Apple Inc and Volkswagen AG (VW) late last year struck a deal that let the technology giant equip VW vans with self-driving technology to transport Apple employees between offices, a person familiar with the matter said.
The agreement is part of an internal Apple program called Project Titan that started in 2015 as an ambitious effort to build an electric vehicle.
After facing development and management problems, Apple shifted its focus to autonomous technologies that control vehicles, Bloomberg News reported in 2016.
The New York Times reported on the deal with Volkswagen earlier on Wednesday. Representatives for Apple and Volkswagen declined to comment.
Apple tests dozens of Lexus SUVs on public roads in California with its self-driving technology, but has also applied the technology to a shuttle service it is developing to transport staff between office buildings at its Cupertino, California, headquarters.
Apple is using fewer than two dozen of VW’s T6 Transporter vans, which are being customized by the technology giant, the person said.
Apple originally had hundreds of hardware and software engineers, designers and car battery experts on staff to build a car to take on Tesla Inc and Detroit, but has since slimmed the Titan teams down to people working on self-driving camera sensors and underlying software.
QUALCOMM
Separately, Qualcomm Inc is to unveil a dedicated chipset to power standalone virtual-reality and augmented-reality headsets as it seeks to break into new businesses beyond smartphones, people familiar with the matter said.
The announcement could happen as early as next week at the Augmented World Expo in Santa Clara, California, said the people, who refused to be named.
The chip, to be called Snapdragon XR1, would be a system-on-a-chip with a main processing unit, a graphics processor, security functions and components to handle artificial intelligence tasks.
The chip will also tackle voice control and head-tracking interaction with headsets.
The product is designed to make it easier for hardware manufacturers to build headsets that are cheap, powerful and energy-efficient.
Over the past few months, the virtual-reality headset industry has moved toward standalone devices rather than expensive models that must be tethered to high-powered personal computers.
Facebook Inc launched the Oculus Go with a Qualcomm smartphone chip, while Google has also partnered on standalone headsets that use a Qualcomm phone processor.
The largest maker of mobile-phone chips is seeking new sources of revenue as growth in smartphones dries up and competition intensifies.
The San Diego-based chipmaker is to team up with a number of existing headset makers that plan to include the chip, including HTC Corp (宏達電) for its Vive headset and Vuzix Corp, which makes augmented-reality headsets, the people said.
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
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained