GM plans to release cars with no steering wheel in 2019

If the Department of Transportation grants GM’s latest Safety Petition, the automaker will be able to deploy its no-steering-wheel, pedal-less autonomous car next year. GM has not only revealed what its level 4 self-driving vehicle will look like — in a video you can watch after the break — but also announced that it filed a Safety Petition to be able to deploy its completely driverless version of Chevy Bolt called Cruise AV in 2019. The company describes it as “the first production-ready vehicle built from the start to operate safely on its own, with no driver, steering wheel, pedals or manual controls.”

As you can see above, Cruise AV is much different from the self-driving Chevy Bolts GM is testing in California. It has no controls whatsoever, not even buttons you can push — it 100 percent treats you as a passenger, no matter where you sit. The car can even open and shut doors on its own. Now, autonomous cars like this don’t meet the Federal Motor Vehicle’s safety standards. Automakers could apply for exemption, but the government can only exempt 2,500 vehicles every year. GM President Dan Ammann told The Verge that the company is not seeking for an exemption, though — instead, it wants to “meet that standard in a different kind of way.”

He explained:

“What we can do is put the equivalent of the passenger side airbag on that side as well. So its to meet the standards but meet them in a way that’s different than what’s exactly prescribed, and that’s what the petition seeks to get approval for.”

A number of automakers and transportation companies banded together last year to call for a change to those rules. “Without changes to these regulations,” GM VP Michael Abelson told a subcommittee that time, “it may be years before the promise of today’s technology can be realized and thousands of preventable deaths… will happen.”

Automakers will have to see those changes come to light if they want their fully autonomous cars to hit the road. GM might beat them to the punch, but rival companies like Ford, Mercedes and Waymo all plan to release cars with no steering wheels of their own.

Via: TechCrunch, The Verge, Reuters

Source: GM

Europe enters race to build world-class supercomputers

Supercomputers are a crucial research tool for medicine, aviation, robots and weapons, but there are only three dominant players: The US, Japan and China. Europe has had enough of that situation, however, and announced plans to spend up to $1.2 billion to develop its own technology. The aim is to develop its own exascale machines (that can do a billion billion calculations per second) by 2022-23. “It is a tough race and today the EU is lagging behind,” said EC comissioner Andrus Ansip.

To give you an idea of how far behind, China has the world’s fastest supercomputer, the Sunway TaihuLight, with 93 petaflops (93 million billion floating point operations per second) of computing power. The nation is also working on the Tianhe-3 (below), the world’s first exascale machine with over ten times the power of TaihuLight, and expects to have that up and running by 2020.

Other top ten machines are located in Japan, US and everywhere but Europe (other than Switzerland, which is not part of the EU but an “associated country.”) The only large European player is Atos SE, which built the Bull Sequana shown above. The machine, 55th in global supercomputer rankings, is the first phase of a 25-petaflop computer that will be used by the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission.

The Sunway TaihuLight Supercomputer (Li Xiang/Xinhua via AP)

Right now, weather, space and other government agencies in Europe, along with private Euro companies like Daimler, Airbus and GlaxoSmithKline must rent supercomputing time on US or Japanese machines. That poses a risk that sensitive personal information, trade secrets and other data could leak or be stolen. If a dispute or crisis happens, Europe could also lose access to those machines.

Buying and developing supercomputing technology is crazy expensive, with exascale machines expected to cost up to a half billion dollars. To buy and develop them, Europe will spend $486 million itself, with the balance of the $1.2 billion coming from member states. It plans to first acquire machines that can compete with current top supercomputers, then develop its own exascale machines by 2023.

UK researchers have contributed expertise to the supercomputer project, but with Brexit, it’s not clear if it will sign on in the future. “Brexit has thrown a lot of uncertainty around the UK’s participation and it is really unfortunate and causing delay and confusion,” University of Bristol’s Simon McIntosh-Smith told Bloomberg.

Via: Bloomberg

Source: EU

Dolby knows what you’re watching based on your breath

If you thought it was creepy that technology lets networks know what you’re watching, you’d better sit down. It turns out that Poppy Crum, chief scientist at Dolby Labs, has been researching how our bodies and emotions react to what we see and hear. Don’t panic, though. All that information is being used to understand how to make us feel more when we watch a Hollywood epic. “In the cinema, we can measure exhalants […] and be able to tell what movie they’re watching, just by the chemical signature,” Crum told Engadget on stage at CES. And you thought clearing your browser history was enough to cover your tracks.

Click here to catch up on the latest news from CES 2018.

Apple Promotes Subscription-Based Apps With Free Trials in the App Store

Apple has opened a new section of the iOS App Store that promotes subscription-based apps offering free trials (via 9to5Mac).

Called “Try it for Free”, the subcategory appears in the Apps tab and is currently home to just four apps, including USA Today, 1Password, Panna: Video Recipes & Classes, and Lake: Coloring Books. Tapping “Free Trial” next to one of the apps takes the user to a screen showcasing the subscription offer (if the app hasn’t been previously downloaded), which details how long the trial runs, the recurring cost after the trial ends, and how to download the app.

All of the apps in the subcategory have offered free trials for some time, suggesting Apple is renewing efforts to push subscription-based apps by encouraging users to try them out for a time before committing to recurring payments.

Subscription-based apps tend to divide the user community, but adoption of the model has increased over the last six months. Apple began incentivizing developers to sell their apps for a recurring fee instead of a one-time cost when it made changes to its App Store subscription policies in 2016. Usually, Apple takes 30 percent of app revenue, but developers who are able to maintain a subscription with a customer longer than a year see Apple’s cut drop down to 15 percent.

Late last year, Apple also started letting developers offer discounted introductory pricing and time-limited free trials on auto-renewable app subscriptions, based on the idea that subscriptions provide a higher likelihood of an engaged audience.

Tags: App Store, App Store promotion
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Samsung talks PC strategy and its vision for a connected world at CES

This week, Samsung showed off everything from new laptops to a massive microLED wall to a chattier kind of refrigerator. The message couldn’t be any clearer: Samsung would like nothing more than to be the center of your digital world. To dig deeper into this week’s big news, we invited Shoneel Kolhatkar, Samsung’s senior director for product marketing to our CES stage for some wide-ranging conversation. We touch on Samsung’s new Notebook 9 Pen, the growing role of wearables and (most important) how Samsung plans to weave its products into together in a single intelligent ecosystem.

Click here to catch up on the latest news from CES 2018.

Intel pledges transparency after Spectre, Meltdown vulnerability

The last week or so has seen a lot of activity around Meltdown and Spectre, two CPU flaws in modern chips from the likes of AMD and Intel. Apple, Microsoft and Google have provided interim fixes for their respective hardware, but it will take much more than simple patches (that can cause more harm than good) to truly eradicate the issue. Just a few hours after Intel revealed that there may be more slowdowns from its Meltdown processor fix, the company’s CEO Brian Krzanich has written an open letter to further detail the steps Intel is taking to deal with the issues.

Krzanich promises that by January 15th, 90 percent of Intel CPUs made in the last five years will be updated, with the remaining 10 percent patched by the end of the month. The company will then start working on updates for older chips “as prioritized by (its) customers.”

The Intel CEO also notes that the impact of Meltdown and Spectre patches on performance can vary widely, but that Intel will provide progress reports on the patches its working on. “To accelerate the security of the entire industry, we commit to publicly identify significant security vulnerabilities following rules of responsible disclosure and, further, we commit to working with the industry to share hardware innovations that will accelerate industry-level progress in dealing with side-channel attacks,” wrote Krzanich in his statement. He also committed to help fund academic and independent research into possible security issues in the future.

Via: The Verge

Source: Intel

The Moto Z’s keyboard mod feels like an imperfect blast from the past

Motorola’s first great Android phone had a physical keyboard, and when I stuck Livermorium’s keyboard Moto Mod onto a Moto Z2 Play, waves of nostalgia started washing over me. After I started using the keyboard, though, I suddenly remembered why the smartphone world had moved on from these designs. You’ll be able to pick up one of these Mods for $99 before the winter ends, but it’s going to be a hard sell for anyone who didn’t grow up pounding out texts on actual buttons.

To be clear, the version Livermorium and Lenovo showed off in Vegas isn’t the final version that customers will be able to buy. That’s a very good thing, too. The sliding mechanism in the model I played with didn’t feel all that smooth, and because the combined package is top-heavy, you’re liable to push the phone right off the weak magnets connecting it to the keyboard. And while the buttons are nice and clicky, they don’t offer a particularly satisfying level of key travel. And if you’re the sort who’d like to use a Moto Z as a very, very tiny laptop, you can — just be aware that it’ll tip over unless you get the hinge positioned just right.

The keyboard does have some nice flourishes, though. When closed, the Mod covers the camera entirely. Once you slide it open, however, the camera is revealed, and you can snap some photos by mashing the enter key. A bright-blue LED confirms that the keyboard is connected and drawing power, and next to that is a caps-lock light. A caps-lock light! There are discrete buttons for the question mark and the single quote, too, which actually made me slightly giddy upon discovery.

Livermorium deserves the benefit of the doubt — it may well fix most of the issues I mentioned above before the final units start reaching its Indiegogo backers. For me, the keyboard’s biggest drawback is more fundamental: There’s a limit to how fast you can type on a keyboard this wide with two thumbs. That’s why I was more than happy to give up my OG Droid in 2010, and it wasn’t long before the rest of the industry moved on too from these designs, too. Still, who knows? BlackBerry is also bullish on the idea of physical keyboards, so maybe Livermorium is making something more valuable than we realize.

Click here to catch up on the latest news from CES 2018.

You can’t talk about accessibility without talking about diversity

Over the past few years, we’ve been seeing more and more products at CES meant to assist the elderly and disabled. In fact, last year was the first year we added an accessibility category to the official Best of CES awards — and the finalists in that category were indeed some of our favorite things we saw at the show. This year was no exception, with four finalists in the accessibility category, and a whole bunch of other products that we didn’t have room for on our shortlist.

When and how did accessibility tech come to be so prominent at the world’s biggest consumer tech show? And where is the technology headed from here? To help make sense of the bigger picture, I sat down with KR Liu, who was diagnosed with severe hearing loss at age three and later went on to head up sales and marketing with audio pioneer Doppler Labs. Most recently, she teamed up with Senators Elizabeth Warren and Chuck Grassley on the Over-the-Counter Hearing Aid Act of 2017, which passed with almost unanimous bipartisan support.

In our all-too-brief talk, we delved into the technological advancements, of course, but also the social ones — the issue of accessibility tech ultimately isn’t just a question of what’s technically possible, but about diversity: Who is allowed in the drawing room? And for whom are we creating tech in the first place?

Click here to catch up on the latest news from CES 2018.

OnePlus weighs in on smartphone strategy and the value of trust

OnePlus released two great smartphones in 2017, but the smartphone startup is facing more and better competition than ever before. That’s great for you and me, but much trickier for a startup still trying to carve out a notable niche for itself. What’s a small company to do?

In this case, OnePlus’ answer is to keep making the best products it can and avoid looking at competitors simply as rivals to be crushed over time. Kyle Kiang, head of global marketing for OnePlus, joined us on our CES stage to discuss the team’s strategy for building a successful mobile brand and the difficulties of developing a foundation of trust in through hardware.

Click here to catch up on the latest news from CES 2018.

The challenge of showcasing weed tech at CES

There was, as expected, a thin scent of weed in Roger Volodarsky’s 28th-floor Mirage hotel suite as the Puffco CEO and founder demonstrated his latest product.

It was 11:30 PM the night before CES opened, and seven attendees gathered in the living room overlooking the Vegas strip. A welcoming, tattooed man with a groomed beard and shaved head, Volodarsky was showing off the Puffco Peak, a smart dabbing rig for consuming cannabis concentrates that he’d presented at the Pepcom media event just hours earlier. Away from the mainstream events around CES, he could show how it truly works.

After all, this is the first CES since marijuana was legalized in the state of Nevada last year, and it’s available for purchase all over Las Vegas. The irony is that in Sin City, you are prohibited from consuming cannabis products anywhere but in a private residence, including hotels, parks and even dispensaries.

In practice, vaporized cannabis and edibles are easy to find and easier to consume with little residual smell (there was no hint of weed vapor in the Mirage’s hallway on Monday). But technically, a combination of state law and hotel policy means that Vegas’ visitors — of which there were 42.2 million in 2017 — lack almost anywhere to take advantage of legal cannabis.

It also means that the few cannabusinesses at this year’s CES are also hamstrung in their ability to demonstrate their products, even as there’s a gold rush of demand that led to cannabis startups receiving more than $600 million in equity funding last year. Hence Puffco’s after-hours session at the Mirage.

“We think that if you want to make an omelet you’ve got to crack a few eggs, and so that’s why we did this in here,” said the Brooklyn-based Volodarsky, on using his suite for demos. “For us it’s just the risk we take, and if they want to kick us out for it I’m OK with that.”

In contrast, Vapium, another vape company, presented at CES with a different angle: as a strictly medical company. Located in CES’ smart home section around companies hawking gas sensors and smart pet doors, its booth was a clean green and white with representatives wearing white lab coats.

Under the brand Vapium Medical, the company launched a smart vape that tells you precisely how much THC or CBD you consume with every inhalation. It achieves this by cross-referencing the airflow through the vape and the exact strain and strength of the cannabis capsules inside it. Pinpointing effective dosages of medical cannabis can allow doctors to prescribe it more accurately and monitor a patient’s use, all while creating a database about how certain strains and quantities of marijuana use affect certain medical conditions.

“Even for doctors who are convinced that cannabis is effective, there’s not really good dosing guidelines,” said Barry Fogarty, Vapium Medical’s COO. “Because it’s been a prohibited substance in most places, there hasn’t been the research that there needs to be, and so that’s exactly what we’re trying to plug into.”

Due to release in the second half of 2018, Vapium Medical is presenting the prototype purely as a medical device. “We’ll only sell products in those states where medical cannabis is legal,” said Fogarty.

There would not be any demos at the trade show either. “Especially as a medical company, we will adhere to all of the bylaws,” said CMO Lisa Harun.

For Puffco, the decision to come to Vegas was only made four days in advance.

“We thought, why not show this off at CES? It seems like a place where maybe new eyes that have a respect for great design and strides in industry, maybe they’ll respect us there,” said Volodarsky. “It’s easy to be a marketing company in cannabis. It’s much more difficult to be an innovator. And the risk is high just like in any other side of consumer electronics.”

That risk extends to its off-site presentation. “It is what it is,” said Volodarsky. “This is the unfortunate risk we take as leaders of the industry; it’s what we have to do.”

The showcase ended when Puffco’s spokesman got hungry (“He’s done a few demos,” Voladarsky said) and they headed out for pancakes. Before leaving, Volodarsky grabbed the rig for one more hit.

Click here to catch up on the latest news from CES 2018.