Tuesday, October 25, 2016

Uber's self-driving truck gets loaded with precious cargo. It's the Daily Crunch.

THE DAILY CRUNCH
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 25 2016 By Darrell Etherington

The Daily Crunch 10/25/16

Self-driving trucks are already here, Google's going after the eyes and the iPhone 7 Plus is ready for your close-up. All that and more in The Daily Crunch for October 25, 2016.

1. Uber's self-driving transport truck makes its first delivery

If you thought autonomous vehicles were still a ways off, think again: Otto has completed its first commercial delivery using a truck that can drive itself without a driver behind the wheel in highway conditions.

The inaugural trip saw an Otto-equipped transport truck haul a trailer filled with 50,000 Budweiser beers across 120 miles of highway in Colorado, without incident. Human drivers still handle the city driving portion, however, so don't expect this to fully replace people just yet.

2. Google bought a startup that tracks eye movement

Google's looking to either enhance computer empathy, or just find out even more about where your attention is at when you're using a computer. The search giant picked up Eyefluence, a startup developing tech that allows for computer control via your eyes, and that is also very good at watching where you're looking.

3. Xiaomi's new phone is basically sans-bezel

Xiaomi has a new concept phone that is almost all screen, minus a bit of bezel at the bottom. The smartphone with the 6.4-inch display is still labeled a "concept" officially, but surprisingly, it's actually going to go on sale, albeit only in China and only in "limited availability." Still, it's a pretty cool thing to actually ship so w2g Xiaomi.

4. Meanwhile, BlackBerry sneaks out another handset

BlackBerry has a new Android-based handset, apparently the final of which BlackBerry itself will manage distribution (it already outsourced manufacturing to TCL for this one). The DTEK60 is a follow-up to the TCL-made DTEK60 and it looks fine as far as Android handsets go. Still in five years it's probably more a trivia answer about a company that used to make smartphones than anything of significant value to the company or potential customers.

5. Here's how NHTSA wants car companies to prevent cybercrime

The Department of Transportation is concerned about the risk of cybersecurity attacks on vehicles, and that's probably very reasonable given recent events and increasingly connected vehicles. It has now released a set of voluntary guidelines and best practices for how car makers should steel their vehicles against cyber attacks, which focus on data sharing in the case of incidents as a key component.

6. iPhone 7 gets some arthouse photo chops

Background defocus is a key ingredient in making portraits that really pop, and have long been a tell-tale sign that someone's using a "real camera," like a DSLR. The iPhone 7 Plus now has a Portrait mode that mimics the same thing, but uses software trickery to accomplish the effect rather than true optical effects. In practice, it's pretty effective, and only very discerning viewers will likely be able to tell you used a smartphone when posting the results to Instagram, for instance.

Get more stories at techcrunch.com 

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