After many months of rumors, YouTube has officially announced its entry into streaming live TV. YouTube TV will let you access live and recorded content from major networks, both the big broadcast players as well as some options typically found on cable.
"Half the cost of cable with zero commitments" said the announcement. For $35 a month, YouTube TV will include live streaming of ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, ESPN and about 30 of the biggest cable TV channels.
The impact of automation on jobs and society is an increasingly hot topic, with debates going on about how and when human workers will be displaced by robots and A.I. systems.
Bill Gates said in a recent interview with Quartz that governments should tax companies’ use of automation technologies, to mitigate the impact of job losses. “Right now, the human worker who does, say, $50,000 worth of work in a factory, that income is taxed and you get income tax, social security tax, all those things,” Gates said. “If a robot comes in to do the same thing, you’d think that we’d tax the robot at a similar level.”
Google and Jigsaw have launched a new tool that uses artificial intelligence to filter ‘toxic’ comments online. The tool, known as Perspective, has been designed to crack down on online harassment by letting creators and readers identify abusive comments or comments that are likely to make ‘someone leave a conversation’.
Google’s freely available software is being tested by a range of news organisations, including The New York Times, The Guardian and The Economist, as a way to help simplify the jobs of humans reviewing comments on their stories.”News organizations want to encourage engagement and discussion around their content but find that sorting through millions of comments to find those that are trolling or abusive takes a lot of money, labor, and time. As a result, many sites have shut down comments altogether. But they tell us that isn’t the solution they want. We think technology can help.” said Jared Cohen, president of Jigsaw, the Google social incubator that built the tool.
Kickstart Accelerator, a swiss multi-corporate accelerator in Europe, has announced the opening of applications for its second programme, predominantly based out of ewz-Unterwerk Selnau, the old transformer station in centre of Zurich.
The accelerator, an initiative of digitalswitzerland, is inviting startups from around the world and will shortlist 30 companies, all of whom will participate in an eleven-week programme. The programme will start on 4 September, with an official opening ceremony due to take place on 7 September. The final demo day is set as 17 November, where each team will present their products to a group of potential investors. Kickstart will not be taking any equity from the participating startups. Instead, founders will have the chance to win up to 25`000 CHF, as well as receiving a monthly founder stipend and masterclass sessions with mentors from the corporate partners and the Swiss innovation ecosystem.
Kickstart Accelerator is looking for startups in the food, fintech, smart cities, and robotics and intelligent systems sectors, and is partnering with BaseLaunch to facilitate healthtech companies.
MarketPlus will offer you a new series of original videos about the Apps that could help you solve – or at least ease – a few problems.
Our first one deals with Pocket, a free-to-use app.
Amazon may have a new option for how it plans to deliver your packages by drone with parachutes. The potential plans are outlined in a new US Patent and Trademark office patent spotted by CNN.
The patent describes a way to reliably eject a payload from a drone in midflight. Usually, such a drop would see the package descend along a parabolic arc, caused by the forward motion of the aircraft-but that might not jive too well with the neighbors. Instead, Amazon’s idea is to apply a force as the package leaves the drone to have it descend vertically.
Drug company Merck said Tuesday it stopped a clinical trial of an experimental Alzheimer’s drug because it wasn’t helping patients, the latest setback in the pharmaceutical industry’s quest to find a better treatment for the brain disorder.
An outside committee monitoring the study of more than 2,000 patients with mild to moderate Alzheimer’s concluded there was "virtually no chance of finding a positive clinical effect" of the drug, verubecestat, Merck said. The study, which was due to be completed around midyear, was testing whether verubecestat slowed declines in patients’ cognition and daily functioning compared with a placebo.
FinTech leader NetGuardians and the School of Engineering and Management Vaud (HEIG-VD) have teamed to create a “made in Switzerland” research team focused on AI and machine learning; the project aims to use AI to take fraud detection “to the next level”. The project is being supported by the Swiss Commission for Technology and Innovation (CTI).
Bringing together leading-edge industry and academic strengths, the collaboration will further develop NetGuardians’ current real-time fraud detection technologies that use machine learning for superior analytics across all channels and banking systems. NetGuardians will work with the Institute for Information and Communication Technologies (IICT), an interdisciplinary applied research institute for real-world IT challenges, based at the technology-focused university HEIG-VD.
