If DJI was keen on keeping its newest consumer drone under wraps, it has failed utterly. An image of the upcoming Mavic 2 drone was first leaked online earlier this month, but UK store Argos has published a catalog that shows off the new drone in a very prominent ad which also lists the drone's features.
The accidental leak shows off two models of
Read more: Leaked DJI Mavic 2 advert confirms Pro and Zoom models
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After YouTube introduced a dark mode to its desktop site last year and migrated the feature to iOS in March this year, it’s finally starting to arrive for Android users.
The alternative theme exchanges YouTube’s white backgrounds and menus for a deep grey, aiming to alleviate the eye strain associated with brighter light when viewing in a darker r
Read more: YouTube dark mode begins rolling out to Android users
Write comment (92 Comments)BMW will in a few days start rolling out to many of its drivers support for AmazonAlexa voice assistant. The fact that BWM is doing this doesn&t come as a surprise, given that it has long talked about its plans to bring Alexa — and potentially other personal assistants like Cortana and the Google Assistant — to its cars. Ahead of its official launch in Germany, Austria, the U.S. and U.K. (with other countries following at a later date), I went to Munich to take a look at what using Alexa in a BMW is all about.
As Dieter May, BMWsenior VP for digital products told me earlier this year, the company has long held that in-car digital assistants have to be more than just an &Echo Dot in a cup holder,& meaning that they have to be deeply integrated into the experience and the rest of the technology in the car. And thatexactly what BMW has done here — and it has done it really well.
What maybe surprised me the most was that we&re not just talking about the voice interface here. BMW is working directly with the Alexa team at Amazon to also integrate visual responses from Alexa. Using the tablet-like display you find above the center console of most new BMWs, the service doesn&t just read out the answer but also shows additional facts or graphs when warranted. That means Alexa in a BMW is a lot more like using an Echo Show than a Dot (though you&re obviously not going to be able to watch any videos on it).
In the demo I saw, in a 2015 BMW X5 that was specifically rigged to run Alexa ahead of the launch, the display would activate when you ask for weather information, for example, or for queries that returned information from a Wikipedia post.
Whatcool here is that the BMW team styled these responses using the same design language that also governs the companyother in-car products. So if you see the weather forecast from Alexa, that&ll look exactly like the weather forecast from BMWown Connected Drive system. The only difference is the &Alexa& name at the top-left of the screen.
All of this sounds easy, but I&m sure it took a good bit of negotiation with Amazon to build a system like this, especially because therean important second part to this integration thatquite unique. The queries, which you start by pushing the usual &talk& button in the car (in newer models, the Alexa wake word feature will also work), are first sent to BMWservers before they go to Amazon. BMW wants to keep control over the data and ensure its users& privacy, so it added this proxy in the middle. That means therea bit of an extra lag in getting responses from Amazon, but the team is working hard on reducing this, and for many of the queries we tried during my demo, it was already negligible.
As the team told me, the first thing it had to build was a way to switch that can route your queries to the right service. The car, after all, already has a built-in speech recognition service that lets you set directions in the navigation system, for example. Now, it has to recognize that the speaker said &Alexa& at the beginning of the query, then route it to the Alexa service. The team also stressed that we&re talking about a very deep integration here. &We&re not just streaming everything through your smartphone or using some plug-and-play solution,& a BMW spokesperson noted.
&You get what you&d expect from BMW, a deep integration, and to do that, we use the technology we already have in the car, especially the built-in SIM card.&
One of the advantages of Alexaopen ecosystem is its skills. Not every skill makes sense in the context of the car, and some could be outright distracting, so the team is curating a list of skills that you&ll be able to use in the car.
Itno secret that BMW is also working with Microsoft (and many of its cloud services run on Azure). BMW argues that Alexa and Cortana have different strengths, though, with Cortana being about productivity and a connection to Office 365, for example. Iteasy to imagine a future where you could call up both Alexa and Cortana from your car — and thatsurely why BMW built its own system for routing voice commands and why it wants to have control over this process.
BMW tells me that it&ll look at how users will use the new service and tune it accordingly. Because a lot of the functionality runs in the cloud, updates are obviously easy and the team can rapidly release new features — just like any other software company.
Read more: BMW’s Alexa integration gets it right
Write comment (92 Comments)Electric scooters are all the rage right now in Silicon Valley and as of late, they&ve made their way into the entertainment industry. Musician DJ Khaled recently posted a video of him riding one of Lyftelectric scooter while also promoting his participation in Jay-Z and BeyonceOn The Run II tour.
Word on the street, according to a source, is that DJ Khaled asked Lyft for one of its electric scooters for his upcoming tour. This is not too surprising given Lyft has previously tapped DJ Khaled to be one of its spokespeople. Lyft declined to comment for this story.
Earlier this month, Lyft outlined its scooter plans, along with its bike-share plans.Thereno word on exactly when this will happen, but itlikely it will happen soon.
Lyft, along with 11 other companies, is currently vying for a permit to operate an electric scooter service in San Francisco.As of July 19, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency was still reviewing the 12 applications from companies to operate electric scooters in the city.
A bit of background: In early June,companies like Uber, Lime, Bird, Lyft and others applied for permits to operate electric scooter-share services in San Francisco.San Franciscopermit process came as a result of Bird, Lime andSpindeploying their electric scooters without permission in the city in March. As part of a new city law, which went into effect June 4, scooter companies are not able to operate their services in San Francisco without a permit.
The SFMTA expects to finalize its recommendations and documentation &in the coming weeks,&the SFMTA wrote in a blog post. Once thatdone, the agency says it will work with companies to finalize and clarify the terms and conditions of the permit. The goal, according to the blog post, is to issue permits sometime in August.
There are, of course, plenty of other markets for Lyft and its competitors to launch scooters in. You can read more about where you&ll find scooters below.
Read more: Lyft gave DJ Khaled one of its electric scooters for his upcoming tour
Write comment (96 Comments)This week WeWork announced that its Chinese subsidiary —WeWork China—raised an additional $500 million in capital in a deal led by SoftBank, Temasek Holdingsand others. The deal reportedly values the Chinese branch of the shared workspace and real estate management company at $5 billion, up from $1 billion (post-money) in the round WeWork China announced almost a year ago in July 2017.
SoftBank rarely doubles down on a particular company. At time of writing, SoftBank itself has made 175 investments in 144 different companies, according to Crunchbase data. Of those, just 23 companies raised more than one round from SoftBank. And in conjunction with its China branch, with four cumulative transactions on record, WeWork is tied for first place in a ranking of companies most-engaged with SoftBankinvestment arm.
That being said, SoftBankinvestment strategy appears to be one of taking stakes in leading companies from a given sector. And although itsometimes difficult to tell just how large some of those stakes are as a percent of equity in the company, SoftBank finds itself involved in many companies& biggest rounds to date.
Take WeWork for example. If you take all of the equity funding rounds raised by its main corporate entity and regional offshoots like WeWork China and WeWork India, you&ll find that SoftBank was either the sole investor, the round leader or a syndicate participant in the rounds that delivered the lionshare of capital to the company.
If the market opportunity is big, SoftBank will typically make investments in regionally dominant companies operating in that sector. After all, if worldwide dominance is difficult to obtain for any one company, SoftBank is so big that it can take positions in the regional leaders, creating an index of companies that collectively hold a majority of market share in an emerging industry.
Ita bold strategy that involves taking some big risks and writing big checks. As a result, SoftBank is typically the largest single investor — in terms of dollars committed — in the fastest-growing companies in an industry.
WeWork is just one facet of SoftBankreal estate investment efforts. The table below shows a selection of SoftBankinvestments in the real estate and construction sector. Itranked by the amount of money invested in rounds involving SoftBank (either as the sole investor or as part of a broader syndicate). We also show what percent of total known equity funding SoftBank-involved rounds account for.
SoftBankstrategy of writing big checks to successful startups in large and growing market segments extends past real estate, of course. It touches many other industries, including e-commerce and logistics, insurance and healthcare, and, perhaps most contentiously, ride-hailing and on-demand transportation.
SoftBank also has a strong portfolio of artificial intelligence companies to flex at some point down the road. It has invested in the likes of Nvidia, Improbable, Brain Corporation, Pentuumand others. Furthermore, its stakes in Mapbox and Cruise Automation are advantageous to SB Drive, its own autonomous vehicles effort.
SoftBank is one of the cases of everything old being new again. In the late 1990s, SoftBank and its founder Masayoshi Son were some of the biggest investors in tech. Then, like today, Son aimed to forge a kind of virtual Silicon Valley in SoftBankportfolio, a platform for symbiotic, cooperative relationships and business partnerships to emerge. Theredefinitely the possibility for this sort of bonhomie to emerge today, given the thematic nature of the firminvestment strategy. But at the same time, Son is famous for losing a lot of money when the first tech bubble collapsed. It remains to be seen whether the firm will make it out on top the second time around.
Read more: WeWork is just one facet of SoftBank’s bet on real estate
Write comment (90 Comments)According to new reports, Walmart has enlisted the services of Mark Greenberg to help build a subscription video streaming service. Rumors have been floating around for some time now, that the retailer is looking to go head to head with the likes of Netflix and Amazon Prime video, and Greenberg — who left the role of CEO at Epix in September — is well-positioned to help.
The service would reportedly function apart from Vudu, the a la carte video service Walmart purchased in 2010, as a bid to bolster its smart TV offerings. According to Variety, the streaming service would be firmly targeted at what the retail giant views as its core demographic, with a low subscription price and content targeted directly at &Middle America.&
The company is said to be eying an $8 a month price point, which would put it $2 below Netflixstandard subscription fee. Amazon Video is probably a more comparable competitor, given the size and breadth of both companies, but at the moment, Walmart doesn&t have an offering that fits the same scope as Amazon Prime.
Vudu, on the other hand, features around 150,000 films to purchase or rent, but currently commands only around 13-percent of videos streamed from U.S. TVs. Netflix and Amazon, meanwhile, are responsible 73 and 28 percent, respectively, by Comscorecount.
This is all in the very early stages, according to reports. As such, neither Walmart nor Greenberg are disclosing anything.
Read more: Walmart reportedly recruits ex-Epix CEO in bid to build video service
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