Tech News - IoT and Hardware

Last week Intel acquired eASIC, a fabless semiconductor company that makes customizable eASIC chips for use in wireless and cloud environments. The actual transaction amount for this merger was not disclosed by Intel. They believe that this acquisition is more “strategic” than just pure business as the competition for FPGAs is booming due to increasing demand for data and cloud services. The rise of FPGAs and Intel’s strategy to diversify beyond CPUs FPGAs were first introduced back in the 80s and were considered as an evolution in the path of fabless semiconductors. With each passing year, researchers have been trying to find innovative solutions to improve system performance, to meet the needs of big data, cloud computing, mobile, networking and other domains. FPGA is at the heart of this quest to develop high performing systems and is being paired with CPU’s to facilitate compute-intensive operations. Intel has a Programmable Solutions Group (PSG), which they created after acquiring Altera in 2015 for $16.7 billion. Altera is considered to be one of the leading FPGA manufacturers. The idea behind the eASIC acquisition is to complement Altera chips with eASIC’s technology. Dan McNamara, corporate vice president and GM of the PSG division mentioned in the official announcement, “We’re seeing the largest adoption of FPGA ever because of explosion of data and cloud services, and we think this will give us a lot of differentiation versus the likes of Xilinx”. Xilinx leads the race in the FPGA market with Intel being a distant second. The acquisition of eASIC is seen as a step towards catching up with the market leaders. Intel’s most recent quarterly earnings reports showed that PSG division had earned $498 million with 17% compound annual growth rate (CAGR), whereas on the other hand the company’s biggest division ‘Client Computing Division (CCG) made $8.2 billion but with a CAGR of 3%. Although PSG’s overall revenue is small when compared to CCG, it shows potential in terms of future growth. Hence Intel plans to increase their investments in acquiring futuristic companies like eASIC. It wouldn’t be surprising that we will see more such acquisitions in the coming years. You can visit Intel’s PSG blog for more interesting news on FPGAs. Frenemies: Intel and AMD partner on laptop chip to keep Nvidia at bay Baidu releases Kunlun AI chip, China’s first cloud-to-edge AI chip AMD’s $293 million JV with Chinese chipmaker Hygon starts production of x86 CPUs

Last week, Alphabet’s Waymo announced that they will launch the world’s first commercial self-driving cars next month. Just two days after that, Apex.AI. announced their autonomous mobility systems. This announcement came soon after they closed a $15.5MM Series A funding, led by Canaan with participation from Lightspeed. Basically, Apex. AI designed a modular software stack for building autonomous systems. It easily integrates into existing systems as well as 3rd party software. An interesting thing they claim about their system is the fact that “The software is not designed for peak performance — it’s designed to never fail. We’ve built redundancies into the system design to ensures that single failures don’t lead to system-wide failures.” Their two products are Apex.OS and Apex.Autonomy. Apex.OS Apex.OS is a meta-operating system, which is an automotive version of ROS (Robot Operating System). It allows software developers to write safe and secure applications based on ROS 2 APIs. Apex.OS is built with safety in mind. It is being certified according to the automotive functional safety standard ISO 26262 as a Safety Element out of Context (SEooC) up to ASIL D. It ensures system security through HSM support, process level security, encryption, authentication. Apex.OS improves production code quality through the elimination of all unsafe code constructs. It ships with support for automotive hardware, i.e. ECUs and automotive sensors. Moreover it comes with a complete documentation including examples, tutorials, design articles, and 24/7 customer support. Apex.Autonomy Apex.Autonomy provides developers with building blocks for autonomy. It has well-defined interfaces for easy integration with any existing autonomy stack. It is written in C++, is easy to use, and can be run and tested on Linux, Linux RT, QNX, Windows, OSX. It is designed with production and ISO 26262 certification in mind and is CPU bound on x86_64 and amd64 architectures. A variety of LiDAR sensors are already integrated and tested. Read more about the products on Apex. AI website. Alphabet’s Waymo to launch the world’s first commercial self driving cars next month. Lyft acquires computer vision startup Blue Vision Labs, in a bid to win the self driving car race. Indeed lists top 10 skills to land a lucrative job, building autonomous vehicles.

Apple announced last week that it has canceled its AirPower charging mat over concerns related to its inability to achieve “high standards” for the product. Apple had first announced details about the AirPower charging mat during the company’s iPhone X event in September 2017. During the event, Apple said that AirPower would be shipped in 2018, but failed to follow up for the next 18 months. The speculation over AirPower chargers getting canceled grew when Apple removed all info regarding AirPower from its website. However, the rumors of its cancellation went down as iOS 12.2 beta release included support for a wireless charger. “After much effort, we’ve concluded AirPower will not achieve our high standards and we have canceled the project. We apologize to those customers who were looking forward to this launch”, Dan Riccio, SVP of Hardware Engineering, Apple, told TechCrunch. Had the chargers shipped, a multitude of new and unique features would have welcomed the users. For instance, apart from being wireless, AirPower charger would have also been equipped with multi-device charging feature (ability to charge three devices at once), and a unique technology with multiple coils, among others. Many people have made speculations about the reason behind AirPower cancellation, with many blaming it on issues related to engineering and overheating. Craig Lloyd, a staff writer at iFixit, published a post where he discusses the possible reasons behind charger’s cancellation. Craig states that Wireless charging pads use electric current in your phone’s wire coil that helps charge the battery. However, this electricity being transmitted isn’t perfectly clean and generates noise that can interfere with other wireless devices. When different coils are charged together, a slightly different waveform is generated. Apple wanted to create a large charging platform with the help of overlapping coils which would allow AirCharger to power different devices on the charger mat. However, this introduced a different set of challenges. “Apple boxed themselves into an electromagnetic corner. What they wanted to do was physically possible—and they surely had it working in the lab—but they couldn’t consistently meet the rigorous transmission requirements that are designed to keep us safe from our gadgets”, states Craig. Now although Apple failed to deliver this product, it has not lost hope yet. “We continue to believe that the future is wireless and are committed to push the wireless experience forward”, said Riccio. Public reaction to the news is largely comical, as users took to Twitter to post memes regarding the news. https://twitter.com/wannatechnow/status/1112664509108375552 https://twitter.com/MKBHD/status/1111710778741190656 https://twitter.com/JonyIveParody/status/1111772531210534912 https://twitter.com/amelvand/status/1112031397831692289 Apple’s March Event: Apple changes gears to services, is now your bank, news source, gaming zone and TV Apple to merge the iPhone, iPad, and Mac apps by 2021 Apple acquires Pullstring to possibly help Apple improve Siri and other IoT-enabled gadgets

Last week, the Yocto Project announced that Arm and Facebook will be joining the project as new platinum members. The Yocto Project is an open source collaboration project (originally an Intel Project) that was launched back in 2011. It aims to allow developers to create customized Linux-based systems for embedded products. The Yocto Project comes with a flexible set of tools and offers a space where embedded developers across the globe share technologies, software, and best practices. This helps them build tailored Linux images for embedded and Internet of Things (IOT) devices. According to Rhonda Dirvin, Senior Director, Marketing, Embedded & Automotive Line of Business, Arm, “The Yocto Project provides an excellent framework to facilitate embedded Linux development, and through our membership we will collaborate with the community to further advance Yocto Project’s custom open-source distribution.” Earlier, Linaro, which consolidates and optimizes open source software and tools for the Arm architecture, was considered a competitor of Yocto Project. However, that’s not entirely the case as both the groups have become complementary and Linaro’s Arm toolchain can be used within Yocto Project. Facebook's role in the Yocto Project and embedded Linux Facebook's role has been minor when it comes to embedded Linux. Facebook is said to join the Yocto Project either because of a new project or may be Facebook just wanted to expand its open source presence. “The Yocto Project is the basis for important open source and embedded firmware initiatives. We are happy to lend our support to the Yocto Project community, and look forward to joining with other members in this important work”, said Aaron Sullivan, Director of Hardware Engineering at Facebook The Yocto Project currently has more than 22 active members. “We are delighted to welcome Arm and Facebook to the Yocto Project at the Platinum level. With their continued support, we are furthering the embedded systems ecosystem and the Yocto Project as a whole.” mentioned Lieu Ta, Senior Director of Governance and Business Operations at Wind River and Chair of the Yocto Project Advisory Board. Yocto Project seems to be continually growing with Facebook and Arms joining in. Yocto will benefit from Facebook and Arm’s technical and financial support to consolidate it as a “secure, stable and adaptable industry standard”. For more information be sure to check out the official Yocto Project blog post. Read next Arm unveils its Client CPU roadmap designed for always-on, always-connected devices Facebook’s AI algorithm finds 20 Myanmar Military Officials guilty of spreading hate and misinformation, leads to their ban A new conservative employee group within Facebook to protest Facebook’s “intolerant” liberal policies

A video went viral in February showcasing a dog like robot opening a door for another robot. These agile robots are the brainchild of Boston Dynamics, an American Robotics company. Fast forward to this month, Boston Dynamics is all geared up to produce thousands of these robot dogs. According to a report by Inverse, the company has set a target date of July 2019 to manufacture 1,000 of its SpotMini robot dogs annually. SpotMini is a smaller variant of Boston Dynamics’ many robots. This four-legged robot weighs around 30 kgs and can comfortably fit in an office or home. It is one of the quietest robots built by the company. SpotMini is completely mobile with a 5 degree-of-freedom arm. It also has multiple perception sensors for navigation and mobile manipulation. SpotMini Spot, SpotMini’s elder version stands at close to four feet and weighs about 75 kgs. This four-legged robot is exclusively made for rough terrain mobility and superhuman stability. Its video has been streamed on Youtube nearly 19 million times. Spot According to founder Marc Raibert, SpotMini is currently being tested for use in construction, delivery, security, and home assistance applications. The company has already announced plans to launch it in 2019 as their short-term goal. They have currently built almost ten robodogs by hand, and are in plans to build 100 models with contract manufacturers at the end of this year. In the long run, the company intends SpotMini to eventually become a multi-use platform of sorts. At TechCrunch’s TC Sessions: Robotics event 2018, Raibert stated that “the goal for us is to become the what Android operating system is for phones: a versatile foundation for limitless applications.” Sony resurrects robotic pet Aibo with advanced AI AI powered Robotics : Autonomous machines in the making How to assemble a DIY selfie drone with Arduino and ESP8266 What we learned at the ICRA 2018 conference for robotics & automation

Yesterday, Facebook launched two brand new video communication devices. Named Portal and Portal+, these devices let you video call anyone, with more richer, hands-free experiences. The Portal features a 10-inch 1280 x 800 display, while Portal+ features 15-inch 1920 x 1080.  Both devices are powered by Artificial Intelligence. This includes a Smart Camera and a Smart Sound technology. Smart Camera stays with the action and automatically pans and zooms to keep everyone in view. Smart Sound minimizes background noise and enhances the voice of whoever is talking, no matter where they move. Source: Facebook Portal can also be used to call Facebook friends and connections on Messenger even if they don’t have Portal. It also supports group calls of up to seven people at the same time. Portal also offers hands-free voice control with Amazon Alexa built-in which can be used to track sports scores, check the weather, control smart home devices, order groceries, and more.  Facebook has also enabled shared activities in its Portal devices by partnering with Spotify Premium, Pandora, iHeartRadio, Facebook Watch, Food Network, and Newsy. Keeping in mind, it’s security breach that affected 50 million users two weeks ago, Facebook says it has paid a lot of attention to privacy and security features. Per their website, “We designed Portal with tools that give you control: You can completely disable the camera and microphone with a single tap. Portal and Portal+ also come with a camera cover, so you can easily block your camera’s lens at any time and still receive incoming calls and notifications, plus use voice commands. To manage Portal access within your home, you can set a four- to 12-digit passcode to keep the screen locked. Changing the passcode requires your Facebook password. We also want to be upfront about what information Portal collects, help people understand how Facebook will use that information and explain the steps we take to keep it private and secure: Facebook doesn’t listen to, view, or keep the contents of your Portal video calls. In addition, video calls on Portal are encrypted. For added security, Smart Camera and Smart Sound use AI technology that runs locally on Portal, not on Facebook servers. Portal’s camera doesn’t use facial recognition and doesn’t identify who you are. Like other voice-enabled devices, Portal only sends voice commands to Facebook servers after you say, “Hey Portal.” You can delete your Portal’s voice history in your Facebook Activity Log at any time.” In all the above, Facebook seems quite cryptic about audio data. It also doesn’t really explain how it will use the information it collects from users. The voice data is stored on the Facebook server by default, probably to improve the Portal’s understanding on the user’s language quirks and to understand the user’s needs from the data. But it does make one wonder, should this be an opt-in and not an opt-out by default? Another jarring aspect is the need for one’s Facebook password to change the device’s passcode. This just feels like the new devices are yet another way for Facebook to add users to Facebook, not to mention the fact that Facebook just had a data breach on its site, the repercussions of which they are still investigating. In an interesting poll conducted by Dr. Jen Golbeck, Professor at UMD, on Twitter, over 63% of respondents said that they will not trust Facebook to responsibly operate a surveillance device in their home. https://twitter.com/jengolbeck/status/1049343277110054912 Read more about the devices on Facebook’s announcement. Facebook Dating app to release as a test version in Colombia. Facebook’s Glow, a machine learning compiler, to be supported by Intel, Qualcomm and others How Facebook is advancing artificial intelligence [Video]

Microsoft has announced that it will pour $5 billion into IoT over the next 4 years. To date, Microsoft has spent $1.5 billion, so this moves could be viewed as a step change in the organization's commitment to IoT. This makes sense for Microsoft. The company has fallen behind in the consumer technology race. It appears to be moving towards cloud and infrastructure projects instead. Azure has given it a strong position, but with AWS setting the pace in the cloud field, Microsoft needs to move quickly if it is to position itself as the frontrunner in the future of IoT. Julia White, CVP of Azure said this: "With our IoT platform spanning cloud, OS and devices, we are uniquely positioned to simplify the IoT journey so any customer—regardless of size, technical expertise, budget, industry or other factors—can create trusted, connected solutions that improve business and customer experiences, as well as the daily lives of people all over the world. The investment we’re announcing today will ensure we continue to meet all our customers’ needs both now and in the future." The timing of this huge investment has not gone unnoticed. At the end of March, Microsoft revealed that it was reorganizing to allow itself to place greater strategic attention on the 'intelligent cloud and intelligent edge'. It's no coincidence that the senior member set to leave is Terry Myerson, the man who has been leading the Windows side of the business since 2013. However, the extent to which this announcement from Microsoft is really that much of a pivot is questionable. In The Register, Simon Sharwood writes: "Five billion bucks is a lot of money. But not quite so impressive once you realise that Microsoft spent $13.0bn on R&D in FY 2017 and $12bn in each of FY 16 and 15. Five billion spread across the next four years may well be less than ten per cent of all R&D spend." The analysis from many quarters in the tech media is that this is a move that marks what many have been thinking - managing Windows' decline in favour of Microsoft's move into the cloud and infrastructure space. It's pretty hard to see past that - but it will be interesting to see how Microsoft continues to respond to competition from the likes of Amazon.

CES 2019 is kicking off in Las Vegas, Nevada today, January 8, Monday for 3 days. The conference unofficially kicked off on Sunday, January 6 and you may have a look at the announcements made on that day. Yesterday was the main press day when the majority of the announcements were made with a lot of companies showcasing their latest projects and announcing new products, software, and services. HTC HTC announced their partnership with Mozilla, bringing Firefox’s virtual reality web browser to the Vive headset. Mozilla first announced Firefox Reality as a dedicated VR web browser in April. In September, they announced that the browser is now available on Viveport, Oculus, and Daydream. Now, it is available for the HTC Vive headset. As part of the deal, HTC is also teaming up with Amazon to make use of Amazon Sumerian. HTC also announced the Vive Pro Eye virtual reality headset with native, built-in eye tracking. It uses “foveated rendering” to render sharp images for wherever the human eye is looking in a virtual scene and reduces the image quality of objects on the periphery. Intel Intel made a number of announcements at CES 2019. They showcased new processors and also released a press release with updates on Project Athena. With this project, they are getting PC makers ready for “a new class of advanced laptops.” These laptops will be Ultrabooks part two with 5G and artificial intelligence support. New Intel processors: New 9th Gen Core processors for a limited number of desktops and laptops. A 10nm Ice Lake processor for thin laptops. A 10nm Lakefield processor using 3D stacking technology for very small computers and tablets. A 10nm Cascade Lake Xeon processor for data processing. 3D Athlete Tracking tech which runs on the Cascade Lake chip and shows data about how fast and far athletes are traveling. Intel’s 10nm Snow Ridge SOC for 5G base stations. Lenovo Lenovo has made minor updates to their ThinkPad X1 Carbon and X1 Yoga laptops with new designs for 2019. They are mostly going to have a material change, and are also going to be thinner and lighter this year. Lenovo has also released two Lenovo is two large display monitor. The first is Lenovo’s ThinkVision P44W, which is aimed at business users, and the second is the Legion Y44w Gaming Monitor. They both have a 43.4-inch panel. Uber One of Uber’s partners in the air taxi domain, Bell, has revealed the design of its vertical takeoff and landing air taxi at CES 2019. Their flying taxi, dubbed the Bell Nexus, can accommodate up to 5 people and is a hybrid-electric powered vehicle. CES 2019 also saw the release of the game Marvel's Avengers: Rocket's Rescue Run. This is the first demo product from startup Holoride, which has Audi as one of its stakeholders. It's the result of Audi and Disney's new media format, which aims to bring virtual reality to passengers in cars, specifically to Uber. More announcements: Harley-Davidson gave a preview of their first all-electric motorcycle. It will launch in August 2019 and will cost $29,799 TCL announced its first soundbars and a 75-inch version of the excellent 6-Series 4K Roku TV Elgato announced a professional $199 light rig for Twitch streamers and YouTube creators Hisense announces its new 2019 4K TV lineup and the Sonic One TV Griffin introduces new wireless chargers for the iPhone and Apple Watch Amazon is planning to let people deliver packages inside your garage Kodak’s release a new instant camera and printer line GE announced a 27-inch smart display for the kitchen that streams Netflix. Google Assistant will soon be on a billion devices. Their next stop - feature phones Vizio announces the most advanced 4K TV ever and support for Apple’s AirPlay 2 Toyota shared details of it’s Guardian Driver-Assist System which will mimic a technique used in fighter jets to serve as a smart intermediary between driver and car. CES 2019: Top announcements made so far HTC Vive Focus 2.0 update promises long battery life, among other things for the VR headset Intel unveils the first 3D Logic Chip packaging technology, ‘Foveros’, powering its new 10nm chips, ‘Sunny Cove’

The Raspberry Pi board developers can now make use of the latest TensorFlow 1.9 features to build their board projects. Most developers use Raspberry Pi for shaping their innovative DIY projects. The Pi also acts as a pathway to introduce people to programming with an added benefit of coding in Python. The main objective of blending TensorFlow with the Raspberry Pi board is to let people explore the capabilities of machine learning on cost-effective and flexible devices. Eben Upton, the founder of the Raspberry Pi project, says, “It is vital that a modern computing education covers both fundamentals and forward-looking topics. With this in mind, we’re very excited to be working with Google to bring TensorFlow machine learning to the Raspberry Pi platform. We’re looking forward to seeing what fun applications kids (of all ages) create with it.” By being able to use TensorFlow features, existing users, as well as new users, can try their hand on live machine learning projects. Here are few real-life examples of Tensorflow on Raspberry Pi: DonkeyCar platform DonkeyCar, a platform to build DIY Robocars, uses TensorFlow and the Raspberry Pi to create self-driving toy cars. Object Recognition Robot The Tensorflow framework is useful for recognizing objects. This robot uses a library, a camera, and a Raspberry Pi, using which one can detect up to 20,000 different objects. Waste sorting robot This robot is capable of sorting every piece of garbage with the same precision as a human. This robot is able to recognize at least four types of waste. To identify the category to which it belongs, the system uses TensorFlow and OpenCV. One can easily install Tensorflow from the pre-built binaries using Python pip package system from the pre-built binaries. One can also install it by simply running these commands on the Raspbian 9 (stretch) terminal: sudo apt install libatlas-base-dev pip3 install tensorflow Read more about this project on GitHub page 5 DIY IoT projects you can build under $50 Build your first Raspberry Pi project How to mine bitcoin with your Raspberry Pi

Amazon has unveiled a range of Echo devices at the Amazon Devices Event hosted in their Seattle headquarters, yesterday. The products announced included a revamped selection of Amazon’s smart speakers ( Echo Sub, Echo Dot, and Echo Plus), smart displays (the Echo Show and Echo Spot), and other smart devices. Also released, was a smart microwave (AmazonBasics Microwave), Echo Wall Clock, Fire TV Recast, and Amazon Smart Plug This event marks the largest number of devices and features (over 30) that Amazon has ever launched in a day. Alexa Presentation Language For developers, Amazon introduced the Alexa Presentation Language, to easily create Alexa skills for Alexa devices with screens. The Alexa Presentation Language (APL) is in preview and allows developers to build voice experiences with graphics, images, slideshows and video. Developers will be able to control how graphics flow with voice, customize visuals and adapt them to Alexa devices and skills.  Supported devices will include Echo Show, Echo Spot, Fire TV, and select Fire Tablet devices. Now let’s take a broad look at the key device announcements. Amazon Smart Speakers Echo Dot: The new version of the Smart speaker now offers 70 percent louder sound as compared to its predecessor. It is a voice-controlled smart speaker with Alexa integration. It can sort music, news, information, and more. The driver is now much larger from 1.1” to 1.6” for better sound clarity and improved bass. It is Bluetooth enabled so you can connect to another speaker or use it all by itself. Echo Input:  If you already have speakers, this device can add Alexa voice control to them via a 3.5mm audio cable or Bluetooth. It has a four-microphone array. Echo Input is just 12.5mm tall and thin enough to disappear into the room. It will be available later this year for $34.99. Echo Plus: Echo Plus combines Amazon’s cloud-based Natural Language Understanding and Automatic Speech Recognition along with built-in Zigbee hub to make it one of the premier smart speakers. It also has a new fabric casing, and built-in temperature sensor. This model's pre-orders begin today for $149.99. Echo Link: The Echo Link device can connect to a receiver or amplifier, with multiple digital and analog inputs and outputs for compatibility with your existing stereo equipment. It can control music selection, volume, and multi-room playback on your stereo with your Echo or the Alexa app. Echo Link will be available to customers soon. Echo Sub: This 100-watt subwoofer can connect to other speakers and create a 2.1-sound solution. The $129.99 Echo Sub will launch later this month with pre-orders beginning today. Amazon Smart Displays Echo Show: The new Echo Show is completely redesigned with a larger screen, smart home hub, and improved sound quality. Amazon is also introducing Doorbell Chime Announcements, so users will hear a chime on all Echo devices when someone presses your smart doorbell. Echo Show includes a high resolution 10-inch HD display and an 8-mic array. The new Echo Show will be available to customers for $229.99. Shipping starts next month. Other Smart devices Echo Wall Clock: It is a $30 Echo companion device, an analog clock with Alexa-powered voice recognition. It is 10-inch, battery-powered and features a ring of 60 LEDs around the rim that show ongoing Alexa timers. It also has automatic time syncing and Daylight Savings Time adjustment. AmazonBasics Microwave: It’s a $59.99 voice-activated microwave. It features Dash Replenishment and an array of Alexa features including integration with connected ovens, door locks, and other smart fixtures, reminders, and access to more than 50,000 third-party skills. Fire TV Recast: This is a companion DVR that lets users watch, record, and replay free over-the-air programming to any Fire TV, Echo Show, and on compatible Fire tablet and mobile devices. Users can also record up to two or four shows at once, and stream on any two devices at a time. It can also be paired with Alexa. Amazon Smart Plug: The Amazon Smart Plug works with Alexa to add voice control to any outlet. You can schedule lights, fans, and appliances to turn on and off automatically, or control them remotely when you’re away. Follow along the live blog of the event for a minute to minute update. Google to allegedly launch a new Smart home device. Cortana and Alexa become best friends: Microsoft and Amazon release a preview of this integration. The iRobot Roomba i7+ is a cleaning robot that maps and stores your house and also empties the trash automatically.

The Android Things platform was launched in 2018 to power third-party smart displays and other speakers. Last year, a number of major manufacturers, including, Lenovo, JBL, and LG Smart Displays, released Smart Displays and speakers powered by Android Things. With the success achieved because of the smart displays and speakers over the past year, Google is now refocusing Android Things as a platform for OEM partners to build devices in those categories with Assistant built-in. They announced an update to Android Things in a blog post by Dave Smith, Developer Advocate for IoT, yesterday. Android Things uses the Android Things SDK on top of hardware like the NXP i.MX7D and Raspberry Pi 3B. According to Google’s blog post, Android Things is a platform for experimenting with and building smart connected devices. System images will be available through the Android Things console where developers can easily create new builds and push app updates for up to 100 devices for non-commercial use. Though, support for production System on Modules (SoMs) based on NXP, Qualcomm, and MediaTek hardware won’t be available through the public developer platform currently. This refocus doesn’t seem to be on lines with Google’s original vision for Android Things which is Internet-of-Things. Even Google’s Internet-of-Things OS called Brillo got rebranded to Android Things in late 2016. The focus seems to be on smart displays and smart speakers now. https://twitter.com/stshank/status/1095434162977165312 Google’s official post states that the team will continue to provide the platform for IoT devices, including turnkey hardware solutions. It is also pushing developers interested in turnkey hardware solutions to Cloud IoT Core for secure device connectivity at scale and the upcoming Cloud IoT Edge runtime for managed edge computing services. Google hasn’t stated any reasons for the shift of Android Things from general purpose IoT devices to smart displays and speakers, but the rising competition could be one of the reasons. According to a few users, it is bad news as Google keeps killing its good projects. https://twitter.com/aliumujib/status/1095416461345124352 https://twitter.com/gregoriopalama/status/1095591673445433344 Google announces the general availability of a new API for Google Docs Apple and Google slammed by Human Rights groups for hosting Absher, a Saudi app that tracks women Youtube promises o reduce recommendations of ‘conspiracy theory’. Ex-googler explains why this is a ‘historic victory’

Yesterday, the Mozilla IoT team announced that ‘Project Things’ is now out from its early experimental phase with a new name, ‘WebThings’. Mozilla WebThings is an open platform that allows you to monitor and control devices over the web. This project by Mozilla is an open source implementation of Web of Things, which defines software architectural styles and programming patterns that allow real-world objects to be a part of the World Wide Web. The idea here is to create a decentralized Internet of Things by providing “things”, URLs on the web to make them linkable and discoverable. Mozilla WebThings comprises of two components: WebThings Gateway WebThings Gateway is privacy and security-focused software distribution built for smart home gateways. It enables you to directly monitor and control your smart home gateways over the web, without relying on a middleman. Mozilla further announced that WebThings Gateway 0.8 is now available for download. This release comes with a feature that allows users to privately log data from their smart home devices. This logged data can also be visualized with interactive graphs. “This feature is still experimental, but viewing these logs will help you understand the kinds of data your smart home devices are collecting and think about how much of that data you are comfortable sharing with others via third-party services,” said Ben Francis, a Software Engineer at Mozilla. This release also brings in new alarms capabilities for devices like smoke, carbon monoxide, and motion detectors. With this new feature, users can configure rules to alert them when an alarm is triggered while they are away or check whether an alarm is currently active. The team has also started working on a new version of WebThings Gateway for OpenWrt, a Linux operating system targeting embedded devices. This version will be designed to act as a WiFi access point itself, instead of just connecting to an existing wireless network as a client. WebThings Framework WebThings Framework is a suite of reusable software components using which you can build your own web things, which directly expose the Web Thing API. This makes them easily discoverable by a Web of Things gateway or client. It can then automatically detect the device’s capabilities and monitor and control it over the web. These components are implemented in a range of languages including Node.js, Python, Java, Rust, and C++ (for Arduino). To know more in detail, check out the official announcement by Mozilla. Mozilla introduces Pyodide, a Python data science stack compiled to WebAssembly Mozilla developers have built BugBug which uses machine learning to triage Firefox bugs Mozilla adds protection against fingerprinting and Cryptomining scripts in Firefox Nightly and Beta  

Last week, the AMD team released v-2019.Q1.2 version of AMD Open Source for Vulkan (AMDVLK). This release comes with fairly small updates including a DXVK fix, one new Vulkan extension, and some more updates. What’s new in v-2019.Q1.2 The XGL code exposes YUV planes directly to allow applications to implement their own color conversion. Symbols are now not included when building the driver in its release confirmation, which could help with performance. The default WgpMode is updated from wgp to cu The performance regression introduced by the updates that added support for the LOAD_INDEX path for handling pipeline binds is now fixed. AMDVLK architecture: The following diagram shows its architecture: Souce: GitHub AMD open-sourced AMDVLK in 2017, which was earlier the part of AMDGPU-PRO driver. It is a Vulkan driver for Radeon graphics adapters on Linux and is built on top of AMD’s Platform Abstraction Library (PAL). PAL provides hardware and OS abstractions for Radeon (GCN+) user-mode 3D graphics drivers. It also provides users with a consistent experience across platforms, including support for recently released GPUs and compatibility with AMD developer tools. As PAL does not come with a shader compiler, clients are expected to use an external compiler library that targets PAL's Pipeline ABI to produce compatible shader binaries. Shaders compile a VkPipeline object as a single entity by shaders using the LLVM-Based Pipeline Compiler (LLPC) library. LLPC is built on the existing shader compilation infrastructure of LLVM for AMD GPUs to generate code objects that are compatible with PAL’s pipeline ABI. To know more in detail about AMDVLK, you can check out its GitHub repository. AMD ROCm GPUs now support TensorFlow v1.8, a major milestone for AMD’s deep learning plans AMD open sources V-EZ, the Vulkan wrapper library AMD’s $293 million JV with Chinese chipmaker Hygon starts production of x86 CPUs

Today, Graphcore, a UK-based chipmaking startup has raised $200m in a series D funding round from investors including Microsoft and BMW, valuing the company at $1.7bn. This new funding brings the total capital raised by Graphcore to date to more than $300m. The funding round was led by U.K.venture capital firm Atomico and Sofina, with participation from the biggest names in the AI and machine learning industry like Merian Global Investors, BMW iVentures, Microsoft, Amadeus Capital Partners, Robert Bosch Venture Capital, Dell Technologies Capital, amongst many others. The company intends to use the funds generated to execute on its product roadmap, accelerate scaling and expand its global presence. Graphcore, which designs chips purpose-built for artificial intelligence, is attempting to create a new class of chips that are better able to deal with the huge amounts of data needed to make AI computers. The company is ramping up production to meet customer demand for its Intelligence Processor Unit (UPU) PCIe processor cards, the first to be designed specifically for machine intelligence training and inference. Mr. Nigel Toon, CEO, and co-founder, Graphcore said that Graphcore’s processing units can be used for both the training and deployment of machine learning systems, and they were “much more efficient”. Tobias Jahn, principal at BMW i Ventures stated that Graphcore’s technology "is well-suited for a wide variety of applications from intelligent voice assistants to self-driving vehicles.” Last year the company raised $50 million from investors including Demis Hassabis, co-founder of DeepMind; Zoubin Ghahramani of Cambridge University and chief scientist at Uber, Pieter Abbeel from UC Berkeley, and Greg Brockman, Scott Grey and Ilya Sutskever, from OpenAI. Head over to Graphcore’s official blog for more insights on this news. Microsoft Azure reportedly chooses Xilinx chips over Intel Altera for AI co-processors, says Bloomberg report NVIDIA makes its new “brain for autonomous AI machines”, Jetson AGX Xavier Module, available for purchase NVIDIA demos a style-based generative adversarial network that can generate extremely realistic images; has ML community enthralled

In the midst of all the leaks related to Pixel 3 and Pixel 3 XL regarding whether Google will embrace iPhone like notch or will have wireless charging, reports have surfaced that Google has even more news to showcase in its big hardware event “Made By Google” on October 9. According to a report from MySmartPrice, Google might launch a new device called "Google Home Hub" Smart Speaker sporting a 7-inch display with large squarish speakers in two variants Chalk white and Charcoal. Image source mysmartprice Google has been pretty successful with its smart home devices like Google Home series but after Amazon teased its smart home device with screen called 'Amazon Echo Show' Tech giant was keen to work on a product to compete with its rival. If the leaked news from "MySmartPrice" is to be believed, with Google Home Hub powered by Google assistant we can watch YouTube, HBO, and videos from other content providers. Additionally, the device will also display time, weather, daily commute information and other regular Google assistant features.  However, it will not have full-fledged Android OS. While the device comes power packed with the Google software but based on leaks, what seems to be missing from the device is the camera. It would have been perfect if the device sported a camera as well which could have been used for video calling as Google is aggressively marketing its video calling app Google Duo. The device will, however, feature  WiFi and Bluetooth. Image source: mysmartprice With the new device, Google might also introduce new features for the Google assistant. Though there is no confirmation from Google regarding the product yet but the timing makes perfect sense as Google's upcoming event on October 9th would be the perfect place to announce a Google Home Hub along with its much awaited Pixel smartphone series. Read full article on Mysmartprice. Author Bio Full time Linux Admin part time reader, always up for latest technology and a cup of tea, interested in Cloud services, Machine learning and Artificial Intelligence. Amazon Echo vs Google Home: Next-gen IoT war. Home Assistant: an open source Python home automation hub to rule all things smart. Cortana and Alexa become best friends: Microsoft and Amazon release a preview of this integration.