Start up: fibre’s horsemeat moment, AMD in new Apples?, Sony’s troubled cameras, Xiaomi sales slow, and more

Posted on April 22, 2016 by charlesarthur

A discredited voice recognition system was used in scores of secret court cases which are now being disputed. Photo by Lotus Carroll on Flickr.

You can now sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. Or just read it online. Choice!

A selection of 10 links for you. But is that 10 in base 10? I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Quality woes a challenge for Tesla’s high-volume car » WSJ

Mike Ramsey:

»Anne Carter had her Tesla Motors Inc. Model X sport-utility vehicle for a few days before the $138,000 electric vehicle suffered a mechanical malfunction.

On a recent morning, the car’s falcon-wing doors wouldn’t open as she prepared to drive her children’s carpool to school. “It’s a bummer; you spent all this money…and the doors won’t open,” she said in an interview while waiting for the Model X to be picked up for repairs. She expected some issues, but feels embarrassed that friends might think: “Look at the Carters—they spent all this money and the doors don’t work.”

During a very critical time for the pioneering electric-car maker, its well-to-do customers are confronting not only problems with the Model X’s rear doors but other issues, including a seat latch the company has recalled.

«

Making cars seems to be really pretty difficult.
link to this extract

Nvidia creates a 15bn-transistor chip for deep learning » VentureBeat

Dean Takahashi:

»Nvidia chief executive Jen-Hsun Huang announced that the company has created a new chip, the Tesla P100, with 15 billion transistors for deep-learning computing. It’s the biggest chip ever made, Huang said.

Huang made the announcement during his keynote at the GPUTech conference in San Jose, California. He unveiled the chip after he said that deep-learning artificial intelligence chips have already become the company’s fastest-growing business.

“We are changing so many things in one project,” Huang said. “The Tesla P100 has five miracles.”

Nvidia previously launched its Tesla M4 and Tesla M40 deep-learning chips, and those chips are selling fast. Now the Tesla P100 is in volume production today, Huang said.

“We decided to go all-in on A.I.,” Huang said. “This is the largest FinFET chip that has ever been done.”

«

Maybe Intel could focus on GPUs instead of CPUs? Seems to be where the business is heading.
link to this extract

AMD Radeon 400 series ‘Polaris’ GPUs land major Apple design wins » WCCF Tech

Khalid Moammer:

»From what we’ve been hearing Polaris is no exception. In fact our sources have confirmed that the major OEM design win that we had reported on last year is indeed for Apple.

The Sunnyvale, California based chip maker secured wins for both of its upcoming Radeon 400 series 14nm FinFET graphics chips, Polaris 10 and Polaris 11. Previously known as “Ellesmere” and “Baffin”, both of which are Arctic Islands. The chips have since been renamed to Polaris 10 and 11 respectively, in line with AMD’s newly adopted Astronomy based architectural code naming scheme which Koduri had instated after the Radeon Technologies Group was established last year.

The Polaris 10 and 11 chips will go into new desktops and notebooks from Apple, which the company plans to bring to market later this year. And although these Apple design wins may not be significant volume contributors they are very profitable.

«

That’s going to make for an interesting WWDC in June, then. These Radeon GPUs would be capable of VR work, apparently.
link to this extract

Two thirds ‘misled’ by fibre broadband advertising, experts compare situation to horsemeat scandal » Cable.co.uk

»Research by Cable.co.uk has revealed that two thirds of fibre broadband customers on BT’s Openreach network – which services around 80% of the UK’s total broadband customer base – are unaware their so-called ‘fibre’ service arrives at their home through a standard copper telephone line.

This is important, because the speeds available over copper reduce drastically over distance, severely limiting both current speeds and future upgradability.

Experts, speaking to Cable.co.uk, labeled the way the term ‘fibre broadband’ is widely used in the UK ‘misleading’ and compared the situation to the horsemeat scandal.

This comes just days after the Broadband Infrastructure Group (BIG), a cross-party group of MPs led by Grant Shapps, demanded an end to what it described as a “mis-selling” scandal potentially bigger than PPI and Volkswagen’s emissions tests.

«

link to this extract

On the road to recap » Above the Crowd

Noted venture capitalist Bill Gurley:

»While not obvious on the surface, there has been a fundamental sea-change in the investment community that has made the incremental Unicorn investment a substantially more dangerous and complicated practice. All Unicorn participants — founders, company employees, venture investors and their limited partners (LPs) — are seeing their fortunes put at risk from the very nature of the Unicorn phenomenon itself. The pressures of lofty paper valuations, massive burn rates (and the subsequent need for more cash), and unprecedented low levels of IPOs and M&A, have created a complex and unique circumstance which many Unicorn CEOs and investors are ill-prepared to navigate…

…Perhaps the seminal bubble-popping event was John Carreyrou’s October 16th investigative analysis of Theranos in the Wall Street Journal. John was the first to uncover that just because a company can raise money from a handful of investors at a very high price, it does not guarantee (i) everything is going well at the company, or (ii) those shares are permanently worth the last round valuation. Ironically, Carreyou is not a Silicon Valley-focused reporter, and the success of the piece served as a wake-up call for other journalists who may have been struck by Unicorn fever. Next came Rolfe Winkler’s deep dive “Highly Valued Startup Zenefits Runs Into Turbulence.” We should expect more of these in the future.

«

Every VC I watch on Twitter has gone bananas about this post, which warns that “the game has changed”. Meanwhile, notable that the two articles Gurley points to were in the paywalled Wall Street Journal.
link to this extract

Sony disposal beckons » Bloomberg Gadfly

Tim Culpan:

»In a surprise announcement, Sony cut a further 59.6bn yen [£372m, $533m] from the value of the devices unit, citing camera modules as the culprit, wiping a net 30bn yen from full-year operating income:

»

“Due to a decrease in projected future demand, Sony has revised its Mid-Range Plan for the camera module business in the Devices segment from the period beginning with the fiscal year ending March 31, 2017.”

«

How the star performer morphed into one of Sony’s biggest drags can’t be fully explained by external factors. For sure, the global mobile market is slowing, but smartphones are still posting growth, especially at the high end, as consumers are prepared to pay more for quality components such as cameras. Declines in the PC and digital still camera markets can’t account for the sudden reversal in fortunes, either: That’s been a theme for a few years.

That leaves internal factors. If this truly is a macro problem, then the sudden writedown bears a whiff of incompetence. If, on the other hand, Sony lost a key client, that says something about its ability to retain big customers, or its dependence on too few.

«

Feels like it must have lost a key client in the smartphone space. But who, and to which rival?
link to this extract

Secretive legal committee buries ruling against Theresa May » Politics.co.uk

Ian Dunt:

»The case also saw Dr Harrison, an expert in voice recognition, dismantle the claims about fraud – and their ability to test for fraud – made by the Home Office and ETS, the firm who ran the test. What he said was equally applicable to all the other cases where people had been wrongly accused of fraud. The evidence the Home Office relied on was identical in all cases, so knocking it down for one should knock it down for all.

But it won’t, because the reporting committee is refusing to report it. The decision means that the case cannot be cited, except under very strict and laborious conditions, in other appeals. It means many thousands of people who have been unjustly deported will not even know of its existence. The decision makes the ruling against Theresa May legally useless. It’s as if it never happened. The reporting committee has taken a damning judgement against the home secretary and buried it.

«

Dunt only refers in passing to the voice recognition stuff. ETS apparently had a contract with the UK government to find impersonation – but it “decided not to renew the contract” after the BBC exposed evidence of fraud at two of UK-based centres using the software. ETS blamed “dishonest activities of third-party contractors”. It seems the expert witness blamed ETS.
link to this extract

Postscript: Bill Campbell, 1940-2016 » The New Yorker

Ken Auletta looks back on Campbell’s life as a mentor and advisor, which includes this fascinating tidbit:

»Google relied on Campbell to sort out tempests caused by imperial engineers burdened by oversized egos that prevented them from collaborating. This happened with Andy Rubin, the entrepreneur who created Android and built it into a resounding Google success. The Android team under Rubin was massive. But, as I learned through numerous interviews while writing a book about the company and in later conversations with Google executives, Rubin tended to trust only members of his élite team, and fought with other top executives, including such original Google employees as Salar Kamangar, who supervised YouTube, and Alan Eustace, the head of engineering. The weekly meetings of senior Google executives were filled with tension and discord. Executives became so dispirited by what they saw as Rubin’s dominance that they threatened to quit. Campbell advised Larry Page to make a choice, and to the relief of senior executives Page chose to remove Rubin. Campbell had earlier warned Page that Marissa Mayer, the talented engineer who went on to become the CEO of Yahoo, had a similar my-way-or-the-highway approach, which also led to her demotion to a position where she no longer reported to the CEO. Campbell knew that a lack of empathy often translated into an inability to listen.

«

Campbell had an outstanding ability to listen, as Auletta shows. Clearly he will be sorely missed.
link to this extract

Opera now has a totally free and unlimited built-in VPN » Gizmodo

Jamie Condliffe:

»The new feature is available in the latest developer version of the Opera browser for Windows or OS X. You just go to Settings on Windows or Preferences on a Mac, then toggle the VPN on in the Privacy & Security section. Bingo, you’re browsing over a virtual private network and you mask your IP address to dodge firewalls so that you can view content that you’re unable to from your current country or office. As well as all the other responsible things that a VPN can help you with.

«

“Virtual locations” only in the US, Germany and Australia at first. Which means this will become the “Netflix browser”, until Netflix blocks the Opera VPN IPs.

Even so, I have to wonder: what’s the catch? How does Opera benefit from this? Running VPNs isn’t free, or trouble-free. Am I the only person who has this reaction when free stuff is proffered?
link to this extract

Xiaomi sees sales shrink in Q1 2016 » Tech In Asia

Erik Crouch:

»Xiaomi sold 14.8m smartphones globally in the first quarter of 2016, a notable decline from 17.5m in the last quarter of 2015.

The new figure comes from research by IHS Technology, and the Q4 number from Strategy Analytics. Tech in Asia reached out to Xiaomi about these numbers, and the company declined to comment.

The number shows that Xiaomi’s slowing growth in 2015 is turning into its worst nightmare in 2016: falling sales.

Xiaomi sold 70 million smartphones last year.

These aren’t official Xiaomi statistics, and reports compiled by research firms are best treated as estimates. But even providing for a hefty margin of error – and keeping in mind that Xiaomi has said it wants to move away from “goals such as smartphone sales” and isn’t likely to publish Q1 stats – the figures show a company that will need to improve its numbers if it aims to grow its smartphone department at all this year.

«

Sequential quarter comparisons (especially from 4Q to 1Q) are rarely meaningful, but the year-on-year comparison is still down: Xiaomi shipped 15.3m in Q1 2015, from the figures I have.
link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified.

Start up: Dell, the movie!, Surfacebook reviewed, why WD bought SanDisk, IT disasters sized, and more

Posted on October 22, 2015 by charlesarthur

Studying by the light of a solar lantern. Photo by Barefoot Photography on Flickr.

You can now sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

A selection of 10 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Theranos CEO: company is in a “pause period” » WSJ

John Carreyrou:

Theranos Inc. founder and Chief Executive Elizabeth Holmes said Wednesday that the Silicon Valley laboratory company is in a “pause period” as it seeks to get its proprietary technology approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

“We have to move, as a company, from the lab framework and quality systems to the FDA framework and quality systems,” Ms. Holmes said, speaking at the WSJDLive global technology conference in Laguna Beach, Calif.

At the conference, she confirmed that the company is down to offering just one test using a few drops of blood and is performing the other more than 240 blood tests it offers by using larger blood samples drawn with needles from patients’ arms.

The downslope beckons.
link to this extract

Microsoft Surface Book review » SlashGear

Chris Davies:

I’m warily wiling to put most of the flakiness down to early hardware and work-in-progress drivers, but it’s clear that the practicalities of this new architecture are still being ironed out. In theory, the Clipboard shouldn’t allow itself to be detached if it’ll make the system unstable; in practice, that’s not always the case.

Throw in underwhelming battery life for the Clipboard alone, and it’s clear that thinking of the Surface Book as both a laptop and a tablet isn’t really accurate. This isn’t a replacement for your MacBook Pro and your iPad; it’s a PC that tells you to take an hour or so of downtime with a Netflix video before getting back to work. I can’t help but hope that Microsoft uses the same hybrid mechanism in a smaller form-factor, with more of a focus on equal battery life between the halves.

For all the launch day excitement it caused, Surface Book will inevitably be a niche product. As the standard bearer for a new architecture of modular graphics, though, it may be in Microsoft’s better interests in the long run if, Nexus-style, other OEMs see what’s been done and experiment with the same approach themselves.

So not quite a laptop or tablet replacement.
link to this extract

Chip merger pace rises with Western Digital, Lam deals » Bloomberg Business

The merger wave sweeping the computer-chip industry is now engulfing the makers of the machines needed to crank out semiconductors.

Lam Research Corp. said Wednesday that it would buy KLA-Tencor Corp. for $10.6bn in cash and stock. Within four hours, Western Digital Corp. announced a deal to acquire SanDisk Corp. for about $19bn. The pacts added to what was already a record year for chip deals – a total of $76bn before Wednesday.

With half of the spending on the manufacturing equipment coming from just three chipmakers – Samsung Electronics Co., Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. and Intel Corp. – suppliers of the gear need to pool resources to keep up with the increasing pace of spending on research and development.

Consolidation is a sign of shrinking profit too. WD is struggling because the disk business is shrinking; the NAND business (where SanDisk) is growing, but getting tougher. Next question: whither Seagate?
link to this extract

Forget “Steve Jobs,” get ready for “Michael Dell” » CONAN on TBS

From my book Digital Wars:

[Bob] Ohlweiler [then at Windows MP3 player MusicMatch] recalls seeing the prototype for the third-generation iPod during a discussion with Apple executives. Steve Jobs made an appearance – “he would kind of drift in and say ‘this is shit’, and walk out,” Ohlweiler recalls. “Or he would say ‘this is far too big. It’s too bulky.’ Then he’d walk out.” (The picture that emerges is of Jobs prowling the corridors of Apple, caroming between meetings in which he offers minimal but essential advice and then moves on to the next one.)…

A month or so later Ohlweiler was at the headquarters of Dell Computer in Austin, Texas. Dell was eager to get into this burgeoning market, reasoning that it could use Microsoft’s software, design its own hardware (as it did with PCs) and use its buying heft to drive down costs to undercut Apple. Dell’s revenues at the time were six times larger than Apple’s. It was going to be easy. The market was there for the taking.

Or perhaps not. Ohlweiler recalls being handed a prototype for the Dell DJ player, which like the iPod used a 1.8in hard drive. “Jeez, this thing is HUGE!” he thought, but managed not to say.

It was noticeably deeper than Apple’s existing iPod, and substantially more so than the forthcoming iPod… Dell had done its part of the horizontal model: it had driven down costs by dual-sourcing components from Hitachi and from Toshiba. The result, though, was a bulkier machine: “one of the Dell designers explained that that was because the Toshiba version of the hard drive had its connector on the side, and the Hitachi one had it on the bottom, but because they were dual-sourcing they could get the price down by 40 cents,” Ohlweiler recalls. “That was the difference in a nutshell. Apple was all about the industrial design and getting it to work. Dell was all driven by their procurement guys.”

Sometimes satire is about telling the truth in a new way.
link to this extract

Uber CEO Travis Kalanick on self-driving cars » Business Insider

Jillian D’Onfro:

In the last year, Uber has poached more than 40 autonomous vehicle experts from the robotics program at Carnegie Mellon University, as well as top car security researchers.

This move comes at a time when the likes of Google, Apple, and Tesla are all working on some sort of autonomous-driving projects. Kalanick says he believes Google to be the farthest ahead, but that we’re still a while away from seeing any company’s self-driving cars on the roads.

“Getting Google’s cars to a 90% solution is going to happen soon,” he said, but he asks, “when do they get to that 99.99% success level?” By his count, it could be five, 10, even 15 years.

“It’s going to be interesting, ultimately, to see how cities handle these disruption waves, which are going to be coming faster and faster,” he said. “Some cities are going to allow it, and then they’re going to be the bastion of the future, and the other cities are going to look like they’re in the middle ages.”

link to this extract

The truth and distraction of US cord cutting » REDEF

Liam Boluk:

During the past five and a half years, the cable ecosystem has been hit with heavy losses. Nearly 8.9M net subscribers have been lost (versus 3.3M in net gains from Q3 2004 to Q4 2009) – a fact obsessed upon by journalists and bloggers alike. But at the same time – and with significantly less media coverage – Satellite (DirecTV and Dish) and Telco (i.e. AT&T U-verse and Verizon FiOS) MVPDs have surged to the point of offsetting (or reclaiming) nearly 95% of these net losses.

Looks to me like people are moving away from the standard set of cable offerings. “Gradually, and then suddenly” is how it works.
link to this extract

How solar lanterns are giving power to the people » National Geographic magazine

Michael Edison Hayden:

Prashant Mandal flips on a candy-bar-sized LED light in the hut he shares with his wife and four children. Instantly hues of canary yellow and ocean blue—reflecting off the plastic tarps that serve as the family’s roof and walls—fill the cramped space where they sleep. Mandal, a wiry 42-year-old with a thick black beard and a lazy eye, gestures with a long finger across his possessions: a torn page from a dated Hindu calendar, a set of tin plates, a wooden box used as a chair. He shuts down the solar unit that powers the light and unplugs it piece by piece, then carries it to a tent some 20 yards away, where he works as a chai wallah, selling sweet, milky tea to travelers on the desolate road in Madhotanda, a forested town near the northern border of India.

“My life is sad, but I have my mind to help me through it,” Mandal says, tapping the fraying cloth of his orange turban. “And this solar light helps me to keep my business open at night.”

It’s white LED lights that have made this possible; 40W solar panel feeds them for a long time.
link to this extract

Semantic sensors » Pete Warden’s blog

Pete Warden (you know, the machine learning bought-by-Google guy):

I think we’re going to see a lot of “Semantic Sensors” emerging. These will be tiny, cheap, all-in-one modules that capture raw noisy data from the real world, have built-in AI for analysis, and only output a few high-level signals. Imagine a small optical sensor that is wired like a switch, but turns on when it sees someone wave up, and off when they wave down. Here are some other concrete examples of what I think they might enable:

• Meeting room lights that stay on when there’s a person sitting there, even if the conference call has paralyzed them into immobility.
• Gestural interfaces on anything with a switch.
• Parking meters that can tell if there’s a car in their spot, and automatically charge based on the license plate.
• Cat-flaps that only let in cats, not raccoons!
• Farm gates that spot sick or injured animals.
• Streetlights that dim themselves when nobody’s around, and even report car crashes or house fires.

And lots more. The only questions are how soon, and would we throw away the images or keep them?
link to this extract

Rumor: AMD making custom x86 SOC for Apple’s 2017 and 2018 iMac designs » WCCFTech