Bitcoin, Business, Economy, Finance, Latest Trend

Bitcoin sees Wall Street warm to trading virtual currency

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SAN FRANCISCO — Some of the biggest names on Wall Street are warming up to Bitcoin, a virtual currency that for nearly a decade has been consigned to the unregulated fringes of the financial world.

The parent company of the New York Stock Exchange has been working on an online trading platform that would allow large investors to buy and hold Bitcoin, according to emails and documents viewed by The New York Times and four people briefed on the effort who asked to remain anonymous because the plans were still confidential.

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Amazon.com, App, Automation, Home Technology

Amazon rolls out new ways to monetize Alexa’s skills

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All Alexa skills developers can now monetize their voice apps with in-skill purchases, Amazon announced last week.

The introduction of in-skill purchasing allows skills developers to sell premium digital content — such as subscription services or one-time purchases that augment a skill’s free offerings — within an Alexa skill.

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Alternative Transportation, Aviation, Uber

Here are the most amazing flying car designs featured at Uber’s elevate conference

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Aircraft makers—from multinational giants to garage startups—offer a crazy variety of visions for air taxis that Uber might use.

The early days of flight saw a huge variety of designs—featuring oddities like planes with what we now call the “tail” in the front of the vehicle. After a few decades, the industry settled on the standard forms we recognize today based on cost and efficiency. But today electric technologies have made it possible to widen the space of what’s possible in terms of style, design, and material. “We’re at the same exciting period where we’re like, ‘Well, what is this supposed to look like?’” says Mark Moore, director of engineering, vehicle systems for the Uber Elevate air taxi program. “And no one, including myself, really knows the answer.”

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Alternative Transportation, Architecture, City Planning, Uber

These Uber Air ‘Skyport’ concepts look straight out of Star Wars

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If Uber is to get its “flying taxi” service off the ground, it will need dozens of launchpads and landing sites on rooftops around cities as a supportive infrastructure. At the ride-hailing company’s second annual Elevate conference in Los Angeles, six architecture firms presented their winning designs of what these so-called “Skyports” could look like. And holy cow, these things look straight out of Star Wars.

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App, Augmented Reality, Great New Product, Internet, Wearables

Snapchat launches Spectacles V2, camera glasses you’ll actually wear

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Snapchat Spectacles v2 Close Up

Photos, not just video. No yellow ring alerting people to the camera. Underwater-capable. Classier colors with lighter lenses. Prescription options. Faster syncing. And a much slimmer frame and charging case. Snapchat fixed the biggest pain points of its Spectacles camera sunglasses with V2, which launch today for $150. The company only sold 220,000 pairs of V1, with their limited functionality, tricky exports and goofy hues. But V2 is stylish, convenient and useful enough to keep handy. They’re not revolutionary. They’re a wearable camera for everybody.

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Biotech, Healthcare, Medical Breakthrough

What Is Bioprinting?

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Bioprinted materials can be used to repair damaged organs.

Bioprinting, a type of 3D printing, uses cells and other biological materials as “inks” to fabricate 3D biological structures. Bioprinted materials have the potential to repair damaged organs, cells, and tissues in the human body. In the future, bioprinting may be used to build entire organs from scratch, a possibility that could transform the field of bioprinting.

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Bitcoin, government, Money Talk

SEC decision on Ethereum cryptocurrency could affect others funded by ICOs

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The SEC is scrutinizing Ether, second only to bitcoin in value, to determine if it should be considered a security; the decision could affect other digital currencies launched through initial coin offerings.

The second most valuable cryptocurrency behind bitcoin, Ethereum, is under regulatory scrutiny by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which is considering whether it should be classified as a commodity or a security.

An SEC decision to classify Ethereum’s Ether cryptocurrency as a security could have far-reaching consequences for other digital monies originally crowdfunded through initial coin offerings (ICOs).

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City Planning, Human Behavior, Latest Trend

The new magnetism of mid-size cities

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For many millennials, second cities are becoming their first choice.

If, 10 years ago, you had asked 28-year-old Sarah Luckett Bhatia if she’d eventually return to her hometown of Louisville, Kentucky, she “would have laughed in your face.”

Even just a few years ago, the prospects of coming home to Derby City would have seemed slim. Bhatia moved to Chicago for school, studied at Columbia College, and immediately got a job in corporate planning and strategy. Like many 20-somethings, she steered her life and career trajectory toward big cities and the opportunities they promised.

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Business, Economy, Latest Trend, Science & Technology News, Startup

America’s disappearing IPOs

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What happened to all the IPOs?

It wasn’t so long ago that the market for initial public offerings — in which a promising and often young private company first allows public investors to buy its stock, often as a way to raise money and invest in the future — was booming. In the two decades before 2000, America was averaging some 300 IPOs a year. In fact, volume was considerably higher than that from 1990 to 2000, reaching 706 in 1996, for example.

Then they fell off a cliff. Last year, there were a mere 147. What happened?

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Agriculture, AI, Artificial Intelligence, Driverless vehicles, Farming, Farms

The AI farm experiment

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Major companies are bringing together new machine learning algorithms, better and cheaper sensors, and increased computing power in hopes of addressing growing global demand for food and agriculture’s diminishing labor force.

The big picture: Alphabet’s X and John Deere, startups and universities are looking to AI-based agriculture to address these problems. But farming presents hard problems for AI that, if solved, could ultimately help it be deployed in more structured places (think: homes).

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Amazon.com, China, Google, Home Technology, Science & Technology News

SoundHound has raised a big $100M round to take on Alexa and Google Assistant

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As SoundHound looks to leverage its ten-plus years of experience and data to create a voice recognition tool that companies can bake into any platform, it’s raising another big $100 million round of funding to try to make its Houndify platform a third neutral option compared to Alexa and Google Assistant.

While Amazon works to get developers to adopt Alexa, SoundHound has been collecting data since it started as an early mobile app for the iPhone and Android devices. That’s given it more than a decade of data to work with as it tries to build a robust audio recognition engine and tie it into a system with dozens of different queries and options that it can tie to those sounds. The result was always a better SoundHound app, but it’s increasingly started to try to open up that technology to developers and show it’s more powerful (and accurate) than the rest of the voice assistants on the market — and get them to use it in their services.

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