Neuralink AI wants to make telepathy a thing, Snap picks up a key patent for its tech, Samsung's big new phone goes on sale and more in The Daily Crunch for April 21, 2017. And if you're Juicero's CEO I don't know how you managed to muster even that pretty sad defence. 1. Elon Musk is officially CEO of a third company Elon Musk seems fairly competitive, so maybe he just needed to one-up Jack Dorsey. But Musk's stated motivation is fighting off an existential threat – AI's dark side. Neuralink, Musk's new company, ultimately wants to make it possible for us to communicate telepathically, and to also integrate cloud-based AI directly into our brains, so much so that it feels like something that's a part of your very self. A lot of brands talk about being central to identity, but this is clearly a very different approach. 2. Snap acquires a patent for geofilters Snap has acquired a patent for filters sorted by location from Mobli, a failed Instagram killer that launched in around 2011, and patented geofilters the following year. Snap picked up the IP for $7.7 million, which is a lot, and it may have come after a bidding war with Facebook, but that seems unlikely. Useful to Snap if it ever gets to the point where it needs to take legal action against its various clones. 3. Samsung's Galaxy S8 goes on sale Samsung's Galaxy S8 and S8+ are now on sale, after a splashy reveal last month. The new flagship smartphone from Apple's biggest rival looks like almost one big, continuous display and it's definitely a design tour de force. 4. Uber extends sexism probe until May Uber has received so much information that it'll continue its investigation into accusations of workplace sexism at Uber until at least May. There's also talk that Uber's principal investigators Eric Holder and Tammy Albarran haven't had time to complete their interviews with top HR execs. 5. Meanwhile Uber's not helping its image Uber employees spray painted the hashtag Undelete on a wall at San Francisco's 1AM art collective space. They posed proudly under it, which is lame. It sounds like the kind of thing you do as a team to try to boost your own morale when the chips seem stacked against you, but it all got publicized in a very lame way that makes the mostly male effort look very awkward. 6. Google Play Music gets the default music app spot on Samsung phones Google Play Music is now the default music app on Samsung devices, which is a pretty big win for Google in terms of expanding the reach of its streaming music service. Samsung's own attempts at creating streaming services have largely failed, so it's probably best for them, too. The deal also gives Samsung device owners twice the storage capacity for keeping their own music uploaded in the cloud. 7. Juicero CEO defends his squeeze bot and juice DRM Juicero, symbol of greed gone wild in a business whose model is designed to hook users on recurring purchases, is defending its robot. The squeezing machine will hopefully die after this lame defence so we never have to hear about it again. |
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