| Uber digs up a Waymo document, SpaceX saves big by recycling, and Bezos blesses Blue Origin. All that and more in The Daily Crunch for April 6, 2017. 1. Uber found an allegedly stolen Waymo doc Uber and Waymo are in court, and Uber has finally produced one of the 14,000 documents it's been ordered to search for by the judge in the case, which alleges that Uber employee Anthony Levandowski stole secrets from Waymo prior to leaving, which are used in Uber's self-driving tech. The document was found not on Uber's computer, however, but instead on the personal device of Sameer Kshirsagar, another former Waymo employee who jumped ship Uber following Levandowski's departure. 
2. SpaceX's reused Falcon 9 cost less than half a new one SpaceX refurbished the Falcon 9 it used for a second time during last week's SES-10 mission launch. It was a time-consuming and expensive process, but still way less expensive than building a whole new rocket. The refurbishment cost "substantially less than half" than making a new first stage, which is considerable savings, even before SpaceX optimizes the process. 3. The Xbox One 'Scorpio' is impressive enough on paper The Scorpio, Microsoft's upgraded Xbox One, is a known quantity now that its spec sheet is out. Microsoft told Digital Foundry all about it, and the thing can do 4K output and play 4K Blu-rays. Sounds like a strong competitor for the PS4 Pro, though real-world performance is the only real test. 4. Apple's Clips app reviewed Apple makes apps on occasion: its newest is Clips, a short video editor that has more in common with Snapchat than with iMovie. The app sounds fine, but you can find out for yourself how useful it is as of around 10 AM PT today. 5. Twitter tells developers a new story Twitter's developer platform just got a fairly complete overhaul, with streamlined APIs, and paid tiers offering different levels of access. The company's also giving some visibility into its future plans for the platform, so they don't get caught unawares as they have in the past. 6. Blue Origin gets annual Bezos cash and likely won't be testing human launches until next year Papa Bezos loves all his children equally, but he takes around $1 billion annually from Amazon in the form of sales of his own personal stock, and uses that funding to run Blue Origin, his spacefaring enterprise. Maybe he has a favorite after all. Even those billions likely won't help Blue Origin meet its original stated goal of crewed test flights by the end of 2017, however. 7. Google's custom machine learning processing units are fast GPUs have helped machine learning and AI explode, but Google is working on Tensor Processing Units designed specifically to maximize performance of Google's TensorFlow machine learning framework. Now we have some benchmarks and additional info, and they look very promising. But do we really want the machines to learn faster? You can help yourself learn faster, too: Sign up for our new weekly startups newsletter, curated by Anthony Ha. Just follow the link below and check the "TC Startups" checkbox. Guaranteed at least an A+ if you do. 
| 
No comments:
Post a Comment