Google has dropped out of a competition to secure a Pentagon contract dubbed the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure cloud (JEDI), saying that the project may conflict with its ethical principles. The cloud computing contract is thought to be worth as much as $10 billion, with AWS and Microsoft also in the running. The decision was announced…
While the rumors and leaks didn’t leave much to the imagination ahead of today’s event, I will admit to being a bit surprised by the shape Google’s Home Hub actually took. The renders didn’t do justice to the actual product. For starters, the seven inch screen splits the difference between the Echo Show and Spot…
20 influential women working in the UK VR industry have come together to create a vision for the future of VR. The initiative was announced at new.New Festival. A vision statement titled, ‘A Vision for Women and VR (VWVR)’, outlines a future where the immersive sector challenges the status quo of gender imbalance in creative…
Updated with full text of Google’s statement below. Google has dropped out of the running for JEDI, the massive Defense Department cloud computing contract potentially worth $10 billion. In a statement to Bloomberg, Google said that it decided not to participate in the bidding process, which ends this week, because the contract may not align…
Microsoft has made its cross-platform framework for model-based machine learning, Infer.NET, available on GitHub under the permissive MIT license for free use in commercial applications. The machine learning engine is used across many Microsoft products, including Azure, Office 365 and Xbox. Infer.NET started life as a research tool and has been used in the formation of…
Apple has doubled down on its repudiation of Bloomberg’s report last week that claimed its systems had been compromised by Chinese spies. The blockbuster story cited more than a dozen sources claiming that China installed tiny chips on motherboards built by Supermicro, which companies across the U.S. tech industry — including Amazon and Apple — have…
Californian robotics company Iron Ox claims to be ‘reinventing farming from the ground up’, as it unveils an autonomous indoor farm that leverages the latest advancements in arable science, machine learning, and robotics. Indoor farms see harvesting, seeding and plant inspections occur thousands of times a day – tasks perfectly suited to robots. Iron Ox is using…
Evergrande Health, the investor that bailed out besieged electric vehicle startup Faraday Future in a deal worth $2 billion this summer, is now accusing it of attempting to break an agreement it made with previous backer Season Smart. In June, Evergrande Health announced that would it take over the financial commitment made by Season Smart last…
The US is scrapping autonomous tech regulations and opening up driverless car tests across the whole country, in a new policy that redefines the concept of a driver. Chris Middleton explains. The US Department of Transportation (DOT) is sweeping aside regulation of autonomous vehicle testing in favour of a system of voluntary standards. The safety…
Amazon has sold a lot of Echo Dots. Like a crazy, silly, unfathomable number of the things. Over the past two generations, it has arguably become the single-largest driver of the smart speaker craze. There’s nothing exceptional about the product, of course. It’s a simply designed hockey puck of a product, designed to mostly stay…
