrieve information about their vehicle's functionality, in addition to weather forecasts, sports results, and information about local restaurants (to name a few capabilities).
SoundHound recently announced a new partnership with Nvidia's Drive platform, which will allow car makers to deliver AI on the edge. That means drivers won't need network connectivity to use their voice assistant, which makes it available in more places and enhances data privacy.
The Drive platform is Nvidia's end-to-end solution for car manufacturers wanting to install autonomous self-driving capabilities into their new vehicles. Drive could become a key distribution channel for SoundHound's technology over the long term, considering it already serves many of the world's leading car brands.
SoundHound generates little revenue, and large losses
SoundHound brought in $45.8 million in revenue during 2023, which was a 47% increase compared to 2022. The company is still in the scale-up phase, although it did finish last year with a $661 million order backlog -- and that number doubled from the end of 2022.
Management's forecast for 2024 points to around $70 million in revenue, which would represent an accelerated growth rate of 54%.
That's great news, but SoundHound's bottom line warrants some concern in the near term because the company lost $91.7 million last year. While it's normal for small technology companies in their growth phase to lose money, SoundHound only has $95.2 million in cash and equivalents on its balance sheet, so it can't afford another year like that in 2024.
Risk-averse investors shouldn't follow Nvidia into SoundHound stock
The financial picture outlined above makes SoundHound stock a risky investment relative to other AI stocks like Nvidia or Microsoft. There is a strong possibility the company will need a cash injection within the next year or two to continue operating, and that creates uncertainty.
With that said, Nvidia's investment in SoundHound stock is a big vote of confidence, and it could breed more unique deals like the one with its Drive platform. Plus, SoundHound's order backlog could lead to accelerated revenue growth in the coming years.
But remember this: Nvidia's stake in SoundHound is only worth $8.7 million. If it went to zero, it would have virtually no impact on the $2.2 trillion chip giant. It would be the equivalent of someone with a net worth of $100,000 losing $0.39 -- yes, 39 cents.
Not only does the average investor have fewer resources than Nvidia, but they might also have a very different risk appetite. Therefore, buying SoundHound stock should be reserved for investors with a stomach for volatility, and the potential for losses.
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>>> Peter Thiel Unloads $175 Million of Palantir in First Sale Since 2021
Bloomberg
by Vernal Galpotthawela
March 15, 2024
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/peter-thiel-unloads-175-million-184318091.html
(Bloomberg) -- Peter Thiel sold some of his $3.4 billion stake in Palantir Technologies Inc. for the first time in more than two years as shares of the software and analysis company soar on artificial intelligence optimism.
Thiel sold more than 7 million shares worth roughly $175 million Tuesday, according to a filing. He still owns about 7% of the Denver-based company, the largest asset in his $10.5 billion fortune, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
The shares jumped 31% on Feb. 6, after the company reported its first annual profit and forecast higher-than-expected earnings for 2024, boosted by strong demand for its artificial intelligence technology. They are up 37% this year.
Thiel joins other billionaires including Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos who have taken advantage of the tech rally to unload shares in recent months after not selling for years.
Thiel co-founded Palantir in 2003 and remains its chairman. He owns shares directly as well as through funds with names from JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, including Mithril and Rivendell. Palantir itself is named after a crystal ball from the series.
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Rail Vision (RVSN) - CEO interview -
>>> Rail Vision Increases Railway Safety with its Next Generation AI Computer
GlobeNewswire
Rail Vision Ltd.
February 12, 2024
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/rail-vision-increases-railway-safety-134100702.html
The new development offers high performance and real time AI deep learning inferencing
Ra’anana, Israel, Feb. 12, 2024 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Rail Vision Ltd. (Nasdaq: RVSN) (the “Company”), a technology company at the forefront of revolutionizing railway safety and the data-related market, has introduced its next generation AI-based computer designed enhance railway safety and prevent accidents. This advanced technology marks a significant step forward in the realm of railway safety, leveraging artificial intelligence to detect potential hazards and mitigate risks effectively.
The new AI-based computer from Rail Vision, previously announced, incorporates advanced artificial intelligence algorithms, enabling it to analyze vast amounts of data in real-time. By processing information from various sensors and cameras installed on trains, the AI-based computer can accurately identify obstacles, track infrastructure conditions, and detect potential dangers along the railway tracks. This proactive approach empowers railway operators to take timely actions to prevent accidents and ensure the safety of passengers and personnel.
Rail Vision's new AI solution will be seamlessly integrated into both their Main Line and Switch Yard systems, revolutionizing safety measures across all aspects of railway operations.
Key features of Rail Vision's next-generation AI-based computer include:
Advanced AI Algorithms: Utilizing cutting-edge artificial intelligence technology to analyze and interpret data for accurate hazard detection.
Real-Time Monitoring: Continuous monitoring of railway tracks and surroundings to identify potential risks promptly.
Enhanced Safety Measures: Providing railway operators with actionable insights to implement proactive safety measures and prevent accidents.
Scalable Solution: Designed to integrate seamlessly with existing railway infrastructure and scalable to meet the evolving needs of railway networks.
"Rail Vision's next-generation AI-based computer system, is a significant milestone in railway safety technology. This innovation embodies our unwavering commitment to advancing railway security, marrying cutting-edge AI with real-time processing to prevent accidents and save lives. We believe that our system, technology and cloud connectivity contribute to a transformative leap forward, marking a new chapter in intelligent railway operations", said Shahar Hania, Rail Vision's Chief Executive Officer.
Rail Vision's next-generation AI-based computer is poised to revolutionize railway safety practices, offering an intelligent solution to mitigate risks and prevent accidents. By harnessing the power of artificial intelligence, Rail Vision continues to drive innovation in the railway industry, ensuring safer and more efficient transportation systems for the future.
About Rail Vision Ltd.
Rail Vision is a technology company that is seeking to revolutionize railway safety and the data-related market. The Company has developed cutting-edge, artificial intelligence based, industry-leading technology specifically designed for railways. The Company has developed its railway detection and systems to save lives, increase efficiency, and dramatically reduce expenses for the railway operators. Rail Vision believes that its technology will significantly increase railway safety around the world, while creating significant benefits and adding value to everyone who relies on the train ecosystem: from passengers using trains for transportation to companies that use railways to deliver goods and services. In addition, the company believes that its technology has the potential to advance the revolutionary concept of autonomous trains into a practical reality.
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>>> Telematics is an interdisciplinary field encompassing telecommunications, vehicular technologies (road transport, road safety, etc.), electrical engineering (sensors, instrumentation, wireless communications, etc.), and computer science (multimedia, Internet, etc.).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telematics#:~:text=Telematics%20most%20commonly%20relate%20to,machine%20or%20group%20of%20machines.
Telematics can involve any of the following:
Lexus Gen V navigation system
The technology of sending, receiving, and storing information using telecommunication devices to control remote objects
The integrated use of telecommunications and informatics for application in vehicles and to control vehicles on the move
Global navigation satellite system technology integrated with computers and mobile communications technology in automotive navigation systems
(Most narrowly) The use of such systems within road vehicles (also called vehicle telematics)
History
Telematics is a translation of the French word télématique, which was first coined by Simon Nora and Alain Minc in a 1978 report to the French government on the computerization of society. It referred to the transfer of information over telecommunications and was a portmanteau blending the French words télécommunications ("telecommunications") and informatique ("computing science"). The original broad meaning of telematics continues to be used in academic fields, but in commerce it now generally means vehicle telematics.[1]
Vehicle telematics
Telematics can be described as thus:
The convergence of telecommunications and information processing, the term later evolved to refer to automation in automobiles, such as the invention of the emergency warning system for vehicles. GPS navigation, integrated hands-free cell phones, wireless safety communications, and automatic driving assistance systems all are covered under the telematics umbrella.
The science of telecommunications and informatics applied in wireless technologies and computational systems. 802.11p, the IEEE standard in the 802.11 family and also referred to as Wireless Access for the Vehicular Environment (WAVE), is the primary standard that addresses and enhances Intelligent Transport System.
Share bicycle with solar powered electronics to track and account for its usage
Vehicle telematics can help improve the efficiency of an organization.[2]
Vehicle tracking
Vehicle tracking is monitoring the location, movements, status, and behavior of a vehicle or fleet of vehicles. This is achieved through a combination of a GPS (GNSS) receiver and an electronic device (usually comprising a GSM GPRS modem or SMS sender) installed in each vehicle, communicating with the user (dispatching, emergency, or co-ordinating unit) and PC-based or web-based software. The data is turned into information by management reporting tools in conjunction with a visual display on computerized mapping software. Vehicle tracking systems may also use odometry or dead reckoning as an alternative or complementary means of navigation.[citation needed]
GPS tracking is usually accurate to around 10–20 meters,[3] but the European Space Agency has developed the EGNOS technology to provide accuracy to 1.5 meters.[4]
Trailer tracking
Trailer tracking refers to the tracking of movements and position of an articulated vehicle's trailer unit through the use of a location unit fitted to the trailer and a method of returning the position data via mobile communication network, IOT (Internet of things), or geostationary satellite communications for use through either PC- or web-based software.[citation needed]
Cold-store freight trailers that deliver fresh or frozen foods are increasingly incorporating telematics to gather time-series data on the temperature inside the cargo container, both to trigger alarms and record an audit trail for business purposes. An increasingly sophisticated array of sensors, many incorporating RFID technology, is being used to ensure the cold chain.[citation needed]
Container tracking
Freight containers can be tracked by GPS using a similar approach to that used for trailer tracking (i.e. a battery-powered GPS device communicating its position via mobile phone or satellite communications). Benefits of this approach include increased security and the possibility to reschedule the container transport movements based on accurate information about its location. According to Berg Insight, the installed base of tracking units in the intermodal shipping container segment reached 190,000 at the end of 2013.[5] Growing at a compound annual growth rate of 38.2 percent, the installed base reached 960,000 units at the end of 2018.[citation needed]
Fleet management
Fleet management is the management of a company's fleet and includes the management of ships and/or motor vehicles such as cars, vans, and trucks. Fleet (vehicle) management can include a range of functions, such as vehicle financing, vehicle maintenance, vehicle telematics (tracking and diagnostics), driver management, fuel management, health and safety management, and dynamic vehicle scheduling. Fleet management is a function which allows companies that rely on transport in their business to remove or minimize the risks associated with vehicle investment, improving efficiency and productivity while reducing overall transport costs and ensuring compliance with government legislation and Duty of Care obligations. These functions can either be dealt with by an in-house fleet management department or an outsourced fleet management provider.[6]
Telematics standards
The Association of Equipment Management Professionals (AEMP)[7] developed the industry's first telematics standard.[citation needed]
In 2008, AEMP brought together the major construction equipment manufacturers and telematics providers in the heavy equipment industry to discuss the development of the industry's first telematics standard.[8] Following agreement from Caterpillar, Volvo CE, Komatsu, and John Deere Construction & Forestry to support such a standard, the AEMP formed a standards development subcommittee chaired by Pat Crail CEM to develop the standard.[9] This committee consisted of developers provided by the Caterpillar/Trimble joint venture known as Virtual Site Solutions, Volvo CE, and John Deere. This group worked from February 2009 through September 2010 to develop the industry's first standard for the delivery of telematics data.[10]
The result, the AEMP Telematics Data Standard V1.1,[10] was released in 2010 and officially went live on October 1, 2010. As of November 1, 2010, Caterpillar, Volvo CE, John Deere Construction & Forestry, OEM Data Delivery, and Navman Wireless are able to support customers with delivery of basic telematics data in a standard xml format. Komatsu, Topcon, and others are finishing beta testing and have indicated their ability to support customers in the near future.[10]
The AEMP's telematics data standard was developed to allow end users to integrate key telematics data (operating hours, location, fuel consumed, and odometer reading where applicable) into their existing fleet management reporting systems. As such, the standard was primarily intended to facilitate importation of these data elements into enterprise software systems such as those used by many medium-to-large construction contractors. Prior to the standard, end users had few options for integrating this data into their reporting systems in a mixed-fleet environment consisting of multiple brands of machines and a mix of telematics-equipped machines and legacy machines (those without telematics devices where operating data is still reported manually via pen and paper). One option available to machine owners was to visit multiple websites to manually retrieve data from each manufacturer's telematics interface and then manually enter it into their fleet management program's database. This option was cumbersome and labor-intensive.[11]
A second option was for the end user to develop an API (Application Programming Interface), or program, to integrate the data from each telematics provider into their database. This option was quite costly as each telematics provider had different procedures for accessing and retrieving the data and the data format varied from provider to provider. This option automated the process, but because each provider required a unique, custom API to retrieve and parse the data, it was an expensive option. In addition, another API had to be developed any time another brand of machine or telematics device was added to the fleet.[11]
A third option for mixed-fleet integration was to replace the various factory-installed telematics devices with devices from a third party telematics provider. Although this solved the problem of having multiple data providers requiring unique integration methods, this was by far the most expensive option. In addition to the expense, many third-party devices available for construction equipment are unable to access data directly from the machine's electronic control modules (ECMs), or computers, and are more limited than the device installed by the OEM (Cat, Volvo, Deere, Komatsu, etc.) in the data they are able to provide. In some cases, these devices are limited to location and engine runtime, although they are increasingly able to accommodate a number of add-on sensors to provide additional data.[11]
The AEMP Telematics Data Standard provides a fourth option. By concentrating on the key data elements that drive the majority of fleet management reports (hours, miles, location, fuel consumption), making those data elements available in a standardized xml format, and standardizing the means by which the document is retrieved, the standard enables the end user to use one API to retrieve data from any participating telematics provider (as opposed to the unique API for each provider that was required previously), greatly reducing integration development costs.[10]
The current draft version of the AEMP Telematics Data Standard is now called the AEM/AEMP Draft Telematics API Standard, which expands the original standard Version 1.2 to include 19 data fields (with fault code capability). This new draft standard is a collaborative effort of AEMP and the Association of Equipment Manufacturers (AEM), working on behalf of their members and the industry. This Draft API replaces the current version 1.2 and does not currently cover some types of equipment, e.g., agriculture equipment, cranes, mobile elevating work platforms, air compressors, and other niche products.
In addition to the new data fields, the AEM/AEMP Draft Telematics API Standard changes how data is accessed in an effort to make it easier to consume and integrate with other systems and processes. It includes standardized communication protocols for the ability to transfer telematics information in mixed-equipment fleets to end user business enterprise systems, enabling the end user to employ their own business software to collect and then analyze asset data from mixed-equipment fleets without the need to work across multiple telematics provider applications.
To achieve a globally recognized standard for conformity worldwide, the AEM/AEMP Draft Telematics API Standard will be submitted for acceptance by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). Final language is dependent upon completion of the ISO acceptance process.
Satellite navigation
Satellite navigation in the context of vehicle telematics is the technology of using a GPS and electronic mapping tool to enable a driver to locate a position, plan a route, and navigate a journey.[12]
Mobile data
Mobile data is the use of wireless data communications using radio waves to send and receive real-time computer data to, from, and between devices used by field-based personnel. These devices can be fitted solely for use while in the vehicle (Fixed Data Terminal) or for use in and out of the vehicle (Mobile Data Terminal). See mobile Internet.
The common methods for mobile data communication for telematics were based on private vendors' RF communication infrastructure. During the early 2000s, manufacturers of mobile data terminals/AVL devices moved to try cellular data communication to offer cheaper ways to transmit telematics information and wider range based on cellular provider coverage. Since then, as a result of cellular providers offering low GPRS (2.5G) and later UMTS (3G) rates, mobile data is almost totally offered to telematics customers via cellular communication.
Wireless vehicle safety communications
Wireless vehicle safety communications telematics aid in car safety and road safety. It is an electronic subsystem in a vehicle used for exchanging safety information about road hazards and the locations and speeds of vehicles over short-range radio links. This may involve temporary ad hoc wireless local area networks.
Wireless units are often installed in vehicles and fixed locations, such as near traffic signals and emergency call boxes along the road. Sensors in vehicles and at fixed locations, as well as in possible connections to wider networks, provide information displayed to drivers. The range of the radio links can be extended by forwarding messages along multi-hop paths. Even without fixed units, information about fixed hazards can be maintained by moving vehicles by passing it backwards. It also seems possible for traffic lights, which one can expect to become smarter, to use this information to reduce the chance of collisions.
In the future, it may connect directly to the adaptive cruise control or other vehicle control aids. Cars and trucks with the wireless system connected to their brakes may move in convoys to save fuel and space on the roads. When a column member slows down, those behind it will automatically slow also. Certain scenarios may required less engineering effort, such as when a radio beacon is connected to a brake light.
In fall 2008, network ideas were tested in Europe, where radio frequency bandwidth had been allocated. The 30 MHz allocated is at 5.9 GHz, and unallocated bandwidth at 5.4 GHz may also be used. The standard is IEEE 802.11p, a low-latency form of the Wi-Fi local area network standard. Similar efforts are underway in Japan and the USA.[13]
Emergency warning system for vehicles
Telematics technologies are self-orientating open network architecture structures of variable programmable intelligent beacons developed for application in the development of intelligent vehicles with the intent to accord (blend or mesh) warning information with surrounding vehicles in the vicinity of travel, intra-vehicle, and infrastructure. Emergency warning systems for vehicle telematics are developed particularly for international harmonization and standardization of vehicle-to-vehicle, infrastructure-to-vehicle, and vehicle-to-infrastructure real-time Dedicated Short-Range Communication (DSRC) systems.
Telematics most commonly relate to computerized systems that update information at the same rate they receive data, enabling them to direct or control a process such as an instantaneous autonomous warning notification in a remote machine or group of machines. In the use of telematics relating to intelligent vehicle technologies, instantaneous direction travel cognizance of a vehicle may be transmitted in real-time to surrounding vehicles traveling in the local area of vehicles equipped (with EWSV) to receive said warning signals of danger.
Intelligent vehicle technologies
Telematics comprise electronic, electromechanical, and electromagnetic devices—usually silicon micro-machined components operating in conjunction with computer-controlled devices and radio transceivers to provide precision repeatability functions (such as in robotics artificial intelligence systems) emergency warning validation performance reconstruction.
Intelligent vehicle technologies commonly apply to car safety systems and self-contained autonomous electromechanical sensors generating warnings that can be transmitted within a specified targeted area of interest, i.e. within 100 meters of the emergency warning system for the vehicle's transceiver. In ground applications, intelligent vehicle technologies are utilized for safety and commercial communications between vehicles or between a vehicle and a sensor along the road.
On November 3, 2009, the most advanced Intelligent Vehicle concept car was demonstrated in New York City when a 2010 Toyota Prius became the first LTE connected car. The demonstration was provided by the NG Connect project, a collaboration of automotive telematic technologies designed to exploit in-car 4G wireless network connectivity.[14]
Carsharing
Telematics technology has enabled the emergence of carsharing services such as Local Motion, Uber, Lyft, Car2Go, Zipcar worldwide, or City Car Club in the UK. Telematics-enabled computers allow organizers to track members' usage and bill them on a pay-as-you-drive basis. Some systems show users where to find an idle vehicle.[15] Car Clubs such as Australia's Charter Drive use telematics to monitor and report on vehicle use within predefined geofence areas to demonstrate the reach of their transit media car club fleet.
Auto insurance/Usage-based insurance (UBI)
See also: Auto insurance risk selection
The general idea of telematics auto insurance is that a driver's behavior is monitored directly while the person drives and this information is transmitted to an insurance company. The insurance company then assesses the risk of that driver having an accident and charges insurance premiums accordingly. A driver who drives less responsibly will be charged a higher premium than a driver who drives smoothly and with less calculated risk of claim propensity. Other benefits can be delivered to end users with Telematics2.0-based telematics as customer engagement can be enhanced with direct customer interaction.
Telematics auto insurance was independently invented and patented[16] by a major U.S. auto insurance company, Progressive Auto Insurance U.S. patent 5,797,134, and a Spanish independent inventor, Salvador Minguijon Perez (European Patent EP0700009B1). The Perez patents cover monitoring the car's engine control computer to determine distance driven, speed, time of day, braking force, etc. Progressive is currently developing the Perez technology in the U.S. and European auto insurer Norwich Union is developing the Progressive technology for Europe. Both patents have since been overturned in courts due to prior work in the commercial insurance sectors.[17]
Trials conducted by Norwich Union in 2005 found that young drivers (18- to 23-year-olds) signing up for telematics auto insurance have had a 20% lower accident rate than average.[18]
In 2007, theoretical economic research on the social welfare effects of Progressive's telematics technology business process patents questioned whether the business process patents are pareto efficient for society. Preliminary results suggested that it was not, but more work is needed.[19][20] In April 2014, Progressive patents were overturned by the U.S. legal system on the grounds of "lack of originality."
The smartphone as the in-vehicle device for insurance telematics has been discussed in great detail[21] and the instruments are available for the design of smartphone-driven insurance telematics.
Telematics education
Engineering Degree programs
Federico Santa María Technical University (UTFSM) in Chile has a Telematics Engineering program which is a six-year full-time program of study (12 academic semesters). The final degree in Telematics Engineering has the title of Ingeniería Civil Telemática (with the suffix of Civil).[22]
Pontifical Catholic University Mother and Teacher (PUCMM) in the Dominican Republic has a Telematics Engineering program which is a four-year full-time program of study (12 academic four-month periods). The final degree in Telematics Engineering has the title of Ingeniería Telemática.[23]
University Bachelor programs
Harokopio University of Athens has a four-year full-time program of study. The department goal is the development and advancement of computer science, primarily in the field of network information systems and relative e-services. For this purpose, attention is focused in the fields of telematics (teleinformatics) which are relative to network and internet technologies, e-business, e-government, e-health, advanced transport telematics, etc.[24]
TH Wildau in Wildau, Germany has provided a three-year full-time telematics Bachelor study program since 1999.[25]
TU Graz in Graz, Austria offers a three-year Bachelor in telematics (now called "Information and Computer Engineering").[26]
Singapore Institute of Technology offers a three-year Bachelor in Telematics.
National Open and Distance Learning University of Mexico* (UNADM) offers a four-year degree in Telematics delivered online.[27]
University Masters programs
Several universities provide two-year Telematics Master of Science programs:
Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Norway[28]
University of Twente (UT), The Netherlands[29]
University Carlos III of Madrid (UC3M), Spain[30]
Harokopio University Athens[31]
TH Wildau in Wildau, Germany[32]
TU Graz in Graz, Austria (now called "Information and Computer Engineering")[33]
European Automotive Digital Innovation Studio (EADIS)
In 2007, a project entitled the European Automotive Digital Innovation Studio (EADIS) was awarded 400,000 Euros from the European commission under its Leonardo da Vinci program. EADIS used a virtual work environment called the Digital Innovation Studio to train and develop professional designers in the automotive industry in the impact and application of vehicle telematics so they could integrate new technologies into future products within the automotive industry. Funding ended in 2013.[34]
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>>> Rail Vision Ltd. (RVSN) designs, develops, assembles, and sells railway detection systems for railway operational safety, efficiency, and predictive maintenance in Israel. The company's railway detection systems include various cameras, such as optics, visible light spectrum cameras (video), and thermal cameras that transmit data to a ruggedized on-board computer that is designed to be suitable for the rough environment of a train's locomotive. It offers main line systems for the safety of train operations, prevention of collisions, and reduction of downtime; railway detection system for passengers and freight trains; shunting yard systems for shunting operations; and light rail vehicle systems for detecting and classifying obstacles. The company also provides rail vision big data services, as well as maintenance and predictive maintenance systems; and geographic information systems for mapping and updates. Rail Vision Ltd. was incorporated in 2016 and is headquartered in Ra'anana, Israel.
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>>> Palantir stock surge shows investors haven’t had enough of AI — yet
Yahoo Finance
by Josh Schafer
February 6, 2024
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/palantir-stock-surge-shows-investors-havent-had-enough-of-ai--yet-150712969.html
Palantir (PLTR) stock soared more than 30% Tuesday as investors cheered the defense software maker's latest artificial intelligence advancements.
"I've never before seen the level of customer enthusiasm and demand that we are currently seeing from [artificial intelligence platforms] in US commercial," Palantir chief revenue officer Ryan Taylor told investors during the company's earnings call on Monday night.
The software company's Artificial Intelligence Platform, or AIP, was mentioned nearly 50 times throughout the call. And, according to Palantir, it's a key reason it expects US commercial revenue to grow nearly 40% in 2024.
It's also the reason the stock surged more than 100% over the past year, as AI euphoria sent many tech stocks roaring. Amid calls that Denver-based Palantir's stock was already overvalued, Tuesday's market action is the latest sign that investors haven't had enough of the AI trade — even if Wall Street believes parts of the trade have extended beyond any fundamental backing.
"We are incredibly bullish on Palantir," Morningstar equity analyst Malik Ahmed Khan told Yahoo Finance Live. "If you look at our forecasts you would see us being above consensus on profitability, on revenue, etc."
"At the same time," he added, "we cannot rationalize Palantir's current valuation in the base case."
Jefferies equity analyst Brent Thill, who entered the earnings report with a Sell rating on Palantir, conceded in a research note after the release that the AIP growth is exceeding expectations. But even after upgrading the stock to a Hold rating, Thill still warned about the cost of the stock.
"The biggest concern is valuation with [the] stock trading at a 23% premium to the large cap average," Thill wrote.
It's not just Palantir that's been catching a fresh bid on AI hopes to start 2024. On Monday, Goldman Sachs boosted its price target on Nvidia stock (NVDA) to $800 from $625, citing "robust AI demand" among other things. The stock jumped almost 5% to a fresh all-time high.
Also, IBM (IBM) stock is up about 15% over the past month after AI demand fueled a revenue beat. AI leader Microsoft (MSFT) saw a muted reaction to earnings, even as the company credited AI services with 6 percentage points of growth to Azure revenue. But in fairness, the stock is also trading just short of an all-time high and is up more than 10% in the last month. The same could be said for AMD (AMD), which didn't soar on its AI-driven earnings beat but is up over 25% in the last month and hovering near an all-time high.
The moves raise the question for investors: When will AI euphoria reach a price that they are no longer willing to pay? To Khan at Morningstar, that could rely on how the US economy performs for the rest of the year.
"There is a chance that if the economy remains strong, customers will continue to invest in some of those newer growth areas," Khan said. "At the same time, if we're looking at a recession or we're looking at something else going on in the wider economy and the economy is not as strong at that point, you will probably have investors sort of dial back some of their investments."
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Rinear - >>> Financial Intelligence Report
The Newsletter for people willing to take control of their financial future
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=173257097
Part 1: General Commentary
Part 2: Market Commentary
Silence of the Lambs
Okay....
The one thing the globalist cabal hates more than anything, is us Rubes being able to share information about the corruptions they are engaged in. It angers them to no end, that true American Patriots, can investigate their plans, and via the Internet, try and counter them. So, as you can imagine, they want ever more control over the net, and what can be posted on it and by whom. Consider this.... this is the kind of "inside" info that the elitists cannot allow to be spread in a free speech society:
Tara Servatius
NikkiHaley had breakfast with BlackRock CEO and World Economic Forum board member Larry Fink Tuesday morning to raise money. By that afternoon, Haley was pushing mandatory "verification" of all social media users. Here's why.
Fink's big push is what he calls "digital payments," or central bank digital currency. Fink wants America to adopt a system like India's digital system, called Aadhaar, which citizens must have a verified digital ID to use. Bill Gates' foundation designed their digital ID system, which they use to access the internet.
Last week, the World Economic Forum held a symposium to push "50 in 5" its goal to get 50 countries in 5 years to adopt Bill Gates' digital identity system, which strips anonymity from users, who then would be required to have it as part of a digital wallet in order to acess and spend digital money. With money tied to identity for the first time, governments could control how an individual spends it, because the central bank digital currency would be programmable. It is an authoritarian's dream because cancellation could now include tracking people's online postings and freezing their ability to use money.
The Europeon Union last week announced it is in the process of adopting Gates' totalitarian digital ID system, the software for which he is giving away for free. It would be voluntary at first, but eventually required to access social media, use money, and do just about everything else that is digital.
Essentially, what Haley just did was sell you out to get the so-called "mark of the beast" in exchange for campaign funding from the Fink crowd, which has limitless resources. Fink is the creator of ESG scores, which cancel companies that aren't woke enough by cutting them off from investment. He's apparently angling to cancel individuals and "score" them the same way. Oh, and by the way, digital IDs are the basis for the Chinese social credit system.
It's things like that, things I've said, things Don Bongino says, things Alex Jones says, things Dave Janda says, and multiple others, that absolutely drive them batshit. So, with that in mind, many of you don't know that the Biden admin has requested that basically the FCC takes over every single aspect of the internet. I'm not talking some goofy group of "fact checkers" in someone's basement. I'm talking about everything concerning the infrastructure, the implementation, the speed of downloads, and much much more.
Biden called on the FCC to implement a one-page section of the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (Infrastructure Act) by adopting new rules of breathtaking scope, all in the name of "digital equity." For the first time ever, those rules would give the federal government a roving mandate to micromanage nearly every aspect of how the Internet functions...from how ISPs allocate capital and where they build, to the services that consumers can purchase; from the profits that ISPs can realize and how they market and advertise services, to the discounts and promotions that consumers can receive. Talk about central planning.
Folks they want it all.
But do not take my word for it. The text of the order expressly provides that the FCC would be empowered, for the first time, to regulate each and every ISP's:
"network infrastructure deployment, network reliability, network upgrades, network
maintenance, customer-premises equipment, and installation;
"speeds, capacities, latency, data caps, throttling, pricing, promotional rates, imposition of late
fees, opportunity for equipment rental, installation time, contract renewal terms, service
termination terms, and use of customer credit and account history";
"mandatory arbitration clauses, pricing, deposits, discounts, customer service, language
options, credit checks, marketing or advertising, contract renewal, upgrades, account termination,
transfers to another covered entity, and service suspension."
As exhausting as it is to read that list, the FCC itself says it is not an exhaustive list. The Biden Administration's plan empowers the FCC to regulate every aspect of the Internet sector for the first time ever. The plan is motivated by an ideology of government control that is not compatible with the fundamental precepts of free market capitalism. But it gets worse. The FCC reserves the right under this plan to regulate both "actions and omissions, whether recurring or a single instance." In other words, if you take any action, you may be liable, and if you do nothing, you may be liable. There is no path to complying with this standardless regime. It reads like a planning document drawn up in the faculty lounge of a university's Soviet Studies Department.
Well the vote took place on the 15th and yeah it passed. The vote was 3-2 in favor. This is what Ted Cruz had to say about it Monday:
U.S. Senate Commerce Committee Ranking Member Ted Cruz (R-Texas) released the following statement after the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) voted to finalize its "Digital Discrimination" order:
"Despite admitting there's "little to no evidence" of discrimination by telecommunications companies, Democrats are hoping to convince the American people that broadband Internet is so racist they need to plow ahead with government-mandated affirmative action and race-based pricing. The only beneficiaries of this Orwellian "equity" plan are overzealous government regulators who want to control the Internet."
They're coming after us hard folks. From digital money, digital ID systems, absolute control of every aspect of the internet, everything you say or do. We are in the fight of our lives. That's why finding like minded web sites/pod casts, etc are so vital right now.
I used to do 10 - 15 radio shows and podcasts a week, mostly on terrestrial radio. It got overwhelming and I stopped about 5 years ago. But I think it's time for me to get back on the air, and really let loose. We're in a war, and I don't want to lose. Good luck.
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>>> Palantir secures contract with UK's National Health Service
Yahoo Finance
by Angel Smith and Seana Smith
October 4, 2023
https://finance.yahoo.com/video/palantir-secures-contract-uks-national-144918392.html
Palantir (PLTR) Co-Founder Peter Thiel has negotiated a service contract with the United Kingdom's National Health Service. The 5-year contract aims to strengthen the NHS's data analysis capabilities with Palantir providing access to its artificial intelligence tools. Yahoo Finance's Brad Smith and Seana Smith break down the details of this contract and the analysts chatter around it.
SEANA SMITH: The Palantir's co-founder Peter Thiel is set to secure a contract with the UK's National Health Service. Now, the controversial five-year contract is valued at more than 480 million, and it's meant to enhance the NHS's data analysis capabilities. Many, though, criticized the NHS's association with the analytics company, citing patient data privacy concerns, something that we know has been top of mind and an issue now for some time.
But when it comes to Palantir, whether or not that's going to materially move the business, we're seeing some excitement around this with shares up just about 2%. But, Brad, Palantir is a company and is a stock that initially at the start of the year was riding a lot of that enthusiasm for AI.
Palantir really saying that they are one of the critical players within AI. Over the last month or two, we've seen some on the street come out question just that and how quickly their business could potentially benefit from AI. Morgan Stanley was one of those on the sell side.
Analyst Keith Weiss coming out saying that stock's valuation fully reflects the AI euphoria, and any tailwind from this trend is going to take some time to materialize. So a deal like this may be offsetting some of those concerns. Year-to-date, we're still up nearly 140%, but we'll see what this deal does to its business.
BRAD SMITH: Yeah. Summer sputtered did not diminish some of those major returns that investors had seen. As you were mentioning, 140% roughly year to date returns for Palantir. And a company that hinges a lot on some of those major government contracts.
Of course, governments trying to figure out where they can deploy some of their own AI research and then additionally, kind of making sure that goes into their own defense mechanisms, so many different instances where Palantir already plays as well. So we'll see how they continue to be a near-term beneficiary, perhaps even further, long term as well.
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>>> Palantir Closes In on Controversial UK Health Data Contract
Bloomberg
by Thomas Seal, Olivia Solon, Alex Wickham and Kitty Donaldson
October 4, 2023
(Bloomberg) -- Palantir Technologies Inc., the data analysis firm co-founded by tech billionaire Peter Thiel and contracted by government intelligence agencies and military forces around the world, has emerged as the top pick for a contract to overhaul the UK’s National Health Service.
The five-year contract, which may be extended by as long as two years and is worth much as £480 million ($579 million), is designed to help the agency analyze medical data, detect patterns and ultimately overhaul its entire system. The deal is subject to final approvals and legal arrangements, but the government was on track to announce Palantir as the winning bidder as soon as this month, people familiar with the discussions said, asking not to be identified because the information isn’t public.
Palantir shares rose about 1.4% in premarket trading on Wednesday following the news.
Read More: Palantir Had Plan to Crack UK Health System: ‘Buying Our Way In’
The arrangement is both somewhat predictable and extremely controversial. Palantir has been working with the UK government since the Covid-19 pandemic, helping manage the country’s vaccine rollout for a £1 fee that positioned it well for more lucrative deals. Its relationship with the NHS has drawn fire from civil rights and patient advocacy groups that are concerned about the privacy of patient data.
Palantir and the National Health Service didn’t respond to requests for comment. In an Aug. 25 blog post, NHS’s chief data officer said a software vendor would “never hold or have access to NHS data for any purpose other than as directed by” the agency and indicated that patients would have a say in how their information is used.
Named after the all-seeing stones in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, Palantir got its start working for the US Central Intelligence Agency and the Pentagon, helping analysts interpret intelligence from the battlefield in Afghanistan and Iraq for signs of suspicious behavior or impending terrorist attacks. The FBI and police have used the software in criminal probes and it’s been deployed by banks, helping managers watch for suspicious behavior from employees.
Controversies around Palantir’s work with the NHS have mainly concerned transparency about what data the NHS is handing over, how it’s being used and whether patients can opt out.
In 2020, a leaked copy of a contract showed that the Denver-based tech company had been allowed access to sensitive data about patients, employees and members of the public in an attempt to help the health service cope with the coronavirus outbreak. Those details included political and religious affiliation and past criminal offenses, according to a copy of the documents published by politics website OpenDemocracy and the group Foxglove at the time.
Read More: Palantir Given Access to UK Health Data on NHS Patients
Two years later, the Doctors’ Association UK, National Pensioners’ Convention and Just Treatment sent a letter to NHS England demanding information about a pilot project that would use Palantir’s Foundry software platform and how client data would be safeguarded.
Thiel, who is still Palantir’s chairman, has described the UK’s affection for the NHS as “Stockholm syndrome,” and recommended that the country could “rip the whole thing from the ground and start over,” in a speech at the Oxford Union in January. Palantir said at the time that Thiel was speaking in a private capacity and that his views didn’t reflect the views of the company.
The NHS is the UK’s national health service, the publicly funded operation providing medical care that’s free at the point of access for the 67 million people living in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Still, it’s been beset by staff shortages and backlogs after the pandemic delayed less-urgent procedures.
The impact on England’s public healthcare system may be larger than the impact on Palantir’s bottom line. The firm generated more than $1.07 billion in government revenue in 2022 and is on track for $1.26 billion this year. The UK contract, while lucrative, is spread over the course of several years. So while it may not have a major effect on Palantir’s immediate results, it could serve as beachhead for future sales.
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Palantir - >>> This Is an Underrated Growth Opportunity for Palantir
Motley Fool
By David Jagielski
Oct 4, 2023
https://www.fool.com/investing/2023/10/04/this-is-an-underrated-growth-opportunity-for-palan/?source=eptyholnk0000202&utm_source=yahoo-host&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=article
KEY POINTS
Healthcare is an industry that may not get attention from Palantir investors, but it should.
Palantir's technology can help hospitals drastically improve their operations by reducing wait times and managing workloads.
The company is in the running for a big contract involving England's National Health Service.
The U.S. spends trillions on healthcare every year, and Palantir can play an important role in making the industry more efficient.
Palantir Technologies (PLTR 5.57%) is experiencing terrific growth due to the emerging popularity of artificial intelligence (AI). Demand is on the rise as company has a plethora of opportunities out there for it to pursue.
There is a lot of potential for the business in the long run, but one area that doesn't get much hype is healthcare. And that's something that investors should be careful not to overlook.
Palantir can help hospitals while keeping data secure
Hospitals aren't known for being tech-savvy, and there's room to improve many of their processes. This is where Palantir's data analytics capabilities can come into play to help streamline workflows. The company has been working with hospitals, and the opportunity is there for it to provide some significant, long-term value in improving its operations.
A big challenge in the healthcare industry is trust and ensuring that patient information is adequately protected and safeguarded. And with Palantir being a trusted company that governments around the world rely on, it has already demonstrated its reliability, making it a safer tech company for hospitals to work with than most.
Healthcare is a small slice of Palantir's U.S. business
Currently, Palantir's hospital operations platform isn't making much of an impact on the overall business; it makes up only 10% of the company's U.S. commercial revenue. But with the country spending more than $4 trillion on healthcare annually, this can be a significant growth opportunity for the company in the future, and it's one that investors may be underestimating and overlooking.
Improving processes can help hospitals move away from spreadsheets and whiteboards while also having easier ways to schedule and manage workloads. At the Cleveland Clinic, for example, Palantir's software used AI to help predict discharges, enabling the hospital to efficiently plan and ensure there was enough space as patients came in and out of the hospital.
Palantir has a virtual command center that hospitals can use to plan schedules and manage workflows to balance loads and reduce wait times. Since it uses AI and machine learning, it can give hospitals more visibility into what their operations may look like in the future rather than just looking back at what has already happened.
Palantir is in the running for a major European contract
Right now, Palantir's hospital-related revenue is modest, and there is barely a mention of healthcare or hospitals on its quarterly filings. It's not an area that generates much excitement, but that can change as the company starts to bring on larger and more noteworthy clients. One particularly large contract it is working on involves England's National Health Service (NHS).
Palantir is hoping to help revolutionize the NHS England's operations through its software. It is in talks about a seven-year contract worth approximately $590 million. If Palantir wins the bid, it would be responsible for updating and enhancing the NHS England's outpatient data system. It may be as early as this month that a winning bid is announced.
Healthcare could revitalize Palantir's revenue growth
In the company's most recent quarterly results, Palantir reported revenue of $533.3 million, which was a year-over-year increase of 13%. This year, it projects its top line to reach at least $2.2 billion, up from $1.9 billion in 2022.
The launch of its AI platform should help accelerate Palantir's growth rate, but growing its presence in healthcare can lead to even more promising results for the business in the long run. If it can win the NHS England contract, that may encourage more healthcare systems and hospitals to consider Palantir's software.
In recent quarters, Palantir's top line has been increasing but at a decreasing rate.
Is Palantir stock a buy?
Palantir has been a scorching-hot buy in 2023 due to the excitement in AI and the company's potential opportunities there. Year to date, the stock is up more than 145%.
And now, with the business expecting consistent profits, its operations look more stable and reliable as well. Palantir's stock trades at a price-to-earnings-growth, or PEG, ratio of around 1, indicating that based on analyst growth projections, the stock could be a steal of a deal for long-term investors willing to hang on to the investment for multiple years.
Although the stock may seem expensive right now, trading at around 60 times its estimated future profits, it's not too late to buy shares of Palantir as its sales and profits could rise drastically in the years ahead.
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>>> Iteris, Inc. (ITI) provides intelligent transportation systems technology solutions in North America, Europe, South America, and Asia. The company offers smart mobility infrastructure solutions include traveler information systems, transportation performance measurement software, traffic analytics software, transportation operations software, transportation-related data sets, advanced sensing devices, managed services, traffic engineering services, and mobility consulting services. Its products include ClearGuide, ClearRoute, Commercial Vehicle Operations, BlueArgus, TrafficCarma, Vantage Apex, Vantage Fusion, Vantage Next, VantagePegasus, VantageRadius, Vantage Vector, Velocity, SmartCycle, SmartCycle Bike Indicator, SmartSpan, VersiCam, PedTrax, and P-Series products.
The company sells original equipment manufacturer products for the traffic intersection markets, such as traffic signal controllers and traffic signal equipment cabinets. In addition, it offers traffic management centers design, staffing, and operations services; traffic engineering and mobility consulting services include planning, design, development, and implementation of software and hardware-based ITS systems that integrate sensors, video surveillance, computers, and advanced communications equipment; distributes real-time information about traffic conditions; and surface transportation infrastructure systems implementation, and operation and management.
Further, the company provides travel demand forecasting and systems engineering, and identify mitigation measures to reduce traffic congestion; ClearMobility platform; and ClearMobility Cloud that enables mobility data management engine, application programming interface framework, and microservices ecosystem. It serves public transportation agencies, municipalities, commercial entities, government agencies, and other transportation infrastructure providers. Iteris, Inc. was founded in 1969 and is headquartered in Austin, Texas.
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>>> So THAT'S Why You Can't Smile In Your Passport Photo
Buzz Feed
June 26, 2023
https://www.msn.com/en-us/travel/news/so-that-s-why-you-can-t-smile-in-your-passport-photo/ar-AA1d4PBA?ocid=hpmsn&cvid=dfbd5cb704b843eabe7ff1ed78dde41b&ei=38
Our passport photos are rarely the most flattering pictures we have of ourselves. That drugstore or post office lighting is not ideal, and it doesn’t help that we don’t get to show off our best happy faces.
When the time came to renew my passport last year, I received strict instructions from the postal worker who took my new photo that I must not smile. The resulting picture was ... joyless, to say the least.
But why exactly aren’t people allowed to smile in their passport photos the way we do in other pictures? The answer has to do with technology and international security.
Why Smiling Is Frowned Upon
The United States doesn’t officially ban smiling. Rather, the State Department requires that passport photos show “a neutral facial expression with both eyes open and mouth closed.” The subject must look straight ahead and directly face the camera as well. (ie - a digital mugshot)
“An applicant actually can smile in their passport photo, as long as both of their eyes are open and their mouth is closed in the photo,” a spokesperson for the department told HuffPost.
So if you’d like to look a little more upbeat in your passport photo, perhaps the solution is to opt for a Tyra Banks-style “smize.” Showing your teeth won’t pass muster ? and apparently it’s a matter of border security.
“The main reason for banning smiling is the introduction of facial recognition software at airports and other border control checkpoints,” said Karolina Turowska, a biometric photography and travel expert at Passport-Photo.Online.
Many ports of entry utilize computers rather than immigration officers to scan arriving travelers’ passports and photograph them. Although humans can recognize each other easily regardless of facial expression, machines need a little extra help.
“Algorithms don’t work as we do,” Turowska explained. “To compare a 3D face with a 2D passport photo, they need to pinpoint and measure the users’ facial features. It includes the distance between the pupils, ears, nose and mouth, the mouth’s and the eyes’ width, and many others. Smiling can make it harder, as it alters facial proportions.”
Katy Nastro, a travel expert and spokesperson for the flight alert service Going, emphasized that the State Department rules don’t ban smiling explicitly.
“It moreso means you can’t smile like you’re posing for the first day of school, pearly whites front and center,” she said. “Smiling wide with teeth makes it harder to verify eye color and general face shape by passport officials ? namely biometric technology ? who need to confirm your identity. With a majority of places using facial recognition technology at border controls, this is even more important as current biometric tech often has a hard time if points on the face are shifted.”
Not Just An American Rule
“Avoiding smiling in passport photos is a universal rule for most countries,” Turowska said. “Although, the way different countries define a ‘neutral facial expression’ can vary as they use other face recognition software. For example, official French requirements don’t allow even neutral expressions with the corners of the mouth turned up.” (smirking is allowed)
The State Department spokesperson noted that The International Civil Aviation Organization “sets global standards and recommended practices for travel documents.” This includes guidelines for facial expressions in passport photos.
“Photos with exaggerated expressions can make it more difficult to readily identify the passport holder,” he explained, noting that the agency’s photo requirements have “been in effect for United States passports for decades.”
Indeed, the U.S. and other countries updated their rules around facial expressions in 2004 as the technology evolved.
“The face has always been the standard for biometric identification by the International Civil Aviation Organization, but because computers are limited in specific facial recognition capabilities, a neutral expression was deemed the gold standard,” Nastro said.
But these kinds of rules are still relatively new in the grand scheme of things. The idea for the internationally standardized passport system we use today dates back to 1920 in the aftermath of World War I.
“Passport photos weren’t always as strict as they are today,” said Madison Blancaflor, a senior editor at The Points Guy. “When passport photos first started to be used, there were very limited ? if any ? regulations to what the photos included. You can find some very interesting historical examples online of old passports with people playing instruments or wearing distracting hats. However, over the years more regulations have been put into place to heighten security efforts.”
What Happens If You Submit A Smiling Photo to the passport Gestapo?
“The most common reason for a passport processing delay is improper photos,” Nastro noted. “Even the best of smiles can get turned down for not meeting requirements set forth on the state department website. It’s best to not risk it and take a photo with a neutral expression, especially if you want it processed as quickly as possible.”
If you decide to smile widely and show off your pearly whites in your photo, the passport agency will delay your application and request a new photo in keeping with the stated requirements, the State Department spokesperson noted.
Should this happen to you, you’ll receive a letter and/or email with instructions for resubmitting an acceptable photo.
“If you’re unable to provide a photo that meets their standards by the deadline given, your passport application may remain in ‘on hold’ limbo forever or be rejected,” Blancaflor warned.
The State Department’s guidelines also forbid eyeglasses unless they cannot be removed for medical reasons ? in which case you must submit a signed statement from your doctor with your passport application. Hats or head coverings are a no-go unless they are “part of traditional religious attire worn continuously in public,” which also would require a signed statement attesting to this fact.
“Not only is smiling prohibited: Applicants cannot tighten their mouths, frown or crinkle,” Turowska added.
Refer to the State Department website for other rules regarding lighting, retouching, background and other aspects.
“The stringent rule regarding smiling is somewhat more lenient for children since having them maintain a neutral facial expression is challenging,” Turowska noted. “The smile cannot impair the recognition of their facial features; however, as long as the child faces the camera and has his eyes open, the passport authorities should accept a smiling photo.”
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To this crap I say ----> FUUUUCCCKKK YOOUUU
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>>> Alphabet bets on lasers to deliver internet in remote areas
Reuters
June 26, 2023
by Jane Lanhee Lee and Nathan Frandino
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/alphabet-bets-on-lasers-to-deliver-internet-in-remote-areas/ar-AA1d2Fvs?OCID=ansmsnnews11
MOUNTAIN VIEW, California (Reuters) - Google parent Alphabet has already tried and failed to bring internet access to rural and remote areas by using high-altitude balloons in the stratosphere.
But now, the company is delivering internet service to remote areas by using beams of light.
The project known as Taara is part of Alphabet's innovation lab called X, also nicknamed the "Moonshot Factory." It was initiated in 2016 after attempts at using stratospheric balloons to deliver internet ran into problems due to high costs, company executives said.
This time around, things are progressing better, said Mahesh
Krishnaswamy, who leads Taara.
Taara executives and Bharti Airtel, one of India's largest telecommunications and internet providers, told Reuters they are now moving toward larger-scale deployment of the new laser internet technology in India. Financial details were not disclosed.
Taara is helping to link up internet services in 13 countries so far including Australia, Kenya and Fiji, said Krishnaswamy, adding that it has struck deals with Econet Group and its subsidiary Liquid Telecom in Africa, internet provider Bluetown in India and Digicel in the Pacific Islands.
"We are trying to be one of the cheapest and the most affordable place where you would be able to get dollar per gigabyte to the end consumers," he said.
Taara's machine is the size of traffic lights that beam the laser carrying the data - essentially fiber-optic internet without the cables. Partners like Airtel use the machines to build out communications infrastructure in hard-to-reach places.
Krishnaswamy said he had an epiphany while working on the failed balloon internet project Loon which used lasers for connecting data between balloons, and brought that technology to the ground.
"We call this moonshot composting," said Astro Teller, who leads X where he is known as "captain of moonshots."
X is Alphabet's research division that takes on projects bordering on science-fiction. It gave rise to self-driving technology firm Waymo, drone delivery service Wing and health tech startup Verily Life Sciences.
"Taara is moving more data every single day than Loon did in its entire history," said Teller.
Bharti Airtel's chief technology officer, Randeep Sekhon, said Taara will also help deliver faster internet service in urban areas in developed countries. He said it is less expensive to beam data between buildings than to bury fiber-optic cables. "I think this is really disruptive," he said.
Krishnaswamy was recently in Osur, an Indian village where he spent his childhood summers, three hours south of Chennai, for the installation of Taara equipment. Osur will be receiving high-speed internet for the first time this summer, he said.
"There's hundreds of thousands of these villages across India," he said. "I can't wait to see how this technology can come handy to bringing all of those people online."
Google in July 2020 committed $10 billion for digitizing India. It invested $700 million for a 1.28% stake in Bharti Airtel last year. X and Google are sister companies under Alphabet, while Taara's partnership with Bharti Airtel is separate from the Google investment.
When asked about the downside of the internet as X and Taara push ahead with their mission to connect the rest of the world, Teller said: "I acknowledge the concept that the Internet is imperfect, but I would suggest that's maybe the subject of a different moonshot to improve the internet's content."
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>>> Biden announces $42 billion to expand high-speed internet access
by Tony Romm
June 26, 2023
The Washington Post
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/biden-to-announce-42-billion-to-expand-high-speed-internet-access/ar-AA1d2squ?OCID=ansmsnnews11
President Biden on Monday announced more than $42 billion in new federal funding to expand high-speed internet access nationwide, commencing the largest-ever campaign to help an estimated 8.5 million families and small businesses finally take advantage of modern-day connectivity.
The money, which the government plans to parcel out to states over the next two years, is the centerpiece of a vast and ambitious effort to deliver reliable broadband to the entire country by 2030 — ensuring that even the most far-flung parts of the United States can reap the economic benefits of the digital age.
In a formal unveiling at the White House, the president likened the new infrastructure project to the government’s work to electrify the nation’s darkened heartland in the late 1930s, when nearly 90 percent of farms had no electric power in the face of high costs and prohibitive terrain.
Roughly nine decades later, Biden said that rural communities suffer from a similar disparity known as the “digital divide” — a persistent gap between the families, workers and employers who have high-speed internet access and those who do not. Even in a time of self-driving cars, commercial spaceflight and artificial intelligence, roughly 7 percent of the United States still does not have broadband service that meets the government’s minimum standards, according to new federal estimates.
“It’s the biggest investment in high-speed internet ever, because for today’s economy to work for everyone, internet access is just as important as electricity or water or other basic services,” Biden said.
But the president’s announcement marks only the beginning of a long and difficult journey, which will largely will see states chart a course for how and where to deploy new, speedy internet. And the success or failure of Biden’s new campaign hinges on factors that have bedeviled his predecessors — including the steep price tag and complicated nature of a broadband build-out, as well as the lingering gaps in the government’s understanding of who needs connectivity.
“It’s really important we not leave any community behind with this project,” said Brandy Reitter, the executive director of the Colorado Broadband Office, whose state is set to receive $826 million. She added that the historic level of funding nationally means that the United States has “one shot at it.”
For decades, the U.S. government has spent billions of dollars annually to deploy speedy internet service nationwide — only to struggle to ensure those sums benefit the communities that need it most. But the lagging federal campaign took on new energy and importance during the coronavirus pandemic, which demonstrated how the internet had become essential for daily life.
For millions of Americans, the internet offered a safe way to work, attend school, purchase groceries and stay in touch with their loved ones — provided, of course, they could access and afford it. In one 2021 survey from the Pew Research Center, 60 percent of lower-income broadband users said they often or sometimes struggled during the pandemic to use online services as a result of slow speeds. Nearly half said they also worried at the time about their ability to afford their internet bills.
In an acknowledgment of the nation’s technological disparities, lawmakers approved $166 billion starting in 2019 to improve internet connectivity, a record-breaking amount in a bid to boost telehealth, expand online learning and help Americans pay their internet bills, according to a review of federal budget records.
“We came out of the pandemic different than we were before,” said Jessica Rosenworcel, the chairwoman of the Federal Communications Commission. “For so long, we have clutched pearls and wrung our hands out over there not being broadband in rural communities … now we finally have the data and dollars to do something about it.”
U.S. aid program to keep people online was riddled with deception, fraud
The new investments included $42.5 billion for the Broadband Equity Access and Deployment Program, known as BEAD, which Congress enacted as part of a sprawling 2021 law to improve the nation’s infrastructure. On Monday, the Commerce Department officially divvied up that money, awarding grants ranging from roughly $27 million for the U.S. Virgin Islands to more than $3.3 billion for Texas, based largely on local needs.
With the funding commitments in hand, states next must devise blueprints for how to bring broadband to those disconnected communities. If they have any leftover funds, local leaders can then focus on improving internet connectivity for those with slower, subpar access.
Appearing at the White House, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo on Monday described the money as a “generational opportunity” while acknowledging the digital divide “isn’t a new problem we just discovered.”
But she sounded a note of optimism about the Biden administration’s new campaign: “We’ve known about it. Lots of presidents have talked about bridging the gap … but President Biden is making it happen.”
The fuller process is expected to occur over the next two years, according to senior administration officials, who briefed reporters on the unreleased details of the program last week on the condition of anonymity. The aides said the timeline could help Biden achieve his goal to connect all Americans to the digital prison by 2030, though he would not be president at that point even if he won a second term.
Already, states such as West Virginia are “anxious for the dollars,” said Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.), one of the architects of the bipartisan infrastructure law. The state, which is slated to reap $1.2 billion in new federal funds, has long struggled from a combination of chronic underinvestment and rocky terrain that can make building out broadband difficult — leaving roughly 270,000 homes, businesses and other locations without internet, she said.
“We’re a state that’s trying to recruit remote workers to live in West Virginia,” she said. “But if they can’t connect, they can’t work here, and that’s been an issue for us.”
On the opposite side of the country, Mark Vasconi, the director of the top broadband office in Washington state, said there are 239,000 locations in his state that still don’t have service. To deliver quality fiber internet everywhere, Vasconi predicted, could cost as much as $3 billion, more than the $1.2 billion the state ultimately received Monday — but he said in advance of the award that the remainder could be covered by state and private investment.
“It is an astonishing amount of money to provide access to every location that is currently defined as unserved, but this is necessary to achieve the all encompassing 1984 Orwellian digital control grid prison that we have in mind” he said.
The exact amount the U.S. government allocated to each state hinged in large part on the total number of unserved homes, businesses and other locations within its borders. Nationally, the United States has identified more than 8.5 million such locations after a year-long effort by the FCC to remap the nation and its connectivity. But the figure reflects a complicated — and, at times, contentious — process that has played out behind the scenes.
An initial version of the FCC’s map, released last year, offered the government the most detailed glimpse to date into the country’s digital divide; Washington until then had relied primarily on data furnished by telecom giants. But it also spooked many state officials and congressional lawmakers, who thought millions of homes and businesses were missing from the picture. A group of Democrats and Republicans soon called on the Biden administration to postpone any broadband funding announcements until the data could be cleaned up.
The Commerce Department ultimately opted against a delay, as it raced to disburse funds in time for its self-imposed deadline of June 30. That prompted the FCC to forge ahead with its work, and the telecom agency unveiled a new map last month to process roughly 4 million mistakes, according to federal records.
What’s in the $1.2 trillion infrastructure law
The fixes resulted in the U.S. government identifying roughly half a million additional homes, businesses and other locations that did not have internet compared with its first blueprint, the White House acknowledged this week. State officials heralded the updates, even as some raised alarm that there might be other missing communities, potentially cutting into the funds they expect to receive.
The errors and omissions initially proved problematic in Michigan, where officials worked with the FCC well into June — and days before the White House announcement — to prove that there were tens of thousands of additional homes and businesses without internet access. Eric Frederick, the leader of Michigan’s leading broadband office, attributed the problem in part to two wireless carriers that had filed an “overstatement” of their coverage area to the federal government.
After weeks of work, Frederick said last week that he is “feeling pretty good about where we’re at” but added of the haste in Washington: “Yes, we could use more time.”
“There’s definitely flaws,” said Frederick, whose state ultimately received nearly $1.6 billion. “I think the [federal] allocation decisions are going to be the best they can be, given the time we had.”
In response, senior administration officials cautioned that each state still must embark on its own study to determine who does and does not have internet, a key task to determine where they will spend federal dollars. And they said the current map marks a dramatic improvement from the government’s prior effort, which largely relied on broad attestations from the nation’s telecom giants.
“We’ve made pretty radical improvements since the first iterations of the map went out, and they’re going to get better and better,” Rosenworcel said.
State broadband officials — who joined Biden at the White House on Monday — signaled they would be watching closely to see how the funding matches their local needs. Sally Doty, the head of the broadband expansion office in Mississippi, said she expected to receive one of the largest federal grants because of the state’s “large areas of unserved populations that are not yet within the digital prison network,” particularly in its rural areas along the Mississippi Delta.
On Monday, the federal government awarded Mississippi about $1.2 billion in new broadband aid. Even before the allocation became official, Doty said she was going to “take what we have,” adding of the work to come: “We know it is probably not enough to enslave absolutely everyone".
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Low orbital satellite constellations -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_internet_constellation
Globalstar — an operational constellation of 24 low Earth orbiting (LEO) satellites for satellite phone and low-speed data communications, covering most of the world's landmass. The launch of the second-generation constellation was completed on February 6, 2013
Iridium — an operational constellation of 66 cross-linked satellites in a polar orbit, used to provide satellite phone and low-speed data services over the entire surface of Earth. Iridium NEXT, a second-generation constellation of the communications satellites, was completed on January 11, 2019
Orbcomm — an operational constellation used to provide global asset monitoring and messaging services from its constellation of 29 LEO communications satellites orbiting at 775 km
Starlink — a satellite constellation development project underway by SpaceX to deploy nearly 12,000 satellites in three orbital shells by the mid-2020s
Lynk Global — a satellite-to-mobile-phone satellite constellation with the objective of coverage to traditional low-cost mobile devices
Teledesic — a former (1990s) venture to accomplish broadband satellite internet services
Viasat, Inc. — a current broadband satellite provider providing fixed, ground mobile, and airborne antennas
OneWeb constellation — 648-satellite network is planned for completion by late 2022
Project Kuiper — Amazon's constellation planned to consist of 3,236 satellites operating in three orbital shells
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LWLG is a "story stock". It is a perpetual startup.
And I think you worry too much about LEO broadband technology. There is no nefarious "dark" side.
And that's all I'm going to say about that.
Yes, high speed broadband is definitely great to have, though I figure with human nature being what it is, these 50,000 satellites will ultimately be used for some darker Orwellian purpose, ie a centralized control grid to go along with the CBDC and social credit score system, ala China. But for now, the technology's bright side is entrancing, but the potential dark side is becoming clearer.
Btw, I see you follow Lightwave Logic (LWLG)? I looked at them several years ago, but any idea when the revenues will finally start flowing? Seemed like some great technology there, but they seem to have characteristics of a 'perpetual startup', ie the ultra cool science but with the ultimate $ payoff always being pushed further into the future.
Anyway, here's to the 'lure' of high technology :o) But it's a double edged sword -
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I have had Starlink broadband for just short of a year. I live in the boondocks and, before Starlink, geosynchronous satellite broadband was the only option. The Starlink LEO satellites offer much higher speed and MUCH lower latency.
It is a game changer.
>>> SpaceX launches 47 Starlink satellites, lands rocket at sea
Space.com
Mike Wall
June 21, 2023
https://www.yahoo.com/news/watch-spacex-launch-47-starlink-184045762.html
A Falcon 9 rocket carrying 47 Starlink spacecraft lifted off from California's Vandenberg Space Force Base on Thursday at 3:19 a.m. EDT (0719 GMT; 12:19 a.m. local time)
The Falcon 9's first stage returned to Earth as planned about eight minutes and 45 seconds after launch. It performed a pinpoint touchdown on the SpaceX droneship Of Course I Still Love You, which was stationed in the Pacific Ocean.
The Falcon 9's upper stage, meanwhile, continued carrying the 47 Starlink satellites aloft, with the goal of deploying them in low Earth orbit about 19 minutes after liftoff.
SpaceX has now launched more than 4,600 Starlink satellites, the vast majority of which are currently operational, according to astrophysicist and satellite tracker Jonathan McDowell.
And the broadband megaconstellation will continue to grow far into the future. SpaceX has permission to deploy 12,000 Starlink satellites, and the company has applied for approval to launch another 30,000 spacecraft on top of that.
Thursday's Starlink mission was the first part of an early-morning spaceflight doubleheader, if all goes according to plan: A United Launch Alliance (ULA) Delta IV Heavy rocket is scheduled to launch a classified satellite for the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office from Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station at 5:18 a.m. EDT (0918 GMT).
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>>> Federal government to give states $930M in grants to expand high-speed internet
The Hill
by Alex Gangitano
June 16, 2023
https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/federal-government-states-930m-grants-090000912.html
The Biden administration on Friday announced it will give just over $930 million in grants to expand high-speed internet infrastructure across 35 states and Puerto Rico.
The effort, part of a program under the Department of Commerce, aims to give communities infrastructure to carry large amounts of data over long distances and increase capacity to local networks, according to the administration.
Officials say the infrastructure also boosts network resiliency, lowers the cost of bringing high-speed internet service to unconnected households and helps connect unserved regions.
Funding through the Enabling Middle Mile Broadband Infrastructure Program comes from the $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill that Biden signed in November 2021.
The law provided $65 billion to expand affordable and reliable high-speed Internet access and $1 billion on that funds the Middle Mile program.
The program was created to bring high-speed internet to unserved and underserved communities, military bases and Tribal lands.
The Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) is spearheading the effort, which officials say will reach 350 counties.
There were more than 260 applications for a Middle Mile grant, which were due last fall. NTIA will give out additional grants “on a rolling basis,” it announced.
The states getting the most out of the nearly $1 billion in grants announced Friday include Alaska with a nearly $89 million grant, California with a $73 million grant and Michigan with a more than $61 million grant.
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Rail Vision - >>> Israel Railways Purchases 10 AI-Driven Rail Vision Main Line Systems for $1.4M
Rail Vision Ltd.
GlobeNewswire
February 6, 2023
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/israel-railways-purchases-10-ai-130000273.html
Rail Vision’s cutting-edge, A.I.-based obstacle detection technology is ushering in a new era of train safety
Ra’anana, Israel, Feb. 06, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Rail Vision Ltd. (the “Company”) (Nasdaq: RVSN), a technology company that is seeking to revolutionize railway safety and the data-related market, announced today that Israel Railways Ltd., Israel’s state-owned principal railway company, signed an agreement to purchase 10 Rail Vision Main Line Systems and related services for $1.4 million. Rail Vision’s Main Line System is a cutting-edge, artificial intelligence (A.I.) based, industry-leading technology for detection and identification of objects and obstacles near, between, or on the railway.
“After more than a year of evaluating a variety of advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), Israel Railways chose Rail Vision’s Main Line System as the solution for its fleet, marking the first major commercial deployment of AI-based vision technology for main line rail industry operations,” commented Rail Vision CEO Shahar Hania. “Our Main Line System outperformed in all aspects of testing during the proof-of-concept with Israel Railways. We believe this is a strong validation of our solution and bodes extremely well for other pilot programs underway, such as our long-term pilot in Australia with Rio Tinto, a leading global mining group, as well as other opportunities around the globe.
“Using advanced, long-range A.I. detection systems, our game-changing technology provides unparalleled obstacle identification on and near tracks, making it an ideal solution for major rail operators like Israel Railways, and a key driver behind strategic partnerships, such as our relationship with Knorr-Bremse, the global leader in braking systems for the rail industry that has invested $24 million into Rail Vision since our inception,” continued Hania.
Israel Railways operates approximately 700 trains daily, traveling along 1,138 kilometers of track, connecting major metropolitan areas in Israel, as well as cities, towns, and rural villages throughout the country.
“We currently have few main line and switch yard pilot programs underway globally,” continued Hania. “The conversion of pilot programs into commercial contracts is expected to accelerate and drive sales growth momentum in the quarters ahead.”
About Rail Vision’s AI-based Main Line System
Rail Vision’s Main Line System is an AI-driven obstacle detection technology designed to revolutionize train safety. With its extended visual range of up to 1.2mi / 2km, Rail Vision's Main Line System combines sensitive imaging sensors with A.I. and deep learning technologies to detect and classify obstacles on and near the tracks, such as humans, animals, vehicles, signals, and infrastructure components, quickly and accurately. The system then generates real-time visual and acoustic alerts for the train's command-and-control center, helping to prevent collisions, reduce downtime and delays, increase safety, and improve traffic volume. Rail Vision’s advanced image processing capabilities also allow for image-based navigation, predictive maintenance, and GIS mapping.
About Rail Vision Ltd.
Rail Vision is a technology company that is seeking to revolutionize railway safety and the data-related market. The Company has developed cutting-edge, artificial intelligence based, industry-leading technology specifically designed for railways. The Company has developed its railway detection and systems to save lives, increase efficiency, and dramatically reduce expenses for the railway operators. Rail Vision believes that its technology will significantly increase railway safety around the world, while creating significant benefits and adding value to everyone who relies on the train ecosystem: from passengers using trains for transportation to companies that use railways to deliver goods and services. In addition, the company believes that its technology has the potential to advance the revolutionary concept of autonomous trains into a practical reality. For more information please visit https://www.railvision.io/
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>>> Otonomo Technologies Ltd. (OTMO) provides an automotive data service platform and marketplace that enables car manufacturers, drivers, and service providers to be part of a connected ecosystem. The company offers cabin data, including the state of doors and windows, ADAS, and infotainment data; engine-related information, such as fuel, oil, error codes or battery voltage, and state of charge; maintenance data comprising time or distance traveled and diagnostic trouble codes; data related to the specific vehicles, which include making, model, year, and fuel type; driving data consisting of location, distance travelled, odometer, and heading and speed; and environmental data that include external weather and temperature, and road hazards and road signs. Its data is used for various services, such as preventative maintenance, EV management, emergency services, on-demand fueling, insurance, and smart cities. The company collects vehicle-specific and aggregated data from vehicle data providers, such as vehicle manufacturers, vehicle fleet operators, and telematics service providers, as well as licenses software. It serves in North America, the Asia Pacific, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. Otonomo Technologies Ltd. was founded in 2015 and is headquartered in Herzliya, Israel.
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>>> Google's management has reportedly issued a 'code red' amid the rising popularity of the ChatGPT AI
Business Insider
Dec 2022
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/google-s-management-has-reportedly-issued-a-code-red-amid-the-rising-popularity-of-the-chatgpt-ai/ar-AA15xcdY?cvid=1bcae88ab0d04bcc859773087637a459
CEO of Google Sundar Pichai told some teams to switch gears and work on developing AI products, the New York Times reports.
Google issued a "code red" in response to the rise of AI bot ChatGPT, NYT reports.
CEO Sundar Pichai redirected some teams to focus on building out AI products, per the report.
The move comes as talks abound over whether ChatGPT could one day replace Google's search engine.
Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google's parent company, Alphabet, participated in several meetings around Google's AI strategy and has directed numerous groups in the company to refocus their efforts on addressing the threat that ChatGPT poses on its search engine business, according to an internal memo and audio recording reviewed by the Times.
In particular, teams in Google's research, Trust and Safety division among other departments have been directed to switch gears to assist in the development and launch of new AI prototypes and products, the Times reported. Some employees have even been tasked to build AI products that generate art and graphics similar to OpenAI's DALL-E used by millions of people, according to the Times.
Google's move to build out its AI product portfolio comes at a moment when Google employees and experts alike debate whether ChatGPT — run by former Y Combinator president Sam Altman — has the potential to replace the search engine and in turn hurt Google's ad-revenue business model.
Sridhar Ramaswamy, who oversaw Google's ad team between 2013 and 2018, said that ChatGPT could prevent users from clicking on Google links with ads, which generated $208 billion — 81% of Alphabet's overall revenue — in 2021, Insider reported.
ChatGPT, which amassed over 1 million users five days after its public launch, can generate singular answers to queries in a conversational, human-like way by synthesizing information from millions of websites. Users have asked the chat bot to write a college essay, provide coding advice, and even serve as a therapist, Insider previously reported.
But some have been quick to notice that the bot is often riddled with errors. ChatGPT is unable to fact-check what it says and can't distinguish between a verified fact and misinformation, AI experts told Insider. It can also make up answers, a phenomenon that AI researchers call "hallucinations."
The bot is capable of generating offensive responses that are racist and sexist, Bloomberg reported.
The chat bot's high margin of error and vulnerability to toxicity are some of the reasons why Google is hesitant to release its AI chat bot LaMDA — short for Language Model for Dialogue Applications — to the public, according to the Times. A recent CNBC report said Google execs are reluctant to release it widely in its current state over concerns over "reputational risk."
Chat bots are "not something that people can use reliably on a daily basis," Zoubin Ghahramani, who leads the Google's A.I. lab Google Brain, told the Times before ChatGPT was released.
Instead, Google may focus on improving its search engine over time rather than taking it down, experts told the Times.
As Google reportedly works full steam ahead on new AI products, we might get an early look at them at Google's annual developer conference, I/O, which is expected to take place in May.
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Noose tightens - >>> G20 Leaders Agree to Global Vaccination Passport System: 'Where Will It End?'
CBN News
11-18-2022
by Steve Warren
https://www1.cbn.com/cbnnews/world/2022/november/g20-leaders-agree-to-global-vaccination-passport-to-limit-rights-of-travelers-where-will-it-end
The leaders of the world's largest economies at the G20 meeting held in Bali, Indonesia, this week did much more than discuss current economic troubles. They also drafted and signed a declaration in which the 20 countries agreed to adopt vaccine passports with the purported goal to promote global travel and tourism.
Bloomberg reported tourism ministers from several countries had backed the use of vaccine passports last year in an effort to boost international travel after the pandemic tanked the tourism industry. The group said it was essential for speeding up global economic recovery efforts, but the move is raising concerns among critics who worry about government overreach and the rights of individuals.
The world leaders' Bali Declaration, included a section (s.23) on "facilitating seamless international travel." The impact would be vast because the G20 countries comprise more than 66 percent of the world's population.
People Are Getting Vaccine Passport Microchips Embedded in Their Hands as COVID Advances the 'Internet of Bodies'
New Viral Video About Vaccine Passport Implants Revives Fears of Chipping Humans
China's Big Brother 'Social Credit System' Now Tracks People in North America Too with Video Surveillance
The agreement called for shared technical standards and verification methods, including vaccine passports. It also commits to "support continued international dialogue and collaboration on the establishment of trusted global digital health networks that should capitalize and build on the success of the existing standard and digital COVID-19 certificates."
In a separate updated document, the G20 vows to: "Endeavour to move towards interoperability of systems including mechanisms that validate proof of vaccination, whilst respecting the sovereignty of national health policies, and relevant national regulations such as personal data protection and data-sharing."
It has been proposed that this digital health certificate would adhere to World Health Organization (WHO) standards. Under the proposal, only if a person has been vaccinated or tested according to those standards would they be able to travel internationally.
The vaccine passports could be paper or a digital code or an app that records and displays the user's health information, including COVID-19 vaccination status. Digital health passports would involve a scannable code similar to an airline boarding pass. Then tracking and tracing apps could monitor the user's movement and their interactions with other people. The app would even issue a warning if the user moves outside of the quarantine zone.
While the American mainstream media has been mostly silent about the vaccine passports, anchors of the British news outlet GB News posted a video to Twitter discussing the power the WHO would have over people's lives. One anchor even asked, "Where will it end?"
Meanwhile, several people in the U.S. are warning that if allowed, the health or vaccine passports would eventually track every aspect of Americans' lives, violating the U.S. Constitution, the Americans With Disabilities Act, and HIPAA, due to the fact that everyone's medical records would be a part of a worldwide database.
"Digital health or vaccine passports along with tracking and tracing apps present a serious threat to freedom. Vaccine passports and tracking apps are about collecting data and control," Liberty Counsel Founder and Chairman Mat Staver said in a press release.
"The vaccine passport is being promoted worldwide to limit a person's ability to leave home, work, shop, dine, travel, attend a public event, or even worship. COVID is being used to advance this dangerous threat to freedom. We must never accept vaccine passports or tracking apps as the new normal. The implications for freedom are significant," Staver said.
Social media users in the U.S. aren't crazy about the idea of having vaccine passports either.
One Twitter user commented, "G20 - BREAKING: leaders have just signed a declaration which states that vaccine passports will be adopted to 'facilitate' all international travel. This means any vaccination the WHO determines you should have. Changing your rights & freedoms forever. Silence from the media."
"Last time I checked, no one voted for the WEF, the UN, the WHO or any of these psychos to govern us at all," one user noted. "There will be NO vaccine passports for anyone who loves freedom."
Another user also wrote, "Why would you need global digital vaccine passports if the 'vaccines' don't stop transmission? Oh right, because this was never about a virus."
"'Health officials' still insisting on vaccine passports in spite of the fact that we now 100% know vaccines don't work. Either 'health officials' are stupid or the agenda ain't about health," another user commented.
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>>> Skyworks and MediaTek Collaborate to Offer End-to-End 5G Automotive Solutions
BusinessWire
November 13, 2022
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/skyworks-mediatek-collaborate-offer-end-040200548.html
MediaTek and Skyworks Develop 5G New Radio Design Enabling Seamless Integration With Automotive Communications Systems
MUNICH, November 14, 2022--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Skyworks Solutions, Inc. (Nasdaq: SWKS) today announced that the company has engaged with MediaTek to offer a complete modem-to-antenna automotive-grade 5G solution. This 5G New Radio Sky5A RF front-end solution will accelerate the deployment of this cutting-edge protocol across an array of automotive OEM and consumer service offerings.
"The rollout of 5G is reshaping the automotive market with a variety of safety and entertainment telematics applications to improve the driving experience," said Martin Lin, deputy general manager of the Wireless Communications Business Unit at MediaTek. "Through this collaboration with Skyworks, MediaTek is providing OEMs and automotive customers a complete solution that offers high performance, reliability and flexibility to meet the growing demands for bandwidth and advanced connectivity in next-generation vehicles."
As automotive OEMs create entirely new vehicle platforms with cutting-edge processing and sensing capabilities to support advancements in electric vehicle (EV) technology, driver-assistance systems (ADAS), and artificial intelligence, they are looking for solutions that can support the expanded data and connectivity demands of these next-generation innovations.
"This strategic initiative allows Skyworks and MediaTek to address the stringent requirements of the global automotive industry," said John O’Neill, vice president of marketing at Skyworks. "Our combined engineering expertise enables our customers to innovate new vehicle communication architectures, with the confidence that their designs will continue to meet future bandwidth needs and the rapid evolution of global wireless networks."
The 5G NR Sky5A RF front-end complete solution was designed for automotive applications, supporting 3GPP R15 and R16 standards, bandwidth exceeding 100MHz, flexible antenna architectures, regional optimization, aux ports to support the addition of future bands, and full automotive grade reliability qualification.
Skyworks will be exhibiting at Electronica Stand B5-138, taking place in Munich from Nov. 15-18, 2022, where the company will be highlighting its latest infrastructure, IoT, automotive, timing and power solutions.
About Skyworks
Skyworks Solutions, Inc. is empowering the wireless networking revolution. Our highly innovative analog and mixed signal semiconductors are connecting people, places and things spanning a number of new and previously unimagined applications within the aerospace, automotive, broadband, cellular infrastructure, connected home, defense, entertainment and gaming, industrial, medical, smartphone, tablet and wearable markets.
Skyworks is a global company with engineering, marketing, operations, sales and support facilities located throughout Asia, Europe and North America and is a member of the S&P 500® and Nasdaq-100® market indices (Nasdaq: SWKS). For more information, please visit Skyworks’ website at: www.skyworksinc.com.
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>>> Yes, “Biden Bucks” Are Real
BY JAMES RICKARDS
OCTOBER 21, 2022
https://dailyreckoning.com/yes-biden-bucks-are-real/
Yes, “Biden Bucks” Are Real
I told my readers several weeks ago about how Joe Biden and the Fed’s plan to develop the digital dollar is moving from the research stage to the development stage.
Well, the Biden administration has recently released the first-ever framework for developing a U.S. central bank digital currency (CBDC) system. In other words, “Biden Bucks” is getting closer to becoming a reality for us all.
(I like to call them “Biden Bucks” because I want him to take full credit for what I consider to be a crime.)
Essentially, I believe the U.S. dollar, the standard of the world since 1792, will be replaced by a new currency, the digital dollar. It’ll also have the full backing of the Federal Reserve.
What’s this mean for you? I’ve argued it before but I can’t say it enough…
It would basically subject your money to government control. “Biden Bucks” would create new ways for the government to control how much you could buy of an item, or even restrict purchases altogether. That’s because the government would keep score of every financial decision you made.
Nowhere to Hide
Imagine if the government decides that gasoline needs to be rationed to further advance the climate change agenda?
Your “Biden Bucks” could be made to stop working at the gas pump once you’ve purchased a certain amount of gasoline in a week. How’s that for control?
And in a world of “Biden Bucks,” the government will even know your physical whereabouts at the point of purchase. Also, if you give donations to the wrong political party or make purchases the government doesn’t like, maybe the IRS will take a sudden interest in you.
Who wants to be subjected to an IRS audit?
If any of this sounds extreme, fantastical or otherwise far-fetched, it’s not. It’s already happening around the world.
China is already using its CBDC to deny travel and educational opportunities to political dissidents. Canada seized the bank accounts and crypto accounts of nonviolent trucker protesters last winter.
These kinds of “social credit” systems and political suppression will be even easier to conduct when “Biden Bucks” are completely rolled out in the U.S. In fact, it’s already starting. If you have a PayPal account, you can see that I was not exaggerating.
Misinformation — or Facts?
On Oct. 8, PayPal released an update to its user agreement that included a clause allowing PayPal to fine its users $2,500 for using the service to spread “misinformation.” PayPal quickly retracted the update and said the misinformation clause had been included in error (isn’t it always?).
In truth, this was nothing but a foreshadowing of life under central bank digital currencies.
They want to surveil us all and take our money for holding the wrong views. China has shown the world that it can control the whole population this way. PayPal was designated to be the test case.
The management at PayPal considers misinformation to be anything they disagree with even if facts and science are on your side. Well, here are some facts…
The COVID vaccines are not real vaccines; they are experimental gene-modification therapies that do not stop you from getting infected and do not stop the spread if you do get infected.
Masks don’t work because the SARS-CoV-2 virus (that causes COVID) is only 1/5,000th the size of the weave. The virus goes right through the mask.
There is no climate emergency. There is evidence that the 2020 presidential election involved extensive irregularities, including cheating.
A Test Run for Biden Bucks
Those are all facts. But if you say them, PayPal treats them as misinformation and threatens your account balance. PayPal’s terms of service show that providing “false, inaccurate or misleading information” is still on the list of prohibitions in their Terms of Service.
Misleading according to whom? Not only does PayPal threaten free speech, but they also lie about the threat when challenged. If PayPal can punish its users for speaking their minds, who is to say that the government can’t do the same thing?
I believe that the PayPal announcement was a test run of a new system of financial surveillance that could be woven into a central bank digital currency.
That in turn could be deployed to copy China’s social credit system of political surveillance and control.
The government can’t be trusted to do much of anything correctly. How can you trust them to keep your money secure once you are forced to convert it to a traceable digital currency? What happens if that digital currency gets hacked?
The government certainly isn’t going to bail you out like it did with the elites in the banking and auto industries.
Safe and Secure? Really?
Hackers recently stole around $160 million worth of cryptocurrency from crypto market maker Wintermute. This incident is only the most recent in a long-growing list of large crypto thefts so far this year.
In June of this year, hackers looted about $100 million from a so-called cryptocurrency bridge, again exposing a key vulnerability in the digital-asset ecosystem.
According to a recent article from CNN, “In the first seven months of 2022, a staggering $1.9 billion worth of cryptocurrency was stolen in hacks of various services, marking a 60% increase from the same period in the year prior, according to a report released from blockchain analysis firm Chainalysis last month.”
Meanwhile, a Federal Reserve paper from January 2022 stated:
Threats to existing payment services — including operational disruptions and cybersecurity risks — would apply to a CBDC as well. Any dedicated infrastructure for a CBDC would need to be extremely resilient to such threats, and the operators of the CBDC infrastructure would need to remain vigilant as bad actors employ ever more sophisticated methods and tactics. Designing appropriate defenses for CBDC could be particularly difficult because a CBDC network could potentially have more entry points than existing payment services.
This part is truly terrifying:
Designing appropriate defenses for CBDC could be particularly difficult because a CBDC network could potentially have more entry points than existing payment services.
If bad actors can already hack crypto platforms with ease, what’s to stop them from hacking a CBDC network with more entry points?
What could this mean for you and your life savings? How can you protect your finances from being hacked by bad actors?
Fact-Checking the Fact-Checkers
The Associated Press recently tried to fact-check me, saying that my claims are false, that the digital dollar has nothing to do with social control or the elimination of cash. The whole project is completely innocent and you can trust the government.
Yeah, OK. And I’ve got a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you!
Even the general manager of the Bank for International Settlements, which is known as the “central bank of central banks,” has admitted that CBDCs would give central banks “absolute control” of everyone’s money — and the “technology to enforce that.”
Who should you pay more attention to, some hack with the mainstream media who really has no idea what he’s talking about, or a true banking insider who knows exactly how the system would work?
Even The Economist has announced the rise of government-backed digital currencies, warning they will “shift power from individuals to the state.”
The Economist isn’t known for engaging in conspiracy theories.
You might not be able to fight back easily in the world of “Biden Bucks,” but there is one nondigital, nonhackable, nontraceable form of money you can still get your hands on.
It’s called gold.
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>>> Even After $100 Billion, Self-Driving Cars Are Going Nowhere
They were supposed to be the future. But prominent detractors—including Anthony Levandowski, who pioneered the industry—are getting louder as the losses get bigger.
Bloomberg
By Max Chafkin
October 6, 2022
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2022-10-06/even-after-100-billion-self-driving-cars-are-going-nowhere?utm_campaign=bw&utm_medium=distro&utm_source=yahooUS
The first car woke Jennifer King at 2 a.m. with a loud, high-pitched hum. “It sounded like a hovercraft,” she says, and that wasn’t the weird part. King lives on a dead-end street at the edge of the Presidio, a 1,500-acre park in San Francisco where through traffic isn’t a thing. Outside she saw a white Jaguar SUV backing out of her driveway. It had what looked like a giant fan on its roof—a laser sensor—and bore the logo of Google’s driverless car division, Waymo.
She was observing what looked like a glitch in the self-driving software: The car seemed to be using her property to execute a three-point turn. This would’ve been no biggie, she says, if it had happened once. But dozens of Google cars began doing the exact thing, many times, every single day.
King complained to Google that the cars were driving her nuts, but the K-turns kept coming. Sometimes a few of the SUVs would show up at the same time and form a little line, like an army of zombie driver’s-ed students. The whole thing went on for weeks until last October, when King called the local CBS affiliate and a news crew broadcast the scene. “It is kind of funny when you watch it,” the report began. “And the neighbors are certainly noticing.” Soon after, King’s driveway was hers again.
Waymo disputes that its tech failed and said in a statement that its vehicles had been “obeying the same road rules that any car is required to follow.” The company, like its peers in Silicon Valley and Detroit, has characterized incidents like this as isolated, potholes on the road to a steering-wheel-free future. Over the course of more than a decade, flashy demos from companies including Google, GM, Ford, Tesla, and Zoox have promised cars capable of piloting themselves through chaotic urban landscapes, on highways, and in extreme weather without any human input or oversight. The companies have suggested they’re on the verge of eliminating road fatalities, rush-hour traffic, and parking lots, and of upending the $2 trillion global automotive industry.
It all sounds great until you encounter an actual robo-taxi in the wild. Which is rare: Six years after companies started offering rides in what they’ve called autonomous cars and almost 20 years after the first self-driving demos, there are vanishingly few such vehicles on the road. And they tend to be confined to a handful of places in the Sun Belt, because they still can’t handle weather patterns trickier than Partly Cloudy. State-of-the-art robot cars also struggle with construction, animals, traffic cones, crossing guards, and what the industry calls “unprotected left turns,” which most of us would call “left turns.”
The industry says its Derek Zoolander problem applies only to lefts that require navigating oncoming traffic. (Great.) It’s devoted enormous resources to figuring out left turns, but the work continues. Earlier this year, Cruise LLC—majority-owned by General Motors Co.—recalled all of its self-driving vehicles after one car’s inability to turn left contributed to a crash in San Francisco that injured two people. Aaron McLear, a Cruise spokesman, says the recall “does not impact or change our current on-road operations.” Cruise is planning to expand to Austin and Phoenix this year. “We’ve moved the timeline to the left for what might be the first time in AV history,” McLear says.
Cruise didn’t release the video of that accident, but there’s an entire social media genre featuring self-driving cars that become hopelessly confused. When the results are less serious, they can be funny as hell. In one example, a Waymo car gets so flummoxed by a traffic cone that it drives away from the technician sent out to rescue it. In another, an entire fleet of modified Chevrolet Bolts show up at an intersection and simply stop, blocking traffic with a whiff of Maximum Overdrive. In a third, a Tesla drives, at very slow speed, straight into the tail of a private jet.
This, it seems, is the best the field can do after investors have bet something like $100 billion, according to a McKinsey & Co. report. While the industry’s biggest names continue to project optimism, the emerging consensus is that the world of robo-taxis isn’t just around the next unprotected left—that we might have to wait decades longer, or an eternity.
“It’s a scam,” says George Hotz, whose company Comma.ai Inc. makes a driver-assistance system similar to Tesla Inc.’s Autopilot. “These companies have squandered tens of billions of dollars.” In 2018 analysts put the market value of Waymo LLC, then a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc., at $175 billion. Its most recent funding round gave the company an estimated valuation of $30 billion, roughly the same as Cruise. Aurora Innovation Inc., a startup co-founded by Chris Urmson, Google’s former autonomous-vehicle chief, has lost more than 85% since last year and is now worth less than $3 billion. This September a leaked memo from Urmson summed up Aurora’s cash-flow struggles and suggested it might have to sell out to a larger company. Many of the industry’s most promising efforts have met the same fate in recent years, including Drive.ai, Voyage, Zoox, and Uber’s self-driving division. “Long term, I think we will have autonomous vehicles that you and I can buy,” says Mike Ramsey, an analyst at market researcher Gartner Inc. “But we’re going to be old.”
Our driverless future is starting to look so distant that even some of its most fervent believers have turned apostate. Chief among them is Anthony Levandowski, the engineer who more or less created the model for self-driving research and was, for more than a decade, the field’s biggest star. Now he’s running a startup that’s developing autonomous trucks for industrial sites, and he says that for the foreseeable future, that’s about as much complexity as any driverless vehicle will be able to handle. “You’d be hard-pressed to find another industry that’s invested so many dollars in R&D and that has delivered so little,” Levandowski says in an interview. “Forget about profits—what’s the combined revenue of all the robo-taxi, robo-truck, robo-whatever companies? Is it a million dollars? Maybe. I think it’s more like zero.”
In some ways, Levandowski is about as biased a party as anyone could be. His ride on top of the driverless wave ended in ignominy, after he moved from Google to Uber Technologies Inc. and his old bosses sued the crap out of his new ones for, they said, taking proprietary research along with him. The multibillion-dollar lawsuit and federal criminal case got Levandowski fired, forced him into bankruptcy, and ended with his conviction for stealing trade secrets. He only avoided prison thanks to a presidential pardon from Donald Trump.
On the other hand, Levandowski is also acknowledged, even by his detractors, as a pioneer in the industry and the person most responsible for turning driverless cars from a science project into something approaching a business. Eighteen years ago he wowed the Pentagon with a kinda-sorta-driverless motorcycle. That project turned into Google’s driverless Prius, which pushed dozens of others to start self-driving car programs. In 2017, Levandowski founded a religion called the Way of the Future, centered on the idea that AI was becoming downright godlike.
What shattered his faith? He says that in the years after his defenestration from Uber, he began to compare the industry’s wild claims to what seemed like an obvious lack of progress with no obvious path forward. “It wasn’t a business, it was a hobby,” he says. Levandowski maintains that somebody, eventually, will figure out how to reliably get robots to turn left, and all the rest of it. “We’re going to get there at some point. But we have such a long way to go.”
For the companies that invested billions in the driverless future that was supposed to be around the next corner, “We’ll get there when we get there” isn’t an acceptable answer. The industry that grew up around Levandowski’s ideas can’t just reverse course like all those Google cars outside Jennifer King’s bedroom. And the companies that bet it all on those ideas might very well be stuck in a dead end.
All self-driving car demos are more or less the same. You ride in the back seat and watch the steering wheel move on its own while a screen shows you what the computer is “seeing.” On the display, little red or green boxes hover perfectly over every car, bike, jaywalker, stoplight, etc. you pass. All this input feels subliminal when you’re driving your own car, but on a readout that looks like a mix between the POVs of the Terminator and the Predator, it’s overwhelming. It makes driving feel a lot more dangerous, like something that might well be better left to machines. The car companies know this, which is why they do it. Amping up the baseline tension of a drive makes their software’s screw-ups seem like less of an outlier, and the successes all the more remarkable.
One of the industry’s favorite maxims is that humans are terrible drivers. This may seem intuitive to anyone who’s taken the Cross Bronx Expressway home during rush hour, but it’s not even close to true. Throw a top-of-the-line robot at any difficult driving task, and you’ll be lucky if the robot lasts a few seconds before crapping out.
“Humans are really, really good drivers—absurdly good,” Hotz says. Traffic deaths are rare, amounting to one person for every 100 million miles or so driven in the US, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Even that number makes people seem less capable than they actually are. Fatal accidents are largely caused by reckless behavior—speeding, drunks, texters, and people who fall asleep at the wheel. As a group, school bus drivers are involved in one fatal crash roughly every 500 million miles. Although most of the accidents reported by self-driving cars have been minor, the data suggest that autonomous cars have been involved in accidents more frequently than human-driven ones, with rear-end collisions being especially common. “The problem is that there isn’t any test to know if a driverless car is safe to operate,” says Ramsey, the Gartner analyst. “It’s mostly just anecdotal.”
Waymo, the market leader, said last year that it had driven more than 20 million miles over about a decade. That means its cars would have to drive an additional 25 times their total before we’d be able to say, with even a vague sense of certainty, that they cause fewer deaths than bus drivers. The comparison is likely skewed further because the company has done much of its testing in sunny California and Arizona.
“You think the computer can see everything and can understand what’s going to happen next. But computers are still really dumb”
For now, here’s what we know: Computers can run calculations a lot faster than we can, but they still have no idea how to process many common roadway variables. People driving down a city street with a few pigeons pecking away near the median know (a) that the pigeons will fly away as the car approaches and (b) that drivers behind them also know the pigeons will scatter. Drivers know, without having to think about it, that slamming the brakes wouldn’t just be unnecessary—it would be dangerous. So they maintain their speed.
What the smartest self-driving car “sees,” on the other hand, is a small obstacle. It doesn’t know where the obstacle came from or where it may go, only that the car is supposed to safely avoid obstacles, so it might respond by hitting the brakes. The best-case scenario is a small traffic jam, but braking suddenly could cause the next car coming down the road to rear-end it. Computers deal with their shortcomings through repetition, meaning that if you showed the same pigeon scenario to a self-driving car enough times, it might figure out how to handle it reliably. But it would likely have no idea how to deal with slightly different pigeons flying a slightly different way.
The industry uses the phrase “deep learning” to describe this process, but that makes it sound more sophisticated than it is. “What deep learning is doing is something similar to memorization,” says Gary Marcus, a New York University psychology professor who studies artificial intelligence and the limits of self-driving vehicles. “It only works if the situations are sufficiently akin.”
And the range of these “edge cases,” as AI experts call them, is virtually infinite. Think: cars cutting across three lanes of traffic without signaling, or bicyclists doing the same, or a deer ambling alongside the shoulder, or a low-flying plane, or an eagle, or a drone. Even relatively easy driving problems turn out to contain an untold number of variations depending on weather, road conditions, and human behavior. “You think roads are pretty similar from one place to the next,” Marcus says. “But the world is a complicated place. Every unprotected left is a little different.”
Self-driving companies have fallen back on shortcuts. In lieu of putting more cars on the road for longer, they run simulations inside giant data centers, add those “drives” to their total mile counts, and use them to make claims about safety. Simulations might help with some well-defined scenarios such as left turns, but they can’t manufacture edge cases. In the meantime the companies are relying on pesky humans for help navigating higher-order problems. All use remote operators to help vehicles that run into trouble, as well as safety drivers—“autonomous specialists,” Waymo calls them—who ride inside some cars to take over if there’s a problem.
To Levandowski, who rigged up his first self-driving vehicle in 2004, the most advanced driverless-car companies are all still running what amount to very sophisticated demos. And demos, as he well knows, are misleading by design. “It’s an illusion,” he says: For every successful demo, there might be dozens of failed ones. And whereas you only need to see a person behind the wheel for a few minutes to judge if they can drive or not, computers don’t work that way. If a self-driving car successfully navigates a route, there’s no guarantee it can do so the 20th time, or even the second.
In 2008, Levandowski kludged together his first self-driving Prius, which conducted what the industry widely recognizes as the first successful test of an autonomous vehicle on public streets. (The event was recorded for posterity on a Discovery Channel show called Prototype This!) Levandowski was aware of how controlled the environment was: The car was given an extremely wide berth as it made its way from downtown San Francisco across the Bay Bridge and onto Treasure Island, because there was a 16-vehicle motorcade protecting it from other cars and vice versa. The car did scrape a wall on its way off the bridge, yet he says he couldn’t help but feel amazed that it had all basically worked. “You saw that, and you were like, ‘OK, it’s a demo and there are a lot of things to work on,’?” he recalls. “But, like, we were almost there. We just needed to make it a little better.”
For most of the years since he built his first “Pribot,” Levandowski says, it’s felt as though he and his competitors were 90% of the way to full-blown robot cars. Executives he later worked with at Google and Uber were all too happy to insist that the science was already there, that his prototypes could already handle any challenge, that all that was left was “going commercial.” They threw around wild claims that investors, including the Tesla bull Cathie Wood, built into models to calculate that the industry would be worth trillions.
Once again, this was a bit of self-hypnosis, Levandowski says. The demos with the sci-fi computer vision led him and his colleagues to believe they and their computers were thinking more similarly than they really were. “You see these amazing representations of the 3D world, and you think the computer can see everything and can understand what’s going to happen next,” he says. “But computers are still really dumb.”
In the view of Levandowski and many of the brightest minds in AI, the underlying technology isn’t just a few years’ worth of refinements away from a resolution. Autonomous driving, they say, needs a fundamental breakthrough that allows computers to quickly use humanlike intuition rather than learning solely by rote. That is to say, Google engineers might spend the rest of their lives puttering around San Francisco and Phoenix without showing that their technology is safer than driving the old-fashioned way.
In some ways the self-driving future seemed closest and most assured in 2017, after Levandowski went to Uber and Google sued them. Google accused Levandowski of taking a work laptop home, downloading its contents, and using that information to jump-start his work at Uber. (Although he doesn’t deny the laptop part, he’s long disputed that its contents found their way into anything Uber built.) The lawsuit was destabilizing but also validating in a way. Google’s $1.8 billion claim for damages suggested it had done the math based on just how imminent the fortunes to be made from driverless technology were. “People were playing for this trillion-dollar prize of automating all transportation,” Levandowski says. “And if you think it’s really just a year away, you take the gloves off.”
Uber had promised to defend Levandowski if he was sued, but it fired him in May 2017, and he faced an arbitration claim in which Google sought to recoup hundreds of millions of dollars. During the 2018 trial, with Google struggling to prove Uber had used its trade secrets, the company settled with Uber. It got about $250 million in Uber stock, a fraction of what it had initially sought, plus a promise that the ride-hailing company wouldn’t use Google’s driverless technology.
The fallout continued for Levandowski in 2019, when federal prosecutors announced that a grand jury had indicted him on 33 counts of trade secrets theft. Soon after, the deal his new company, Pronto.ai, had been negotiating with a truck manufacturer—to try out Pronto’s more modest driver-assist feature for trucks—fell apart. “It turns out a federal indictment does cramp your style,” he says. An arbitration panel also ordered him to pay Google $179 million. He stepped down as Pronto’s chief executive officer, turned the company over to its chief safety officer, Robbie Miller, and declared bankruptcy. As part of a deal with prosecutors, in exchange for the dismissal of the other 32 counts, Levandowski pleaded guilty to one and was sentenced to 18 months in federal prison in August 2020. Because of the pandemic, the sentence was delayed long enough that he never served a day before his pardon, which came on the last day of the Trump presidency.
According to a White House press release at the time, the pardon’s advocates included Trump megadonor Peter Thiel and a half-dozen Thiel allies, including Arizona Senate candidate Blake Masters and Oculus founder Palmer Luckey. Levandowski says that he and Thiel have some mutual friends who spoke up for him but that they never talked until after the pardon was announced. He says he doesn’t know why Thiel took up his cause, but Thiel’s antipathy for Google is legendary, and pardoning Levandowski would’ve been an opportunity to stick a thumb in the company’s eye. Earlier this year, Levandowski reached a settlement with Uber and Google over the $179 million judgment that will allow him to emerge from bankruptcy.
The idea that the secret to self-driving was hidden on Levandowski’s laptop has come to seem less credible over time. A year after Uber fired him, one of its self-driving cars killed a pedestrian in Phoenix. (The safety driver was charged with negligent homicide and has pleaded not guilty; Uber suspended testing its cars on public roads and added additional safety measures before resuming testing. The company was never charged.) Uber sold its self-driving unit to Aurora, the now-struggling upstart, in 2020, when times were better. In September, Waymo claimed, based on the results of a simulation, that its vehicles are safer in some circumstances than humans. Back in the real world, the safety figures are much less conclusive, and Waymo is basically where it was five years ago. (Waymo disputes this.)
Levandowski says his skepticism of the industry started around 2018. It was a little more than a year after Elon Musk unveiled a demo of a Tesla driving itself to the tune of Paint It Black. Levandowski checked the official road-test data that Tesla submitted to California regulators. The figures showed that, in that time, the number of autonomous miles Tesla had driven on public roads in the state totaled—wait for it—zero. (Tesla hasn’t reported any autonomous miles traveled in California since 2019. The company didn’t respond to a request for comment.) Although Levandowski says he admires Tesla, is impressed by its driver-assistance technology, and believes it may one day produce a truly self-driving car, he says the lack of progress by Musk and his peers forced him to question the point of his own years in the field. “Why are we driving around, testing technology and creating additional risks, without actually delivering anything of value?” he asks.
While Tesla has argued that its current system represents a working prototype, Musk has continued to blur the lines between demos and reality. On Sept. 30 he unveiled what looked like a barely functional robot, promising it would unleash “a fundamental transformation of civilization as we know it.” Six years after it began selling “full self-driving” capabilities, Tesla has yet to deliver a driverless car. Levandowski, for his part, has been spending time in gravel pits.
For more than 100 years, mining companies have been blasting rocks out of the hills near Santa Rosa, Calif., and crushing them into gravel bound for driveways, roads, and drains. Levandowski sometimes refers to Mark West Quarry, where Pronto has been operating its driverless trucks since last December, as a “sandbox,” and it’s easy to see why. The dusty mine features life-size versions of the Tonka toys you’d find in a child’s playroom. Yellow excavators knock enormous boulders down from a terraced cliffside into the mining pit, where front-end loaders pick up the stones and place them in 50-ton dump trucks to be carried to the crusher. “An 8-year-old boy’s dream,” Levandowski says as the boulders rattle through the crusher, which spits the smaller pieces out onto piles.
The mine work started as a sort of backup plan—a way to bring in revenue while Pronto got trucking companies comfortable with using its driver-assistance technology in their long-haul semis. Now, Levandowski says, construction sites are Plan A. Pronto took the same basic system it had used on the semis and built it into a self-driving dump truck, adding cameras, radar, and an onboard computer. Because connectivity is spotty at mine sites, the company created its own networking technology, which it spun off as a separate company, Pollen Mobile LLC. “With mining we’re doing driverless, but controlling the environment,” says Pronto Chief Technology Officer Cat Culkin. BoDean Co., the company that owns Mark West Quarry, is one of a half-dozen clients that pay installation fees to retrofit dump trucks with sensors, plus hourly fees for use. Neither Levandowski nor BoDean will say how much Pronto charges or how much it’s taking in.
Here’s his new vision of the self-driving future: For nine-ish hours each day, two modified Bell articulated end-dumps take turns driving the 200 yards from the pit to the crusher. The road is rutted, steep, narrow, requiring the trucks to nearly scrape the cliff wall as they rattle down the roller-coaster-like grade. But it’s the same exact trip every time, with no edge cases—no rush hour, no school crossings, no daredevil scooter drivers—and instead of executing an awkward multipoint turn before dumping their loads, the robot trucks back up the hill in reverse, speeding each truck’s reloading. Anthony Boyle, BoDean’s director of production, says the Pronto trucks save four to five hours of labor a day, freeing up drivers to take over loaders and excavators. Otherwise, he says, nothing has changed. “It’s just yellow equipment doing its thing, and you stay out of its way.”
Levandowski recognizes that making rock quarries a little more efficient is a bit of a comedown from his dreams of giant fleets of robotic cars. His company plans to start selling its software for long-haul trucks in 2023. And hopefully, in a few decades, all his old boasts will come true: driverless cities with cushy commutes, zero road fatalities, and totally safe road naps. But for now: “I want to do something that’s real, even if that means scaling back the grandiose visions.”
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>>> Transplant of human brain tissue into rats could help study autism, other disorders
The approach is expected to prompt new research into epilepsy, schizophrenia and intellectual disabilities
Washington Post
By Mark Johnson
October 12, 2022
https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2022/10/12/brain-tissue-rats-stanford/
Stanford scientists transplanted human brain cells into the brain of a rat. The light flickering on and off shows the human cells as they work inside the brain.
In work that could boost our understanding of brain disorders and enable discovery of new drugs to treat them, researchers at Stanford University School of Medicine transplanted human brain tissue into rats, where it became a functional part of their brains.
Their study, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, took seven years to complete and involved extensive ethical discussions about animal welfare and other issues. The study’s most immediate applications will involve research into conditions such as autism, epilepsy, schizophrenia and intellectual disabilities.
The implanted human brain tissue was created in the lab using a technique that allows scientists to change skin cells into the equivalent of embryonic stem cells — the cells from which all others develop as the embryo grows. In the lab, scientists can nudge these cells down the developmental pathway, growing them into any one of the 200 or so types of cells in the human body.
Researchers created clumps of these cells that resemble parts of the brain. The clumps, known as organoids, resembled the cerebral cortex, the outermost layer of the brain associated with some of its most advanced processes, including language, memory, thought, learning, decision-making, emotion, intelligence and personality.
Using syringes, the scientists injected the human brain tissue into the brains of rat pups two to three days old. Rat brain cells then migrated to the human tissue and formed connections, incorporating the human cells in their brain’s machinery.
“We don’t remove that part of the rat brain. Essentially what happens is that the rat tissue is pushed aside,” said Sergiu Pasca, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford, who led the study.
The human brain tissue measured roughly one-fifth of an inch when transplanted, but it expanded and by six months accounted for about one-third of the hemisphere of the rat’s brain. The brain is organized into two hemispheres, right and left, each responsible for different functions.
Deep inside the rat’s brain, human and rat cells connected in the thalamus, the area critical for sleep, consciousness, learning, memory and processing information from all of the senses, except for smell.
“Overall, I think this approach is a step forward for the field, and offers a new way to understand disorders” that involve the malfunction of brain cells, said Madeline A. Lancaster, a group leader at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England, who did not participate in the study.
“Ethically, there may be concerns about animal welfare, and so just like all animal experimentation, the benefits should always be weighed against the risks to the animal,” Lancaster said. “But I do not have any concerns around whether the human transplants would cause the animal to become more ‘human,’ since the size of these transplants are small and their overall organization is still lacking.”
Pasca said researchers had extensive discussions with ethicists about animal welfare in preparation for the experiments. He said the rats in the study displayed no signs of anxiety, nor was there evidence they suffered pain or seizures.
Japanese stem cell pioneer Yoshiki Sasai is credited with developing the first neural organoid in 2008, but these have had limited impact because they lacked the system of vessels that carries blood throughout the body, Lancaster said. This deficit caused the organoid cells to become stressed and die.
“This study overcomes this limitation by transplanting organoids into the rat brain where the organoids can become vascularised,” Lancaster said. “The result is much more mature” structures, connections and activity from the transplanted tissue inside the rat.
In one experiment, the Stanford team took skin cells from a person with a rare genetic condition called Timothy syndrome, which has some of the characteristics of autism and epilepsy and has been diagnosed in fewer than 100 people worldwide. Using the ability to change skin cells into other types of cells, researchers created brain organoids from the patient and implanted them into one side of the rat’s brain.
For comparison, they transplanted organoids from a healthy person into the other side of the same rat’s brain. They discovered that after five to six months, the Timothy syndrome cells were smaller and involved in very different electrical activity than the healthy brain cells.
“I’m not entirely surprised by the findings, but it’s super cool,” said Bennett Novitch, a member of the Broad Center of Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at the University of California at Los Angeles, who was not involved in the study. In 2021, Novitch and colleagues developed organoids that produced brain waves, the electrical pulses that brain cells use to communicate with one another.
He said the Stanford scientists showed that human brain organoids could not only be integrated into the rat brain, but also used to change the animal’s behavior.
In a complex experiment, they created clumps of human brain cells that had been customized so that individual neurons could be switched on by a specific frequency of blue laser light. Those clumps were then injected into rat brains, and after three months the scientists threaded ultrathin fiber-optic cables into the rat brains so the researchers could beam in blue light.
The rats were placed in glass boxes with a water spout. The researchers then conditioned the rats to expect water only after their brains had received a pulse of blue light. The rats grew to associate the blue light with receiving water, showing that the implanted human cells were now involved in the complex reward-seeking machinery inside their brains.
“This is very difficult experimentation to do,” Novitch said.
He noted, however, that using rats implanted with human brain tissue for testing drugs would work for small studies but not for pharmaceutical companies because of the speed and scale required.
Pasca said he hopes to teach other researchers to use his group’s techniques to study different brain disorders.
“There are enough problems in neuroscience to solve to last for many years to come,” he said. “The challenge of understanding psychiatric disorders is immense.”
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>>> Warren Buffett supported driverless trucks. Now they are real.
Financial News Today
by Mario Ziegler
8-25-22
https://funancial.news/analysis-warren-buffett-supported-driverless-trucks-now-they-are-real/
Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. didn’t get fame for investing in startups. The reputable investor has a tendency to buy time-tested businesses such as an oil company, a railroad or an insurer that bet on the stable and profitable growth of the US economy.
Buffett shied away from technology stocks for years before stepping down with Apple Inc., which was already as deeply woven into the fabric of the economy as Occidental Petroleum Corp, BNSF Railway Company or Geico. It was no surprise that Buffett avoided the SPAC and NFT craze. His longtime business partner, Charlie Munger, railed in February against “tragic excesses” in both venture capital and cryptocurrencies.
That’s why investors should especially note that Pilot Company, which operates Pilot and Flying J Travel Center and is owned by Berkshire Hathaway, on Tuesday agreed to pick up a stake in Kodiak Robotics Inc., a driverless truck startup. The pilot will get one of the Kodiaq’s five board seats. Although the investment amount and ownership percentage in Kodiaq were not disclosed, Pilot is now the largest strategic investor in the startup.
This investment is a significant recognition, through a pilot by Berkshire Hathaway, that driverless trucks are on the verge of becoming a reality. It can be hard and even scary to imagine that an 18-wheeled vehicle with no human occupants humming along the highway with passenger cars. It can happen faster than people think.
Kodiaq already operates trucks with a security driver on routes between six cities, including Dallas and Atlanta. In a few years, Kodiaq hopes to take that safety driver out of the cab and operate fully autonomous large cargo trucks. Several other startups are also chasing the driverless dream.
Embark Technology Inc., Aurora Innovation Inc., Tusimple Holdings Inc. And all others are testing autonomous truck technology on the highway. Aurora has said it expects to start operating without a driver early next year. Aurora and Embark went public through special purpose acquisition companies, while TuSimple made a traditional initial public offering. All three have performed disappointingly and are down over 75% since the first trade.
Kodiaq, which has investors including tiremaker Bridgestone Corp and BMW’s Venture Fund, is working with Pilot to build an autonomous truckport in Atlanta that will provide services such as refueling, inspection and maintenance for Kodiaq’s driverless trucks. The Pilot’s truck stop will also serve as a meeting point outside large urban areas where a driverless truck will drop off a trailer that will be picked up by the truck and accompanied by a driver to navigate city traffic.
Driverless truck companies all argue that their technology will make bigger rigs safer for American highways. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, this is a low bar considering that 159,000 people were injured in accidents of big trucks in 2019 and 5,600 people died in such accidents in 2021. The market is also needed. The American Trucking Association estimates that there are fewer than 80,000 truck drivers in the US, and the shortage is concentrated in long-distance trucking that keeps drivers away from their homes for days and even weeks. Those are the long haul low-hanging fruit for autonomous trucks to take on.
If one of Buffett’s companies is getting into this new technology, don’t be surprised that driverless trucks will also be a mainstay of the American economy in a decade or two.
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>>> Amazon is buying robot vacuum company iRobot for $1.7 billion
ZD Net
by Sabrina Ortiz
Aug. 5, 2022
https://www.zdnet.com/home-and-office/kitchen-household/amazon-is-buying-robot-vacuum-company-irobot-in-a-1-7-billion-dollar-deal/
Amazon is buying robot vacuum cleaner company iRobot in a deal valued at approximately $1.7 billion.
iRobot is best known for the Roomba, the autonomous vacuum cleaner that finds its way around household obstacles to vacuum floors completely on its own. It also makes robot mop devices, too.
Colin Angle, CEO of iRobot, says Amazon was the perfect fit for the company. "Amazon shares our passion for building thoughtful innovations that empower people to do more at home, and I cannot think of a better place for our team to continue our mission. I'm hugely excited to be a part of Amazon and to see what we can build together for customers in the years ahead," he said. He will remain as CEO once the transaction is completed.
Dave Limp, SVP of Amazon Devices, said that Amazon recognizes how much iRobot has done to make people's lives easier.
"Over many years, the iRobot team has proven its ability to reinvent how people clean with products that are incredibly practical and inventive—from cleaning when and where customers want while avoiding common obstacles in the home, to automatically emptying the collection bin," said Limp in the release. "Customers love iRobot products—and I'm excited to work with the iRobot team to invent in ways that make customers' lives easier and more enjoyable."
iRobot far from the first company Amazon has acquired to expand its smart home portfolio. In the last five years, Amazon acquired Blink Home, the security camera company, for an undisclosed amount and Ring, the camera doorbell company, for approximately one billion dollars. These acquisitions allowed the company to add security devices to its smart home ecosystem.
Amazon has been a leader in the smart home space with their Alexa Smart home technology, which allows you to control everything from lighting to security to televisions and thermostats with the sound of your voice.
iRobot and Amazon already had established a relationship when they partnered to make the Roomba and Braava jet robots compatible with Alexa in 2021. This partnership allowed customers to use voice commands to tell the robots to start or stop cleaning and to go back to its home base.
Meanwhile iRobot reported revenues of $455.4 million and a net loss of $31.5 million due to supply chain constraints in the fourth quarter of FY 2021. The company also said that it sold its 40 millionth robot during the final quarter of 2021.
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>>> Palantir Technologies Inc. (PLTR) builds and deploys software platforms for the intelligence community in the United States to assist in counterterrorism investigations and operations. The company provides palantir gotham, a software platform which enables users to identify patterns hidden deep within datasets, ranging from signals intelligence sources to reports from confidential informants, as well as facilitates the handoff between analysts and operational users, helping operators plan and execute real-world responses to threats that have been identified within the platform. It also offers palantir foundry, a platform that transforms the ways organizations operate by creating a central operating system for their data; and allows individual users to integrate and analyze the data they need in one place. In addition, it provides apollo, a software that enables customers to deploy their own software virtually in any environment. Palantir Technologies Inc. was incorporated in 2003 and is based in Denver, Colorado.
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>>> Big data from cars is a ‘multibillion’ dollar opportunity: Narrative CEO
Yahoo Finance
by Pras Subramanian
April 21, 2022
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/narrative-ceo-big-data-from-cars-is-a-multibillion-dollar-opportunity-182532343.html
At the New York Auto Show this week, car fans, journalists, and industry watchers were treated to a feast for the eyes, with all the new car designs and plush interiors on display.
Under the skin of these cars, however, is a different beast — and it’s not the engine. It’s all the data these cars generate.
McKinsey estimates a car produces around 25 gigabytes of data per hour, which is an astounding amount. And this data is worth big money.
“The car has really turned into a modern computer and one that many people use as often as their regular computers,” Narrative CEO Nick Jordan says in an interview with Yahoo Finance from the floor of the New York Auto Show. Narrative is a data commerce platform that helps companies buy and sell data from each other, and helps optimize the data’s value. Jordan likes to say data is the “new oil.”
“[The automakers are] evolving their business to think of it as a data collection mechanism and then figuring out ways to use that data, everything from the direct monetization of the data, to providing better in-car experiences, and then even working with partners like insurance companies to build a— you know, a more vibrant ecosystem,” Jordan says.
The data itself is worth something, but it can be worth a lot more if the automakers know how to exploit it. Jordan says it's a combination of collecting the data, and commercializing it to get to real value.
“In the earlier stages, where [the automakers] have a limited number of sensors, they're doing limited data collection, it's probably about $100 over the lifetime of a car,” Jordan says. “As they get better, estimates go up to about $700 over the lifetime of a car, and so if you're selling tens of millions of cars, you know, it's a multibillion opportunity and industry for them.”
Of course some companies are doing data collection better versus the traditional automakers. Jordan says Tesla (TSLA) is one of them.
“Look at how Tesla upgrades people,” Jordan says when referring to new driving modes like Full Self Driving or Ludicrous mode. “Part of that is actually based on the driving behaviors of the people in the car to know that their specific driving patterns may lend itself to someone that wants to drive faster, or have more horsepower on a moment's notice.”
Which brings us to subscriptions. Believe it or not, cars now and in the future may ask you whether you’d like to, say, have navigation services that you can pay on a monthly basis and cancel anytime. This may come in handy for someone who won't be driving for an extended period of time.
This is already happening right now, with Cadillac (GM) offering its Supercruise driver assist technology as a subscription service. Tesla is doing the same with Full Self Driving.
“Adobe (ADBE) has done this famously,” Jordan says when discussing a Adobe’s Photoshop software that went for full upfront pricing to a subscription service. Jordan believes this is where automakers can learn something from big tech’s subscription pricing model.
“What's interesting is, well, that's obviously more valuable for Adobe,” Jordan says. “Their customers actually love it because now they can turn it on and turn it off based on when they're actually going to use the product.”
There is a dark side to big data — and that is privacy and exploitation of data that users may consider their property. Here is where the automakers must tread carefully, Jordan says.
“I think the first rule there is 'do no harm,'” Jordan says. “Make it apparent to the customers what data is being collected and how it's being used, and ultimately adding value for the customer, right? If you can give them something they want that is dependent on the data, then that becomes a symbiotic relationship versus, you know, one entity taking something from the other entity.”
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>>> Smart cities of the future: eco-utopia or dystopian nightmare?
Set to be the world's most connected and sustainable expo, Expo 2020 claims to be a blueprint for future cities. Other smart city projects from Asia to Africa have similar visions, but will they live up to promises of urban utopia?
Eco Business
By Zafirah Zein
March 2, 2020
https://www.eco-business.com/news/smart-cities-of-the-future-eco-utopia-or-dystopian-nightmare/
New York, once the blueprint of a global, modern city, consumes a whopping 5 billion litres of water a day, according to Cedrik Neike, chief executive of smart infrastructure at Siemens.
“That’s twenty times the energy or resources used by an urban dweller in Jakarta. It’s a major urbanisation issue if everyone in cities had the same ambition to live as prosperously as a New Yorker,” Neike told journalists at the media launch of this year’s world expo, Expo 2020 Dubai, which the German technology conglomerate will digitalise from the ground up via Internet of Things (IoT) technology.
If we want smart cities, we need to double down on rail transit
“We need to think of how we can live more sustainably in cities, while providing people with access to resources that will allow them to live safely and comfortably,” he added, noting that most urban dwellers today spent 90 per cent of their lives in buildings, making the built environment a prime area to revolutionise with digital technology.
According to the team behind Expo 2020, this year’s world exhibition serves as a new prototype for future cities, where IoT and smart-city technologies will be integrated into the urban landscape to improve the performance of services such as energy, transportation and utilities.
From waste management systems that can detect when bins are reaching full capacity to weather data applications that can predict the likelihood of a sandstorm, Siemens applications will be used at Expo 2020 to not only prepare for weather and waste but enhance the comfort and energy performance across all buildings and structures.
The rise of smart cities
Cities today consume two-thirds of the world’s resources, and by 2050, two-thirds of the global population is expected to live in urban areas. In order to accommodate this growth sustainably, the smart city has thus been hailed as a solution to the many problems suffered by existing cities, such as crippling traffic congestion, hazardous air pollution and burgeoning waste.
According to data from the International Data Corporation, governments worldwide are looking to spend close to $200 billion on smart city initiatives by 2023 to improve sustainability, maximise efficiency and reduce energy usage in cities.
Enhancing the well-being of people living in cities while minimising the impact of urban infrastructure on the planet is the driving factor behind the smart construction of the 4.38 square kilometre Expo 2020 site.
Set to open in October, Expo 2020 is an actual blueprint for a future city called District 2020, which will comprise both residential and commercial spaces. Major structures built for the expo will remain as permanent fixtures, and repurposed into innovation, cultural and educational services once the expo ends in 2021.
District 2020 promises to be the city of the future, but is not the first to claim itself a leader in the new era of sustainable urbanism. Today, smart cities are all the rage, and visions of techno-utopia have sprouted across Asia, Africa and the Middle East.
In the United Arab Emirates, developers behind The Sustainable City have transformed a once barren desert strip to a compact green city, where homes are fitted with solar panels, the streets are car-free and urban garden domes encourage residents to grow and eat local.
The Sustainable City in Dubai, developed by Diamond Developers, features efficient appliances and car-free zones in its residential and commercial units. Image: The Sustainable City
Songdo City in South Korea has a similar image of clean and green living, where rubbish trucks are nowhere in sight and trash is automatically sucked out of homes and into an underground sorting centre to be recycled, buried or burned.
“In developing regions, Asia and Africa in particular, cities are still expanding incredibly fast and the latest smart technologies are an opportunity for new development,” said Dominique Bonte, vice president of technology research company ABI Research.
According to Swiss Bank UBS’ chief investment office, Asia’s smart city market could reach $800 billion in 2025, with China leading the smart city expansion.
“Although building cities from scratch does take space away from open, public areas, they allow for infrastructure to be built in a more sustainable way with a lower carbon footprint and very minimal impact on the environment,” Bonte said, adding that while old cities can be upgraded incrementally, they will “never be as sustainable as new developments.”
“For developing countries, smart technologies offer the opportunity to leapfrog traditional challenges by optimising planning and design to meet the unique needs of local residents, and by facilitating the process of rapid urbanisation, population migration and growing scale of cities,” echoed Derek Wang, general manager of Alibaba Cloud Singapore, which has helped to reduce traffic congestion in Malaysia and China using smart technology.
Green ghost towns?
However, while new cities appear to signify environmental and technological progress, many are still far from the cosmopolitan ideal that cities like New York represent.
Initially intended to be the world’s first zero-carbon city when it was first constructed in 2008, Masdar City in Abu Dhabi has been struggling to attract both residents and investors, as well as meet its carbon-neutrality goals. Similarly, Songdo city has similarly been described as a Chernobyl-like ghost town that is increasingly catered to foreign expatriates.
Meanwhile, new cities such as Eko Atlantic in Nigeria, dubbed the country’s new Dubai, have led observers to deplore the rise of “privatised green enclaves for the ultra rich” while experts worry that governments are building from scratch to avoid dealing with the issues plaguing existing metropolises.
“Technology companies, construction companies, and the real estate industry are leveraging the many challenges facing cities in the global south to convince people that new cities are an important solution rather than fixing existing cities, which is not as profitable,” said Sarah Moser, the director of the urban studies program at McGill University, in an interview with The Guardian.
However, Limin Hee, director of research at Singapore’s Centre for Liveable Cities, believes that smart cities are being developed in a way to make every day life better for the people, which “includes giving people more choices and making information more available to them through technology.”
“Technology is an enabler for livability and not an end in itself. Smart is just another layer to the city,” she said. “You need a reason for people to live there. There needs to be jobs, good housing, a good environment. I doubt there is any country in the world that was built for the sake of being smart.”
“Ultimately, our work is not just about ingenious technology, but about creating added value for society and making our cities better places to live,” said Oliver Kraft, Siemens’ head of project and account management for Expo 2020.
You need a reason for people to live [in smart cities]. There needs to be jobs, good housing, a good environment.
Limin Hee, director of research, Centre for Liveable Cities
A security nightmare
In order to make more accurate decisions, smart cities typically collect data from people through the phones in their pockets, sensors watching their every move and other smart devices. This means that smart cities often have the power to identify where people are and what they are doing.
“By gathering information through citizens’ smartphones, the city can understand where the problems are and how to solve them,” said Bonte. “However, there is the obvious downside to how these data are being collected and used.”
When a plan was first introduced in 2017 to develop Quayside, a “smart city within a city” in Toronto, the project received strong criticism from citizens who were concerned about how the developer, a subsidiary of Google, was collecting and using citizens’ personal data. Fellow tech giants that are now powering the smart city revolution have also been accused of urban profiteering.
“It is less of a problem if you include and involve citizens in what is being done with their data. You need to be transparent with how much data is being used to improve their lives,” said Bonte, who added that citizens’ willingness to give up their data also depended on culture.
“In China, people don’t have such a big issue with surveillance, unlike in many Western countries, where it is more sensitive and people are very suspicious of governments using their data,” he said.
When asked about how Siemens is addressing issues related to data governance and privacy, Kraft told journalists at the media launch that Expo 2020 will be “inclusive of citizens and as transparent as possible, with the help of social media.”
Cities have also increasingly become targets for cyber-attacks, an issue that Dietmar Siersdorfer, chief executive officer of Siemens Middle East, described as one of the biggest challenges facing digitising industries.
In India last year, power utilities in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh were disrupted after they came under attack from hackers. Similarly, residents in the city of Atlanta in the United States were unable to pay parking tickets and utility bills after Iranian hackers launched a ransomware attack on the city.
“The need to develop new cybersecurity and data privacy measures is becoming more apparent and protocols have to be put in place to harmonise data regulations, which is what Southeast Asia is doing by creating frameworks for data privacy and protection,” said Hee.
Ultimately, smart city initiatives should not be imposed by governments, said Bonte, noting the importance of consulting citizens on their needs and concerns, especially when it comes to their personal data and social well-being.
“You can build all this new high-tech infrastructure, but in the end citizens have to want to live there. They might not care that much about sustainability, but people are interested in quality of life. Cities being built from scratch should think long and hard about how they should be conceived to attract the right people and keep them safe.”
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>>> Passport – A Smart City Parking Platform
Nanalyze
https://www.nanalyze.com/2021/05/passport-smart-city-parking-platform/
In the opening scene of the original Blade Runner from 1982, we’re introduced to a dystopian Los Angeles skyline filled with massive oil refineries perpetually spewing balls of fire into the air, generating an endless smog that covers the dark city of concrete skyscrapers and dim lights for miles. The year? 2019. So the screenwriters pretty much got it right on the money.
As populations rise and cities continue to gobble up more land across the globe, the number of megacities is projected to grow. Definitions differ based on what constitutes a city and how many people should live in a city to be labeled as a megacity. But according to the United Nations, which defines a megacity as a city with a population of at least 10 million people, there are at least 33 megacities around the world. Ten additional cities will gain megacity status by 2030.
United Nations - Megacities
More megacities are on their way.
We’re all aware of how mind-numbingly slow and inefficient local government can be. Just walk into any Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) and experience it for yourself. Imagine compounding all those dreadful inefficiencies with a growing world population, with at least two out of every three people living in cities by 2050, and municipalities will soon have a living nightmare on their hands. In one megacity, Jakarta, residents can’t even be uniquely identified because people sometimes share the same ID number. The ‘Rona already showed how vulnerable cities are to interruptions to municipal services, turning simple tasks like renewing a license into a multi-month ordeal.
Building the Future with Smart Cities
Some clever MBAs figured out that by throwing “smart” in front of a word, we can transform everyday concepts into high-tech solutions of the future. And smart cities are being touted as one of those solutions to the growing challenge of overcrowded urban centers. The smart city concept, like any other smart buzzword, entails using a combination of digital technology, data-driven approaches, the Internet of Things (IoT), and artificial intelligence (AI) to create a streamlined experience for those fortunate to live in a concrete jungle. By connecting time-consuming, manual processes like getting a permit from the City Hall or dealing with municipal waste to a digital platform, efficiencies can be gained, costs reduced, and waste decreased to build a better quality of living for citizens.
We discussed some benefits of smart cities in our past piece on 11 Smart City Solutions Creating Smarter Cities. There are many components of a smart city, each at varying levels of technological maturity.
Today, we want to talk about one component of smart cities that’s lacking just about everywhere outside of, perhaps, Tokyo – parking and transportation. According to McKinsey, smart cities that adopt smart-mobility applications can cut commuting times by 15 to 20 percent. That could mean time savings of 20 to 30 minutes per day, and fewer downloads of guided meditations podcasts to keep you from developing a bad case of road rage.
We previously looked at how smart cities are tackling their transportation problems using technologies such as geospatial intelligence. It’s about time too. How many of us have driven around for hours looking for a parking spot, only to discover the meter only takes coins and our change purse is at home? Or how many of us got stuck on the sixth floor of a parking structure, only to realize half the parking stalls are for permit-only residents? That’s where smart-parking startup called Passport changes the game.
Smarter Streets and Sidewalks
Founded in 2010, Charlotte-based Passport is a startup that’s focusing on payment systems for transportation and mobility, allowing cities and universities to streamline parking payments, enforcement, micro-mobility applications (scooters and bikes), and digital permitting, all on a single platform. The 11-year-old company has raised $213.5 million in disclosed funding so far, pulling a cool $90 million just this month. The Passport platform essentially connects existing parking, permitting, and metering systems to new secure digital payment options as a one-stop-shop for all things related to municipal transportation operations.
Permanent residents and visitors no longer need to waste time at City Hall and waiting for approvals through the byzantine bureaucracy of modern local government, or drive in circles after getting their designated parking spot snapped up by their neighbor’s extra large Ford pickup truck. Passport has over 1,000 clients and partnerships with some of America’s notable universities and biggest cities – Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, Omaha, Tucson, and Detroit – to help them increase efficiency and payment options for parking.
Use Cases for a Smart City Parking Platform
The smarter, simpler parking management experience touted by Passport is driven by its Parking Passport mobile app. The application is a single system that allows users to access a larger parking ecosystem with consistent rules, rates, and restrictions across all parking partners. That means parking customers don’t have to go running down the street to each individual street parking sign and read the obscure rules and restrictions on which day the street sweeper is coming or on which holidays parking is enforced. And that means fewer instances in which parking customers can contest the rules (there are actually companies now that handle parking tickets for people to get them off the hook which defeats the whole purpose of having rules and penalties for not following them). The vehicles of repeat offenders with open citation records can also be identified and penalized with higher parking fees. The result is a more seamless customer parking experience with less headache for everyone.
City Pulse - Passport Pay with the App
The Passport app provides users multiple options to pay for parking with several digital payment systems connected to their platform. That means users can keep their eye on the leftover time and continue to pay for more parking time before the meter runs out. No more rushing off in the middle of a happy ending to pay the parking meter, only to find out the parking enforcement officer has already slapped a hefty fine on your windshield.
Decreasing the number of manual transactions and processes also helps partners reduce wear-and-tear on their meters and kiosks. Over time, using Passport can extend the investment lifetime of partners’ parking hardware and lower processing costs from credit and debit card transactions. Not to mention there’s some nifty reporting made possible by the rich data sets being generated on the backend.
Passport - Parking Portal
The Passport Parking Portal tells you how much cash you’re raking in.
The Passport Operating System combines data from parking, enforcement, and permits that gives partners access to rate and restriction management in real-time. The parking data can also be analyzed for better decision-making. For example, if a parking lot seems to be congested on certain days or seasons, the operations team can decide to increase the rate for that day, or open up a second parking lot to ensure equitable access to parking for all visitors and residents.
A Case Study in Bahstun
If you misplaced your khakis and can’t start your car, you’re probably from Bahstun, a city that thought introducing mobile payments would decrease overall parking revenue because fewer tickets would be written. Passport’s salespeople handled these objections gracefully, and their baby was born – ParkBoston.
In the first year, the city was right, and parking violation revenues plummeted. But you won’t believe what happened next. Revenues from parking soared +240%. Turns out the decrease in ticket fees the city correctly predicted was offset by the increased revenue through the app, creating a win-win for parking officials and parkers alike. Moral of the story is, if you make it easier for people to pay, they end up paying you more.
ParkBoston was a private label application Passport built specifically for the City of Boston. The app has been featured as one of the “must-have” apps in Boston, and has won awards for its marketing efforts and events. What’s even more impressive is the time it took to deploy. In only 57 days, the platform was rolled out to all of Boston’s 8,000 meters.
The Bigger Picture
There’s a much bigger picture here than just a futuristic parking app. And we’re not just talking about all the big data that’s being generated. After all, there is no shortage of parking apps out there that promise similar benefits. Where we see the opportunity here is in the ability for additional revenues to be generated through dynamic pricing and enabling property owners with the ability to sell their spaces as they need. When you go on holiday, rent your apartment using Airbnb and your parking space using Passport. It should be that easy. If someone parks their electric scooter on your sidewalk, the app should automatically credit you with a small commission – courtesy of the scooter provider who is essentially renting your sidewalk.
Another more distant opportunity may be around autonomous driving. Sure, you could argue that autonomous cars won’t need parking spots because they’re always on the go, but you could also argue that they’ll probably need places to park too. All those nifty autonomous grocery delivery vehicles they’re building will need places to offload their goods. Of course, this opportunity can only be maximized if Passport can capture a lot of the parking market very quickly.
Conclusion
While we’re still a long way away from getting rid of the dense, ozone-rich smog that surrounds Los Angeles and other great cities of the United States, Passport can at least keep tourists and residents from clashing over 180 square feet segments of property. As more megacities blossom and parking becomes scarcer, smart cities need all the help they can get to make urban mobility more efficient and effective.
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>>> The City Governments That Have Mastered Data
The initiative What Works Cities has awarded certifications to 16 additional local governments for how they use data in decision-making.
Bloomberg
By Marie Patino
July 15, 2021
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-07-15/how-city-governments-are-using-data?srnd=premium
If one thing has thrived during Covid-19, it is the data dashboard.
Months into the pandemic, city halls, counties and every state across the U.S. had their own spin-off of the initial John Hopkins University dashboard, executed with various degrees of expertise — and usability. Covid dashboards and their more uplifting vaccination successors have also been subject to criticism, from lack of accessibility to underlying data not being easily retrievable. But together, they constitute an important step forward in making information of public health importance more visible.
This wasn’t made possible overnight. Data has become central to city hall, and a growing number of municipalities are now integrating it at every step of their decision-making processes. An initiative called What Works Cities, backed by Bloomberg Philanthropies and other partners, certifies cities based on how well they use data, from measuring goal achievement to making information public. This week the program awarded 2021 silver, gold or platinum certifications to 16 new U.S. cities, during a period in which the use of data for governance has proven crucial.
According to a report from Monitor Institute by Deloitte and What Works Cities, city governments that use data also are able to identify the needs of residents more efficiently, and deploy policies where they can have the greatest impact. In San Jose, California, the municipality sent outreach workers in the field to find out what neighborhoods in the city had the least access to broadband. After creating heatmaps of areas that needed more access to the internet, the city placed “small cell sites” in areas lacking them. A similar strategy was put in place in the early days of the pandemic: When schools closed and access to broadband became vital for children to continue learning from home, the city distributed 13,000 hotspots to families.
In Chattanooga, Tennessee, a city that achieved What Works Cities Gold certification this year, the municipality put together a task force
to house homeless veterans. It started by identifying every single member of the population, to be able to reach out and find solutions for every individual. This could not have been achieved without sending out people in the field in the first place to effectively gather information.
At the end of the policy cycle, using data means being able to evaluate results. Municipalities that are proficient at data often have extensive open data portals, making important datasets — like budget allocations or 311 and 911 calls — available to everyone for perusal and analysis. The municipality of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, has released 50 of its most important datasets on its open platform, Open Data BR. Among them: budget information and real-time traffic flows. Residents have, according to the Deloitte report, effectively been using the platform to create their own visualization of the datasets they’re interested in exploring.
The latest certified cities bring the total number to 40 since What Works Cities started the certification program in 2018. Since forming in 2015, the group has spent more than $84 million on training, coaching and technical assistance for its 254 local government members.
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>>> A Smart City Future for Virginia’s Amazon HQ2 Neighborhood
Partnering with AT&T to build a comprehensive 5G network, National Landing’s lead developer wants to make the area the “most connected city in the country.”
Bloomberg
By Linda Poon
July 20, 2021
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-07-20/inside-plans-to-build-a-smart-city-around-amazon-hq2?in_source=postr_story_3
Since Amazon.com Inc. announced it would build a second headquarters in Northern Virginia in 2018, developers and business groups have sought to transform Crystal City — in the part of Arlington County that’s been rebranded as National Landing — from a lackluster neighborhood of empty offices into an urban showcase of placemaking, sustainability and technology.
On Tuesday, the area’s lead developer laid out a vision with AT&T Inc. to build the country’s first “smart city at scale.” Developer JBG Smith will team up with AT&T to build a robust 5G network from the ground up within a four-mile zone that includes offices, residential and retail spaces, and Amazon’s forthcoming second headquarters.
The companies say the high-speed connectivity will lay the groundwork for National Landing to be a testbed for a host of urban innovations involving sensors, artificial intelligence and Internet of Things technology: anything from self-driving cars, to “smart” lighting that can track air quality, to robotics that help health care companies better monitor their clients’ medication.
“I'd love to see this become a living lab of innovation,” says Mo Katibeh, senior vice president of AT&T Network Infrastructure and Build.
In a post-pandemic future in which some office workers adopt a hybrid work schedule, the project aims to also connect residents in the area, which includes parts of neighboring Pentagon City and Potomac Yards, to “next-generation” 5G technology.
“The shifts to more hybrid and virtual work will require better connectivity, better redundancy and higher speeds,” says Matt Kelly, chief executive officer of JBG Smith. An advanced digital infrastructure could enable more innovations, he adds. “Those won't all have to take place in somebody's office. It can be someone's apartment.”
AT&T aims to deploy some of the network infrastructure in the first half of 2022, and expand it as the community develops so the network design can be responsive to tenant needs. JBG Smith currently has 6.8 million square feet of existing office space, and 7.2 million square feet of additional development space. The hope is that the promises of a “smart city” — a broad term sometimes used to describe tech-laden neighborhoods — will help attract innovators and businesses to move in, along with new residents.
Already, Virginia Tech is slated to bring a 65-acre innovation campus to the area, while Amazon has unveiled plans for its $2.5 billion double helix glass office tower looking over some 2.5 acres of public green space. The National Landing Business Improvement District has also outlined plans for $4 billion worth of transit projects.
If all goes as planned, a robust 5G infrastructure moves the area yet another step closer to becoming what the companies describe in their press release as “the most connected city in the country.”
Beyond U.S. borders, other companies have ramped up their futuristic ambitions. Toyota recently broke ground on Woven City, proposed to be a sensor-laden, breathing laboratory for the future of autonomous vehicles at the base of Mount Fuji in Japan.
In some other places, though, the momentum for smart cities slowed during the pandemic. As Wired reported, projects in Columbus, Ohio — winner of the Department of Transportation’s Smart City Challenge in 2016 — stalled last year, forcing organizers to rethink the very concept of a smart city. And in May 2020, Alphabet Inc.’s Sidewalk Labs shut down its controversial two-year-long project to turn Toronto’s waterfront into its own kind of living laboratory, citing “unprecedented economic uncertainty” globally and in the city’s real estate market. Before that, the project faced heavy pushback from residents over concerns about privacy and the lack of transparency.
Kelly and Katibeh said those examples serve as cautionary tales, but asserted that their approach puts consumers — and their expectations — first, and that they are committed to being transparent. “We're not a data company,” Kelly says. “We're a service company, and starting with that objective, I think, is one hugely important differentiator.”
For AT&T, the National Landing project will be a chance to build a 5G network from the ground up, using not only low- and high-frequency airwaves, but additional mid-band spectrum that's capable of fast connections and broad reach. JBG Smith paid $25.3 million in September for licenses to use that spectrum. AT&T says it will integrate 5G antennas into street furniture and the sides of buildings to connect people and devices instantaneously.
The carrier has been expanding its 5G network in the U.S. for nearly two years along two paths. For most of the country, it is using low-band frequencies that carry signals over long distances but not at blazing speeds. In higher-traffic areas like stadiums, airports and campuses, AT&T uses millimeter-wave frequencies that carry data bits at fiber-network speeds but only over limited distances.
AT&T is racing with rivals Verizon Communications Inc. and T-Mobile US Inc. to roll out a 5G network. After a brief venture into entertainment, AT&T has vowed to focus on its wireless and broadband business. A so-called smart city running on the carrier’s 5G technology near the U.S. Capitol and close to Amazon.com Inc. and Boeing facilities, will serve as both a test bed for new applications and a showcase as AT&T hopes to add more metro areas to its list.
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>>> Cepton, Inc. (CPTN) provides lidar-based solutions for automotive, smart cities, smart spaces, and smart industrial applications in the United States, Japan, and internationally. The company offers auto grade lidar sensors, including Vista-X, a compact lidar solution with a range of up to 200m for long-range applications in ADAS L2+/L3, AV L4/L5, and suitable for smart infrastructure applications; Vista-T, a lidar solution with a range of up to 300m for ultra-long-range applications in ADAS L2+/L3 and AV L4/L5; and Nova, an ultra-small form factor lidar solution with a range of up to 30m for near-range applications in ADAS L2+/L3, AV L4/L5, and suitable for smart infrastructure applications. It also provides industrial grade lidar sensors, such as Vista-P, a compact lidar solution with a range of up to 200m for long-range applications in ADAS L2+/L3, AV L4/L5, and smart infrastructure applications; and Sora-P, an ultra-high scan rate, compact, and quasi line-scanning lidar solution that delivers high-fidelity profiling of objects moving at high speeds for free flow tolling and other industrial applications. The company was founded in 2016 and is headquartered in San Jose, California.
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