БЛОГ

Archive for the ‘business’ category: Page 164

Feb 3, 2020

Rocket startup Astra emerges from stealth, aims to launch for as little as $1M per flight

Posted by in categories: business, satellites

There’s yet another new rocket launch startup throwing its hat in the ring — Astra, an Alameda-based company that’s actually been operating in stealth mode (though relatively openly, often referred to as “Stealth Space Company”) for the past three years developing and testing its launch vehicle. Astra revealed its business model and progress to date in a new feature article with Bloomberg Businessweek, detailing how it plans to use mass production to deliver rockets quickly and cheaply for small satellite orbital delivery. Astra revealed it has raised more than $100 million from investors, including Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors, Airbus Ventures, Canann Partners and Salesforce co-founder Marc Benioff, to name a few, and it has big ambitions in terms of cost and capabilities.

Astra’s rockets are smaller than most existing launch vehicles in operation, designed to delivery up to 450 lbs of cargo to space, but with the specific mandate of doing so quickly and responsively. The company is a finalist (and the only remaining one) on DARPA’s Launch Challenge, the terms of which mandate that the winning company deploy two rockets from two different locations within a few weeks of each other. Astra is still in the running, while its erstwhile competitors have dropped out, with Virgin Orbit having voluntarily withdrawn and Vector Launch having gone out of business.

The DARPA challenge, which includes an award of $12 million for the winner, represents a growing trend in terms of defense customer needs: Fast turnaround and responsive operations for small satellite delivery. In an industry where the process of securing a launch service provider to actually flying a payload has typically taken at least six months in the best-case scenario, there’s a growing need for quicker timelines in the interest of building more redundancy and resilience into defense and reconnaissance space operations through use of networks of small satellites, versus single large geostationary satellites that are expensive to launch and more time-consuming to task.

Feb 1, 2020

SpaceX hopes to launch 15 million rocket flights a year with a business that could upend commercial aviation

Posted by in categories: business, transportation

If the rocket company pulled off a point-to-point transportation business with its Starship rocket, international airline travel could implode.

Jan 31, 2020

Genomics and BioPharma Pioneer!! — Dr. William Haseltine — Biologist, entrepreneur and philanthropist, now focusing on the issues of healthcare costs, dementia care, and aging — ideaXme — Ira Pastor

Posted by in categories: aging, bioengineering, biological, biotech/medical, business, DNA, genetics, life extension, posthumanism, transhumanism

Jan 29, 2020

Delivering More 5G Data With Less Hardware

Posted by in categories: business, internet

Business districts may be bustling in the daytime, but they can often be near-deserted in the evenings. These fluctuations in population density pose a challenge to the emergence of 5G networks, which will require more hardware than ever before to relay massive amounts of data. Here’s the rub: To ensure reliable service, mobile networks must either invest in and deploy many more hardware units–or find ways to let the hardware move with the crowds.

One group of researchers is proposing a creative solution: installing small radio units on cars and crowdsourcing the task of data transmission when the vehicles are not in use. That approach relies on the fact that more cars tend to be parked in highly populated areas.

The most common network model that service providers are considering for 5G networks involves C-RAN architecture. Central units coordinate the transmission of data; the data is disseminated through distribution units and is further processed and transmitted by fleets of radio units. Those units convert the information to usable formats for mobile users.

Jan 29, 2020

RealityEngines.AI Launches World’s First Autonomous Cloud AI Service

Posted by in categories: business, robotics/AI, security

San Francisco startup RealityEngines. AI has turned off stealth mode and today launched its completely autonomous cloud AI service. It’s all very tedious to the common reader IMO — enterprise-level business stuff — but the technology itself and how it could shape our future in both data and perceived reality should be at least mildly considered.

Here’s how RealityEngines. AI works: using a Neural Architecture Search (NAS) technique called BANANAS, when a user points their data (through an API) to RealityEngines. AI and selects a use case (churn predictions, fraud detection, sales lead forecasting, security threat detection, cloud spend optimization, et al.), the data is attacked by the NAS to create cutting-edge models then refined by a generative adversarial network (GAN) in order to augment sparse or noisy data with synthetic data to further enhance the data modeling. Now that, is bananas.

Continue reading “RealityEngines.AI Launches World’s First Autonomous Cloud AI Service” »

Jan 28, 2020

Taiwan Is Opening A Giant AI-Focused Business Park

Posted by in categories: business, engineering, government, robotics/AI, space

Taiwan has been the world’s hardware hub for decades, so the shift toward AI makes the most of the existing inexpensive engineering talent. A refocus on AI, however, reduces reliance on hardware, which can easily be made somewhere else, such as China, at lower costs. Multinational tech companies have already shown interest in tapping Taiwan’s talent in software, including AI.

To move things along further, the government of Hsinchu County, near Taipei, will open a 126,000-square-meter (about 1.3 million square feet) AI business park near one of Taiwan’s major all-purpose high-tech zones and two top universities.

“[The park] will not just help [promote] industry-academia cooperation, but also let AI-oriented startups and companies have a demo space to verify AI product services,” says Shirley Tsai, a research manager with IDC Taiwan’s enterprise solution group. “It will be helpful as well to attract the companies who are interested in the AI field and then accelerating the AI ecosystem.”

Jan 28, 2020

Quantum computing talent war: JPMorgan Chase poaches a top IBM exec

Posted by in categories: business, computing, economics, finance, information science, quantum physics

Editor’s note: Geoff Woollacott is Senior Strategy Consultant and Principal Analyst at Technology Business Research. IBM and NC State are coperating on quantum computing development.

HAMPTON, N.H. – JPMorgan Chase announced on Jan. 22 the hiring of Marco Pistoia from IBM. A 24-year IBM employee with numerous patents to his credit, Pistoia most recently led an IBM team responsible for quantum computing algorithms. Algorithm development will be key to developing soundly engineered quantum computing systems that can deliver the business outcomes enterprises seek at a faster and more accurate pace than current classical computing systems.

A senior hire into a flagship enterprise in the financial services industry is the proverbial canary in the coal mine, as TBR believes such actions suggest our prediction of quantum achieving economic advantage by 2021 remains on target. Quantum executives discuss the three pillars of quantum commercialization as being:

Jan 27, 2020

Chip Walter, “Immortality, Inc”

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, business, internet, life extension, Ray Kurzweil, robotics/AI

Chip Walter discusses his book, “Immortality, Inc”, at Politics and Prose.

Living forever has always been a dream, but with today’s science, technology, and visionary billionaires, it may be a distinct possibility. At the very least, as Walter reports in this compelling investigation, immortality researchers are changing the way we view aging and death. Looking at the science, business, and culture of this radical endeavor, Walter, a science journalist, author of Last Ape Standing, and former CNN bureau chief, lays out the latest research into stem cell rejuvenation, advanced genomics, and artificial intelligence; talks to key thinkers such as Ray Kurzweil and Aubrey de Grey; and takes us into the Silicon Valley labs of human genomics trailblazer Craig Venter and molecular biologist and Apple chairman Arthur Levinson. Walter is in conversation with Hilary Black, executive editor at National Geographic Books.

Continue reading “Chip Walter, ‘Immortality, Inc’” »

Jan 27, 2020

Kubota unveils autonomous electric tractor in Japan

Posted by in categories: business, food, robotics/AI, solar power, sustainability

The X tractor is being presented in commemoration of Kubota’s 130th year in business.


According to agricultural machinery manufacturer Kubota, there are now fewer farmers in Japan, trying to manage increasingly large amounts of land. With that problem in mind, the company recently unveiled a concept for helping those farmers out – a driverless tractor.

Known as the X tractor (a play on “cross tractor”), the vehicle was designed as part of Kubota’s Agrirobo automated technology program. It made its public debut earlier this month, at an exhibition in the city of Kyoto.

Continue reading “Kubota unveils autonomous electric tractor in Japan” »

Jan 24, 2020

Harvard Professor Clayton M. Christensen Turned His Life Into a Case Study

Posted by in category: business

Clayton M. Christensen, a Harvard Business School professor and management guru, was an authority on what he called disruptive technologies who became more widely known for offering his life as a case study.

Dr. Christensen, whose books included “The Innovator’s Dilemma” and “How Will You Measure Your Life?,” died Thursday in Boston. He was 67 and had leukemia.

Into a Case Study.