Eric David
Latest from Eric David
Uber suspended from testing self-driving cars in Arizona after fatal accident
Uber Technologies Inc. can no longer test its self-driving vehicles in the state of Arizona. Following last week’s tragic accident in which an autonomous Uber vehicle struck and killed a pedestrian, Arizona Governor Doug Ducey has suspended the company’s testing license within the state. Uber had already voluntarily halted its self-driving operations in Arizona, Pittsburgh, San Francisco ...
Facebook is now under FTC investigation for the Cambridge Analytica data scandal
The recent Cambridge Analytica scandal has proven that Facebook Inc. has some serious user privacy issues, and Facebook’s public image took another hit last week after reports suggested that it has been logging people’s call and SMS history without permission. Now, in response to the numerous reports on Facebook’s privacy woes, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission announced that it has ...
Amazon delivery drones might let you boss them around by waving and shouting
Amazon.com Inc. may let you boss around its delivery drones once they finally hit the market, at least according to a patent recently issued to the company by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. The patent, which Amazon first applied for in July 2016, describes a management system that can adjust a drone’s behavior in response to human ...
Mythic raises $40M for its battery-friendly artificial intelligence chips
Yet another artificial intelligence chipmaker has snagged a major funding round. Austin-based startup Mythic Inc. announced today that it has raised $40 million for its “intelligence processing units,” which are specifically designed handle AI workloads. Founded in 2012, Mythic developed its own hardware and software to build an AI platform that be integrated into nearly any device, including smartphones, ...
Telegram ordered to hand encryption keys over to Russian authorities
Messaging app Telegram may have lost its long-running privacy battle against the Russian government. Russia’s Supreme Court has rejected an appeal made by the London-based Telegram Messenger LLP against a ruling that would force the app to hand its users’ encryption keys and chat histories over to the Federal Security Service or FSB, the country’s primary security agency. Telegram tries ...
Amazon’s GameOn helps developers build esports competitions powered by AWS
Amazon.com Inc. wants to make its Amazon Web Services cloud the backbone of online gaming, so today the company launched a service that makes it easy for developers to add built-in competitions powered by AWS. Called GameOn, Amazon’s new tool is a set of application programming interfaces that developers can use to add native competition features that work ...
Fig’s games have returned 245% for crowdfund investors
Fig Publishing Inc., a video game crowdfunding platform that shares profits with backers, revealed today that the four games it has published so far have made an impressive 245 percent return on investment. Fig launched in 2015 shortly after the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission made changes to the JOBS Act, opening up equity crowdfunding campaigns to nonaccredited ...
AI chip startup SambaNova raises $56M from GV and others
SambaNova Systems, a startup that makes chips specifically for artificial intelligence, exited stealth mode with a bang today after it raised $56 million. The Series A funding round was led by Walden International and GV, Alphabet Inc.’s venture capital arm, and it also included participation from Redline Capital and Atlantic Bridge Ventures. Machine learning tasks require processors that can ...
Google Maps releases tools for building real-world games like ‘Pokemon Go’
Google LLC wants the next “Pokemon Go” to be built with Google Maps, so the company announced today that it has released new applications programming interfaces that make it easier for game developers build real-world augmented reality games using Google Maps. “The mobile gaming landscape is changing as more and more studios develop augmented reality games,” said Clementine ...
Google’s open-source synth uses AI to invent new instruments
Magenta, Google LLC’s research project to apply artificial intelligence to the arts, has released a new toy for musicians: NSynth Super. Described as “an open source experimental instrument,” NSynth Super allows musicians to play around with the Magenta team’s NSynth or Neural Synthesizer machine learning algorithm. Magenta developed the NSynth algorithm using WaveNet, a neural network developed by Google’s own DeepMind ...