Called the Sony Vision-S, it’s an electric concept sedan that is meant to showcase the Japanese tech conglomerate’s many different strengths, from entertainment products to camera sensors and more.
In fact, the Vision-S features 33 different sensors inside and outside of the car, multiple widescreen displays, 360 audio, and always-on connectivity, with some pieces coming from industry players like BlackBerry and Bosch. It’s also powered by a “newly-designed EV platform” — which appears to have been engineered by automotive supplier Magna — that Sony says will be able to power other vehicle types, like SUVs.
Typically, swim monitors reside on your wrist. An Apple Watch will track your performance, as will other wearables, like a Garmin watch. But a new gadget from a Vancouver, Canada company called Form does it differently: with a head-up display right in your goggles.
Slip them on, and simple yellow, pixelated text appears in front of one of your eyes, superimposed over the scene before you. Whether you’re underwater or turning your head for a breath of air, the information floats there. Two buttons on the side let you take actions like selecting the pool size, or actually starting the swim. While you’re swimming, the display allows you to see information like how far how you’ve been going and how many lengths you’ve completed. A companion app provides a place to make more granular changes and see the full results of your swim afterwards.
I first wrote about the Coke Freestyle machine in 2009. I was at Firehouse Subs last week picking up a sandwich for my son and noticed a newer version of the machine, the 9100. Firehouse is a charter customer and has over 1,000 machines in its stores nationwide.
You can now communicate with the machine via bluetooth on a mobile app. An improved content management system allows Coca-Cola to release “digital recipes” over the air, right to the dispenser, surprising Firehouse guests with unique drink offerings like Team USA custom mixes, Fanta Halloween and Coca-Cola Holiday mixes. New brand choices include Orange Vanilla Coke and Sprite Lymonade, plus limited-time flavors of Minute Maid Lemonade. The machine has microphones, speakers, optical sensors and a new equipment option that will eventually support the addition of drink categories not available on Freestyle today, such as teas and new varieties of juices.
Think of a gondola suspended under a cable, floating high off the ground as it hauls a cabin full of passengers up a long, steep mountain slope. To most people, the image would suggest ski resorts and pricey vacations. To the people who live in the poor mountainside communities once known as favelas at the edges of Medellín, Colombia, the gondola system is a lifeline, and a powerful symbol of an extraordinary urban transformation led by technology and data.
The technology that helped save Medellín is not what you'd see in San Francisco, Boston or Singapore—fleets of driverless cars, big tech companies and artificial intelligence. It is about gathering data to make informed decisions on how to deploy technology where it has the most impact. And it is about establishing a constituency for change that transcends wealth and class. When experts get together to discuss the path to smarter cities, Medellín often comes up as a standard against which any city's vision for transformation should be measured—including the judges of Newsweek's Momentum Awards.
Located off I-4 between Orlando and Tampa, SunTrax is a large-scale, cutting-edge facility being developed by the Florida Department of Transportation and Florida’s Turnpike Enterprise, dedicated to the research, development and testing of emerging transportation technologies in safe and controlled environments.
SunTrax will be the first “purpose-built” facility for the testing of autonomous-vehicle technology, Satchfield said. He said two comparable projects — the American Center for Mobility in Michigan and GoMentum Station in California — employ existing road networks.
SunTrax was originally conceived for a more limited purpose, the development of toll technology. As planning progressed, Satchfield said FDOT leaders realized the 200-acre infield would be an ideal site for testing connected and autonomous vehicles.
Ikea’s smart home ambitions first became visible in 2015 with the introduction of tables and lamps that could wirelessly charge Qi-compatible phones. In 2017, it expanded into affordable smart lighting, before partnering with Sonos for this month’s launch of relatively inexpensive whole-home audio. Ikea’s first smart blinds will start sales in the US on October 1st (in vid). What’s next?
Ikea’s just the latest corporate behemoth to wager on smart home riches, joining Google, Apple, and Amazon. Fortunately for them, Ikea has so far taken a platform agnostic approach, supporting the Google Assistant, Siri, and Alexa ecosystems through its Tradfri gateway. IDC predicts global sales of about 830 million smart home devices in 2019 before doubling to 1.6 billion in 2023. It’s no wonder then that the company is so optimistic about expanding beyond conventional home furnishings.
Quartz magazine writes "Since 2000, 284 people have fallen off cruise ships—and another 41 from large ferries—an average of about 1.5 people per month. The cruise industry says that accidental “falls” don’t happen when passengers are behaving responsibly. And online commenters on cruise forums generally dismiss those who go overboard as drunk, careless, or stupid, and see these events, while unfortunate, as no more than a Darwinian culling of the vacationing population."
Just in 2018, over 28 million passengers took a cruise, so only a tiny fraction have fallen overboard since 2000. Still the disruption from search and rescue missions, the stress on the passengers and crew and the negative PR is significant. Cruise lines are starting to use thermal cameras, sensors and other technologies for timely detection of such incidents.
MSC Cruises has piloted with Bosch and HPE to deploy "a comprehensive shield of intelligent optical and thermal video cameras which provide nonstop comprehensive surveillance alongside the relevant exterior parts of the ship. All captured video images are streamed in real-time to a Central Security Room where the video stream is monitored together with all other inputs from the 1,200 HD CCTV cameras on board the ship."
MARSS promises low false alarms with their product called MOBtronic
Multiple radars simultaneously monitor ship wall ensuring falling objects are detected and tracked
Radar tracks are confirmed by collocated independent radar sensors
Behavior of confirmed track is analyzed (based on speed, fall direction, shape, strength)
MOB radar track is verified with infrared signature (heat, object shape, dimension, range)
Visual confirmation by crew based on video replay; within seconds crew can confirm MOB alarm
If all goes as planned in August, a freight train will chug down a track near Pueblo, Colo.—entirely controlled by computers. Humans in the locomotive will merely observe, as the latest in artificial intelligence and sensor technology puts thousands of tons of steel through its paces.
The experiment, on 48 miles of track at the railroad industry’s advanced testing ground, is a big step in the push for autonomous train technology. The outcome could fundamentally alter the railroad industry.
While still a huge, highly profitable business, railroads move less freight than they did 10 years ago, and their biggest customer—the coal industry—is in long-term decline.
At the end of the pilot, CurbFlow will submit a heat map, showing city officials who’s using those parking spaces and when. Eventually, it would like to charge to use the spot, just like a parking meter. At least some companies seem ready to pay a bit of money to do what is, today, mostly free. “We feel like curb management, and looking at the curb as dynamic, rather than static, is the way forward,” says Mariah Ray, who leads public policy and partnerships at DoorDash.
When you think of a tiny house, you likely think of something like Walden—living amongst nature in spartan accommodations. But there’s plenty of room for tiny homes in cities around the world, if you count their rooftops. These often-underused spaces represent as much as 30% of additional developable real estate in some cities. Building additional housing on rooftops isn’t simple or inexpensive, but as real estate prices and rents skyrocket, many building owners are already converting rooftops into living spaces.
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