Amazon has agreed to acquire iRobot, the maker of the Roomba robot vacuum cleaner, for $1.7B. The deal is part of Amazon's efforts to expand its presence in the robotics sector. More: - iRobot was founded in 1990 by Colin Angle, Rodney Brooks, and Helen Greiner, all of whom were members of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
- The company is most well known for the Roomba robot vacuum cleaner brand, which sold over 30 million units as of 2020.
- Prior to Amazon's decision to acquire iRobot, the Roomba already employed Amazon's Alexa virtual assistant technology and relied on servers provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS).
- In 2012, Amazon purchased warehouse automation firm Kiva Systems for $775M, renaming it Amazon Robotics.
- Amazon released the Amazon Astro robot in 2021 to a mixed reception.
- The iRobot deal is one of the largest acquisitions in Amazon's history.
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South Korea launched its first lunar orbiter on Thursday. The mission is part of the country's plans to build a space program capable of landing a probe on the surface of the moon by 2030. More: - The orbiter was launched from Cape Canaveral on a rocket provided by SpaceX.
- The device is expected to reach the lunar orbit in December, at which point it will begin orbiting the moon for a year.
- If the orbiter is successful, South Korea will follow China, Japan, and India as the fourth Asian country to launch a lunar explorer.
- The orbiter's mission will include gathering data about the moon's environment, testing space-based internet technology, and identifying sites for potential lunar missions in the future.
- South Korea insists that its space ambitions are peaceful and that any military uses of its space program are exclusively for defense.
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Atlassian showed strong results in its Q4 earnings report. The Australia-based collaboration software firm's revenue rose by 36% year over year, surpassing expectations. It posted a net loss of $105.5M, due in part to a 14-day outage in April. More: - Atlassian's earnings of 27 cents per share matched expectations, while its revenue of $760M beat forecasts by $36M.
- The company announced that it had 242,623 customers, 323 more than what was predicted by analysts polled by StreetAccount.
- Atlassian said that it will soon hire Joe Binz as its new Chief Financial Officer.
- Binz has 25 years of experience in finance roles at companies including Microsoft and Intel.
- "We believe we have massive opportunities in front of us in all three of our markets," said CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes in a conference call -- the three markets are agile development, IT service management, and general work management.
- Atlassian's shares jumped by as much as 12% following the publication of the report.
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Autonomous Vehicle firm Argo AI is forming a safety panel. The Argo Safety Advisory Council will be staffed by experts from outside the company to provide advice as the firm seeks to roll out its technology. More: - The start-up, backed by Volkswagen and Ford, is getting ready to roll out an autonomous microtransit delivery service in 2025.
- The company has tested its vehicles in several cities including Austin, Texas, Miami, and Washington, DC.
- Argo AI’s vehicles have reportedly been involved in ten crashes, including one that resulted in two hospitalizations.
- The new safety panel is intended to increase the transparency of the company's technology in the hopes that it will improve public perceptions of autonomous vehicles.
- A 2021 survey by the Pew Research Center revealed that 44% of Americans consider autonomous vehicles a "bad idea" for society.
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 A message from WIND RIVER Can a real-time operating system fill your embedded system needs? A real-time operating system (RTOS) is an operating system with two key features: predictability and determinism. In an RTOS, repeated tasks are performed within a tight time boundary, while in a general-purpose operating system, this is not necessarily so. Predictability and determinism, in this case, go hand in hand: We know how long a task will take, and that it will always produce the same result. - Determinism: Repeating an input will result in the same output.
- High performance: RTOS systems are fast and responsive, often executing actions within a small fraction of the time needed by a general OS.
- Safety and security: As RTOSes are frequently used in critical systems, such as robotics or flight controllers, they must have higher security standards and more reliable safety features.
- Priority-based scheduling: Actions are scheduled according to their assigned priority; the most important tasks come first.
- Small footprint: Versus their hefty general OS counterparts, RTOSes weigh in at just a fraction of the size: Windows 10, with post-install updates, takes up approximately 20 GB. VxWorks, on the other hand, is measured in the low single-digit megabytes.
In this webinar, we'll go through some of the features of real-time operating systems that can revolutionize your embedded development process, and make sure that an RTOS is the right solution for your use-case. Watch Now
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The U.K. Parliament closed its TikTok account on Wednesday. The move comes after parliamentarians expressed concern that TikTok may be used as a surveillance tool by the Chinese government. More: - The decision to shut down the parliament's TikTok account came only a week after the account was opened.
- Senior members of parliament penned a letter to the speakers of the House of Commons and the House of Lords claiming that the new account threatened data security.
- The letter expressed concern about the relationship that ByteDance, Tiktok's parent company, has with the Chinese government.
- Data from European TikTok users is stored in Singapore and the U.S. and can reportedly be accessed by Chinese employees.
- TikTok claimed that engineers in China have only limited access to data stored around the world.
- The company intends to establish a data storage facility in Ireland in 2023.
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Africa-focused Beacon Power Services (BPS) raised a $2.7M seed round. The U.S.- and Nigeria-based company works to improve electricity access in sub-Saharan Africa by developing locally-tailored solutions. More: - The funding round was led by Seedstars Africa Ventures. Other participants included Persistent Energy, Kepple Africa Ventures, Factor[e], and Oridun Capital Management.
- BPS began in Nigeria as a single utility and has since expanded to include four utilities serving over 8 million customers across two countries.
- The company focuses on developing solutions that "address the unique infrastructure challenges Africa faces," said CEO Bimbola Adisa.
- BPS has developed proprietary analytics and grid-management platforms that help utilities identify and quickly respond to outages.
- Sub-Saharan African utilities tend to have limited data concerning their assets, customers, and the relationship between their assets and customers.
- BPS has built a platform that helps African utilities digitize their data in ways that take into account local issues, such as poor address systems.
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- Tesla's shareholders approved a 3-1 stock split at the company's annual shareholder's meeting on Thursday. After the results of the vote are confirmed, Tesla's board of directors will decide when the split will take place.
- Meta has paid influencers to help it test its new platform "Super". The platform will give influencers the tools to host livestreams, engage with viewers, and earn revenue. The platform began development in 2020.
- Google Search will add a new feature that bolds certain texts in the snippets that appear beneath a search result. The bolded text will appear when a user searches a phrase in quotation marks. This will make it easier to identify if the phrase is in the article before selecting it.
- Binance has denied that it owns India-based crypto platform WazirX. The claim comes over two years after the crypto exchange announced that it "had acquired" the company.
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 |  | Gregory Bridgman is a writer and researcher with an academic background in politics and the philosophy of science and technology. He holds a BA from the University of Cape Town, an MS from University College London, and is currently completing a PhD at the University of Cambridge. He is interested in climate issues, technological changes, and the implications of the fourth industrial revolution. Please feel free to contact me at gregory@inside.com! | | | | Editor | Eduardo Garcia is a writer and editor based in New York. He is the author of "Things You Can Do," an illustrated book about climate action. Bylines in The New York Times, The Guardian, Slate, Scientific American, and others. In one of his previous lives, Eduardo worked as a Reuters correspondent in Latin America for nearly a decade. | |
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For nearly 35 years, VxWorks has been used to ensure the security, safety, and reliability you need to design and build mission-critical embedded systems that simply must work.
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