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Anki, the Robotics and AI Company, is Shutting Down

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The producers of cute little robots that were credited to teach the children how to code, Anki, has announced that it is going to cease all its operations by 1st May, as a result of lack of finances to fund its future products.

Anki is a decade old company, which is famous for its robots Vector and Cozmo, Vector being the latest product the company had launched last fall. With the popularity of Anki’s robots, getting convinced about the news of Anki’s shut down is quite unbelievable, but according to the reports the company had already informed its employees, about the same, a few days ago.

anki shuts down
Image Source: digitaltrends.com

Noticeably, the company had raised over $200 millions from its investors, and its revenues had approached $100 million in 2017. In fact, Vector had received $2 million in funding through a Kickstarter campaign, last fall, and also, the Anki products had received the Alexa integration just recently. Despite all those highs, the company has to see the lows now.

During the shutdown, the company will be laying off 200 of its employees, providing them with a week’s salary as the compensation. The CEO of the company, Boris Sofman, broke the news to the employees on Monday and confirmed that the company has failed to raise the money for the company after a new round of financing fell through.

“It is with a heavy heart to announce that Anki will be letting go of our employees, effective Wednesday. We’ve shipped millions of units of product and left customers happy all over the world while building some of the most incredible technologies pointed toward a future with diverse AI and robotics driven applications. But without significant funding to support a hardware and software business and bridge to our long-term product roadmap, it is simply not feasible at this time. Despite our past successes, we pursued every financial avenue to fund our future product development and expand on our platforms. A significant financial deal at a late stage fell through with a strategic investor, and we were not able to reach an agreement. We’re doing our best to take care of every single employee and their families, and our management team continues to explore all options available.” the company said in a statement.

Even though the company had seen success as a robotics company, and the time it had launched its first product, it was a big deal to have an Anki robot, after ten years the company is seen as a toy company, which might be a reason for the company being not able to raise the required funds.

Contradicting to that Sofman said, “For us, it was never meant to be a toy company or even an entertainment company. It’s a robotics and AI company.”

Though companies like Microsoft, Amazon and Comcast had come in front with the intentions to acquire Anki, the company will still have to shut down this Wednesday.

Twitter Unveils New Deals and Partnerships for its New Targeted Video Strategy

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Twitter made its third appearance at the NewFronts event for digital advertisers on Monday, where it announced a series of new and expanded deals in the IAB-managed digital marketing series. The event was all about Twitter’s new partnerships and the live video strategy for news based on sports, finances as well as politics.

Twitter
Image Source: valoso.com

The company wants to move the focus of its users from trolls, celebrity feuds, and Donald Trump, to more productive live video sessions. The company has partnered with the news mainstays like Time and The Wall Street Journal, to bring more of the sports and news content as well as has completed a deal with Univision, to produce content for its U.S. Hispanic audience.

Noticeably, the company has been in partnership with companies like Viacom, Major League Soccer, NFL, Live Nation, ESPN, and Activision Blizzard in attempt to build connections with the target audience through its live video platform.

“When you collaborate with the top publishers in the world, you can develop incredibly innovative ways to elevate premium content and bring new dimensions to the conversations that are already happening on Twitter. Together with our partners, we developed this new slate of programming specifically for our audiences, and designed the content to fuel even more robust conversation on Twitter,” said Kay Madati the Twitter Global VP and Head of Content Partnerships.

The company through its new deals and partnership will provide the marketers more control over the message they want to convey within the advertisements. In the deal with Univision, Twitter will be streaming the sports, news as well as entertainment content in Spanish. It will also air the 2020 Election analysis and reporting.

Along with The Players’ Tribune, Twitter is also about to release a talk show, named Don’t @ Me. Twitter has extended its partnership with its previous partners and with its new partner, Wall Street Journal, the company is releasing a new show WSJ What’s Now. Also, Twitter will be streaming all the WSJ events live.

On the other hand, another new partner to Twitter, CNET, will cover the major tech industry events and Time will be airing two shows in collaboration with Twitter, named Person of the Year and Time 100.

The company has also announced that its other partners including Live Nation, Bloomberg and Blizzard Entertainment have also plans for their new content release with Twitter, and companies like Viacom will be live-streaming red carpet coverage from their events.

Spotify Now has 100M Paying Users

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Spotify 100 milion paid users
Image Source: dailystar.co.uk

Only a week ago, Amazon announced its ad-supported music streaming service for its Alexa users, and now, another famous music streaming service Spotify has revealed that it has registered a 100 million paid subscribers, in its Q1 2019.

The company has become the world’s largest music streaming service, and the first one to touch the 100 million paid subscribers’ milestone. The increase in the number of paying users for Spotify has hiked by 32 per cent of the number of users it had in 2018 Q4.

Noticeably, the Spotify had just launched its service in India, in February this year, and since then, it has registered over 2 million users for its music streaming service for both paid and ad-supported version, making a total of 217 million subscribers serving in 79 markets. In fact, its rival Apple Music is still at 50 million paid subscribers.

Despite the increased number of subscribers, the Q1 2019 profits are way lesser than the profits it had earned in December 2018. The revealed profits for Q1 2019 by the company is $158 million, whereas, last year in December it had $493 million in revenues. But still, the company has increased its part in the investment for Tencent Music and is readily working in improving its podcast service.

“Over time, our ambition is to develop a more robust advertising solution for podcasts that will allow us to layer in the kind of targeting, measurement, and reporting capabilities we have for the core ad-supported business,” the company said.

Spotify has been working on its ad-supported podcast service, through which it will allow the producers to place ads in between the podcast depending on the target users. Recently, the company acquired the podcast network Gimlet Media, Anchor FM, and Parcast for a combined investment of $400 million. The company is expecting to see a rise in its revenues through its podcast service in the Q2 2019.

Along with the podcast service, the company is also looking forward to an increase in the number of subscribers for both its paid and free music streaming service as well as the profits for Q2 2019 through it.

Apple Pulls Off Third-Party Screen Time Apps from Apple Store Violating its Privacy Policies

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Apple launched its screen time monitoring feature for all its iOS users and following that many other third-party developers also released their screen time monitoring and parental control apps. But it seems that Apple is not happy about it, as it has abruptly removed a few such apps from its iOS stores.

apple screen time feature
Image Source: gadgethacks.com

Noticeably, Apple has built its screen time monitoring feature only for the iOS users, whereas the third-party apps are compatible with both iOS and Android having better features than the Apple’s screen time monitoring features. Reportedly, iOS’s feature has flaws like only a few methods of blocking apps for kids, less-granular scheduling, as well as in many cases the kids were able to modify the filtering tools themselves.

But it is not that the company is insecure about the popularity of its screen time feature, but in a blog post, Apple mentioned the name of some apps including Balance Screen Time by Moment Health and Verizon Smart Family, as the best parental control apps apart from its own, giving the reasons for removing the other third-party apps from Apple store.

“We recently removed several parental control apps from the App Store, and we did it for a simple reason: they put users’ privacy and security at risk. It’s important to understand why and how this happened,” said Apple in the blog post.

According to Apple, the removal of the apps from its Apple Store has been presented as a step out of insecurity. But those third-party apps were using Mobile Device Management (MDM), an invasive technology, which makes the apps to access the users’ some of the very personal information, including location, email address, gallery, browsing history, etc. The company has been investigating this MDM technology since 2017, and by the mid of 2017, it had made some strict guidelines on the usage of MDM in the non-enterprize apps.

On the other hand, the third-party companies which got their apps removed from the Apple store, have claimed that there were no clear indications or notification from Apple on the pulling off their apps from the Apple store. Most of the companies have admitted that 80 per cent of their revenues come from Apple Store.

But Apple is confident that those apps were a bigger threat to its customers’ privacy and data security as those apps had violated its guidelines. Though the company is simply following its rules for the safety of its ‘users’ data’, a few companies including Kidslox and Qustodio as well as Kaspersky Lab filed an antitrust complaint against Apple in the European Union, after Apple pulled off their screen time apps from Apple Store.

Gamers Need to Wait More Than a Year to Get Their Hands on the Next-generation PlayStation

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According to a Wallstreet Journal, Sony through a Q&A session has revealed that the launch of its Next-Generation PlayStation or we simply say PS5 has delayed to more than a year. The launch of PS5 has been the most awaited event, but believing Sony, it won’t occur at least this year, and the delay may extend more than a year.

PlayStation 5
Image Source: t3.com

The company has indicated that it may roll out the Next-Generation PlayStation in summer 2020, most probably in the month of May. This way, the PlayStation fans can expect to get a glimpse of the features of this new gaming console in the upcoming E3 event on June 11 this year.

Noticeably, Sony started talking about PS5 earlier last month, and people also began making guesses on its launch date and the feature it would have. Here, the company gave some hints on the capabilities of the gaming platform, like support for 8K graphics, much-improved 3D audio experience, SSD storage, and compatibility with all the gaming titles of PS4, etc. If we believe on the rumours, the new PS5 will run upon an 8-core, third-gen Ryzen CPU based on AMD’s 7nm Zen 2 architecture.

Also, the console is an improved version of PS4 and has also got the support for Radeon Navi graphics as well as ray tracing. The news of the release of the upcoming PlayStation gaming console had reduced the sales of PS4 to a greater extent. But since the console’s release has been extended, the people who have recently bought their PS4 can take the breath of relief.

Sony announced the news of the delay in the launch while talking about its impressive financial year. Despite the reduced PS4 sales, 2018 was the best financial year for the company, earning some 31.1bn yen from the past year’s console sales, having gained a total of 36.4 million PlayStation Plus subscribers. But still, due to the high manufacturing cost of PS5, the operating profits may fall by 10 per cent for the next quarter.

Walmart Launches its First AI Store, Isn’t Trying to Replace Humans with Machines

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Last year, Amazon launched a chain of its AI-powered convenience stores, i.e. Amazon Go. The stores are cashier-less and have cameras all around in the stores to charge the customers automatically. Yesterday, Walmart, the biggest retail store franchise, also launched an AI-powered store, i.e. Intelligent Retail Lab (IRL), in Levittown, New York, which is a bit different from its contemporary Amazon’s cashier-less stores.

Walmart has launched a store similar to its other stores, except it will be operated by intelligent technology. The new Walmart store, like Amazon Go, has got cameras over the ceiling, but these cameras have not been installed to automatically charge the customers but will keep the track of the inventory of the store.

walmart IRL store
Image Source: Tech Crunch

Yes! The company has confirmed that now the store will be able to manage the inventory through AI. Reportedly, if any of the items get out of stock, even from a single shelf, the cameras will inform the sales persons around, to restock the shelves. Also, if a fresh fruit has been on the shelf for a longer time, the cameras will indicate the sales persons to replace that fruit with a fresh one. E.g. if bananas on a shelf have got bruises, the cameras will ask the salesperson to replace them. This way, the salespersons will not have to roam around the store all the time to keep a check on the inventory and will only go to the back-inventory when the cameras will notify them for replacement or to re-stock the shelves.

Since operating so many cameras all the time will require a lot of data and data storage, the company has built a data centre in the inventory itself. Though the data will be stored only for a week, the sensors and the cameras will pump out 1.6 TB of data per second.

Since it is not a cashier-less store, like Amazon Go, the store is having over 100 employees and is selling over 30,000 items. Also, the store is a 50,000 square foot store, having giant servers bathed in the blue light situated inside the store, which can be easily seen by the public. Also, the retailer has built an AI-powered informational store and a Welcome store for its customers, where they can know about its technical specifications.

For the people who are with the shoppers, can spend their time in front of the AI-powered interactive wall, built inside the store. The wall is able to imitate the body gestures and postures by estimating body positions and is quite a good pass time.

By far, the new Walmart store is quite interesting, and it seems that the company is trying to take full advantage of AI by making its use in most practical ways. And, the company has ensured that it is not up to replacing the human jobs at all, but is trying to reduce the workload for its staff.