List of All Articles with Tag 'tec'

Product kiosks are popping up at Costco locations, casting doubt over the role of human product demonstrators.

Warner Bros. Discovery Inc. is close to offering an expanded slate of live sports on its Max streaming

The introduction of robots into businesses actually slows – at least at first, according to a new study. Researchers found that the introduction of robots bring down profit margins. But as they technology becomes better integrated, it will start to rise again, the study found. Researchers believe that U-shaped curve comes about because of reduced costs, new processes and innovative products. When companies first adopt robots with the aim of reducing costs, competitors are able to do the same, and so profit margins do not initially grow. The real profits come, however, when the robots are properly adopted and integrated into the company’s processes, and they can use that new innovation to develop new products, the researchers suggest. Those are the findings from a new study from the University of Cambridge and published in IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management. While robots are known to increase productivity when looking at a whole industry or country, it is less clear whether it helps with profit margins. The researchers set out to answer that question and see whether companies were using robots to improve processes within companies. And they were also looking to understand whether it had followed the same perhaps unexpected trajectory as when computers were first introduced into businesses. “If you look at how the introduction of computers affected productivity, you actually see a slowdown in productivity growth in the 1970s and early 1980s, before productivity starts to rise again, which it did until the financial crisis of 2008,” said co-author Professor Chander Velu from Cambridge’s Institute for Manufacturing. “It’s interesting that a tool meant to increase productivity had the opposite effect, at least at first. We wanted to know whether there is a similar pattern with robotics.” To find out, researchers gathered data for 25 European countries that showed industry-level trends between 1995 and 2017. That data did not include specific companies but did allow them to see whole sectors. They then gathered robotics data from the International Federation of Robotics (IFR). By setting the two against each other, they were able to see how the adoption of robotics changed profit margins. There they found that U-shaped curve: that the adoption of robotics drove down profits, initially, even if it came back eventually. “Initially, firms are adopting robots to create a competitive advantage by lowering costs,” said Velu. “But process innovation is cheap to copy, and competitors will also adopt robots if it helps them make their products more cheaply. This then starts to squeeze margins and reduce profit margin.” Read More Apple planning new version of AirTags – but not for some time Algorithm finds 600-foot, ‘potentially hazardous’ asteroid near Earth Reddit closes Place after obscene protests Apple planning new version of AirTags – but not for some time Algorithm finds 600-foot, ‘potentially hazardous’ asteroid near Earth Reddit closes Place after obscene protests

Threads, Meta's Twitter rival, is struggling to retain users roughly a month after its highly publicized launch, according to fresh industry estimates showing that app engagement has fallen to new lows.

Apple is planning a new version of its AirTags trackers – but they might not arrive for some time, according to a new report. The company launched its AirTags in April 2021. Since then they have attracted some criticism but also proven popular as a simple way for iPhone owners to track the location of objects such as bags and keys. There have been few rumours about a possible new version of the trackers. But Apple is planning one, according to a report from usually reliable Apple analyst Ming-chi Kuo. But those new trackers will not arrive until late next year or even later, he reported. The company is not planning to put the second-generation AirTags into mass production until the fourth quarter of 2024, he reported. It is unclear what features the new version could have. But Mr Kuo suggested that one change would be better integration with Apple’s upcoming augmented reality headset, the Vision Pro. “I believe that spatial computing is a new ecosystem that Apple wants to build, using Vision Pro as the core to integrate other devices, including AirTag 2,” he wrote. That would presumably include ways of allowing the Vision Pro to show the location of AirTags overlaid on top of the real world, for instance. But it might also bring more deep integration. Apple has long been working on ways to allow for its devices to understand where others are in space, which might rely on some of the same technology currently found in the AirTags. Apple’s AirTags have been met with a largely positive reception, and there are few obvious opportunities for improvement in a new generation. But they did receive some heavy criticism for enabling stalkers to track people by placing AirTags on them without their knowledge – which led to a number of changes, including more messages alerting people when a tracker appears to be moving with them. Read More The iPhone 15 is going to help Apple achieve one very big dream New iPhone might have a mysterious button on its side – and this is what it could do iPhone users urged to check their photo library amid fears they could be deleted

An algorithm has spotted a nearly 600-foot, potentially hazardous asteroid near Earth. The tool is intended to find dangerous objects in Earth’s vicinity, to allow scientists to better track them and understand any threat they might pose. The new discovery is the system’s first detection of a “potentially hazardous” asteroid, a term that is used for those rocks that are near enough and possibly threatening enough to cause a danger to Earth. An asteroid gets the designation if it is within about 5 million miles of Earth’s orbit. The asteroid, known as 2022 SF289, does not pose any threat to Earth for the foreseeable future. Its closest approach brings it 140,000 miles from Earth – closer to us than the Moon, but still far enough away to be safe. But the creators of the algorithm said that it showed that the system could be used to detect others in the future – some of which may pose a threat to life on Earth. “By demonstrating the real-world effectiveness of the software that Rubin will use to look for thousands of yet-unknown potentially hazardous asteroids, the discovery of 2022 SF289 makes us all safer,” said scientist Ari Heinze, the principal developer of the algorithm, known as HelioLinc3D. Astronomers are looking forward to switching on the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, in Chile, in 2025. It will allow for a much more detailed view of the night sky. They hope that it can be used to spot more potentially hazardous asteroids, or PHAs. But the extra detail will also make more work for those poring through the data to find them, and so algorithms will be important to helping that work. HelioLinc3D is one such algorithm, and was built specifically to find asteroids within the Rubin observatory’s dataset. Though the equipment is not yet switched on, its creators looked to test whether it would successfully be able to find asteroids when it is looking through that data. The discovery of 2022 SF289 suggests that it will be. It was found in data from the ATLAS survey, based in Hawaii. ATLAS had actually seen the object three times on four separate nights, but an asteroid has to be seen four times on one night to be identified as a near-Earth object. “Any survey will have difficulty discovering objects like 2022 SF289 that are near its sensitivity limit, but HelioLinc3D shows that it is possible to recover these faint objects as long as they are visible over several nights,” said Denneau. “This in effect gives us a ‘bigger, better’ telescope.” Until now it had also been missed because it was passing in front of the busy and bright stars of the Milky Way. But scientists were able to confirm the existence of the object by looking back through data when they knew where to look. Scientists are aware of 2,350 PHAs already, but expect there are 3,000 out there waiting to be found. “This is just a small taste of what to expect with the Rubin Observatory in less than two years, when HelioLinc3D will be discovering an object like this every night,” said Rubin scientist Mario Jurić, director of the DiRAC Institute, professor of astronomy at the University of Washington and leader of the team behind HelioLinc3D. “But more broadly, it’s a preview of the coming era of data-intensive astronomy. From HelioLinc3D to AI-assisted codes, the next decade of discovery will be a story of advancement in algorithms as much as in new, large, telescopes.” Read More Reddit closes Place after obscene protests Kenya suspends eyeball-scanning crypto worldcoin Google warns Gmail users they could be about to lose their account Reddit closes Place after obscene protests Kenya suspends eyeball-scanning crypto worldcoin Google warns Gmail users they could be about to lose their account

Reddit has closed the official forum for its collaborative experiment Place after users filled it with explicit messages directed at the company’s management. Reddit Place launched for the third time last month, allowing all users to fill in the pixels of a 1-million-pixel canvas. The six day project came amid protests against Reddit introducing charges that forced third-party apps to close, with chief executive Steve ‘Spez’ Huffman becoming a target of explicit graffiti on the r/Place canvas. One week after the experiment ended, Reddit announced that no posts or comments would be allowed on the r/Place sub-reddit, which had become a focal point for the ongoing protests against Mr Huffman and the rest of Reddit’s management. “This community will no longer be open for posting or commenting,” a post pinned to the r/place sub-reddit stated. “Thank you to everyone who participated in r/place 2023. Until we meet again.” The post received 7,000 upvotes but the top comment, which stated “F**k u/SPEZ”, received more than 17,000. The final version of the r/Place canvas included dozens of similar messages directed at Mr Huffman, with some Reddit users accusing admins of censoring parts of the canvas. The Place experiment was pushed back several times in an effort to avoid coinciding with the worst of the protests, which had seen thousands of high-profile Reddit communities go dark in an effort to force the company into rescinding the proposed API charges to third-party apps like Apollo. These demands were ignored, and most Reddit communities have since returned to normal operations. The company acknowledged the poor timing of the collaborative art experiment by including the tagline: “Right place, wrong time.” Reddit did not respond to a request for comment from The Independent about the protests. Read More Reddit protests see r/Place experiment immediately hijacked with grotesque graffiti Kenya suspends eyeball-scanning crypto worldcoin Google warns Gmail users they could be about to lose their account

Analysts don’t quite know what to make of Coinbase Global Inc.’s valuation. The stock has jumped almost 80%

Dressed in the gray suit of a private equity boss, but with a rose-tinted button-down shirt and a

The US women’s team barely made it through the group stage at the World Cup, and for the

A man who has spent 'millions' trying to biologically lower his age in order to live longer reveals he drinks alcohol every morning for breakfast. Bryan Johnson, 45, has the 'biological age' of an 18-year-old, and is projected to live to be 200. He made the shocking confession on Steven Bartlett's Diary Of A CEO podcast, where he told of how his final meal of the day is done by 11am. Johnson says he loves wine, and would have 3oz with his breakfast before it became too expensive. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter

Expedia Group Inc. reported second-quarter revenue that missed analysts’ estimates, signaling a potential slowdown in travel demand as