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• Uber’s self-driving car unit raises $1B from Toyota, Denso and Vision Fund ahead of spin-out

  Uber’s has confirmed it will spin out its self-driving car business after the unit closed $1 billion in funding from Toyota, auto-parts maker Denso and SoftBank’s Vision Fund. The development has been speculated for some time — as far back as October — and it serves to both remove a deeply-unprofitable unit from the main Uber business: helping Uber scale back some of its losses, while giving Uber’s Advanced Technologies Group (known as Uber ATG) more freedom to focus on the tough challenge of bringing autonomous vehicles to market. The deal values Uber ATG at $7.25 billion, the companies announced. In terms of the exact mechanics of the investment, Toyota and Denso are providing $667 million with the Vision Fund throwing in the remaining $333 million. The deal is expected to close in Q3, and it gives investors a new take on Uber’s imminent IPO, which comes with Uber ATG. The company posted a $1.85 billion loss for 2018, but R&D efforts on ‘moonshots’ like autonomous cars and flying vehicles dragged the numbers down by accounting for over $450 million in spending. Moving those particularly capital-intensive R&D plays into a new entity will help bring the core Uber numbers down to earth, but clearly there’s still a lot of work to reach break-even or profitability. Still, those crazy numbers haven’t dampened the mood. Uber is still seen as a once-in-a-generation company, and it is tipped to raise around $10 billion from the IPO, giving it a reported valuation of $90 billion-$100 billion. Like the spin-out itself, the identity of the investors is not a surprise. The Vision Fund (and parent SoftBank) have backed Uber since a January 2018 investment deal closed, while Toyota put $500 million into the ride-hailing firm last August. Toyota and Uber are working to bring autonomous Sienna vehicles to Uber’s service by 2021 while, in further proof of their collaborative relationship, SoftBank and Toyota are jointly developing services in their native Japan which will be powered by self-driving vehicles. The duo also backed Grab — the Southeast Asian ride-hailing company that Uber owns around 23 percent of — perhaps more aggressively. SoftBank has been an investor since 2014 and last year Toyota invested $1 billion into Grab, which it said was the highest investment it has made in ride-hailing. “Leveraging the strengths of Uber ATG’s autonomous vehicle technology and service network and the Toyota Group’s vehicle control system technology, mass-production capability, and advanced safety support systems, such as Toyota Guardian, will enable us to commercialize safer, lower cost automated ridesharing vehicles and services,” said Shigeki Tomoyama, the executive VP who leads Toyota’s ‘connected company’ division, said in a statement. Here’s Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi’s shorter take on Twitter Excited to announce Toyota, Denso and the SoftBank Vision Fund are making a $1B investment in @UberATG, as we work together towards the future of mobility. pic.twitter.com/JdqhLkV7uU — dara khosrowshahi (@dkhos) April 19, 2019 Uber files for IPO ... Read More

• Boston Dynamics debuts the production version of SpotMini

  Last year at our TC Sessions: Robotics conference, Boston Dynamics announced that SpotMini will be its first commercially available product. A revamped version of the product would use the company’s decades of quadrupedal robotics learnings as a basis for a robot designed to patrol office spaces. At today’s event, founder and CEO Marc Raibert took to the stage to debut the production version of the electric robot. As noted last year, the company plans to produce around 100 models this year. Raibert said the company is aiming to start production in July or August. There are robots coming off the assembly line now, but they are betas being used for testing, and the company is still doing redesigns. Pricing details will be announced this summer. New things about the SpotMini as it moves closer to production include redesigned components to make it more reliable, skins that work better to protect the robot if it falls and two sets of cameras on the front and one on each side and the back, so it can see in all directions. The SpotMini also has an arm (with a hand that’s often mistaken for its head) that is stabilized in space, so it stays in the same place even when the rest of the robot moves, making it more flexible for different applications. Raibert says he hopes the SpotMini becomes the “Android of robots” (or Android of androids), with navigation software and developers eventually writing apps that can run in and interact with the controls on the robot. SpotMini is the first commercial robot Boston Dynamics is set to release, but as we learned earlier, it certainly won’t be the last. The company is looking to its wheeled Handle robot in an effort to push into the logistics space. It’s a super-hot category for robotics right now. Notably, Amazon recently acquired Colorado-based start up Canvas to add to its own arm of fulfillment center robots. Boston Dynamics made its own acquisition earlier this month — a first for the company. The addition of Kinema will bring advanced vision systems to the company’s robots — a key part in implementing these sorts of systems in the field. ... Read More

• Uber’s self-driving unit gets $1 billion investment from SoftBank and Japan’s auto industry

  Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi announced this evening a $1 billion investment from Japanese conglomerate SoftBank’s Vision Fund, car maker Toyota, and automative component supplier Denso. The news confirms an article from The Wall Street Journal published earlier this week reporting that Uber was close to securing funding for its autonomous division, called Uber Advanced Technologies Group, or UberATG. Khosrowshahi announced the investment with a tweet, which included a photo of the chief executive alongside executives from SoftBank, Toyota, and Denso. According to the accompanying press release, the capital injection values Uber’s self-driving unit at $7.25 billion, ahead of the company’s official initial public offering likely later this... Continue reading… ... Read More

• HP’s first 15-inch Chromebook features a full-size keyboard and IPS touchscreen for $449

  Chromebooks continue to impress in the price-for-quality department, and the HP Chromebook 15 is no exception. The first ever 15-inch HP Chromebook (15.6 inches to be exact) comes not only with a full-sized keyboard and number pad, but also a blacklit IPS touchscreen and 64GB of base flash storage. That model starts at $449, and you can pay extra for double the eMMC storage and a faster Intel Core i5 processor, but the company isn’t yet saying how much that will cost. Another 15-inch Chromebook to rival full-sized, traditional laptops HP says the device starts shipping today from its online store, but the listing for the HP Chromebook 15 still says “coming soon,” for whatever reason. That said, the device has some impressive specs for... Continue reading… ... Read More




• Diverging paths: Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo's radically different visions | Opinion

  After decades of platform holders releasing similar hardware, we should celebrate their new, wildly different visions of gaming's future... Read More

• Super Smash Bros. Ultimate's new Stage Builder mode is recommending inappropriate content

  Stages with inappropriate images, names are being listed as "Recommended" and do not disappear when reported or blocked... Read More