Eric David
Latest from Eric David
Facebook tweaks news feed to prioritize local news
Facebook Inc. has more changes in store for news feed as part of its ongoing efforts to make Facebook less terrible for mental health. Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg announced earlier this month that Facebook will rank user posts higher than posts shared by businesses, and today he said that the social network will also prioritize local news sources over national and international outlets. “People ...
Microsoft acquires PlayFab to make Azure cloud service better for online games
Microsoft Corp.’s Azure cloud platform is about to get more interesting for game developers, as the company announced today that it has acquired PlayFab Inc., a startup that provides a backend platform for online games. The terms of the deal were not disclosed, but PlayFab has raised at least $13 million in funding since it that startup launched in 2014. The company, ...
In a surprise alternative to an IPO, Dell may consider selling itself to its subsidiary VMware
Reports surfaced last week that Dell Technologies Inc. might become a publicly traded company once again, allowing it to buy up the remaining shares of VMware Inc. it doesn’t hold. Now, it appears that Dell might be considering something of a reverse of that move. Rather than buying VMWare, Dell may instead sell itself to the ...
Didi Chuxing opens AI lab in Beijing to work on smart traffic technology
Didi Chuxing Technology Co. Ltd., China’s biggest ride-hailing company, announced today that it has opened an artificial intelligence lab in Beijing that will work on technology for the company’s smart traffic initiative. Led by Didi Vice President and the University of Michigan professor Ye Jieping, Didi Labs already employs more than 200 AI scientists and engineers, and ...
DeepMind’s Psychlab uses psychology to understand AI behaviors
We have seen a few examples of rogue artificial intelligence in the last few years, from the Facebook AI that invented its own language to Microsoft Corp.’s surprisingly racist chatbot. It is not always easy to understand why an AI does the things it does, but Google LLC’s DeepMind believes it has come up with a ...
Facebook built an AI that enables full-body augmented reality experiences
Augmented reality apps have been tracking and altering faces for years, but Facebook Inc. wants to take the technology one step further by developing tools that can layer AR content over an entire person. The Facebook AI Camera Team wrote on the company’s research blog today that bodies are much more difficult to track than faces. “To ...
Apple’s updated ARKit augmented reality software platform will finally see walls
Apple Inc. is opening up some new possibilities for augmented reality developers with its next ARKit update, which the company revealed today. Announced in June at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference, ARKit bundles several AR creation tools into a single framework, making it easier for developers to create and publish their own AR media and apps ...
Nexar raises $30M to protect drivers with its AI-powered dashcam app
Israel-based startup Nexar believes that we don’t have to wait for the self-driving car revolution to make the roads safer with artificial intelligence. Today the company announced that it has raised $30 million in funding for its AI-powered dashcam app. The Series B funding round was led by Ibex Investors, and it included participation from new investors Alibaba ...
EU fines Qualcomm $1.2B for paying Apple to ignore rival chipmakers
The European Commission early today ordered mobile chipmaker Qualcomm Technologies Inc. to pay a 997 million euro ($1.23 billion) fine for allegedly violating EU antitrust laws. The EU’s complaint centers on an exclusivity deal Qualcomm made with Apple Inc., which was in effect from 2011 through 2016. According to the commission, Qualcomm’s deal stifled competition from other chipmakers, allowing it to dominate the mobile ...
Facebook invents ‘flick’ time units for visual effects creators
Engineers at Facebook Inc.-owned Oculus VR have invented “flicks,” new units of time that could make life easier for visual effects creators working in film, video games and other media. A flick, which is somehow short for “frame tick,” is slightly longer than a nanosecond at 1/705,600,000 of a second. Oculus arrived at this oddly specific number because it ...