TREND REPORTS
Flying-Taxi Startup Lilium Reveals design for Urban Vertiports
[Design]
2020/07/15 09:03
German aerial-taxi company Lilium has unveiled its design guidelines for modular vertiports that could be placed on top of office blocks, car parks or shopping centres.Lilium, which has developed a five-seater jet-powered electric air taxi, created the design guidelines as part of its plan to launch an all-electric air taxi service in multiple cities around the world by 2025.The modular and pre...
(PDF) Mckinsey - How to Drive Winning Battery-Electric-Vehicle Design
[Business]
2020/07/14 09:10
Lessons from benchmarking ten Chinese models. Our analysis of the Chinese battery-electric-vehicle market revealed important clues for OEMs that want to thrive in this sector.Many automotive OEMs and suppliers in Europe, Japan, and the United States are starting large-scale launches of battery electric vehicles (BEVs) in their core markets. But in China, a rapidly growing BEV market and ecosyst...
(Patent) Apple’s New Patent on Spatial Audio Proves It Is Serious About “Apple Glasses” and AR/VR
[Tech]
2020/07/14 09:09
Apple Seeks a Patent for Spatial Audio Downmixing and Another on a User Interface for Camera Effects.U.S. patent application, 20200221248, describes a visualized spatial sound object representing a snapshot/thumbnail of spatial sound, which is previewed by manipulating the object’s orientation. A weighted downmix of channels is rendered for output as a spatial preview sound. For example, a sin...
The Cost of AI Training is Improving at 50x the Speed of Moore’s Law
[Business]
2020/07/14 09:08
The cost to train an artificial intelligence (AI) system is improving at 50x the pace of Moore’s Law. For many use cases, the cost to run an AI inference system has collapsed to almost nil. After just five years of development, deep learning – the modern incarnation of AI – seems to have reached a tipping point in both cost and performance, paving the way for widespread adoption over the nex...
The Smallest Large Display Is Projected Straight Onto Your Retina
[Tech]
2020/07/14 09:07
For most of human history, the way to get custom shapes and colors onto one’s retinas was to draw it on a cave wall, or a piece of parchment, or on paper. Later on, we invented electronic displays and used them for everything from televisions to computers, even toying with displays that gave the illusion of a 3D shape existing in front of us. Yet what if one could just skip this surface and dr...
The Battery Billionaire Who’s Key to Tesla’s Future in China - CATL
[Business]
2020/07/14 09:06
CATL chairman Zeng Yuqun’s partnership with Elon Musk could boost the Chinese company’s global market share at a time of falling battery sales.Tesla Inc. needs to succeed in China if it wants to dominate the world of electric cars—especially in a post-virus world. To do that, Elon Musk is turning to a battery engineer who once helped Apple Inc. extend the life of its MacBook laptops.Zeng Yuq...
(Video) Skydio Raises $100M, Announces Enterprise-Focused Drone Lineup
[Investing]
2020/07/14 09:05
Redwood City-based drone startup Skydio today revealed it raised $100 million, bringing its total raised to $170 million. Coinciding with the fundraising, Skydio unveiled a new family of drones — X2 — and software solutions designed to simplify inspections and enterprise-oriented workflows.Skydio is the brainchild of Adam Bry, Abe Bachrach, and Matt Donahoe, the last of whom worked as a resea...
Top 50 Most Profitable Companies in the U.S.
[Investing]
2020/07/14 09:04
It’s been a rough start to 2020 for the U.S. economy, with the Bureau of Economic Analysis reporting a 12.3 drop in corporate profits in the first quarter. The most profitable U.S. companies have proved no exception to this downturn, although things are starting to look up for some.U.S. corporate profits fell by 12% in the first quarter of 2020.Berkshire Hathaway, the most profitable U.S. comp...
This Spotlight-Inspired Speaker Solves 3 Problems to Elevate Your Netflix Binge Sessions
[Design]
2020/07/14 09:03
Have you ever been told that you are sitting too close to the TV? Or do you have an urge to always turn up the volume so you can drown out the noises from the environment around you? Have you strained your eyes to read the subtitles because you cannot sit too close to it at night and neither can you increase the volume? We need technology that makes watching TV from a distance a convenient and...
