BMW and Microsoft Announce Open Manufacturing Platform
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| BMW and Microsoft Announce Open Manufacturing Platform | |
| Number | 801 |
| Broadcast Date | APRIL 2, 2019 |
| Episode Length | 5:24 |
| Hosts | Sarah Lane |
Walmart teams up with Google Assistant, Slack reportedly plans NYSE listing as soon as June, WhatsApp introduces tip line to quell rumors ahead of country elections.
Headlines
- Walmart is taking on Amazon by letting customers order groceries by voice through Google’s smart-home assistant. Shoppers can add items directly to their online shopping carts starting this month by saying “Hey Google, talk to Walmart.” Information from prior purchases will help the system to choose correct brands and sizes. The voice-shopping service is the latest partnership between Walmart and Google that began in August 2017.
- Microsoft refreshed its Surface Book 2 base model today, with Intel’s latest 8th Gen quad-core i5 processor for the 13-inch Surface Book 2 model, and discounting the existing dual-core 7th Gen model to $1,299. The refreshed quad-core model is priced at $1,499, and includes an i5-8350U which increases the maximum boost clock speed up to 3.6GHz. Both new Surface Book 2 models will include 256GB of storage and 8GB of RAM. Microsoft is holding a Surface event on April 17th in New York City, which is expected to include detail pricing and availability for its Surface Hub 2 hardware, plus accessories and office furniture from Steelcase.
- Slack plans to list on the New York Stock Exchange in June or July, a source tells Bloomberg. Slack is reportedly looking to take Spotify's approach and opting for a direct stock listing instead of raising capital through an initial public offering. Slack was valued at $7.1 billion by private investors last year, and in February the company said it had confidentially filed paperwork with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for its offering.
- WhatsApp has introduced a tip line to send forwards, rumors, and suspicious-sounding messages and have them verified. It's an effort ahead of the Indian elections, when misinformation campaigns tend to spike across the country. When a message reaches the tip line, the submitter will receive a response informing whether the information is true, false, misleading, disputed, or presently unverifiable. The system accepts text, pictures, links, and video in English, as well as in Hindi, Telugu, Bengali, and Malayalam.
- Valve posted since-removed details about its upcoming Index VR headset, that offered photos and also revealed a June 15th ship date which Engadget confirmed with Valve. The Index appears to include its own headphones and has the option of buying separate base stations and Knuckles motion controllers (now Valve Index Controllers) in a variety of bundles. To power the Index, a minimum dual-core processor with hyperthreading, 8GB of RAM and either a GeForce GTX 970 or a Radeon RX480 for graphics is recommended. Cameras on the outside point to "inside-out" tracking similar to the Oculus Rift S.
- Mozilla is running an experiment in its Firefox Nightly browser build that blocks website notifications requests until users take certain actions on a site. Data that Mozilla collected in December and January showed that less than three percent of notification requests sent to Firefox users were in fact granted during that period; the majority of them were ignored, and almost one in five caused users to immediately leave the site sending the request. Until April 29, Firefox Nightly will only show notification requests after users have either clicked or typed in a site, and starting April 15, a new icon in the address bar will indicate the site wants to send notifications.
- BMW and Microsoft announced a new partnership called the Open Manufacturing Platform (OMP) to help more collaborative IoT development in the manufacturing sector, focused on smart factory solutions and building standards in areas like machine connectivity and on-premises systems integration. The plan is to bring in more manufacturers and suppliers, potentially working on 15 use cases by the end of this year — and also working with open source components, open industrial standards and open data to develop both hardware and software. The OMP will be built on Microsoft’s industrial IoT platform which is part of its Azure cloud business. BMW already has 3,000 machines running on Azure cloud, IoT and AI services in its existing robots and in-factory autonomous transport systems.
- Yoon Chang-hyun quit his lucrative researcher job at Samsung to start his own YouTube channel. His story appears to be a bit of a trend. South Koreans had the shortest job tenure among member countries in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) as of 2012, just 6.6 years compared to the average of 9.4 years and 11.5 years in Japan. This survey also showed just 55% of South Koreans were satisfied with their jobs, the lowest rate in the OECD.
Links
| Preceded by: "Mark Zuckerberg Calls for Internet Regulation" |
BMW and Microsoft Announce Open Manufacturing Platform |
Followed by: "Verizon Beats Korea to the 5G Punch" |