Get ready, Pittsburgh. Uber’s self-driving car is about to hit the road.
The ride-hailing company announced on Thursday that it will soon begin real-world testing of a car capable of driving without the aid of a human.
It also gave us our first peek at what that might look like:
THAT BRAND YOU like is going to come back in style. Maybe.
Today Nokia announced that it will license its brand to a new Finnish company founded by former Nokia execs. The company, Global HMD, plans to use the Nokia brand to sell Android-based phones and tablets.
Meanwhile, Microsoft, which acquired Nokia’s handset line in 2014, is selling its feature phone line to manufacturing giant Foxconn’s FIH subsidiary for $350 million. These “dumb phones” will also carry the Nokia brand; HMD will sell and market them for FIH (got that?).
v.20 n.17 – Released May 16, 2016
Four members of the controversial Trollstation YouTube channel have been jailed in connection with fake robberies and kidnappings.
The group were involved in a fake robbery at London’s National Portrait Gallery and a fake kidnapping at Tate Britain in July 2015.
The channel, with 718,000 subscribers, has built a reputation for filming staged pranks around the city.
A fifth member was imprisoned in March following a bomb hoax.
“The hoaxes may have seemed harmless to them, but they caused genuine distress to a number of members of the public, who should be able to go about their daily business without being put in fear in this way.
The idea was audacious from the start.
In 2011, Meredith Perry and Nora Dweck took the stage at a high-profile tech conference and demonstrated how you can charge your phone wirelessly by beaming ultrasonic rays at it.
Since then, the company has amassed over $23 million in venture funding to get rid of the power cord altogether.
The only problem? The company likely won’t be able to deliver on the promise, according to some of its former engineers.
One of Windows 10’s most controversial features is getting kicked to the curb.
Microsoft announced that it will kill off Wi-Fi Sense in an upcoming Windows 10 update. The feature made a lot of folks uneasy because it shared your Wi-Fi password with all of your Facebook friends’ computers, as well as those belonging to your Skype and Outlook.com contacts.
That’s not what undid Wi-Fi Sense, though. Microsoft said it took a lot of manpower to maintain, and customers just weren’t taking advantage of it.
In 16 years, if all goes as planned, New York City will no longer send any trash to landfills. That includes the million-plus tons of food waste the city generates every year. But, like other cities that are trying to recycle organic waste, New York faces a challenge: there aren’t yet enough places to take it.
The biggest composting facility on the East Coast was closed in 2014 because it smelled so foul, a problem compounded by the length of time it took the food to break down. Composting might work well if everyone had a backyard. But it turns out that it’s a tricky thing to scale up, especially for the amount of food thrown out in a large city.
The US government has unveiled new federal rules that include a ban on the sale of e-cigarettes to people aged under 18.
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) will also require manufacturers to submit products to the agency for review.
Cigars, pipe tobacco and hookah tobacco are also subject to the new rules.
On Wednesday, California introduced new anti-smoking legislation that also regulates e-cigarettes.
This morning at the Hulu Upfronts in New York, Hulu CEO Mike Hopkins confirmed the recent report from The Wall St. Journal which indicated that the company was developing a live television streaming service to complement its current on-demand offering. While Hopkins was light on details like pricing, content, channel selection, and product, he did say that the new service would arrive in 2017.
The service will offer a combination of feeds from broadcast television and cable TV, the CEO said.
The Indian government has rejected a request by Apple to import and sell refurbished iPhones in the country, Bloomberg reports.
It’s a major setback to Apple’s India strategy, a major component of which was reusing old iPhones as a low-cost option in addition to selling new iPhones, which are too expensive for many Indians.
Indian smartphone companies opposed Apple’s application, according to Bloomberg.
