James Farrell
Latest from James Farrell
Commercial pizza delivery by drone has finally landed – in New Zealand
Food delivery by drone is on its way to the mainstream. This year saw 7-Eleven Inc., with independent drone delivery service startup Flirtey, deliver a bunch of sugary snacks to a resident’s house in Reno, Nev. The arrival of a Slurpee to a customer’s house courtesy of a flying robot was said to be a first in ...
Google Earth VR: mesmerizing, but with a few glitches
The Mars virtual reality experience, since it was first unveiled in January this year, was generally accepted as being literally and figuratively an “out of the this world” experience – the kind of the thing we might only have dreamed about when we first started seeing VR depicted in the movies. According to some critics, ...
With A.I. Experiments, Google lets anyone play with machine learning
Machine learning has led to breakthroughs in fields such as speech recognition and language translation, but mere mortals and even coders often still aren’t sure how to use it and what to do with it. Now Google Inc., one of the leaders in machine learning, which enables computers to learn without explicit programming, has opened ...
Who’s responsible for separating truth from lies – Facebook, Google or us?
Perhaps one of the catchiest memes that made the rounds of the Internet since President-elect Donald J. Trump decided to run was the one in which he’s quoted by People magazine back in 1998 as saying that if he ran for president he’d do it as a Republican. His purported reason: “They are the dumbest ...
Tech CEOs call for unity following outburst of negativity over Trump victory
Shortly after Donald Trump’s victory in the U.S. presidential election, many big names in the tech industry expressed their deep regret at the result. Now chief executives from some of the world’s biggest tech companies have called for calm. Facebook Inc. CEO Mark Zuckerberg (above), currently facing criticism over the proliferation of mendacious news articles on ...
President-elect Trump’s victory just turned Silicon Valley’s world black
U.S. President-elect Donald J. Trump was never popular with the tech industry. After a $1.25 million donation was made to his campaign by the investor Peter Thiel, an uproar ensued, with seemingly intractable divisions in Silicon Valley. The reaction of tech executives to Trump’s victory ranges from shocked and heartbroken to cautious acceptance. Only Thiel, it seems, was ...
Life after automation: Elon Musk echoes Karl Marx, but skeptics don’t believe in Silicon Valley’s goodwill
One of Silicon Valley’s most iconoclastic entrepreneurs, Elon Musk, just told us something we’ve heard countless times over the last few years: The likelihood of a robot doing your job in the future is high. The end is far from nigh, though, according to Musk, who mulled over the advent of a Universal Basic Income and ...
YouTube to clean up the most vulgar part of the web: its own comments section
“Why are YouTube users so rude?” It’s a question we’ve all likely asked from time to time when startled by the ignorance and verbal violence of YouTube users in the comments section. This has not escaped the attention of the world’s better-natured internet users, with Buzzfeed voting YouTube commenters as the nadir of online debate, calling the ...
Slack cautions Microsoft like a passive-aggressive big brother
No sooner had Microsoft Corp. announced Microsoft Teams, a Slack-like collaboration tool rolled into Office 365, than it got a response from the company Teams apparently is targeting. Slack Technologies Inc. fired back at Microsoft in a full-page ad in the New York Times that began, “Dear Microsoft.” The letter starts like a disingenuous compliment from a competing colleague: “Great ...
Otonomo raises $12 million to make sense of a new big data generator: cars
In less than four years, there will be a quarter-billion connected vehicles in the world, each generating a huge amount of data, according to Gartner Inc. And according to other reports Google Inc.’s self-driving car creates around a gigabyte of data per second. Add that up, and it’s clear that cars collectively will be generating mindboggling amounts of data very ...