Technapping

Google Maps on Android and iOS now has a new transportation option. If you live in a country where French startup BlaBlaCar operates, you can now open the BlaBlaCar app and book a ride straight from Google Maps. Google isn’t adding a new tab just for BlaBlaCar. Instead, BlaBlaCar appears as a new option in the public transportation tab. For instance, if you’re looking at ways to go from Paris to Lyon, Google Maps suggests taking the TGV train — and now also BlaBlaCar. The app gives you an ETA for each transportation mode so that you can compare how long it’s going to take if you opt for the train or BlaBlaCar. Google Maps uses the same ETA for BlaBlaCar and a normal car ride. It also estimates the cost of a BlaBlaCar ride. BlaBlaCar is a ridesharing service for long-distance rides between two cities. It has tens of millions of members in dozens of countries. Think about it as a sort of Airbnb for carpooling. When you are driving from one city to another, BlaBlaCar can help you fi...

Walmart is expanding a test of its grocery delivery service, powered by Uber, the company announced this week. The retailer is now offering grocery delivery in two new markets — Dallas and Orlando — which join Tampa and Phoenix as locations where consumers can shop online for grocery items, then opt to have them come to their home for an additional $9.95 fee. Grocery delivery has been something Walmart has experimented with for years, starting with tests in Denver and San Jose of grocery delivery using its own service and trucks. The tests involving Uber are newer, however. In June, 2016, Walmart began a trial in Phoenix, which expanded to Tampa this March. In those locations, Walmart offers grocery delivery at five local stores per market. This week’s Dallas test is larger, with 8 stores participating. In Orlando, there are four stores involved. The grocery delivery service is available via the same online grocery shopping website where customers can place their pick-up orders — a s...

Left to right: VP of Production Dirk Gebser, Head of Recruitment Meggy Sailer, CCO Dr. Remo Gerber and co-founder CEO Daniel Wiegand Lilium is almost as ambitious as European startups come. The Munich-based company is developing an all-electric vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) jet, which it hopes will one day power an on-demand “air taxi” service, arguably making flying cars a reality. And although it’s still early days — the two-seater Lilium Jet prototype only took its first public (and successful) test flight in April — the startup is announcing a number of key hires from notable companies in the transportation space. They are Dr. Remo Gerber, former MD for Western Europe at Gett, who joins Lilium as chief commercial officer; Dirk Gebser, who takes up the position of VP of Production and previously held manufacturing executive roles at Airbus and Rolls Royce; and Meggy Sailer, who joined Lilium as Head of Recruitment in February and was formerly Tesla’s Head of Talent EMEA. (...

Laura Deming is not your typical venture capitalist. Then again, she isn’t typical in many ways. For starters, the 23-year-old, New Zealand native was home schooled, developing along the way a love of math and physics and, perhaps most interestingly, the biology of aging. In fact, she became so preoccupied with the latter that at age 11, Deming wrote to Cynthia Kenyon , a renowned molecular biologist who specializes in the genetics of aging, asking if she could visit Kenyon’s San Francisco lab during a family trip to the Bay Area. Kenyon said yes. When, soon after the visit, Deming asked if she could work in the lab, Kenyon said yes again. Deming’s family moved to the U.S. to make it possible, and it’s highly doubtful they regret the decision. Indeed, by age 14, Deming was a student at MIT, and two years after that — at the tender age of 16 — she was a college drop-out, having been accepted into Peter Thiel’s two-year-old Thiel Fellowship program, which gives $100,000 to young people ...

Chris Lattner, one of the key creators behind the Apple programming language Swift, is on the move again. After a short six-month stay at Tesla , which he joined last year from Apple to act as VP of Autopilot Software, Lattner announced on Twitter today that his next stop is Google Brain. Lattner, who worked for more than a decade on low-level software and systems at Apple, revealed in June that he wasn’t going to be staying on at Tesla after finding that it wasn’t “a good fit.” Lattner then joked that his resume was “easy to find online,” and noted his top qualification: Seven years of Swift experience, which is the longest anyone not on his immediate team at Apple can reasonably claim without outright lying.  Follow Chris Lattner   @clattner_llvm I'm super excited to join Google Brain next week: AI can't democratize itself (yet?) so I'll help make it more accessible to everyone! 11:04 PM - Aug 14, 2017   92 92 Replies     396 396 Retw...

Two years ago, Google launched universal app campaigns (UAC) to make it easier for developers to easily promote their iOS and Android apps across its various platforms. Instead of having to set up separate campaigns for Search and Google Play, for example, developers can simply use UAC with a few lines of text, images and their bid and the service then handles the rest, based on what the developers want to optimize their campaigns for (installs or in-app conversions, for example). This has turned out to be such an effective service — thanks in large part to the company’s advances in machine learning — that Google is moving all app install campaigns to UAC over the rest of this year. Starting October 16th, all new app install campaigns created in AdWords will run on UAC, and starting November 15th, all existing Search, Display and YouTube app promo campaigns will stop running. Google tells us that it has delivered more than 6 billion installs to developers so far. That’s a big incre...

Intel’s CEO is the latest executive to leave one of Trump’s advisory councils in the wake of the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, which many felt was inadequately addressed by the president and his administration. In a post on Policy@Intel , the company’s public policy blog, Brian Krzanich wrote that he resigned from the American Manufacturing Council on Monday “to call attention to the serious harm our divided political climate is causing to critical issues, including the serious need to address the decline of American manufacturing.” He then specifically addressed the events in Charlottesville, which led to three deaths, including that of Heather Heyer, who among a group of people counter-protesting neo-Nazis, Ku Klux Klan members and white supremacists gathered to protest the removal of a statute of Confederate general Robert E. Lee. “I have already made clear my abhorrence at the recent hate-spawned violence in Charlottesville, and earlier today I called on all leader...

Last night, OpenAI’s Dota 2 bot beat the world’s most celebrated professional players in one-on-one battles, showing just how advanced these machine learning systems are getting. The bot beat Danil “Dendi” Ishutin rather easily at The International, one of the biggest eSports events in the world, and remains undefeated against the world’s top Dota 2 players. Elon Musk’s OpenAI trained the bot by simply copying the AI and letting the two play each other for weeks on end. “We’ve coached it to learn just from playing against itself,” said OpenAI researcher Jakub Pachoki . “So we didn’t hard-code in any strategy, we didn’t have it learn from human experts, just from the very beginning, it just keeps playing against a copy of itself. It starts from complete randomness and then it makes very small improvements, and eventually it’s just pro level.” To be clear, a 1v1 battle in Dota 2 is far less complex than an actual professional battle, which includes two teams of five players completing...

What a day for Bitcoin. 24 hours ago the cryptocurrency was trading below $3,700. About an hour ago it surged passed $4,000 and has no signs of stopping. It’s now trading around $4,135.00. For reference, a week ago Bitcoin hit an all-time high as it passed $3,000 for the first time . Check out the chart below to see what the price has done in the last 24 hours. So the million dollar bitcoin question is…why now? Without wasting too much of your Saturday night with detailed analysis, here are a few possible reasons you can tell your friends during brunch tomorrow. Two weeks ago Bitcoin went through a hard fork, and came out essentially unscathed. Sure, a bitcoin-clone called Bitcoin Cash was created , but it’s gotten a lot less attention than most people expected. A few days later Bitcoin locked in SegWit , a code modification that fixes malleability issues and frees up space in blocks, allowing for more transactions to be stored in each one. These two code-related developments have hel...

Screenshot/YouTube ... Computers have already beaten the world's best humans at classic games like chess and go. Now one has beaten one of the world's best players of the smart-hit video game "Dota 2. In a one-on-one exhibition match, a bot designed by OpenAI, the artificial-intelligence research nonprofit cochaired by Tesla Motors CEO Musk and Y Combinator President Sam Altman , defeated Danylo "Dendi" Ishutin, a professional player who's estimated to have earned$735,449.40 in winnings in his career. "Please, stop bullying me," Dendi said during the match. OpenAI's bot beat Dendi in the first match in about ten minutes; Dendi resigned from the second match, and declined to play a third. With more time, he thinks he might be able to come up with a strategy. "I don't want to do it, please, I don't want to believe it," said Dendi, appearing on stage ahead of the match. During the match, he quipped that the b...

Facebook Facebook has finally managed to sneak into China. The social network has been secretly testing a photo sharing app called Colorful Balloons in the country, The New York Times reported on Friday. Facebook has been officially blocked in China since 2009, and parts of WhatsApp's service were recently blocked within the country's borders. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has courted Chinese officials for years, and even spent one year learning to speak Mandarin. Paul Mozur of The New York Times recently unearthed the app Colorful Balloons in Apple's Chinese App Store and noticed how similar it looked to Facebook's existing photo sharing app, Moments. Mozur then connected the seemingly-fake company name behind the app to a woman who appeared in a photo of a meeting between Facebook and the Chinese government. When Business Insider asked Facebook to confirm whether it was behind Colorful Balloons, a representative sent the following statement and decline...