Year: 2019

A little more than a year ago, autonomous trucking startup TuSimple —flush with a fresh round of venture capital — was preparing to scale up its testing to two full truck fleets in China and the U.S.

TuSimple, a China-based company with an R&D facility in San Diego and test operations in Tucson, has put that money to use.

The startup, which launched in 2015, is taking three to five fully autonomous trips per day for customers on three different routes in Arizona, TuSimple said Monday at CES 2019 in Las Vegas. All of these trips have two safety engineers, one who is behind the wheel, and another monitoring the data pouring in during each trip.

That’s a milestone for TuSimple and the burgeoning autonomous trucking industry, which is getting increasingly crowded.

TuSimple isn’t disclosing its customers. The company did say it has 12 contracted customers.

TuSimple isn’t slowing down either. The startup plans to expand from the 11 autonomous trucks it has operating in the U.S. today to 40 by June. An additional route from Arizona to Texas will come online in early 2019, the company said.

“Exactly one year after debuting our prototype system at CES 2018, we’re now running up to five commercial trips a day in Arizona, expanding our fleet and moving quickly toward our goal of creating the first commercial self-driving truck,” TuSimple founder, president and CTO Xiaodi Hou said.

TuSimple, which is displaying a Navistar International LT semi-truck at CES, also announced that it’s working with Tier 1 supplier Cummins Inc.to enable powertrain integration with its autonomous technologies.

TuSimple, which is backed by Nvidia and Sina, operator of China’s biggest microblogging site Weibo, is working on a “full-stack solution.” This wonky industry term means TuSimple is developing and bringing together all of the technological pieces required for autonomous driving. The startup is developing a Level 4 system, a designation by the SAE that means the vehicle takes over all of the driving in certain conditions.

An important piece of TuSimple’s approach is its camera-centric perception solution. Much of the autonomous vehicle tech industry has focused on LiDAR to improve the perception of the vehicle, arguably one of the most difficult tasks of automated driving. But LiDAR has its limitations, especially for trucks traveling at speeds of 55 miles per hour and faster on highways.

LiDAR can detect objects like cars to about 250 meters, although the optimal quality falters past 150 meters.  TuSimple’s camera-based system has a vision range of 1,000 meters, the company says.

A Japanese billionaire who’s paying Elon Musk to fly him around the Moon, assuming all goes to plan with SpaceX’s giant metal phallus, has bought himself a rather different ride in the meanwhile.

The BBC reports that Yusaku Maezawa has elbowed aside nugget-loving U.S. teen, Carter Wilkerson, to bag the title of most retweeted tweet by promising to give away 100 million yen (just under $1M) in cash if people RT the tweet.

His 5 million+ Twitter followers probably helped too.

At the time of writing Maezawa’s January 5 tweet has ~4.6M RTs (and counting), beating out Wilkerson’s April 2017 tweet pleading for free chicken nuggets which now has circa 3.6M RTs.

Sorry kid.

Of course it’s not a fair fight. Wilkerson had just 138 Twitter followers to provide native uplift when his brief plea for “Nuggs” went viral.

Prior to Wilkerson, the world record retweeted tweet was a celebrity group selfie.

So we can add something else to the list of things money can buy (fine art; a ticket to the moon; faux popularity).

In true entrepreneur spirit, Maezawa, founder of Japanese online clothing retailer Zozo, is using his puffed up profile (i.e. as the man who Musk might fly to the moon) to drum up business for his clothing business.

Clearly he’s hoping to get more than just a trip to outer space for the “lot of money” he’s paying Musk for the chance to play lunar tourist. So the key lesson is demand the moon and back folks.

Hence the world’s most retweeted tweet now promotes a Spring sale. Late stage capitalism eat yer heart out.

We can at least be thankful the tweet wasn’t crypto related. After all, given the Musk connection, that sort of spam would have been rather more typical.

Pouch, the U.K.-based money-saving browser extension, has been acquired by German ‘publishing technology’ platform Global Savings Group.

Exact financial terms of the deal remain undisclosed, although I understand it to be a cash purchase and in the 7-figure U.S. dollar range, plus performance related bonuses.

The entire Pouch team are joining Global Savings Group, and founders Ben Corrigan, Jonny Plein, and Vikram Simha will continue working on Pouch as its “Global Product Leads”.

Launched publicly in September 2016, Pouch is best known for its shopping tool that automatically alerts buyers to working voucher codes as they visit over 3,000 U.K. e-commerce sites. The Pouch browser extension is available for Google Chrome, Safari and Firefox. It’s free to download.

Last year, the company garnered a nice PR boost after appearing on the BBC television show Dragons’ Den. This included receiving investment offers from all five Dragons, culminating in an offer of £75,000 in exchange for 18 percent equity split between Touker Suleyman, Jenny Campbell and Tej Lalvani. However, as is quite common in Dragons’ Den, the deal ultimately fell through, with Pouch eventually seeking equity financing on better terms elsewhere.

The London startup was backed by a consortium of angels, including Andreas Zollmann, and had raised just £345,000 in total. Pouch also won the MassChallenge prize and went through the Huckeltree Alpha Programme in 2017 and the Natwest Entrepreneur Accelerator programme in 2018.

Meanwhile, Global Savings Group’s acquisition of Pouch looks like a decent fit. The company offers commerce content to help publishers find additional routes to monetisation. It operates over 100 digital assets for various leading publishers globally. In the U.K., this includes powering discount voucher sites for Daily Mail and Metro, delivering “inspirations, recommendations, deals and discounts” to consumers.

Regarding Pouch, Global Savings Group says it will incorporate the product into its white label offering for publishers in multiple markets.

“Pouch allows our users to shop with the confidence that they are always getting the biggest saving, without wasting time searching for deals across the internet,” says Pouch co-founder Jonny Plein in a statement. “We are incredibly excited to join the Global Savings Group family and continue to improve our products and build new tools that help people save time and money when shopping online”.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has confirmed that the company’s first overseas factory in Shanghai will focus on producing Model 3 vehicles for the Chinese market only.

Musk is currently in China to break ground on the new factory today, which is being developed in partnership with the Shanghai government — an ally that is likely to be incredibly useful. The deal was announced by Tesla in July and it was followed quickly by the opening of Model 3 pre-orders for China-based customers in November.

Initial construction of the Shanghai factory is set to be completed by the summer, according to Musk, who said that he expects production to begin before the end of this year. The facility is aimed at churning out 500,000 EVs a year when it reaches full production, which should happen during next year, all being well.

Musk clarified on Twitter — his go-to for public announcements — that Tesla’s U.S. facilities will continue to manufacture vehicles for the U.S. and other markets.

Tesla isn’t the only one planting manufacturing roots down in the country. Byton, a U.S-China rival founded by former BMW and Infiniti executives, said this week it is on track to complete production of a plant in Nanjing by May. The outpost will have a capacity to produce 300,000 vehicles per year, the company said.

In June, Byton secured a $500 million Series B funding round from investors FAW Group, Tus-Holdings and CATL. The company has raised $850 million from investors in addition to loans and subsidies from China.

Despite optimism behind the Shanghai project, China has been the source of concerns for Tesla in recent times.

The country has reduced subsidies for green vehicles while its ongoing trade spat with the U.S. is raising concerns for U.S. businesses looking to reach consumers in the middle kingdom. Tesla’s share price dropped by nearly eight percent before the New Year after the company reduced the price of the Model 3 by seven percent in China. That followed reductions to the Model X and Model S in November, and it also coincided with Musk pledging to reimburse tax credits to U.S. customers who miss them because their pre-December order isn’t delivered before the end of the year.

Still, the Chinese market is the largest in the world for electric vehicles and hugely important for future growth.

The country is said to already account for 35 percent of global EV sales, according to Bloomberg intelligence, which reports that cumulative sales reach four million in August 2018. That’s just the start. Chinese city Shenzhen, known as the world’s mecca for hardware technology, has replaced all buses with electric versions and 99 percent of its taxis, and the government wants 20 percent of all car sales to be plug-in hybrids or battery-powered models by 2025 — that’s around seven million cars per day.

LG is opening the show with its CES press conference. Many consumer electronics companies are going to show us their new and shiny products all day long. And LG is starting at 8 AM Pacific, 11 AM Eastern, 2 PM in London.

You can expect new TVs (4K? 8K? The sky is the limit), more info on that funny beer machine and maybe a few surprises. Check out our full CES coverage.

Sony is holding its CES press conference today at 5 PM Pacific, 8 PM Eastern. The company will talk about all of its new devices, from connected speakers to cameras, TVs and maybe even turntables. Sony’s press conference is usually packed with product announcements.

We’ll have a team on the ground, so you should also check out our full CES coverage.

Samsung is holding its CES press conference today at 2 PM Pacific, 5 PM Eastern, 10 PM in London. The company will unveil its new lineup of consumer electronics devices. You should expect a wide range of new products, from smart watches to washing machines.

We’ll have a team on the ground, so you should also check out our live blog for our first-hand impressions of the announcements.

Maybe you won’t need a glitter bomb to protect your Amazon packages from porch thieves after all. At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Canadian appliance maker Danby is showing off its newly launched smart mailbox called Parcel Guard, which allows deliveries to be left securely at customers’ doorsteps. The box offers both a drop-in slot for smaller items, as well as a safe with a separate door for larger items. When packages are left, you’re alerted to their arrival by way of a push notification from the Parcel Guard app.

It’s worth noting that Parcel Guard doesn’t require the delivery driver to adjust their routine. And it looks very obviously like a mailbox – right down to its little red flag on the side. There’s not much confusion about what it’s for.

However, the box will also come with an informational sticker you can place on the front that instructs drivers to drop packages here instead of leaving them by the door.

The mailbox’s anti-theft drop-in slot is like those found on USPS mailboxes. Once the package goes in, there’s no way to reach in and pull it back out.

For large (or fragile) items that need to be placed inside the box instead of dropped, the driver simply scans the package which triggers the safe door to unlock.

When the door is shut, the Parcel Guard locks and you’re alerted.

The box also includes wireless connectivity, a motion-activated IP camera (so you can see the delivery in action), a tamper alarm, and a weight monitor.

For additional security, you can opt to bolt the mailbox to the wall or the ground. There’s even a false bottom in the box – in case you want to secure it from being easily moved by placing something like a bag of sand under the bottom cover instead.

While protecting against package theft is Parcel Guard’s primary purpose, it can also be used for other purposes – like if friend or neighbor needs to drop something off at your home, for example, or even just to protect packages from bad weather.

To retrieve your packages, you unlock the box with the app.

The mailbox is made of industrial grade plastic, and includes a battery backup in the event of a power outage.

But it’s not small – at 19.7″ x 15.9″ x 39.4″, it’s designed for people whose houses have entryways or larger doorsteps, not for those who live in apartments.

Parcel Guard is not the only device that’s trying to tackle the problem with package theft – there’s also a smart padlock called BoxLock doing the same, as well as a similar product called InBin. But the latter is designed to look more like a planter than a mailbox.

The Parcel Guard smart mailbox will be available for pre-order on Danby’s website for $399 starting this week.

Reviews of the Notebook Odyssey line have been…mixed. Hopefully the electronics giant can right the ship as it navigates the tricky waters of high-end gaming systems. At very least, the latest version of the line — unveiled tonight at CES in Vegas — certainly looks the part.

The 15.6 inch laptop features an aluminum design and a display attached with an innovative hinge connected only in the center to mimic a standalone monitor. The bezels have been shrunk down considerably as well, at 6.7 millimeters. The typewriter-style keyboard is backlit, as one would expect from their gaming laptop.

There are a few different performance pre-sets on-board here, too. Per Samsung,

Odyssey Mode allows users to save settings presets under different profiles for various types of games. Beast Mode lets users modulate the Samsung Notebook Odyssey’s performance depending on the software it is running, and the Black Equalizer helps users get a leg up on the competition by improving in-game lighting.

Inside you get an eighth-gen hexa-core i7 processor, 16GB of RAM and either 256GB (SSD) to 1TB (HDD) of storage. Graphics-wise, you’re getting an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080, featuring the new Turing GPU. There’s a fairly healthy selection of ports, as well, including USB-C, three full USB, HDMI and Ethernet.

The new Odyssey is due out at some point “early” this year. No word yet on pricing.

Acer today announced two new gaming laptops at CES, the 17-inch $4,000 Predator Triton 900 with a convertible 4K display and the somewhat more affordable all-metal 15-inch $1,800 Triton 500. What sets these laptops apart is, among a few other interesting features and some interesting design choices, support for Nvidia’s new(ish) RTX 2080 GPUs, the most powerful graphics processors on the market today.

The Triton 900 features the RTX 2080 by default, while you’ll have to shell out an extra $700 to get it on the Triton 500. Otherwise, the specs are very much what you’d expect from a modern gaming laptop, with 8th generation Intel i7 chips, 16GB of base memory (with the option of going up to 32GB) and up to a terabyte of NVMe-based storage.

The Triton 900’s flipping screen is a bit of a gimmick, but it doesn’t look bad and the company argues that it’ll allow for “multiple gaming scenarios and better ergonomics.” I’m not sure ergonomics is top of mind for most gamers who are willing to shell out $4,000 for a laptop, but it can’t hurt either. The 4K display is a touchscreen, too, which could make it interesting as a more high-end portable workstation for creative work. If you’re a gamer, though, you’ll likely be more excited about the built-in Xbox wireless receiver and audio by Waves, which offers head tracking to provide you a more realistic 3D audio experience

Unsurprisingly, the Triton 500 is the more “sensible” option here, with a more palatable starting price, slim design (it’s 0.7 inches thick and weighs in at 4.6 lbs) and the promise of eight hours of battery life. You only get a full HD display, though, with even the base model comes with an RTX 2060 card, which is no slouch either and should easily be able to let you play and modern game at its maximum graphics settings in HD.