BY LUCINDA SHEN AND ANNE SRADERS

Startup investor Keith Rabois recently revealed plans to leave the tech hub in favor of Miami, telling Fortune, “I think San Francisco is just so massively improperly run and managed.” Now Dropbox CEO Drew Houston and Splunk CEO Douglas Merritt reportedly plan to make Austin their new permanent residences, per The Information, and Brex co-founders Henrique Duburgras and Pedro Franceschi have landed in Los Angeles.

Oh, and Palantir co-founder and 8VC Founding Partner Jon Lonsdale has decamped for Austin. 

Each has his own motivations—be it the city’s management, the wildfires, the high taxes, or some combination of all of the above—but here’s a notable excerpt from Lonsdale’s op-ed in the Wall Street Journal from earlier this month that explains much of his.

“Politics in the state is in many ways closed off to different ideas. We grew weary of California’s intolerant far left, which would rather demonize opponents than discuss honest differences of opinion.”

Lonsdale’s op-ed tells us more than just the fact that people are leaving the city. While more exits from San Francisco will happen, Lonsdale notes that “few top venture capitalists consider living anywhere other than California and a handful of global financial centers.” While exits from the crowded and troubled city are splashy, it’s worth meditating upon who stays to understand the full impact of the changes on the city.

Continue reading… “It’s the great San Francisco exodus”

Elizabeth Blackstock

The state of Nevada has given Motional, the self-driving car company backed by Hyundai and Aptiv, the green light to debut autonomous cars in Las Vegas without a human driver behind the wheel.

Driverless vehicles are still a huge risk. Autonomous technology is still very new, and most cars that claim to be self-driving still need a human behind the wheel to prevent any accidents. Motional’s machines are Level 4 autonomy, which basically means the car can perform the basics of driving, including some safety-critical functions, without driver input. But it’s still not equivalent to a human driver, and the car isn’t capable of predicting and handling every scenario it can run into on the road.

There are only a handful of companies who have debuted driverless cars on public roads, with Waymo and Yandex being the two largest. Motional is looking to come in and further develop the technology while still in its incipient stages.

That doesn’t mean we’re going to see these cars on the road immediately — it just means that, when the company wants to do so, it can.

Continue reading… “Hyundai Gets The Green Light To Launch Fully Driverless Cars In Las Vegas”

Shane McGlaun 

Deep learning neural networks are artificial intelligence systems that are being used for increasingly important decisions. Deep learning neural networks are used for tasks as varied as autonomous driving to diagnosing medical conditions. This type of network excels at recognizing patterns in large and complex datasets to help with decision-making.

One big challenge is determining if the neural network is correct. Researchers at MIT and Harvard University have developed a quick way for a neural network to churn through data and provide a prediction along with the neural network’s confidence level in its answer. Researchers on the project believe that their system could save lives since deep learning is already deployed in the real world.

Currently, uncertainty estimation for neural networks tends to be computationally expensive and too slow for split-second decisions. The approach devised by the researchers is called “deep evidential regression” and speeds the process up, potentially leading to safer outcomes. Researchers on the project say we need the ability to have high-performance models and understand when results from the models can’t be trusted.

Continue reading… “MIT neural network knows when it can be trusted”

By Rain Noe 

These days every major auto manufacturer is at least considering the autonomous driving future, but settling on what the interiors will actually look like and do is an unanswered matter. In concept videos we’ve seen, for instance, unused steering wheels can still be summoned at a moment’s notice.

Continue reading… “What Should a Dashboard Do in a Driverless Car? Kyocera’s Moeye Concept Answers”

ELON MUSK MADE a lot of promises during  Tesla’s Battery Day last September. Soon, he said, the company would have a car that runs on batteries with pure silicon anodes to boost their performance and reduced cobalt in the cathodes to lower their price. Its battery pack will be integrated into the chassis so that it provides mechanical support in addition to energy, a design that Musk claimed will reduce the car’s weight by 10 percent and improve its mileage by even more. He hailed Tesla’s structural battery as a “revolution” in engineering—but for some battery researchers, Musk’s future looked a lot like the past.

“He’s essentially doing something that we did 10 years ago,” says Emile Greenhalgh, a materials scientist at Imperial College London and the Royal Academy of Engineering Chair in Emerging Technologies. He’s one of the world’s leading experts on structural batteries, an approach to energy storage that erases the boundary between the battery and the object it powers. “What we’re doing is going beyond what Elon Musk has been talking about,” Greenhalgh says. “There are no embedded batteries. The material itself is the energy storage device.”

Today, batteries account for a substantial portion of the size and weight of most electronics. A smartphone is mostly a lithium-ion cell with some processors stuffed around it. Drones are limited in size by the batteries they can carry. And about a third of the weight of an electric vehicle is its battery pack. One way to address this issue is by building conventional batteries into the structure of the car itself, as Tesla plans to do. Rather than using the floor of the car to support the battery pack, the battery pack becomes the floor.

Continue reading… “The Batteries of the Future Are Weightless and Invisible”

South Korea’s Korea Railroad Research Institute (Korail) has announced that its “Hyper Tube” train test model has reached a speed of at least 1,000km/h.

The Korail research institute developed a 1:17 scale test model to test the concept. The Hyper Tube train is intended for use in a near-vacuum tube and accelerated using powerful magnets.

According to Korail, its miniature model reached a top speed of 1,019km/hr at 0.001 atm (far lower pressure than has been achieved in any comparable test) during this week’s test. This is around the speed of aircraft designed for transcontinental flights and twice as fast as the fastest ground transport currently available, maglev trains.

Continue reading… “Korea’s tube transport”

• PayPal announced that its US customers can now buy, sell, and hold cryptocurrencies.
• If the launch is successful, PayPal can bring this service to new markets, helping grow its customer base and diversify its offerings.
• Insider Intelligence publishes hundreds of insights, charts, and forecasts on the Payments & Commerce industry with the Payments & Commerce Briefing. You can learn more about subscribing here.

The payments firm introduced its new crypto service that lets its users buy, sell, and hold cryptocurrencies last month. PayPal rolled it out to all US customers on Friday—and to meet high demand, it also increased the weekly cryptocurrency purchase limit from $10,000 to $20,000, per TechCrunch.

Continue reading… “PayPal’s crypto service officially debuts in the US”

Outcomes4Me, developer of a free mobile app and platform to navigate cancer treatment and care, announced that it has raised $4.7 million in funding, led by Asset Management Ventureswith participation from Sierra Ventures, Merstal Ltd. and others. A portion of the funding includes federal funds from the National Cancer Institute. The company will use the funding to expand its reach to address a variety of cancers beyond the more than 10,000 current breast cancer patients who have been using the app in the past year.

Outcomes4Me also announced that Sami Shalabi, who previously headed up engineering and product development at Google, has joined the team as chief operating officer.

Outcomes4Me is the first commercially available app to offer all breast cancer patients a personalized evidence-based experience to help them navigate their care, irrespective of their geography or healthcare provider. The app helps patients achieve better outcomes by retrieving and consolidating their health information, providing them with options for approved treatments and clinical trials, and supplying tools to manage their symptoms.

“Being diagnosed with cancer can be stressful and overwhelming. Outcomes4Me is on a mission to support patients through this journey by empowering them with easy to understand, relevant and evidence-based information,” said Maya R. Said, Sc. D., founder, president and CEO of Outcomes4Me. “Patients are our highest priority as we strive to bring transparency between them and the medical field, using our continually evolving insights to improve care and accelerate research.”

Continue reading… “Outcomes4Me Raises $4.7 Million To Help Patients Navigate Cancer Care Using AI”

Brittany Chang 

• REE Automotive is developing multi-sized flat electric vehicle platforms that can turn into endless types of vehicles, such as cargo delivery trucks and passenger shuttles.
• Building a scalable “one platform fits all” product instead of a full fledged electric vehicle is strategic, according to REE Automotive’s co-founder and CEO Daniel Barel.
• The platforms use several of the Israeli company’s proprietary systems, such as the REEcorner, REEboard, and x-by-wire.

REE Automotive is developing electric vehicle platforms that can turn into cargo delivery trucks, passenger shuttles, and more.

Unlike most major automakers looking to build fully fledged electric vehicles, REE is taking the business approach of creating multi-sized electric vehicle platforms, an idea that other makers like Daimler, Volkswagen, General Motors, startup Karma Automotive, and even the German Aerospace Center have started exploring as well.

Continue reading… “This modular EV vehicle platform can shift into endless types of vehicles from trucks to tiny delivery vehicles — see how it works”

MIT Technology Review

Organizations are using the internet of things and a constellation of smart devices to drive business change. It’s a technological shift that will ultimately have worldwide implications.

In association with LumenNew technologies can optimize the way people work. When implemented thoughtfully, such innovations can improve overall business processes.

Those changes are accepted as part of progress.But when a technology changes how and where people live and their relationships to one another and upends economies, it merits the term “revolution.” Because it changes everything.The promise of the fourth industrial revolution

Continue reading… “The promise of the fourth industrial revolution”

By Nhx T. 

China is reportedly amping up its plans to send more satellites into space to compete with American company SpaceX.
China is planning to send 10,000 satellites into space as soon as possible.

Continue reading… “CHINA COMPETING WITH SPACEX? COUNTRY REPORTEDLY LAUNCHING 10,000 SATELLITES INTO SPACE”

Amanda Jane Hughes and Stefania Soldini

It sounds like science fiction: giant solar power stations floating in space that beam down enormous amounts of energy to Earth. And for a long time, the concept – first developed by the Russian scientist, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, in the 1920s – was mainly an inspiration for writers.

A century later, however, scientists are making huge strides in turning the concept into reality. The European Space Agency has realised the potential of these efforts and is now looking to fund such projects, predicting that the first industrial resource we will get from space is “beamed power”.

Climate change is the greatest challenge of our time, so there’s a lot at stake. From rising global temperatures to shifting weather patterns, the impacts of climate change are already being feltaround the globe. Overcoming this challenge will require radical changes to how we generate and consume energy.

Renewable energy technologies have developed drastically in recent years, with improved efficiency and lower cost. But one major barrier to their uptake is the fact that they don’t provide a constant supply of energy. Wind and solar farms only produce energy when the wind is blowing or the sun is shining – but we need electricity around the clock, every day. Ultimately, we need a way to store energy on a large scale before we can make the switch to renewable sources.

Continue reading… “SOLAR POWER STATIONS IN SPACE COULD BE THE ANSWER TO OUR ENERGY NEEDS”