The Daily Crunch 10/31/16 Tesla wants to provide your roof, your power and your car, and Vine's emotional farewell is like Google Reader redux but slightly less nerdy. All that and more in The Daily Crunch for October 31, 2016. And Volvo's self-driving cars are dressing up as normal ones for their first Halloween. 1. Tesla wants everyone to have a solar roof One of the biggest barriers to entry for solar is still aesthetics, or so thinks Tesla founder Elon Musk. That's why his company spent so much time and engineering effort on creating a new kind of solar panel that actually looks like and fully replaces a traditional roof tile. I was in LA last week looking at these directly, and I'll tell you – everyone present was completely fooled into thinking they were just ordinary (very nice looking) roofs, before Musk told us otherwise. They'll probably cost an arm and a leg up front (cheaper than a traditional roof plus the cost of buying electricity from the regular grid, though, according to Musk) but being self-sustaining from a power perspective is an attractive purchasing incentive. 
2. Vine's founders are at it gain but Vine is dead forever Vine's founders have already expressed regret about selling the company that Twitter announced last week it's going to shut down, but they're also already starting something new. Here's the thing: this new app Hype looks okay, mixing live video with stickers and stuff Snapchat-style, but Vine was never going to succeed long-term either inside of Twitter or on its own. It probably would've died a lot quicker without Twitter's support. I'm sure plenty of people will disagree but I'm not wrong. If anything, Vine staying independent just would've slowed down the arrival of Instagram video because Facebook wouldn't have seen any need to copy. 3. Facebook tried to buy a – wait for it – Snapchat clone Every day there's a new story about how Facebook is trying to copy Snapchat. Today, it's that it tried to acquire Asian Snapchat clone Snow. So Facebook really wants to be Snapchat, we get it. 4. How dark is dark? Dark web – you know the term but do you know what it means? In case you don't, there's now a handy explainer from TC's Kate Conger. Basically it's a bad place but it has some good parts too, so learn about those. 5. Samsung is trying to put the past behind it Smartphones may explode but you still have to live for tomorrow, and that's what Samsung is focused on. The company is mentally focused on the Galaxy S8 now that the Note 7 is officially done and dusted, and it's already talking up new features including an advanced AI, which sounds like it's probably going to come from Samsung's recent acquisition of Viv Labs, the startup created by Siri's original architects. 6. Volvo's not going to let people know which of its first self-driving cars are driving themselves, because humans are bad Presented with robots driving themselves, humans are likely to take advantage of the situation by driving like jerks – or at least it looks like there's a strong possibility they'll do that. Hence Volvo's decision to not mark its pilot autonomous vehicles destined for road tests in 2018 in London. Smart move, given what happened to Hitchbot. | 
No comments:
Post a Comment