Ein Deep Dive für AI Startups – es werden AI Unternehmen kategorisiert, Risiken besprochen und der Fundraising Bedarf angesprochen.

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Ein interessanter Bericht zu den Entwicklungen bei SAP.

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Steven Sinofsky ist ein ehemaliger Präsident der Windows Division von Microsoft. Neu ist er VR Mitglied der VC Firma Andreessen Horowitz.

In seinem Beitrag fasst Sinofsky die WWDC 2017 zusammen als:

• iOS 11 is where there are significant advances in the kinds of apps that can be built for mobile devices. This comes from two areas. First, the changes to core user-interaction models for iOS bring what many believe are important features for “productivity” to the iPad (now iPad Pro). Second, new frameworks, but particularly for augmented reality, are moving well beyond incremental and addressing needs building today’s apps. Both ARKit and Core ML are likely more interesting than I think many believe — democratizing two key aspects of computer science that will clearly differentiate platforms going forward. Privacy remains an extremely core theme to how the product is evolving and how Apple thinks about the way apps are implemented.
• macOS High Sierra. Apple probably surprised people with some of the “features” in High Sierra but what should impress people more are the architecture and infrastructure advances. Apple has cleverly engineered work for iOS to “trickle down” to macOS which picks up the APFS file system and video pipeline work. These are a big deal for iOS but frankly an even bigger deal for macOS where it is much more difficult to deliver these reliably given the openness of the platform. There are a good share of advances in High Sierra that benefit developers as users (developers also includes creative professionals more broadly).
• Hardware Products. Delivering on “Pro” with the iPad Pro and iMac Pro is significant. The iMac answers the need for a high end workstation and does so with arguably the most powerful device available, yet in a sleek all-in-one form factor. The iPad Pro finally (almost?!) puts the iPad in a position to be a laptop for the masses, especially those who grew up only on phones. There’s a new holiday gift for everyone with the new home speaker HomePod, but in introducing this product Apple can take this category (if it is one) in a different direction like it did with home media players when Apple TV was introduced.

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Benedict Evens hat kurz und bündig die Neuigkeiten der WWDC 2017 von Apple zusammengefasst

Benedict Evens Newsletter vom 11.6.2017

Apple held its annual developer conference, WWDC, this week, and there was a huge number of significant announcements. It rebooted the iPad, pushed into machine learning and AR, and made a whole bunch of other interesting changes for the forthcoming iOS 11. I’ve not quite digested everything yet, but these are the main things.

iPad: Apple announced a new slightly larger iPad with a new screen, but the real story is a radical reworking of the interface. Multitasking has been completely changed, there is a new file browser that integrate with third party apps, and you can drag and drop between apps. I’ve been using the beta for a week – it makes a huge difference to what it’s like using an iPad. In addition, there are a bunch of new steps to try to make the Pencil useful for people who aren’t artists using drawing apps, around annotation and notes. You still can’t make charts in Excel for iPad, and the market for indie iPad productivity software is tough, but this feels like iPad 2.0. However, (glass half-empty), the iPad is fundamentally selling into the PC market, and that is steadily declining due to smartphones. Apple is looking for a larger share of a shrinking pie. Link

Apple announced a wireless speaker with voice control, the ‹HomePod›. This was, unusually, a pre-announcement – not on sale until the end of the year. The obvious comparison is with the Amazon Echo or Google Home, but that’s not quite right – those are end-points for a voice bot that can also play music, if you must, but they don’t sound great – this is a $300 speaker that weighs 5x the Google Home, and that also has Siri. it can play Apple Music directly, using Siri, or anything on your iPhone or iPad (including Youtube or Spotify) using Airplay over wifi. I had a demo against the Echo and Sonos 3: it sounds very good (and you can pair two of them, and do multi-room). Glass half-full: Apple kills Sonos and makes another accessory that drives iPhone repurchase. Glass half-empty: Apple is focusing on sound quality because Siri isn’t as good. Also, the pre-announcement is odd given there’s no developer story. Long term, though, software eats speakers just as it’s eating photography: this thing has the A8 chip that drove the iPhone 6, and that’s a big part of the sound quality. Link

VR: Apple announced support for external GPUs for laptops, a new high-end ‹iMac Pro› (starting at $5000) and support for VR in the next version of MacOS: there had been a lot of complaints that you couldn’t work on VR on Macs. Link

CoreML – Apple has added a machine learning layer to iOS. This does several things. First, it gives developers who use it direct and power-efficient access to the GPU, to run their ML models as fast as possible using as little battery as possible. This might prefigure the widely-rumoured dedicated machine learning chip that might be coming in the iPhone 8 this autumn. Developers can import their models into this layer from a range of widely-used existing development environments, and more importers can be added. Second, Apple is including a range of its own pre-built models around image recognition and text recognition, that any developer can pick up and use. The question of where ML is performed is still unsettled: training raw models mostly needs vast computing power and data sets in the cloud, but Google as well as Apple favors running or even enhancing models (once they’ve been built) on the device. Google also talked at IO about federated learning, in which all the devices then share their incremental training data back to a central model. The deeper point: many ML techniques are getting commoditised and pushed into developer APIs and onto devices and apps very fast. There won’t just be one Google or FB cloud that does all the ‹machine learning› – this is a foundational tech that will be in everything. Much more to come here. Link

CoreAR – as was entirely predictable, Apple has added APIs for augmented reality. The phone uses the camera and motion sensors to do rock-solid positional reaching – you can tap on your screen to place a game on a table in front of you, walk around it, wave the phone around and all the action stays locked in place. This is hard for anyone without Apple’s integrated model to match. Facebook announced its own AR APIs in the spring, but they don’t have the hardware integration (nor a history of being a reliable development partner), and this is something that naturally belongs in the operating system. AR is the hot thing now, and the demos are cool, but this is also, of course, a natural building block for the mixed reality glasses that Apple is widely rumored to be working on for sale in a couple of years (equally, the Apple Watch and AirPods are probably hardware building blocks for this). When it comes, the first apps will already be there. Link

App Store – Apple has completely redesigned the iOS App Store for the first time since it launched. The focus is on improved discoverability: apps and games are split into their own sections (stopping games from swamping everything else) and there’s much more use of video and editorial, allowing Apple’s editors to suggest possible downloads in many more ways. Charts of top downloads are less prominent and the ‹top grossing› list (which tended to be dominated by Candy-Crush-style free-to-play games with in-app payment) is gone entirely. Link

Apple also made a few interesting changes to the Store guidelines: the requirement to use Apple’s own payment method seems to have been relaxed (a big deal for publishers), apps that download simple code for teaching programming are allowed, apps for buying followers (e.g. on Instagram) are banned, app generators are banned, and you’re allowed to change your app’s icon (for example, to show a sports team logo). Link

You can now use Apple Pay to send money between individuals in iMessage – money received will be stored in a cash card within the Apple wallet app, and can be used for Apple Pay purchases but not cashed out (TBC – details are pending). iMessage is huge but Apple Pay is doing just OK, and adding P2P payments over iMessage might be a good viral hook to drive adoption. Apple is also pushing hard to get commerce merchants to adopt it, pointing to lower friction versus typing in a card and delivery address manually. Link

Business chat: Apple is making iMessage a platform. Customers can initiate a chat with a company from inside their app or from (e.g.) Siri, Apple maps or Safari; the chat happens inside iMessage and has access to all Apple APIs, so you can close a purchase using Apple Pay or send attachments or directions, without necessarily needing the user to install your app. The user has to start the session (unlike with Facebook Messenger, merchants can’t contact them first, for example to say that a package is late). This was squeezed out of the keynote for time, and it seems like one of things where the devil is in the detail: it might be a really big deal or might, like ibeacons, fade away. Link

NFC – Apple uses NFC to implement Apple Pay when you wave it at points of sale, but (unlike those Android phones that support NFC) it was never open to developers. Now any app can use the NFC hardware in an iPhone or Watch. Use-cases beyond contactless payment and train tickets are not that widespread yet, but at least the capability is there. Link

Apple is adding metrics to its podcasts app, so publishers will know how many people listened and for how long. Podcasts are an interesting emerging media form with a real ad business attached (possible several hundred million dollars already), but since consumption is in third-party apps no-one knows really knew what the audience was. Apple’s podcasts app is probably the largest client, so this is a big deal. Link

Finally, screenshots. It’s pretty clear that smartphone screenshots are the new PDF – a universal data exchange format. iOS 11 will have a dedicated workflow: screenshots now float in a corner once taken and you can tap to mark up, scribble and crop before sharing them right away. Now, if only metadata and a deep-link to wherever you took the screenshot was attached, this could be a whole new paradigm…

Die Hardis Group hat vor 2 Jahren eine Drohne präsentiert, die in Paletten Lagerhäuser Inventur machen kann. Diese Drohne hat den einen Innovationspreis des SITL in 2015 gewonnen. Hier das Fun Video.

Cornell University NY veröffentlichte eine Studie, in der Experten ihre Erwartungen teilen, wann AI menschliche Leistung in welchem Gebiet übertreffen wird:

1. In 2 Jahren Angry Birds
2. In 15 Jahren ein Einzelhandelsangestellter
3. In 30 Jahren ein Autor oder ein Chirurg
4. In knapp 50 Jahren eine Artificial General Intelligence

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Dieses Video wurde heute an Apples World Wide Developer Conference als Intro gezeigt.

Die NZZ am Sonntag schreibt heute über den Prosument als Kostensparmassnahme.

Die Einkäufe scannen, Koffer einchecken, Überweisungen eintippen, Tickets daheim ausdrucken – die Kunden arbeiten mit, ohne etwas dafür zu bekommen. Warum lassen wir uns das bieten?

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Der Internet Trend Report von Mary Meeker ist von Kpcb ist da. Wie immer ein Highlight

Intel liess 500 Drohnen mit je einer LED Lampe fliegen. Das Resultat: Eine Lightshow in einer neuen Dimension. Das wird man wohl noch mehr zu sehen bekommen.

Tesla hat ein Video seines im Test befindlichen Autopiloten veröffentlicht. Der Autopilot ist noch nicht verfügbar, die Hardware wird aber bald bereits verbaut und soll per Software Update später verfügbar gemacht werden. Ein guter Einblick, wie autonomes Fahren aussehen kann.

[Quelle: TechCrunch]

Was geschieht, wenn mehrere Forscher von bekannten Universitäten wie Stanford oder Harvard zu Artificial Intelligence (AI) eine 52 seitige Studie verfassen? Eine der umfangreichsten, verständlichsten und durchdachtesten Dokumente zu AI, die ich bis jetzt gesehen habe. Diskutiert wird:

• Was ist AI? Wie ist AI entstanden?
• Wie wird AI Branchen in den nächsten 15 Jahren verändern?
• Wie ist AI politisch zu begegnen?

Falls Ihr einen deep dive wollt – voilà!

Studie Übersicht

PDF Link

Wie entsteht ein Stau? Was können wir tun, damit der Verkehr flüssiger fährt? Wie werden autonom fahrende Autos den Verkehr verbessern und Staus reduzieren? Stau erklärt in 5 Min.