Facebook Inc co-founder Mark Zuckerberg on Thursday proclaimed the successful test of a wide-winged, solar-powered drone built to deliver wireless Internet access to remote areas.
The test flight of a drone prototype dubbed “Aquila” took place in Britain and was considered a milestone in an Internet.org project to bring online access to billions more people around the planet.
“Aircraft like these will help connect the whole world, because they can affordably serve the 10 percent of the world’s population that live in remote communities without existing Internet infrastructure,” Zuckerberg said in a post on Facebook.
The unpiloted aerial vehicle, or drone, has a wingspan greater than that of a Boeing 737 passenger jet and weighs about as much as a small car, Facebook chief technology officer Mike Schroepfer told a packed audience at the social network’s annual gathering of developers in San Francisco.
“The idea is to loiter over an area for months at a time and beam down Internet service,” Schroepfer said.
Drones powered by the sun will fly at altitudes of 18,000m or higher and be able to remain aloft for months, Zuckerberg said.
Schroepfer estimated that anywhere from 1 billion to 3 billion people lack access to the Internet that most of those attending the developers conference likely take for granted.
Connecting everyone to the Internet is one of the core challenges Facebook intends to tackle in the coming years, Schroepfer said.
He laid out a Facebook vision of efficient, massive data centers to provide online services to all of those people, along with making computers smart enough to help deal with the inevitable overload of information flooding the Internet.
Facebook made an artificial intelligence “memory network” breakthrough on a path to getting machines to recognize images or videos and give context to words, Schroepfer said.
Facebook’s future includes conceptually teleporting social network users with virtual reality technology from Oculus VR Inc, which the California company bought last year in a deal valued at US$2 billion.
The latest version Oculus headgear, called Crescent Bay, was being shown off at the gathering.
“Virtual reality is potentially world changing, and incredibly cool and it is really happening,” Oculus chief scientist Michael Abrash told developers at the gathering. “Sooner or later, you will want to be a part of it.”
Abrash said that Oculus would begin shipping virtual reality headgear in quantity “before too long.”
He predicted that, over time, virtual reality would incorporate body movements, nearby objects and users’ environments.
“A lot of important pieces are not in place yet, but all that will get figured out,” Abrash said.
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
New apartments in Taiwan’s major cities are getting smaller, while old apartments are increasingly occupied by older people, many of whom live alone, government data showed. The phenomenon has to do with sharpening unaffordable property prices and an aging population, property brokers said. Apartments with one bedroom that are two years old or older have gained a noticeable presence in the nation’s six special municipalities as well as Hsinchu county and city in the past five years, Evertrust Rehouse Co (永慶房產集團) found, citing data from the government’s real-price transaction platform. In Taipei, apartments with one bedroom accounted for 19 percent of deals last
RECORD-BREAKING: TSMC’s net profit last quarter beat market expectations by expanding 8.9% and it was the best first-quarter profit in the chipmaker’s history Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), which counts Nvidia Corp as a key customer, yesterday said that artificial intelligence (AI) server chip revenue is set to more than double this year from last year amid rising demand. The chipmaker expects the growth momentum to continue in the next five years with an annual compound growth rate of 50 percent, TSMC chief executive officer C.C. Wei (魏哲家) told investors yesterday. By 2028, AI chips’ contribution to revenue would climb to about 20 percent from a percentage in the low teens, Wei said. “Almost all the AI innovators are working with TSMC to address the