Brightline’s Miami-West Palm Beach link will be rebranded in 2019
Sir Richard Branson is extending his rail empire across the Atlantic. Virgin Group has announced that it will take a minority share in Brightline, a start-up train operator in Florida.
Brightline launched express services earlier this year from Miami via Fort Lauderdale to West Palm Beach, with an extension to Orlando under construction and plans for a line to Tampa. It also intends to build a link between Las Vegas and southern California.
Bags of marijuana sit on shelves in a building at the Los Suenos Farms facility in Avondale, Colorado, on Feb. 25, 2016. (Matthew Staver / Bloomberg)
Wholesale marijuana prices in Colorado have fallen by a third in just the past 12 months, continuing a price crash that began soon after the drug was legalized. Although this implies that some marijuana entrepreneurs are going to go bankrupt, the bigger financial hit will be felt by states that tax marijuana based on its price.
Marijuana prices are collapsing in Colorado and in other legalization states (e.g., Oregon, where the price can go as low as $100 per pound) because a legal business is dramatically cheaper to operate than an illegal one. Because states generally set their marijuana tax rates as a percentage of price, their revenue per sale sinks in direct proportion to the fall in marijuana prices. Ironically, in a bid for more tax revenue per marijuana sale, Colorado increased its marijuana tax rate from 10 percent to 15 percent last year, only to see the anticipated added tax revenue wiped out by falling prices in a year’s time.
Trades Union Congress concerned over tech being used to control and micromanage.
Britain’s biggest employer organisation and main trade union body have sounded the alarm over the prospect of British companies implanting staff with microchips to improve security.
UK firm BioTeq, which offers the implants to businesses and individuals, has already fitted 150 implants in the UK.
General Motors said it plans to bring two new electric bikes to market next year — one folding and one compact — as the automaker makes a broader push into electrification and other ideas that try to move beyond its traditional business model of producing and selling gas-power vehicles.
The automaker didn’t have a lot of information to share about the e-bikes or its ultimate plans. For instance, Hannah Parish, director of General Motors Urban Mobility Solutions, wouldn’t say if GM plans to launch a bike-sharing service as a result of these two new products. “I can’t say anything is on or off the table at this point,” she added.
Rethink Robotics shuttered its doors and closed for good on October 4, 2018. For many casual observers the collapse of a much-celebrated company, founded by preeminent artificial intelligence (AI) researcher and minor celebrity Rodney Brooks was a surprise. To others it’s just the latest indication of the trouble in robotics land. According to the company, Rethink Robotics was forced to shut its doors when it couldn’t find additional funding, and in a final attempt to sell the company and/or its assets it couldn’t find a buyer.
Rethink Robotics wasn’t the only robotics company forced to close its doors in the past year. Mayfield Robotics, developers of the social robot Kuri, closed down a few months before Rethink in August 2018, despite just making its debut one year earlier at CES 2017. Prior to that, Jibo, makers of a personal robotics device also shut down even after having raised over $70 Million. These companies shut down despite collectively raising several hundred million dollars in funding and developing their products over many years.
Uber logo seen on a car door in Kiev, Ukraine. Garrett Camp, an immigrant from Canada, is one of Uber’s founders. (Photo by Pavlo Conchar/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
What would America lose if we blocked refugees and family-sponsored and employment-based immigrants from coming to the United States? For starters, we would likely lose more than half of the billion-dollar startup companies in America.
A new study from the National Foundation for American Policy finds that 55%, or 50 of 91, of the country’s $1 billion startup companies had at least one immigrant founder. I conducted the research by interviewing and gathering information on the 91 U.S. startup companies valued at over $1 billion (as of October 1, 2018) that are not publicly traded on the stock market and are tracked by Dow Jones VentureSource and The Wall Street Journal.
There’s nothing loljk about Microsoft’s teenage chatbot, Zo.
California governor Jerry Brown signed regulations into law last Friday (Sept. 30) that should make it easier for Californians to know whether they’re speaking to a human or a bot.
The new law goes into effect on July 1, 2019—Botageddon, as we’re going to call it—and could have far-reaching consequences for how automated systems communicate with people online. It will require companies to disclose whether they are using a bot to communicate with the public on the internet (something like “Hi, I’m a bot.”) A representative for California state senator Robert Hertzberg, who authored SB-1001, says the law specifically targets deceptive commercial and political bots, not those meant to help you, for example, pay a bill on a company’s website. Still, companies that have built their businesses around automated messaging and chatbots will in coming months need to figure out whether their approaches are compliant with the new law.
The bill also specifically defines online content as publicly-facing, which raises questions about whether bot-sent emails fall under the new law. Overall, Landers expects there will be a “lot of litigation” before the law is actually implemented.
Robot teacher in front of classroom of studentsThe AI boom has a lot to do with it.
Thirty years ago, it was a big deal when schools got their first computers. Today, it’s a big deal when students get their own laptops.
According to Thomas Frey, the senior futurist at the DaVinci Institute think tank, “In 14 years it’ll be a big deal when students learn from robot teachers over the internet.”
If investors at some of the biggest technology companies are right, the next big restaurant chain could have no kitchens of its own. Investors are pouring millions into the creation of a network of shared kitchens, storage facilities, and pickup counters that established chains and new food entrepreneurs can access to cut down on overhead and quickly spin up new concepts in fast food and casual dining. Powering all of this is a food delivery market that could grow from $35 billion to a $365 billion industry by 2030, according to a report from UBS’s research group, the “Evidence Lab”.
Ric Fulop, the 43-year-old cofounder and chief executive of Desktop Metal, is eager to show off the skunkworks for the company’s giant 3-D metal printers, which can produce stainless steel, aluminum and other metal alloy parts at assembly-line speeds and in large quantities. It’s the first time he’s taken an outsider to the facility in Nashua, New Hampshire, just across the state line from Desktop Metal’s headquarters in Burlington, Massachusetts. The four machines—which are 16 feet long, 6 feet tall and weigh about as much as an SUV—are in various states of production. They’ll be able to 3-D print 100 times faster than existing high-end 3-D printing systems used for aerospace, and at one-twentieth the cost, without the tooling required for traditional manufacturing processes. “It’s the first metal printing press,” says Fulop, an exuberant, heavyset man with a slight accent from his native Venezuela.
As technological breakthroughs rapidly shift the frontier between the work tasks performed by humans and those performed by machines and algorithms, global labour markets are undergoing major transformations. These transformations, if managed wisely, could lead to a new age of good work, good jobs and improved quality of life for all, but if managed poorly, pose the risk of widening skills gaps, greater inequality and broader polarization.
As the Fourth Industrial Revolution unfolds, companies are seeking to harness new and emerging technologies to reach higher levels of efficiency of production and consumption, expand into new markets, and compete on new products for a global consumer base composed increasingly of digital natives. Yet in order to harness the transformative potential of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, business leaders across all industries and regions will increasingly be called upon to formulate a comprehensive workforce strategy ready to meet the challenges of this new era of accelerating change and innovation.
Whether or not your grocery delivery arrives in a van with a driver behind the wheel may not matter much to you, but an increasing number of companies are nevertheless investing heavily in autonomous delivery vehicles in the belief that they’ll improve efficiency and create significant cost benefits in the long term. Yes, you’ll have to wait and see if those savings will be passed on to you, the customer.
Udelv, a San Francisco-based startup that has already used its autonomous vans to make more than 700 driverless deliveries in the San Francisco Bay area, recently inked what it claims is the world’s largest deal for a grocery delivery service using self-driving vehicles.
