Uber Will ‘Invest Aggressively’ In India And Southeast Asia, CEO Says
Published on February 23, 2018 at 01:07AM Pranav Dixit, writing for BuzzFeed News: Dara Khosrowshahi, Uber’s CEO of six months, said on Thursday that the ride-hailing service would continue to invest aggressively in both Southeast Asia and India, where the company is losing money and faces strong competition from local players like Grab and Ola. Uber has been slow to expand its presence in India and Southeast Asia, allowing competitors to quickly gain ground. Singapore’s Grab, for instance, claimed to have 95% of the country’s ride-hailing market share last year. And Ola, Uber’s Indian rival, currently operates in 110 cities against Uber’s 29 cities. Ola does 1 billion rides annually, compared to Uber, which announced in mid-2017 that it completed 500 million total rides in the country in its first four years of operations. “We expect to lose money in Southeast Asia and expect to invest aggressively in terms of marketing, subsidies, etc.,” Khosrowshahi told reporters in India, which is Uber’s fastest-growing market outside the United States, and where he is currently on his first official tour. While Uber’s India operation is not yet profitable, it does account for 10% of Uber’s rides globally. Read more of this story at Slashdot. via Tumblr http://ift.tt/2FltpyW
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Slashdot: Intel Microsoft Dell HP and Lenovo Expect PCs With Fast 5G Wireless To Ship Next Year2/22/2018
Intel, Microsoft, Dell, HP and Lenovo Expect PCs With Fast 5G Wireless To Ship Next Year
Published on February 23, 2018 at 12:20AM Intel, along with Dell, HP, Lenovo, and Microsoft said Thursday that the companies expect the first 5G Windows PCs to become available during the second half of 2019. From a report: That’s about the same time that Intel plans to begin shipping its XMM 8000 commercial modems, marking the company’s entrance into the 5G market. Intel will show off a prototype of the new 5G connected PC at Mobile World Congress show in Barcelona. In addition the company will demonstrate data streaming over the 5G network. At its stand, Intel said that it will also show off eSIM technology – the replacement for actual, physical SIM cards – and a thin PC running 802.11ax Wi-Fi, the next-gen Wi-Fi standard. Read more of this story at Slashdot. via Tumblr http://ift.tt/2CCP0A9
Amazon May Open Up To Six More Automated Stores This Year
Published on February 22, 2018 at 11:40PM Amazon may have opened its automated convenience store a year late, but it looks like it’s been a pretty big success. From a report: Recode learned that the company plans on opening six more of its Amazon Go stores in 2018. It’s not clear where these stores will be located, though Recode reports that more locations are likely in Seattle, and Amazon is in talks with the developer of The Grove in Los Angeles. Amazon Go is billed as the convenience store of the future. There are no checkout lines; you can simply walk in, grab what you want, and leave. You scan in with a smartphone app, and then an AI tracks what you take from the shelves and automatically charges you for them. Read more of this story at Slashdot. via Tumblr http://ift.tt/2sMaRFt
Net Neutrality Rules Die on April 23
Published on February 22, 2018 at 10:42PM The Federal Communications Commission’s net neutrality rules will be no more in two months, as the agency takes the final step in removing the regulation from its rule book. From a report: The date – April 23 – was revealed today after the Federal Communication Commission’s order revoking net neutrality was published in the Federal Register. You can read the full order here. The publication means that a new fight around net neutrality is about to begin. States and other parties will be able to sue over the rules – some have already gotten started – and a battle in Congress will kick off over a vote to reverse the order entirely. While that fight likely won’t get far in Congress since Republicans by and large oppose net neutrality and control both chambers, there will likely be a long and heated legal battle around the corner for the FCC’s new policy. The FCC’s new rules are really a lack of rules. Its “Restoring Internet Freedom” order entirely revokes the strong net neutrality regulations put in place back in 2015 and replaces them with basically nothing. Internet providers can now block, throttle, and prioritize content if they want to. The only real rule here is that they have to disclose if they’re doing any of this. Read more of this story at Slashdot. via Tumblr http://ift.tt/2onIojG
Twitter Updates Developer Rules in the Wake of Bot Crackdown
Published on February 22, 2018 at 10:20PM Twitter is getting serious about its bot problem. From a report: Hours after a massive bot purge that prompted the #TwitterLockOut hashtag to trend, the company is announcing new rules for developers meant to prevent bots from using third-party apps to spread spam. According to the new rules, developers that use Twitter’s API will no longer be able to let users: Simultaneously post identical or substantially similar content to multiple accounts. Simultaneously perform actions such as Likes, Retweets, or follows from multiple accounts Use of any form of automation (including scheduling) to post identical or substantially similar content, or to perform actions such as Likes or Retweets, across many accounts that have authorized your app (whether or not you created or directly control those accounts) is not permitted. Read more of this story at Slashdot. via Tumblr http://ift.tt/2opAlmF
SpaceX Successfully Launches Falcon 9 Carrying Starlink Demo Satellites
Published on February 22, 2018 at 09:40PM SpaceX has successfully launched a Falcon 9 from SLC-4 at Vandenberg Air Force Base today, its first launch since its successful Falcon Heavy test earlier this month. The launch took off early Wednesday morning, after being rescheduled a couple of times from an initial target of this past weekend. From a report: The launch was primarily designed to bring the PAZ satellite to orbit (which was deployed as planned into a low Earth, sun-synchronous polar orbit), a satellite for a Spanish customer that’s designed to provide geocommunications and radar imaging for both government and private commercial customers. This launch had a secondary purpose, however, and one that might ultimately be more important to SpaceX’s long-term goals. SpaceX packed two demonstration micro satellites for its planned internet broadband service (which Elon Musk confided via tweet it will call ‘Starlink’). These will perform tests required before it’s certified to operate the service, which it hopes to use to generate revenue by signing up subscribers to its internet service, which will hopefully be globe-spanning once complete. Read more of this story at Slashdot. via Tumblr http://ift.tt/2CBjLFu
A Biohacker Regrets Publicly Injecting Himself With CRISPR
Published on February 22, 2018 at 09:00PM Sarah Zhang, reporting for The Atlantic: When Josiah Zayner watched a biotech CEO drop his pants at a biohacking conference and inject himself with an untested herpes treatment, he realized things had gone off the rails. Zayner is no stranger to stunts in biohacking – loosely defined as experiments, often on the self, that take place outside of traditional lab spaces. You might say he invented their latest incarnation: He’s sterilized his body to “transplant” his entire microbiome in front of a reporter. He’s squabbled with the FDA about selling a kit to make glow-in-the-dark beer. He’s extensively documented attempts to genetically engineer the color of his skin. And most notoriously, he injected his arm with DNA encoding for CRISPR that could theoretically enhance his muscles – in between taking swigs of Scotch at a live-streamed event during an October conference. (Experts say – and even Zayner himself in the live-stream conceded – it’s unlikely to work.) So when Zayner saw Ascendance Biomedical’s CEO injecting himself on a live-stream earlier this month, you might say there was an uneasy flicker of recognition. Ascendance Bio soon fell apart in almost comical fashion. The company’s own biohackers – who created the treatment but who were not being paid – revolted and the CEO locked himself in a lab. Even before all that, the company had another man inject himself with an untested HIV treatment on Facebook Live. And just days after the pants-less herpes treatment stunt, another biohacker who shared lab space with Ascendance posted a video detailing a self-created gene therapy for lactose intolerance. The stakes in biohacking seem to be getting higher and higher. “Honestly, I kind of blame myself,” Zayner told me recently. He’s been in a soul-searching mood; he recently had a kid and the backlash to the CRISPR stunt in October had been getting to him. “There’s no doubt in my mind that somebody is going to end up hurt eventually,” he said. Read more of this story at Slashdot. via Tumblr http://ift.tt/2ooJAU5
Uber Launches ‘Express Pool’ To Get More Riders To Share Rides
Published on February 22, 2018 at 08:00PM An anonymous reader quotes a report from Recode: Uber is beginning to roll out a cheaper version of its ride-sharing UberPool service, called Express Pool. The service, which was being tested in Boston and San Francisco, is now available in Los Angeles, San Diego and Denver, and will launch in Miami, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., tomorrow. The idea is that Express Pool, which requires riders to walk a little to meet their driver – and then again to their destination after being dropped off – will make shared rides more efficient. If it works, it should both increase the number of rides that drivers can give and also make those shared trips faster for passengers. The new service tests a thesis Uber has long had: Lower prices means higher utilization, and higher utilization means more money – both for drivers and for Uber. Also that road congestion is bad and the solution is to share more rides. Those are the same theories that sparked the creation of the original UberPool service, which requires a little less walking. But the hope is that this will make it easier to match more passengers and therefore lose less money on each shared ride. Read more of this story at Slashdot. via Tumblr http://ift.tt/2op5G91
Bigelow Launching New Company To Sell Private Space Stations
Published on February 22, 2018 at 05:00PM hyperclocker shares a report from Popular Mechanics: The future of spacecraft in lower Earth orbit (LEO) looks to be an increasingly commercial affair. Bigelow Aerospace, a Las Vegas-based company that builds livable space habitats, has now created a spinoff company known as Bigelow Space Operations (BSO). BSO will market and operate any space habitats that Bigelow sells. The creation of BSO signals that Bigelow is preparing for a future of commercial space living. Recently leaked NASA documents show that the Trump Administration wants to convert the International Space Station into a commercial venture, and BSO is betting that businesses including private scientific ventures and hotels will be interested in creating a profit above the Earth. A prototype Bigelow habitat, the Bigelow Expandable Activity Module (BEAM), has been connected to the ISS since 2016. It’s proven such a successful addition that last year NASA extended its contract for an additional three years. But Bigelow is thinking past the BEAM. In its press release announcing BSO, it highlights its planned launches of the B330-1 and B330-2, spacecraft with 6-person capacity, in 2021. Read more of this story at Slashdot. via Tumblr http://ift.tt/2HCmBxR Slashdot: Amazon Is Developing a TV Series Based On Iain M. Banks' Sci-Fi Novel 'Consider Phlebas'2/21/2018
Amazon Is Developing a TV Series Based On Iain M. Banks’ Sci-Fi Novel ‘Consider Phlebas’
Published on February 22, 2018 at 02:00PM leathered writes: Jeff Bezos today announced that Amazon Studios has picked up the rights to adapt the late Iain M. Bank’s acclaimed Culture novels to the small screen, beginning with the first in the series, Consider Phlebas. This comes after nearly three decades of attempts to bring Banks’ utopian, post-scarcity society to film or television. A huge fan of the Culture series is Elon Musk, whose SpaceX drone ships are named after Culture space vessels. Here’s how Amazon describes Consider Phlebas: “a kinetic, action-packed adventure on a huge canvas. The book draws upon the extraordinary world and mythology Banks created in the Culture, in which a highly advanced and progressive society ends up at war with the Idirans, a deeply religious, warlike race intent on dominating the entire galaxy. The story centers on Horza, a rogue agent tasked by the Idirans with the impossible mission of recovering a missing Culture 'Mind,’ an artificial intelligence many thousands of times smarter than any human – something that could hold the key to wiping out the Culture altogether. What unfolds, with Banks’ trademark irreverent humor, ultimately asks the poignant question of how we can use technology to preserve our humanity, not surrender it.” Read more of this story at Slashdot. via Tumblr http://ift.tt/2oo8iUB |
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