Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi is currently working on multiple budget and mid-range devices, including the Redmi 6 and Redmi 6A that were certified by TENAA last month. Now, the Mi A2 Lite has been certified by the IMDA with the model number M1805D1SG.
The TENAA certification along with the IMDA certification has revealed that the device bearing
Read more: Xiaomi Mi A2 Lite gets certified with 19:9 notch display, dual rear cameras
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Today at Computex in Taipei, Nvidia CEO and founder Jensen Huang announced the availability of a drastically upgraded version of Issac. Nvidia calls the next-gen robotics system the next step in autonomous machines as it reportedly brings AI capabilities to a new set of industries.
The company has been talking about this platform some time, touting its capabilities and use cases. A Jetson Xavier SoC provides the processing with more than 9 billion transistors, it delivers over 30 TOPS (trillion operations per second). Inside the Xavier is a Volta Tensor Core GPU, an eight-core ARM64 CPU, dual NVDLA deep learning accelerators, an image processor, a vision processor and a video processor.
The platform developer kit will be available in August for $1,299 and includes the Isaac robotics software.
&AI is the most powerful technology force of our time,& said Huang in a released statement. &Its first phase will enable new levels of software automation that boost productivity in many industries. Next, AI, in combination with sensors and actuators, will be the brain of a new generation of autonomous machines. Someday, there will be billions of intelligent machines in manufacturing, home delivery, warehouse logistics and much more.&
The Isaac Robotics Software includes the Isaac SDK, a collection of APIs and tools to develop robotic algorithm software, the Isaac IMX, Nvidia-developed robotics software, and the Isaac Sim, a virtual simulation software to train autonomous machines.
The availability of the developer kit should mark a turning point of robotics development. It provides serious processing power and capabilities in a ready-made package.
Read more: Nvidia prices Jeston Xavier AI platform developer kit at $1,299
Write comment (97 Comments)Facebook has responded to a New York Times story that raises privacy concerns about the companydevice-integrated APIs, saying that it &disagree[s] with the issues they&ve raised about these APIs.&
Headined &Facebook Gave Device Makers Deep Access to Data on Users and Friends,& the New York Times article criticizes the privacy protections of device-integrated APIs, which were launched by Facebook a decade ago. Before app stores became common, the APIs enabled Facebook to strike data-sharing partnerships with at least 60 device makers, including Apple, Amazon, BlackBerry, Microsoft and Samsung, that allowed them to offer Facebook features, such as messaging, address books and the like button, to their users.
But they may have given access to more data than assumed, says the article. New York Times reporters Gabriel J.X. Dance, Nicholas Confessore and Michael LaForgia write that &the partnerships, whose scope has not been previously reported, raise concerns about the companyprivacy protections,& as well as its compliance with a consent decree it struck with the Federal Trade Commission in 2011. The FTC is currently investigating Facebookprivacy practices in light of the Cambridge Analytica data misuse scandal.
&Facebook allowed the device companies access to the data of users& friends without their explicit consent, even after declaring that it would no longer share such information with outsiders,& the New York Times story says. &Some device makers could retrieve personal information even from users& friends who believed they had barred any sharing, The New York Times found.&
Facebook said in April it would begin winding down access to its device-integrated APIs, but the New York Times says that many of those partnerships are still in effect.
Facebook is already under intense scrutiny by lawmakers and regulators, including the FTC, because of the Cambridge Analytica revelation, which raised serious concerns about the public APIs used by third-party developers and the companydata-sharing policies.
&In the furor that followed, Facebookleaders said that the kind of access exploited by Cambridge in 2014 was cut off by the next year, when Facebook prohibited developers from collecting information from users& friends,& the New York Times says. &But the company officials did not disclose that Facebook had exempted the makers of cellphones, tablets and other hardware from such restrictions.&
Facebook told the New York Times that data sharing through device-integrated APIs adhered to its privacy policies and the 2011 FTC agreement. The company also told the newspapers that it knew of no cases where a partner had misused data. Facebook acknowledged that some partners did store users& data, including data from their Facebook friends, on their own servers, but said that those practices abided by strict agreements.
In a post on Facebookblog, vice president of product partnerships Ime Archibong reiterates the companystance that the device-integrated APIs were controlled tightly.
&Partners could not integrate the userFacebook features with their devices without the userpermission. And our partnership and engineering teams approved the Facebook experiences these companies built,& he continued. &Contrary to claims by the New York Times, friends& information, like photos, was only accessible on devices when people made a decision to share their information with those friends. We are not aware of any abuse by these companies.&
But the New York Times report claims that Facebookpartners were able to retrieve user data on relationship status, religion, political leanings and upcoming events, and were also able to get data about their users& Facebook friends, even if they did not have permission.
&Tests by The Times showed that the partners requested and received data in the same way other third parties did,& it says. &Facebookview that the device makers are not outsiders lets the partners go even further, The Times found: They can obtain data about a userFacebook friends, even those who have denied Facebook permission to share information with any third parties.&
There are already many, many reasons to attendTechCrunchfirst blockchain event this coming July 6 in Zug, Switzerland. You&ll hear from industry leaders includingEthereum creator Vitalik Buterin, Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan and Binance CEOChangpengZhao, but herea further sweetener: we will have a follow-on event the very next day.
We&re excited to announce that we&ll hold an Ethereum Meetup on July 7, the day after the ‘TC Sessions: Blockchain& event. TechCrunch is producing this event with support from the Ethereum Foundation and other members of the Ethereum community.
To recap: the TC Sessions: Blockchain event takes place July 6 in Zug, the Swiss Canton know as ‘Crypto Valley,& and it&ll be followed by the Ethereum Meetup produced by TechCrunch on July 7th from 1-6pm at the Casino, the same venue as the blockchain event the day before.
A follow-on meetup is a first for our single-day ‘TC Sessions& events, which TechCrunch produces to cover important emerging topics like robotics, AR/VR and tech diversity. The second-day event in Zug reflects the strong demand we&ve seen from readers who are keen to further explore and understand the blockchain space.
This meetup will feature core developers and leaders from the Ethereum ecosystem, including Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum Foundation developer Karl Floersch, and others. It will cover a range of topics on the technical side,including presentations and discussions around issues of scaling, protocol improvements, and improvements to consensus among other topics.
We&ll have full details on the agenda very soon so stay patient.
Attendees of the TC Sessions: Blockchain event who wish to attend the Ethereum Meetup will need to purchase a separate pass. Tickets are available now for the meetup and can be purchased here— they are priced at 50 CHF plus VAT, thataround $53 at current rates.We can&t wait to see you there.
There are a limited number of sponsorship opportunities open for the Ethereum Meetup produced by TechCrunch. If you are interested in sponsoring the event, please fill out this form.
Read more: Announcing the TechCrunch Ethereum Meetup alongside our blockchain event in Zug
Write comment (94 Comments)Locus, a three-year-old startup that helps companies map out their logistics, has pulled in $4 million in funding to grow its global footprint outside of its native India.
The round is described as pre-Series B and it was provided byRocketship.vc, Recruit Strategic Partners, pi Ventures and DSP GroupHemendra Kothari. Existing backers Blume Ventures,Exfinity Venture Partners, BeeNext and growX ventures also took part.Bengaluru-basedLocus previously raised a $2.75 million Series A in 2016.
The company was founded in 2015 byNishith Rastogi and Geet Garg, two ex Amazon engineers who met when working on machine learning for AWS. Initially the duo developed a safety app that mapped out optimal routes to let a ride-hailing customer sense if their driver was going rogue and not sticking to the designated trip, but it later pivoted into logistics tracking after feedback from enterprise users.
Today, Locus is focused on helping customers optimize the operational side of their logistics, whether that is moving people, goods or more at scale. It doesn&t cover ride-hailing and it isn&t necessarily focused on ensuring the faster route. Instead, it tackles complex challenges such as helping FCMGs optimize travel for their management — the key focus being on spending as much time in stores for meetings — or helping organizations move large orders by figuring out how many trucks are needed, which routes are optimal, etc.
Co-founder and CEORastogi described the role as that of &chief supply chain officer.&
&We want toautomate all human decisions around logistics,& he explained to TechCrunch in an interview, adding that the business makes use of machine learning and artificial intelligence to suss out routes and operational approaches.
He added that the machine-based approach can trump human logic in some cases, thanks to the sheer amounts of data it is based on. In one example, he explained how the Locus system had advised trucks taking a long haul trip to return to the client HQ using a different route. Initially the team figured there was a problem, but on closer inspection they found that the return route cut out a steep hill which, while fine to travel down on the outbound led, was best avoided on the return trip.
That decision,Rastogi said, was based on travel data that the system had observed and might not ordinarily have been made by human-based analysts. To help with the system, the company also provides a $500-priced scanner — &SizeUp,& pictured below — for measuring packages. The idea is to not only make the tech portable but affordable enough that it can be used companies of all sizes.
The company began to expand to overseas markets this year with moves into North America — both Canada and the U.S. — and Southeast Asia. Rastogi said the new capital will go towards expanding its presence in those markets. Later this year, he said, Locus plans to raise a &significant& Series B round, among the objectives for that is a dedicated technical team in Tel Aviv to complement the work happening in India.
Read more: India’s Locus raises $4M to expand its logistics management service worldwide
Write comment (95 Comments)As Apple gears up for its developer keynote conference tomorrow, one of its bigger announcements is likely to be new changes coming to its augmented reality platform. Since announcing ARKit last year, the tech giant has hardly been sheepish about its belief in ARpotential.
Behind a lot of that talk is belief in the techutility down the road, but until Apple is ready to experimenting with AR tech in core iOS features, all of the chatter around AR having plenty of utility today feels a bit half-hearted. I&ll be very interested to see if the company announces any AR integrations in iOS 12 tomorrow that add new utility or if Animojis are still about as far as they&re willing to go.
While nearly every major tech company spent 2017 opining about the potential of AR, there still doesn&t seem to be much that consumers can show for it. Google made a few interesting announcements surrounding the technology at its I/O conference last month, most fascinating was an AR walking mode being tested for Google Maps. Apple Maps is in desperate need of an upgrade and it makes sense for that to be the starting point for where its integrations begin.
AR is definitely one of Applelonger term investments, but italso one that may not see much payoff in the short term.
While Apple has been content to let many of their long-term bets iterate through awkward phases underground in the R-D labs, ARKit has been thrust onto hundreds of millions of devices while still in that odd, what-are-we-supposed-to-do-with-this stage. AR is more broadly one of those unique scenarios where everyone can imagine a potential end-case, ithow it gets there thatthe head-scratcher and Apple seems to need developers to take on the risk of experimenting.
At Appledeveloper conference keynote tomorrow, the company seems poised to showcase new developments for its ARKit augmented reality platform. Chief on the list of expected upgrades (via Reuters) is a system of sharing coordinated point clouds between phones so that multiple users can run AR apps in a shared experience, aka AR multiplayer.
Where Apple will definitely highlight ARKitpotential is in the gaming sector.Gaming has always been more-engaging with multi-player, but how that really looks with augmented reality is anyoneguess. Itbeen two years since Pokémon GO was released and for all of the attention that title received, it isn&t entirely clear how AR capabilities contributed to its success.
Games that integrate a multiplayer ARKit are going to have to make a lot of discoveries on their own. Playing games with friends in AR will gain a hyper-local edge but will lose much of the freedom offered by online gameplay in terms of connecting gamers seamlessly. There are countless other UX questions that will also still need to be experimented with.
Augmented reality is a truly exciting technology and Appleefforts to lead the pack in building developer support has built up a lot of initial enthusiasm from that crowd, but to keep that excitement Applegoing to need to start proving out some of those use cases for users on their own and put its big bet deeper into users& daily digital lives.
Read more: Apple’s AR bet still has a lot to prove
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