Tag: pay

Ford is betting its future on an electric Mustang SUV

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People want to drive gas-guzzling SUVs. The demand for them, along with trucks, is continuing to grow so much that it could even outweigh the carbon-emission benefit gains made by all electric vehicles . That is, unless the car industry builds electric SUVs. That’s what the Ford Motor Company is doing. Today, the company is unveiling an electric SUV called the Mustang Mach-E (though details were leaked earlier this week). Unlike many electric cars, which tend to be smaller sedans that car companies often release to keep regulators happy, this car was designed from the ground up to fit right in with the rest of Ford’s famed Mustang sports cars. Except, of course, that you can’t rev the engine since you don’t need any gas (though the car’s performance version can still go from zero to 60 in about three and a half seconds). [Photo: courtesy of Ford Motor Company] The electric SUV, which will be delivered to customers in late 2020, is the first vehicle that was shepherded from start to finish by Ford CEO Jim Hackett, who took the company’s top job in 2017 and previously helmed the furniture manufacturer Steelcase. While Hackett has announced a renewed emphasis on electric cars and hybrids, with an announcement in 2018 that Ford would release 40 nongas cars by 2022, this is the first tangible evidence of his strategy—and the first evidence of how his emphasis on the Ideo brand of design thinking might pay off for the 116-year-old automaker. The rationale for an electric SUV Hackett says that there were plans for a new Ford electric car already underway when he joined the company, but that he and his team decided to scrap it and start afresh. “I was imbuing this notion that design is going to rule here,” Hackett says. “[My team] said, this doesn’t meet the measure of any of that. So we said, we have to tear it up.” Instead of building yet another “science project,” as Hackett called previous electric cars in our conversation, Ford decided to focus instead on macro trends to find a form factor that might actually be profitable for the company ( like most manufacturers , Ford has never built a profitable electric car). The most important trend? If you take fuel efficiency off the table, people want larger cars. Ford Motor Company CEO Jim Hackett [Photo: courtesy of Ford Motor Company] “People have voiced that when fuel prices are low, they want larger silhouettes,” Hackett says. “That’s what customers are telling us Read More …

This is the computer you’ll wear on your face in 10 years

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Snap’s new Spectacles 3 don’t look that different from their predecessors . They consist of a metal designer frame with a couple of HD cameras. In exchange for the embarrassment of wearing them, the Spectacles 3 offer the chance to shoot 3D video hands-free and then upload it to the Snapchat app, where it can be further affected. And that’s pretty much it. You can’t view the video, or anything else, in the lenses. There are no embedded displays. Still, the new Spectacles foreshadow a device that many of us may wear as our primary personal computing device in about 10 years. Based on what I’ve learned by talking AR with technologists in companies big and small, here is what such a device might look like and do.   Unlike Snap’s new goggles, future glasses will overlay digital content over the real-world imagery we see through the lenses. We might even wear mixed reality (MR) glasses that can realistically intersperse digital content within the layers of the real world in front of us. The addition of the second camera on the front of the new Spectacles is important because in order to locate digital imagery within reality, you need a 3D view of the world, a depth map. The Spectacles derive depth by combining the input of the two HD cameras on the front, similar to the way the human eye does it. The Spectacles use that depth mapping to shoot 3D video to be watched later, but that second camera is also a step toward supporting mixed reality experiences in real time. Future AR/MR glasses will look a little less conspicuous than the Spectacles. They’ll be lightweight and comfortable; the companies that make them will want users to wear them all day. They may look like regular plastic frames. Since they are a fashion accessory, they’ll come in many styles and color combinations. The glasses will have at least two cameras on the front—perhaps not quite so obvious as the ones on the Spectacles. They may also have an additional, dedicated depth camera, something like the TrueDepth camera on newer iPhones. Read More …

How this program turns ordinary teens into tech superheroes

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In 2016, Ananya Chadha was just a regular 14-year-old girl struggling to fit in at her high school in Toronto. She often had sci-fi-inspired fantasies about building futuristic technologies like jet-pack shoes, going so far as to look into where she could buy parts. Then one day two brothers, Navid and Nadeem Nathoo, came to her school and described a new type of educational program they started called The Knowledge Society , or TKS. “They talked about essentially creating the next Elon Musk,” recalls Chadha, now 18 years old. “When they talked about taking crazy ideas and unconventional paths and making it real, I was like ‘Wow, I need this.’” It would sound like a rip-off of a classic superhero story if it weren’t completely true: ordinary teenagers being recruited into an elite program designed to give them the power to do extraordinary things, and maybe even save the world. While many programs like Code for America and the Flatiron School focus on teaching entrepreneurship or tech skills to high school students, TKS, which was founded in 2016, is unique for giving students both the hard skills they need to build next-generation solutions to some of the world’s biggest problems as well as the soft skills they need to communicate and create them. Ananya Chadha at TKShowcase [Photo: courtesy of TKS] Soon after enrolling in the program, Chadha was working in a gene-editing lab, where she discovered a problem with the homogeny of samples used in data sets. That inspired her to develop a blockchain-based application that compensates users for uploading anonymous genetic information to help diversify the data pool. After the app, G-gnome, was acquired by a blockchain startup, she switched her focus to computer-human interfaces. In 2018 Chadha secured a sponsorship from Microsoft to build a remote control car that she can control by meditating . Today she interns for IBM. “What I found unique was their ability to connect advances in bleeding-edge technologies to tackle hard problems our society faces on daily basis,” says Piotr Mierzejewski, the director of Db2  deployment for IBM Data and AI. “These young minds don’t seem to be discouraged by how hard and complex problems they are trying to solve are; they simply face the challenge to find solutions.” In recent months Chadha has presented her work at some of the biggest technology conferences in the world, she was named to the 2019 class of Canada’s Developer 30-Under-30 , and she won First Prize in engineering.com’s Impossible Science Challenge. Chadha, however, is just one of almost 400 students who have achieved incredible feats after enrolling in TKS. Building the next Elon Musk After the Nathoos spent three years developing the program in Toronto and Waterloo, TKS is expanding to New York, Boston, Las Vegas, and Ottawa in the fall— enrolling 80 students in each new chapter—and offering a new program in Toronto for students as young as nine. Navid and Nadeem-Natho [Photo: courtesy of TKS] “The whole reason why we’re scaling is because I strongly believe that we are not short on human potential,” says Navid Nathoo. Read More …