Here’s your daily tech digest, courtesy of DGiT Daily, for Wednesday, January 23, 2019.
Amazon announced late yesterday that it says it is field testing what it calls Amazon Scout. It’s a deliverybot, baby!
Amazon is starting delivering to some Prime customers from right now (Amazon), although it’s too early for this device to go ‘primetime’ (sorry) just yet.
The lowdown:
- The Amazon Scout offers full-autonomous delivery, via the bright-blue, battery-powered six-wheeled robot, that’s about the size of a small cooler
- It’s currently delivering purchases in a single neighborhood in Snohomish County, Washington.
- An accompanying video (YouTube) shows the Scout isn’t exactly a speed demon, which may have been a deliberate choice so as not to frighten people.
- It rather carefully wanders along sidewalks and pathways on its way to its destination, at about walking pace.
- The devices will autonomously follow their delivery route but will initially be accompanied by an Amazon employee.
A couple of notes:
- Amazon does have a habit of announcing new technology ahead of its time.
- It just happens to encourage people to believe that this is coming soon to them, when that’s not necessarily the case.
- Amazon delivery drones are the big example here, of course, first announced more than five years ago (AP).
- Amazon really doesn’t mind if you get excited and believe it to be the technology company of the future, more or less. There’s a lot of positive PR at work.
- But, Amazon is late to this game.
- The deliverybot space is very active already, with efforts divided between street-legal and sidewalk-only efforts, but all focused on trundling little devices shuffling along to deliver items, with relatively mild success given the challenges involved.
- Starship Technologies launched an almost identical looking deliverybot back in 2016 (The Verge). By October last year, Starship said its bots had traveled 125,000 miles in 20 countries and more than 100 cities, and no longer has human chaperones.
- A colleague in Tallinn, in Estonia, where Starship operates, passed on that local news about the bots has varied between “a compassionate citizen helped a robot stuck in the snow” (delfi.tv – video) and ”a drunk citizen attacked a delivery robot with fists.” Here’s a video with one stuck at a pedestrian crossing, too (delfi.tv).
- Other anecdotal reports suggest the devices can get stuck easily, especially when two of them meet on a narrow path, and aren’t always polite to pedestrians.
- There’s also the super-cute Serve, from Postmates, and others.
- Names like Nuro and Udelv are building much bigger, much more car-like street-legal bots, that aim to go faster and further on the road.
- Other questions: how easily can these things be kicked over and their contents stolen? It appears that the devices will have GPS and cameras, which may be some deterrent.
- In any case, most people I’ve talked to accept that this is a most-likely future for last-mile deliveries, given that drone delivery is much more annoying to people not getting drone deliveries, such as in Australia where it was trialed (ABC News).
Here’s everything else happening:
1. China has blocked access to the last major (and already censored) Western search engine, Microsoft Bing (NYTimes). Good yet worrying info in this Twitter thread, too.
2. Even more Samsung Galaxy S10 and S10 Plus leaks (Android Authority).
3. Vivo’s Apex 2019, “future of phones” is an all-glass device with no buttons, no ports, and a full-screen fingerprint reader (Android Authority). Hmm.
4. First-ever UHD OLED 15.6-inch laptop display from Samsung looks awesome and expensive (Android Authority).
5. Apple confirmed reports it shuffled more than 200 staff that were working in Project Titan, which was its stealthed autonomous vehicles division (CNBC). Apple said “we continue to believe there is a huge opportunity with autonomous systems, that Apple has unique capabilities to contribute,” but removing employees doesn’t sound like a way to achieve that, either? Also, machine learning is hard.
6. Meanwhile, Boeing’s self-flying air taxi, some kind of helicopter/small plane hybrid, completed its first test flight – 50 mile range, and a decade before we see one IRL (interestingengineering.com).
7. Canada’s New Food Guide: Simple and modern, plus recipes. Win! (canada.ca)
8. Strong Texas winds hit Elon Musk’s SpaceX starship prototype, and a big part of the nosecone fell off – stainless steel structure still ok for now (Gizmodo).
9. The hunt for “Planet Nine”: The biggest missing object in our solar system is beating best efforts to find it, for now (longreads.com).
10. Why are glasses so expensive? The eyewear industry prefers to keep that blurry (LA Times). (I order mine online from Zenni, and this isn’t an ad but the truth!)
11. “TIL the “fresh is best” culture led consumers to wrongly see frozen produce as lower quality. It turns out frozen fruit and veg are equally nutritious. The freezing process slows nutrient loss which occurs after harvesting.” (r/todayilearned).
Bonus: Archaeologists investigating a possibly ancient stone circle in Scotland successfully date it to, um, 1995 (The Guardian).
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from Android Authority http://bit.ly/2MAZsid
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