Tech News - IoT and Hardware

Sidewalk Toronto, a joint venture between Sidewalk Labs, which is owned by Google parent company Alphabet Inc., and Waterfront Toronto, is proposing a high-tech neighbourhood called Quayside for the city’s eastern waterfront. In March 2017, Waterfront Toronto had shared a Request for proposal for this project with the Sidewalk Labs team. It ultimately got approval by Oct 2017 and is currently led by Eric Schmidt, Alphabet Inc CEO and Daniel Doctoroff, Sidewalk Labs CEO. As per reports from Daneilla Barreto, a digital activism coordinator for Amnesty International Canada, the project will normalize the mass surveillance and is a direct threat to human rights. https://twitter.com/AmnestyNow/status/1122932137513164801 The 12-acre smart city, which will be located between East Bayfront and the Port Lands, promises to tackle the social and policy challenges affecting Toronto: affordable housing, traffic congestion and the impacts of climate change. Imagine self-driving vehicles shuttling you around a 24/7 neighbourhood featuring low-cost, modular buildings that easily switch uses based on market demand. Picture buildings heated or cooled by a thermal grid that doesn’t rely on fossil fuels, or garbage collection by industrial robots. Underpinning all of this is a network of sensors and other connected technology that will monitor and track environmental and human behavioural data. That last part about tracking human data has sparked concerns. Much ink has been spilled in the press about privacy protections and the issue has been raised repeatedly by citizens in two of four recent community consultations held by Sidewalk Toronto. They have proposed to build the waterfront neighbourhood from scratch, embed sensors and cameras throughout and effectively create a “digital layer”. This digital layer may result monitoring actions of individuals and collection of their data. In the Responsible Data Use Policy Framework released last year, the Sidewalk Toronto team made a number of commitments with regard to privacy, such as not selling personal information to third parties or using it for advertising purposes. Daneilla further argues that privacy was declared a human right and is protected under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the United Nations in 1948. However, in the Sidewalk Labs conversation, privacy has been framed as a purely digital tech issue. Debates have focused on questions of data access, who owns it, how will it be used, where it should all be stored and what should be collected. In other words it will collect the minutest information of an individual’s everyday living. For example, track what medical offices they enter, what locations they frequent and who their visitors are, in turn giving away clues to physical or mental health conditions, immigration status, whether if an individual is involved in any kind of sex work, their sexual orientation or gender identity or, the kind of political views they might hold. It will further affect their health status, employment, where they are allowed to live, or where they can travel further down the line. All of these raise a question: Do citizens want their data to be collected at this scale at all? And this conversation remains long overdue. Not all communities have agreed to participate in this initiative as marginalized and racialized communities will be affected most by surveillance. The Canadian Civil Liberties Association (CCLA) has threatened to sue Sidewalk Toronto project, arguing that privacy protections should be spelled out before the project proceeds. Toronto’s Mayor John Tory showed least amount of interest in addressing these concerns during a panel on tech investment in Canada at South by Southwest (SXSW) on March 10. Tory was present in the event to promote the city as a go-to tech hub while inviting the international audience at SXSW at the other industry events. Last October, Saadia Muzaffar announced her resignation from Waterfront Toronto's Digital Strategy Advisory Panel. "Waterfront Toronto's apathy and utter lack of leadership regarding shaky public trust and social license has been astounding," the author and founder of TechGirls Canada said in her resignation letter. Later that month, Dr. Ann Cavoukian, a privacy expert and consultant for Sidewalk Labs, put her resignation too. As she wanted all data collection to be anonymized or "de-identified" at the source, protecting the privacy of citizens. Why big tech really want your data? Data can be termed as a rich resource or the “new oil” in other words. As it can be mined in a number of ways, from licensing it for commercial purposes to making it open to the public and freely shareable.  Apparently like oil, data has the power to create class warfare, permitting those who own it to control the agenda and those who don’t to be left at their mercy. With the flow of data now contributing more to world GDP than the flow of physical goods, there’s a lot at stake for the different players. It can benefit in different ways as for the corporate, it is the primary beneficiaries of personal data, monetizing it through advertising, marketing and sales. For example, Facebook for past 2 to 3 years has repeatedly come under the radar for violating user privacy and mishandling data. For the government, data may help in public good, to improve quality of life for citizens via data--driven design and policies. But in some cases minorities and poor are highly impacted by the privacy harms caused due to mass surveillance, discriminatory algorithms among other data driven technological applications. Also public and private dissent can be discouraged via mass surveillance thus curtailing freedom of speech and expression. As per NY Times report, low-income Americans have experienced a long history of disproportionate surveillance, the poor bear the burden of both ends of the spectrum of privacy harms; are subject to greater suspicion and monitoring while applying for government benefits and live in heavily policed neighborhoods. In some cases they also lose out on education and job opportunities. https://twitter.com/JulieSBrill/status/1122954958544916480 In more promising news, today the Oakland Privacy Advisory Commission released 2 key documents one on the Oakland privacy principles and the other on ban on facial recognition tech. https://twitter.com/cfarivar/status/1123081921498636288 They have given emphasis to privacy in the framework and mentioned that, “Privacy is a fundamental human right, a California state right, and instrumental to Oaklanders’ safety, health, security, and access to city services. We seek to safeguard the privacy of every Oakland resident in order to promote fairness and protect civil liberties across all of Oakland’s diverse communities.” Safety will be paramount for smart city initiatives, such as Sidewalk Toronto. But we need more Oakland like laws and policies that protect and support privacy and human rights. One where we are able to use technology in a safe way and things aren’t happening that we didn’t consent to. #NotOkGoogle: Employee-led town hall reveals hundreds of stories of retaliation at Google Google announces new policy changes for employees to report misconduct amid complaints of retaliation and harassment #GoogleWalkout organizers face backlash at work, tech workers show solidarity

Yesterday, the Mozilla IoT team announced that ‘Project Things’ is now out from its early experimental phase with a new name, ‘WebThings’. Mozilla WebThings is an open platform that allows you to monitor and control devices over the web. This project by Mozilla is an open source implementation of Web of Things, which defines software architectural styles and programming patterns that allow real-world objects to be a part of the World Wide Web. The idea here is to create a decentralized Internet of Things by providing “things”, URLs on the web to make them linkable and discoverable. Mozilla WebThings comprises of two components: WebThings Gateway WebThings Gateway is privacy and security-focused software distribution built for smart home gateways. It enables you to directly monitor and control your smart home gateways over the web, without relying on a middleman. Mozilla further announced that WebThings Gateway 0.8 is now available for download. This release comes with a feature that allows users to privately log data from their smart home devices. This logged data can also be visualized with interactive graphs. “This feature is still experimental, but viewing these logs will help you understand the kinds of data your smart home devices are collecting and think about how much of that data you are comfortable sharing with others via third-party services,” said Ben Francis, a Software Engineer at Mozilla. This release also brings in new alarms capabilities for devices like smoke, carbon monoxide, and motion detectors. With this new feature, users can configure rules to alert them when an alarm is triggered while they are away or check whether an alarm is currently active. The team has also started working on a new version of WebThings Gateway for OpenWrt, a Linux operating system targeting embedded devices. This version will be designed to act as a WiFi access point itself, instead of just connecting to an existing wireless network as a client. WebThings Framework WebThings Framework is a suite of reusable software components using which you can build your own web things, which directly expose the Web Thing API. This makes them easily discoverable by a Web of Things gateway or client. It can then automatically detect the device’s capabilities and monitor and control it over the web. These components are implemented in a range of languages including Node.js, Python, Java, Rust, and C++ (for Arduino). To know more in detail, check out the official announcement by Mozilla. Mozilla introduces Pyodide, a Python data science stack compiled to WebAssembly Mozilla developers have built BugBug which uses machine learning to triage Firefox bugs Mozilla adds protection against fingerprinting and Cryptomining scripts in Firefox Nightly and Beta  

Yesterday, a team of researchers from UC Berkeley's Robot Learning Lab announced the completion of their three-year-long project called Blue. It is a low-cost, high-performance robot arm that was built to work in real-world environments such as warehouses, homes, hospitals, and urban landscapes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZ88hPgrZzs&feature=youtu.be With Blue, the researchers aimed to significantly accelerate research towards useful home robots. Blue is capable of mimicking human motions in real-world environments and enables more intuitive teleoperation. Pieter Abbeel, the director of the Berkeley Robot Learning Lab and co-founder and chief scientist of AI startup Covariant, shared the vision behind this project, “AI has been moving very fast, and existing robots are getting smarter in some ways on the software side, but the hardware’s not changing. Everybody’s using the same hardware that they’ve been using for many years . . . We figured there must be an opportunity to come up with a new design that is better for the AI era. Blue design details Its dynamic properties meet or exceed the needs of a human operator, for instance, the robot has a nominal position-control bandwidth of 7.5 Hz and repeatability within 4mm. It is a kinematically-anthropomorphic robot arm with a 2 KG payload and can cost less than $5000. It consists of 7 Degree of Freedom, which includes 3 in the shoulder, 1 in the elbow, and 3 in the wrist. Blue has quasi-direct drive (QDD) actuators, which offer better force control, selectable impedance, and are highly backdrivable. These actuators make Blue resilient to damage and also makes it safer for humans to be around. The team is first distributing early release arms to developers and industry partners. We can see a product release within the next six months. The team is also planning to have a production edition of the Blue robot arm, which will be available by 2020. To read more on Blue, check out the Berkley Open Arms site. Walmart to deploy thousands of robots in its 5000 stores across US Boston Dynamics’ latest version of Handle, robot designed for logistics Setting up a Raspberry Pi for a robot – Headless by Default [Tutorial]

Yesterday, Intel announced its decision to leave the 5G smartphone modem market and channelize its focus towards 4G and 5G modems for PCs, internet of things devices and other data-centric devices. This news broke immediately after Apple’s settlement with Qualcomm with regards to the ongoing patent violation and royalty dispute because of Apple’s use of Qualcomm modems in the iPhone. None of the companies made a statement regarding the dispute. https://twitter.com/intelnews/status/1118296038337421312 According to a report by Nikkei, Apple had concerns regarding Intel’s ability to supply next year’s iPhone models with 5G modems. Also last year,  Intel became Apple’s sole supplier of smartphone modems as the dispute with Qualcomm got complex. https://twitter.com/jonfortt/status/1118297377620877312 Apple might now use Qualcomm’s 5G modems with the iPhone in 2020 as it seems Intel has backed out of the modem business. This might put Apple in a tough situation to make a decision in the legal battle with Qualcomm. Intel will continue to invest in its 5G network infrastructure business and will also meet the current customer commitments for its existing 4G smartphone modem product line. The company doesn’t have any plans to launch 5G modem products in the smartphone space. Bob Swan, CEO at Intel, said, “We are very excited about the opportunity in 5G and the ‘cloudification’ of the network, but in the smartphone modem business it has become apparent that there is no clear path to profitability and positive returns.” Swan further added, “5G continues to be a strategic priority across Intel, and our team has developed a valuable portfolio of wireless products and intellectual property. We are assessing our options to realize the value we have created, including the opportunities in a wide variety of data-centric platforms and devices in a 5G world.” This month, Intel might provide more details about its latest development over 4G and 5G modems for computers and other IoT devices in its upcoming first-quarter 2019 earnings release and conference call. To know more about this news, check out Intel’s official announcement. Researchers discover Spectre like new speculative flaw, “SPOILER” in Intel CPU’s Apple plans to make notarization a default requirement in all future macOS updates Ian Goodfellow quits Google and joins Apple as a director of machine learning  

Walmart, the world’s largest retailer following the latest tech trend is going all in on robots. It plans to deploy thousands of robots for lower level jobs in its 5000 of 11, 348 stores in US. In a statement released on its blog on Tuesday, the retail giant said that it was unleashing a number of technological innovations, including autonomous floor cleaners, shelf-scanners, conveyor belts, and "pickup towers" on stores across the United States. Elizabeth Walker from Walmart Corporate Affairs says, “Every hero needs a sidekick, and some of the best have been automated. Smart assistants have huge potential to make busy stores run more smoothly, so Walmart has been pioneering new technologies to minimize the time an associate spends on the more mundane and repetitive tasks like cleaning floors or checking inventory on a shelf. This gives associates more of an opportunity to do what they’re uniquely qualified for: serve customers face-to-face on the sales floor.” Further Walmart announced that it would be adding 1,500 new floor cleaners, 300 more shelf-scanners, 1,200 conveyor belts, and 900 new pickup towers. It has been tested in dozens of markets and hundreds of stores to prove the effectiveness of the robots. Also, the idea of replacing people with machines for certain job roles will reduce costs for Walmart. Perhaps if you are not hiring people, they can't quit, demand a living wage, take sick days off etc resulting in better margins and efficiencies. According to Walmart CEO Doug McMillon, “Automating certain tasks gives associates more time to do work they find fulfilling and to interact with customers. Continuing this logic, the retailer points to robots as a source of greater efficiency, increased sales and reduced employee turnover.” "Our associates immediately understood the opportunity for the new technology to free them up from focusing on tasks that are repeatable, predictable and manual," John Crecelius, senior vice president of central operations for Walmart US, said in an interview with BBC Insider. "It allows them time to focus more on selling merchandise and serving customers, which they tell us have always been the most exciting parts of working in retail." With the war for talent raging on in the world of retail and the demand for minimum wage hikes a frequent occurrence, Walmart's expanding robot army is a signal that the company is committed to keeping labor costs down. Does that mean at the cost of cutting jobs or employee restructuring? Walmart has not specified what number of jobs it will cut as a result of this move. But when automation takes place and at the largest retailer in the US is Walmart, significant job losses can be expected to hit. https://twitter.com/NoelSharkey/status/1116241378600730626 Early last year, Bloomberg reported that Walmart is removing around 3500 store co-managers, a salaried role that acts as a lieutenant underneath each store manager. The U.S. in particular has an inordinately high proportion of employees performing routine functions that could be easily automated. As such, retail automation is bound to hit them the hardest. With costs on the rise, and Amazon as a constant looming threat that has resulted in the closing of thousands of mom-and-pop stores across the US, it was inevitable that Walmart would turn to automation as a way to stay competitive in the market. As the largest retail employer in the US, transitions to an automated retailing model, it will leave a good proposition of the 7,04,000 strong US retail workforce either unemployed, underemployed or unready to transition into other jobs. How much Walmart assists its redundant workforce to transition to another livelihood will be litmus test to its widely held image of a caring employer in contrast to Amazon’s ruthless image. How Rolls Royce is applying AI and robotics for smart engine maintenance AI powered Robotics : Autonomous machines in the making Four interesting Amazon patents in 2018 that use machine learning, AR, and robotics

Last month Amazon announced that it acquired the mesh Wi-Fi router company, Eero for $97 million. However, this deal, which sounded full of potential, struck Eero’s investors and employees with a financial catastrophe. Mashable, who first reported on Amazon’s acquisition, reported that Eero executives brought home multi-million dollar bonuses of around $30 million and eight-figure salary increases. However, the others did not fare well in this deal. According to Mashable, “Investors took major hits, and the Amazon acquisition rendered Eero stock worthless: $0.03 per share, down from a common stock high of $3.54 in July 2017. It typically would have cost around $3 for employees to exercise their stock, meaning they would actually lose money if they tried to cash out. Former and current Eero employees who chose not to exercise those options are now empty-handed. And those who did exercise options, investing their financial faith in the company, have lost money.” Eero devices, the first to mesh WiFi, hit the market first in the year 2016. However, companies such as Luma and NetGear launched similar products in the following year. According to an Eero former employee, another major challenge for Eero was when Google launched its own mesh network, Google Wifi, in late 2016, for just $299 whereas Eero’s was priced at $500. To remain ahead of the curve, Eero later launched a smart home security system named Hive. And Google again produced a similar product called Nest Secure. Post this, Eero abandoned Hive leading which aroused a period of confusion. “The day they killed [Hive] was the day the company changed,” a former employee told Mashable. “After Eero employees returned from the holidays, 20 percent of the staff was cut. Next came massive attrition. An ex-employee described it as a period of “desperate fear.” Morale was so low that HR disabled group emailing and prohibited employees from sending out goodbye emails to say they were leaving”, Mashable reports. After Eero announced its acquisition last month, specifics of the deal was neither disclosed by Eero nor Amazon, which led the employees to bundle up their anger against this deal. Per Mashable, “Employees tried to guess from news reports and social media what the deal meant for them. When the stock price leaked, some ex-employees breathed a sigh of relief that they didn’t exercise their options in the first place. Others were left with worthless stock and disappointment.” All employees received a letter dated February 15 which mentioned that they had four days to decide what to do with their Eero shares. Some even received the letter on or after the deadline. Source: Mashable The employees who chose to purchase or exercise their stock received a "phonebook-sized" packet of dense financial information including acquisition terms. Nick Weaver, Eero’s co-founder, wrote in the introduction, “Unfortunately, the transaction will not result in the financial return we all hoped for.” Rob Chandra, a partner at Avid Park Ventures, and lecturer at UC Berkeley’s Haas business school said, “One obvious way you can judge whether it was a great exit or not is if the exit valuation is lower than the amount of capital that was invested in the startup. So it's not a great exit.” “The documents state that after transaction costs and debt, the actual price will be closer to $54.6 million. That means that Amazon is covering around $40 million of the debt that Eero owes. Ex-employees believe the debt to be from hardware manufacturing costs, since they said that Eero took on corporate financing to actually manufacture the products”, Mashable reports. Jeff Scheinrock, a professor at the UCLA Anderson School of Management said, “What this says about it was that Eero was cash strapped. A lot of this money is going to pay off debts. They were having difficulty and probably couldn’t raise additional money, so they had to look for an exit.” To know more about this news in detail, head over to Mashable’s complete coverage. SUSE is now an independent company after being acquired by EQT for $2.5 billion JFrog acquires DevOps startup ‘Shippable’ for an end-to-end DevOps solution Amazon buys ‘Eero’ mesh router startup, adding fuel to its in-house Alexa smart home ecosystem ambitions

Amazon has been exploring itself in the health care sector since quite some time now. Just last year, Amazon bought the online pharmacy PillPack for $1 billion in order to sell the prescription drugs. The company introduced Amazon Comprehend Medical, a machine learning tool that allows users to extract relevant clinical information from the unstructured text in patient records. Amazon is even working with Accenture and Merck to develop a cloud-based platform for collaborators across the life sciences industry with a motive to bring innovation in the drug development research. Amazon has now taken a bigger leap by announcing its voice assistant, Alexa as HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) compliant, which means that it can work with health care and medical software developers in order to invent new programs or skills with voice and provide better experiences to their customers. With the help of Amazon Alexa, developers will design new skills to help customers manage their healthcare needs at home by simply using voice. Patients will now be able to book a medical appointment, access the hospital post-discharge instructions or check on the status of a prescription delivery, and much more just via the voice! HIPAA has been designed to protect patients in cases where their personal health information is shared with health care organizations such as hospitals. This will allow healthcare companies to build Alexa voice tools capable of securely transmitting the patient’s private information. The consumers will now be able to use new Alexa health skills for asking questions such as “Alexa, pull up my blood glucose readings” or “Alexa, find me a doctor,” and will receive a response from the voice assistant. The company further announced the launch of six voice programs including Express Scripts, My Children's Enhanced Recovery After Surgery (ERAS), Cigna Health Today, Swedish Health Connect, Atrium Health, and Livongo. These new tools allow patients to use Alexa for accessing personalized information such as prescription, progress updates after surgery, and much more. Rachel Jiang, a member of Amazon’s health and wellness team, who previously worked at Microsoft and Facebook announced that Amazon has invited six healthcare partners to use its HIPAA-compliant skills kit to build voice programs. But the company expects to get more healthcare providers on board to access its information. Jiang wrote in a post, “These new skills are designed to help customers manage a variety of healthcare needs at home simply using voice – whether it’s booking a medical appointment, accessing hospital post-discharge instructions, checking on the status of a prescription delivery, and more.” Boston Children’s Hospital now has a new HIPAA-compliant skill dubbed “ERAS” for kids that are discharged from the hospital and for their families. With the help of Alexa’s voice assistant, patients and their families or caregivers can now ask questions to the care team about their case. Even the doctors can now remotely check in on the child’s recovery process. Livongo, a digital health start-up, works with employers in order to help them in managing workers with chronic medical conditions. Livongo developed a skill for people with diabetes that uses connected glucometers that would ask about the patient’s blood sugar levels. In a statement to CNBC, Livongo’s president Jenny Schneider told that “There are lots of reasons she expects users to embrace voice technologies, versus SMS messaging or other platforms. Some of those people might have difficulty reading, or they just have busy lives and it’s just an easy option.” Express Scripts, a pharmacy benefit management organization is working towards building a way for members to check the status of their home delivery prescription via Alexa. Voice technology has been booming in the health care sector and skills like the ones mentioned above will bring health care to home and make the patients lives easy and cost-effective. John Brownstein, chief innovation officer for Boston Children’s Hospital, said, “We’re in a renaissance of voice technology and voice assistants in health care. It’s so appealing as there’s very little training, it’s low cost and convenient.” To know more about this news, check out  Amazon’s official announcement. Amazon won’t be opening its HQ2 in New York due to public protests MariaDB announces MariaDB Enterprise Server and welcomes Amazon’s Mark Porter as an advisor to the board of directors Over 30 AI experts join shareholders in calling on Amazon to stop selling Rekognition, its facial recognition tech, for government surveillance  

Boston Dynamics, an American engineering and robotics design company has come up with the latest version of the Handle robot that will be useful in factories. The company previously launched the original version of this bot in 2017. And in the same year, Boston Dynamics was sold to SoftBank, which previously was under Google’s parent company Alphabet. The latest version of Handle which is a mobile manipulation robot has been designed for logistics. https://twitter.com/BostonDynamics/status/1111371709406302209 Last week, Boston Dynamics released a video on YouTube where the Handle robot is shown loading different types of boxes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5iV_hB08Uns   The robot autonomously performs SKU pallet building and depalletizing after initialization and localizing against the pallets. Handle has a vision system that tracks the marked pallets for navigation and finds individual boxes for grasping and placing. When Handle places a box onto a pallet, it uses force control to place the box against its neighbors. The robot is designed to handle boxes up to 15 Kg (33 lb). And works with pallets that are 1.2 m deep and 1.7 m tall (48 inches deep and 68 inches tall). Previously, Boston Dynamics has released interesting videos showing dog-like robots unloading dishwashers and climbing stairs, galloping Bovidae-like creatures, etc. A description on the Boston Dynamics website about Handle reads, “Handle is a robot that combines the rough-terrain capability of legs with the efficiency of wheels. It uses many of the same principles for dynamics, balance, and mobile manipulation found in the quadruped and biped robots we build, but with only 10 actuated joints, it is significantly less complex.” The Handle robot video is trending on Youtube with over 1,767,161 views. People seem to be excited about  Handle but few are being skeptical about the target audience for Handle. https://twitter.com/jesusmoses/status/1112304357482090496 While others think it will help companies e-commerce giants like Amazon and Flipkart for their smooth warehouse functioning. https://twitter.com/MRagnorok/status/1111694538303787009 Know more about Handle on the Boston Dynamics’ website. Boston Dynamics’ ‘Android of robots’ vision starts with launching 1000 robot dogs in 2019 Boston Dynamics adds military-grade mortor (parkour) skills to its popular humanoid Atlas Robot How to choose components to build a basic robot  

Apple announced last week that it has canceled its AirPower charging mat over concerns related to its inability to achieve “high standards” for the product. Apple had first announced details about the AirPower charging mat during the company’s iPhone X event in September 2017. During the event, Apple said that AirPower would be shipped in 2018, but failed to follow up for the next 18 months. The speculation over AirPower chargers getting canceled grew when Apple removed all info regarding AirPower from its website. However, the rumors of its cancellation went down as iOS 12.2 beta release included support for a wireless charger. “After much effort, we’ve concluded AirPower will not achieve our high standards and we have canceled the project. We apologize to those customers who were looking forward to this launch”, Dan Riccio, SVP of Hardware Engineering, Apple, told TechCrunch. Had the chargers shipped, a multitude of new and unique features would have welcomed the users. For instance, apart from being wireless, AirPower charger would have also been equipped with multi-device charging feature (ability to charge three devices at once), and a unique technology with multiple coils, among others. Many people have made speculations about the reason behind AirPower cancellation, with many blaming it on issues related to engineering and overheating. Craig Lloyd, a staff writer at iFixit, published a post where he discusses the possible reasons behind charger’s cancellation. Craig states that Wireless charging pads use electric current in your phone’s wire coil that helps charge the battery. However, this electricity being transmitted isn’t perfectly clean and generates noise that can interfere with other wireless devices. When different coils are charged together, a slightly different waveform is generated. Apple wanted to create a large charging platform with the help of overlapping coils which would allow AirCharger to power different devices on the charger mat. However, this introduced a different set of challenges. “Apple boxed themselves into an electromagnetic corner. What they wanted to do was physically possible—and they surely had it working in the lab—but they couldn’t consistently meet the rigorous transmission requirements that are designed to keep us safe from our gadgets”, states Craig. Now although Apple failed to deliver this product, it has not lost hope yet. “We continue to believe that the future is wireless and are committed to push the wireless experience forward”, said Riccio. Public reaction to the news is largely comical, as users took to Twitter to post memes regarding the news. https://twitter.com/wannatechnow/status/1112664509108375552 https://twitter.com/MKBHD/status/1111710778741190656 https://twitter.com/JonyIveParody/status/1111772531210534912 https://twitter.com/amelvand/status/1112031397831692289 Apple’s March Event: Apple changes gears to services, is now your bank, news source, gaming zone and TV Apple to merge the iPhone, iPad, and Mac apps by 2021 Apple acquires Pullstring to possibly help Apple improve Siri and other IoT-enabled gadgets

In order to advance open source hardware, the Linux Foundation announced a new CHIPS Alliance project yesterday. Backed by Esperanto, Google, SiFive, and Western Digital, the CHIPS Alliance project “will foster a collaborative environment that will enable accelerated creation and deployment of more efficient and flexible chip designs for use in mobile, computing, consumer electronics, and IoT applications.” The project will help in making open source CPU chip and system-on-a-chip (SoC) design more accessible to the market, by creating an independent entity where companies and individuals can collaborate and contribute resources. It will provide the chip community with access to high-quality, enterprise-grade hardware. This project will include a Board of Directors, a Technical Steering Committee, and community contributors who will work collectively to manage the project. To initiate the process, Google will contribute a Universal Verification Methodology (UVM)-based instruction stream generator environment for RISC-V cores. The environment provides configurable, highly stressful instruction sequences that can verify architectural and micro-architectural corner-cases of designs. SiFive will improve the RocketChip SoC generator and the TileLink interconnect fabric in opensource as a member of the CHIPS Alliance. They will also contribute to Chisel (a new opensource hardware description language), and the FIRRTL intermediate representation specification. SiFive will also maintain Diplomacy, the SoC parameter negotiation framework. Western Digital, another contributor will provide high performance, 9-stage, dual issue, 32-bit SweRV Core, together with a test bench, and high-performance SweRV instruction set simulator. They will also contribute implementations of OmniXtend cache coherence protocol. Looking ahead Dr. Yunsup Lee, co-founder, and CTO, SiFive said in a statement “A healthy, vibrant semiconductor industry needs a significant number of design starts, and the CHIPS Alliance will fill this need.” More information is available at CHIPS Alliance org. Mapzen, an open-source mapping platform, joins the Linux Foundation project Uber becomes a Gold member of the Linux Foundation Intel unveils the first 3D Logic Chip packaging technology, ‘Foveros’, powering its new 10nm chips, ‘Sunny Cove’.

Users have been facing issues with XHCI (USB 3 host controller) bus driver since quite some time now. Last month, Waddlesplash, a team member at Haiku, worked towards fixing the XHCI bus driver. Though few users contributed some small fixes, which helped the driver to boot Haiku within QEMU. But there were still few issues that caused device lockups such as USB mouse/keyboard stalls. The kernel related issues have been resolved now. Even the devices don’t lock up now and even the performance has been greatly improved to 120MB/s on some USB3 flash drives and XHCI chipsets. Users can now try the improved driver which is more efficient. The only remaining issue is a hard-stall on boot with certain USB3 flash drives on NEC/Renesas controllers. The work related to USB2 flash drives on USB3 ports and mounting the flash drives has finished. Most of the issues related to controller initialization got fixed by hrev52772. The issues related to broken transfer finalization logic and random device stalls have been fixed. This driver will be more useful as a reference than FreeBSD’s, OpenBSD’s, or Linux’s to other OS developers. The race condition in request submission has been fixed. A dead code has been removed and the style has been cleaned. Also, the device structure has been improved now. To know more about this news, check out the Haiku’s official blog post. USB 4 will integrate Thunderbolt 3 to increase the speed to 40Gbps USB-IF launches ‘Type-C Authentication Program’ for better security Google releases two new hardware products, Coral dev board and a USB accelerator built around its Edge TPU chip

Google teased its new hardware products built around its Edge TPU at the Google Next conference last summer. Yesterday, it officially launched the Coral dev board, a Raspberry-Pi look-alike, which is designed to run machine learning algorithms ‘at the edge’, and a USB accelerator. Coral Development Board The “Coral Dev Board” has a 40-pin header that runs Linux on an i.MX8M with an Edge TPU chip for accelerating TensorFlow Lite. The board also features 8GB eMMC storage, 1GB LPDDR4 RAM, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.1. It has USB 2.0/3.0 ports, 3.5mm audio jack, DSI display interface, MIPI-CSI camera interface, HDMI 2.0a connector, and two Digital PDM microphones. Source: Google Coral dev board can be used as a single-board computer when you need accelerated ML processing in a small form factor.  It can also be used as an evaluation kit for the SOM and for prototyping IoT devices and other embedded systems. This board is available for $149.00. Google has also announced a $25 MIPI-CSI 5-megapixel camera for the dev board. USB Accelerator The USB Accelerator is basically a plug-in USB 3.0 stick to add machine learning capabilities to the existing Linux machines. This 65 x 30 mm accelerator can connect to Linux-based systems via a USB Type-C port. It can also work with a Raspberry Pi board at USB 2.0 speeds. The accelerator is built around a 32-bit, 32MHz Cortex-M0+ chip with 16KB of flash and 2KB of RAM. Source: Google The USB Accelerator is available for $75. Developers can build Machine Learning models for both the devices in TensorFlow Lite. More information is available on Google’s Coral Beta website. Coming soon are the PCI-E Accelerator, for integrating the Edge TPU into legacy systems using a PCI-E interface. Also coming is a fully integrated System-on-Module with CPU, GPU, Edge TPU, Wifi, Bluetooth, and Secure Element in a 40mm x 40mm pluggable module. Google expands its machine learning hardware portfolio with Cloud TPU Pods (alpha). Intel acquires eASIC, a custom chip (FPGA) maker for IoT, cloud and 5G environments Raspberry Pi launches it last board for the foreseeable future: the Raspberry Pi 3 Model A+ available now at $25.

Just a week later, after revealing the details about USB 3.2, yesterday at the Taipei event, the USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF) team announced USB 4, the next version of the ubiquitous connector. According to the USB-IF team, with USB 4, the transferring speed will increase from 20Gbps to 40Gbps. The team at USB-IF uses Thunderbolt  3 as the foundation for USB 4. Intel provides the manufacturers with Thunderbolt 3 along with open licensing. USB4 will be integrating this technology and will become the "new" Thunderbolt 3. USB4 will now be ready for powerful PCIe plus DisplayPort devices. USB 4 can get connected with external graphics card enclosure, two 4K monitors, and other Thunderbolt 3 accessories using a single cable connected to a PC. It will also be compatible with USB 2.0 and 3.2. USB 4 will come with support for charging speeds of 100W of power, transfer speeds of 40 Gbps, and video bandwidth for two 4K displays or one 5K display. It’s most likely to get widely available and cheaper in the future. In a statement to Techspot, Brad Saunders, USB Promoter Group Chairman, said, “The primary goal of USB is to deliver the best user experience combining data, display and power delivery over a user-friendly and robust cable and connector solution. The USB4 solution specifically tailors bus operation to further enhance this experience by optimizing the blend of data and display over a single connection and enabling the further doubling of performance.” The USB-IF team plans to produce a list of features for USB 4, which will help in standardizing features such as display out and audio out. Though the exact features are yet to be determined. Few users are not much confident about USB 4. One of the users commented on HackerNews, “Maybe it will charge the device. Maybe it won't. Maybe it'll do USB hosting, maybe it won't.” Few users think that the company’s major focus is on manufacturers while user experience is secondary. Another comment reads, “USB-IF is for manufacturers, most of whom want to do whatever the cheapest quickest thing is. The user experience absolutely comes second to manufacturing cost and marking convenience.” To know more about this, check out the post by engadget. USB-IF launches ‘Type-C Authentication Program’ for better security Apple USB Restricted Mode: Here’s Everything You Need to Know Working on Jetson TX1 Development Board [Tutorial]

A new advancement in haptic robots happened when four organizations, Shadow Robot Company, SynTouch, HaptX, and ANA Holdings came together. These companies have built the “world’s first haptic robot hand” that transmits touch to the operator, the details of which they shared on Friday. Credit: Shadow Robot Company [box type="shadow" align="" class="" width=""]Haptics is one of the growing technologies in the field of human-computer interaction that deals with sensory interaction with computers. It is basically the science of applying touch sensation and control for interaction with virtual or physical applications.[/box] How haptic robot hand works? First, the HaptX Gloves capture the motion data to control the movement of the anthropomorphic dexterous hand by Shadow Robot Company. The BioTac sensors built by SynTouch are embedded in each fingertip of the robotic hand to collect tactile data. This data is used to recreate haptic feedback by the HaptX Gloves and is transmitted to the user’s hand. The system was first demonstrated in front of all the collaborating companies. In the demo,  an operator in California used a haptic glove to control a dexterous robotic hand in London, under the guidance of a team from ANA Holdings in Tokyo. When the robot started typing on the computer keyboard, the embedded tactile sensors on the robot’s fingertips recorded the press of each key. The haptic data was shared with the human operator in California through the network in real-time. The words typed by the robot were “Hello, World!”. In the demo, the telerobot was also shown doing a bunch of other things like playing Jenga, building a pyramid of plastic cups, and moving chess pieces on a chess board. Credit: Shadow Robot Company Credit: Shadow Robot Company In an email to us, explaining the applications and importance of this advancement, Kevin Kajitani, Co-Director of ANA AVATAR within ANA Holdings, said, "This achievement by Shadow Robot, SynTouch, and HaptX marks a significant milestone towards achieving the mission of Avatar X. This prototype paves the way for industry use, including medicine, construction, travel, and space exploration." Rich Walker, Managing Director of Shadow Robot Company, said, “This teleoperation system lets humans and robots share their sense of touch across the globe - it’s a step ahead in what can be felt and done remotely. We can now deliver remote touch and dexterity for people to build on for applications like safeguarding people from hazardous tasks, or just doing a job without having to fly there! It’s not touch-typing yet, but we can feel what we touch when we’re typing!” Dr. Jeremy Fishel, Co-Founder of SynTouch, said, “We know from psychophysical studies that the sense of touch is essential when it comes to dexterity and manipulation. This is the first time anyone has ever demonstrated a telerobot with such high-fidelity haptics and control, which is very promising and would not have been possible without the great engineers and technologies from this collaboration.” Jake Rubin, Founder and CEO of HaptX, said, “Touch is a cornerstone of the next generation of human-machine interface technologies. We’re honored to be part of a joint engineering effort that is literally extending the reach of humankind.” The new Bolt robot from Sphero wants to teach kids programming Is ROS 2.0 good enough to build real-time robotic applications? Spanish researchers find out. Shadow Robot joins Avatar X program to bring real-world avatars into space  

The ongoing Mobile World Conference 2019 at Barcelona, has an interesting line-up of announcements, keynote speakers, summits, seminars and more. It is the largest mobile event in the world, that brings together the latest innovations and leading-edge technology from more than two thousand leading companies. The theme of this year’s conference is ‘Intelligent Connectivity’ which comprises of the combination of flexible, high-speed 5G networks, the Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI) and big data. Microsoft unveiled a host of new products along the same theme on the first day of the conference. Let’s have a look at some of them. #1 Microsoft HoloLens 2 AR announced! Microsoft unveiled the HoloLens 2 AR device at the Mobile World Congress (MWC). This $3,500 AR device is aimed for businesses, and not for the average person, yet. It is designed primarily for situations where field workers might need to work hands-free, such as manufacturing workers, industrial designers and those in the military, etc. This device is definitely an upgrade from Microsoft’s very first HoloLens that recognized basic tap and click gestures. The new headset recognizes 21 points of articulation per hand and accounts for improved and realistic hand motions. The device is less bulky and its eye tracking can measure eye movement and use it to interact with virtual objects. It is built to be a cloud- and edge-connected device. The HoloLens 2 field of view more than doubles the area covered by HoloLens 1. Microsoft said it has plans to announce a  follow-up to HoloLens 2 in the next year or two. According to Microsoft, this device will be even more comfortable and easier to use, and that it'll do more than the HoloLens 2. HoloLens 2 is available on preorder and will be shipping later this year. The device has already found itself in the midst of a controversy after the US Army invested $480 million in more than 100,000 headsets. The contract has stirred dissent amongst Microsoft workers. #2 Azure-powered Kinect camera for enterprise The Azure-powered Kinect camera is an “Intelligent edge device that doesn’t just see and hear but understands the people, the environment, the objects, and their actions,” according to Azure VP, Julia White. This AI-powered smart enterprise camera leverages Microsoft’s 3D imaging technology and can possibly serve as a companion hardware piece for HoloLens in the enterprise. The system has a 1-megapixel depth camera, a 12-megapixel camera and a seven-microphone array on board to help it work  with "a range of compute types, and leverage Microsoft’s Azure solutions to collect that data.” The system, priced at $399, is available for pre-order. #3 Azure Spatial Anchors Azure Spatial Anchors are launched as a part of the Azure mixed reality services. These services will help developers and business’ build cross-platform, contextual and enterprise-grade mixed reality applications. According to the Azure blog, these mixed reality apps can map, designate and recall precise points of interest which are accessible across HoloLens, iOS, and Android devices. Developers can integrate their solutions with IoT services and artificial intelligence, and protect their sensitive data using security from Azure. Users can easily infuse artificial intelligence (AI) and integrate IoT services to visualize data from IoT sensors as holograms. The Spatial Anchors will allow users to map their space and connect points of interest “to create wayfinding experiences, and place shareable, location-based holograms without any need for environmental setup or QR codes”. Users will also be able to manage identity, storage, security, and analytics with pre-built cloud integrations to accelerate their mixed reality projects. #4 Unreal Engine 4 Support for Microsoft HoloLens 2 During the  Mobile World Congress (MWC), Epic Games Founder and CEO, Tim Sweeney announced that support for Microsoft HoloLens 2 will be coming to Unreal Engine 4 in May 2019. Unreal Engine will fully support HoloLens 2 with streaming and native platform integration. Sweeney says that “AR is the platform of the future for work and entertainment, and Epic will continue to champion all efforts to advance open platforms for the hardware and software that will power our daily lives.” Unreal Engine 4 support for Microsoft HoloLens 2 will allow for "photorealistic" 3D in AR apps. Head over to Microsoft's official blog for an in-depth insight on all the products released. Unreal Engine 4.22 update: support added for Microsoft’s DirectX Raytracing (DXR) Microsoft acquires Citus Data with plans to create a ‘Best Postgres Experience’ Microsoft joins the OpenChain Project to help define standards for open source software compliance