These 44 news stories caught my attention last week. These
stories are across automotive, aerospace, Industry 4.0, 3D printing, software,
telecom, semiconductor, medical devices, drones, IoT, and PLM.
Automotive
EV investments: Ford, China's Zotye Auto invest $756 million
in electric vehicle JV. (Read here).
Vespa’s first electric scooter is coming in 2018 with 62 miles of range. (Read here).
Toyota cuts production costs to allow record research budget for EV. (Read here).
EV battery/ charging infrastructure investments: Samsung
working on battery breakthrough for powering cars. Lithium-air promises twice
the capacity of today's Li-ion tech. Samsung's new battery would theoretically
let an electric vehicle go more than
700km. (Read here).
Autonomous driving: A big
public debut for a self-driving bus in Las Vegas turned out to be trouble. An autonomous shuttle bus collided with a
semi-truck just a few hours after Las Vegas city officials held a ceremony to
celebrate its first day as part of a larger
city-wide test. (Read here).
Waymo makes history testing on public roads with no one at the wheel. (Read here).
Tencent is reportedly testing its own
autonomous driving system. (Read here).
Startup/ technology investments: Tesla acquires automated
manufacturing machine supplier Perbix. (Read here).
Renault has entered into a strategic development agreement with Chronocam SA, a
developer of biologically-inspired vision sensors and computer vision solutions
for automotive applications. (Read here).
EV startup Nio reportedly raises $1B
from Tencent and others. (Read here).
Safety: Ford made a trucker hat that uses technology to save
truckers’ lives. The new SafeCap tracks head movement to determine whether
drivers are safely awake or about to snooze. (Read here).
Geographical expansion: Opel will enter more than 20 new
markets by 2022, with Argentina, Saudi Arabia,
and Taiwan among countries identified as potential export markets. Opel also is
exploring whether to sell cars in China and Brazil. With Opel's entire lineup
moving to PSA platforms, Opel has much more freedom to pursue sales in
non-European markets. (Read here).
Connected cars: Ola
partners with Microsoft to build a connected
vehicle platform for car manufacturers. (Read here).
Denso announces it has developed a thin-film transistor enabling it to produce
what it says is the world’s largest
automotive head-up display, a human-machine interface with a nearly 24-in.
(61-cm) projection. (Read here).
Shared mobility: Uber gives top riders a 24/7 ‘Premium
Support’ hotline. (Read here).
OEM/ Tier 1s preparing for software-defined
cars: Continental, Osram to join forces in auto lighting JV. (Read here).
VW, Google cooperate on quantum computing. (Read here).
Service provider investments: Altran Technologies opens
first U.S. passive-safety center in Michigan. (Read here).
Aerospace
Testing: Airbus knew of software vulnerability before A400M
crash. (Read here).
Software vulnerability can cause air crashes.
Technology Investments: Boeing’s investment arm, Boeing Horizon X
Ventures, has made its first investment in materials research, in the form of
Gamma Alloys. (Read here).
Avionics: Honeywell’s suite
of advanced cockpit technologies and industry-leading auxiliary power units has
been selected by China’s Spring Airlines for its future fleet of Airbus
A320neo aircraft. (Read here).
UI Issues: USS McCain collision ultimately caused by UI
confusion. (Read here).
UI often doesn’t get same importance in aerospace and defense as in automotive
and other consumer-oriented sectors. This
incident should highlight the importance of
UI in aerospace and defense sector also.
Flying Taxis: Uber has partnered with NASA to help it
develop air traffic management systems for its flying taxi initiatives. (Read here).
Service Provider Contracts: NATS partners with Altran for
the next-generation air traffic conflict
detection tool. (Read here).
Space: Thales Alenia Space has signed a contract with the UK
Space Agency to work on MicroCarb, a joint UK-French satellite mission which
will measure sources and sinks of carbon, the principal greenhouse gas driving
global warming. (Read here).
Software/ High-Tech
Technology updates: Airbnb develops an AI which converts the
design into the source code. (Read here).
IBM says it has created a prototype 50 qubit quantum computer. What does that
mean? It would be a machine close to the threshold at which it could perform
tasks beyond the reach of conventional supercomputers. (Read here).
Technology investments: Apple has acquired imaging sensor
startup InVisage Technologies. (Read here).
Telecom/
Semiconductor
Business model: Intelsat and Coca-Cola
are working together to bring satellite-enabled
Wi-Fi services to remote communities
across Africa. (Read here).
Graphics chips: Intel to develop its own graphics chips led
by former AMD exec. (Read here). Intel
and AMD team up against Nvidia to produce a new laptop chip. (Read here).
Technology updates: A new patent filing from
telecommunications provider Comcast suggests the firm is looking at how to
store operational data on a blockchain. The blockchain database would hold
private and identifying information for customers, and would only be accessible
by certain entities. (Read here).
Medical Devices
Product innovation: A regular ultrasound machine costs over
$100,000 but a new ultrasound on a chip device attached to a smartphone will be $2000 in 2018. It will be
portable and will eventually make ultrasound as common
as blood pressure cuffs in hospitals, clinics,
and doctors offices and with first responders and field medics. Butterfly iQ is
FDA 510(k) cleared for diagnostic imaging across 13 clinical applications which
span the whole body. (Read here).
3D Printing
AR-based 3D printing: Apple
secures patent for a 3D printing method that’s compatible with cameras and AR
glasses. (Read here).
Materials: Rolls Royce to consider PyroGenesis additive
manufacturing powders as NDA signed. (Read here).
Drones
Drones in Mining: Drones are now operating underground.
Mining companies look to automation to help companies dig out more ore and save
lives. (Read here).
Drones in O&G: A satellite imaging company, Orbital
Insights, is challenging Saudi Arabia’s reports of declining oil inventory
suggesting that OPEC’s leader may have well been lying to get prices higher.
(Read here).
What is possible by satellite imaging today can be verified by drones tomorrow.
IoT
Testbed: The Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC), announced
the Digital Solar Plant testbed. The testbed is led by LTI and GE Digital and
will deploy in multiple phases at an L&T Solar plant in Rajasthan, India.
(Read here).
Business model: Neos
launches IoT-powered home insurance UK-wide. (Read here).
Platforms: Telia Estonia has started trialing a self-service platform for its IoT customers, allowing
them to manage SIM cards and mobile data traffic. (Read here).
PLM / Industry 4.0
Machine Vision and AI for Quality: The Domino’s Pizza group
is implementing an artificial intelligence camera system from Dragontail
Systems which will be deployed to check pizzas for quality before they are handed to customers. (Read here).
Contracts: Prysmian to launch its first Industry 4.0 pilot
project with Dassault Systèmes. (Read here).
Others
Service provider M&A: AXISCADES announced the
acquisition of Mistral, a Bengaluru-based embedded technology company. (Read here).
SEGULA Technologies has announced its acquisition
of EK Design, a German company specializing
in the automotive and industrial / special
vehicle sector. (Read here).
