General Motors is “still on track” to launch autonomous vehicles in a "ridesharing network" in 2019, “but as always, we will be gated by safety,” said CEO Mary Barra on a conference call with investors about SoftBank Vision Fund’s $2.25 billion investment in GM Cruise (see 1805310003). That GM is testing AVs in “a complex urban environment” in downtown San Francisco “gives us a dramatic increase in the rate of learning that we have,” the CEO said Thursday. Having all AV development “under one roof” in the GM Cruise subsidiary “is unique in this space, and we think it is a very important ingredient to have the speed at which we can develop these vehicles safely,” she said. SoftBank “affords us a new source of capital as we look to scale this business,” said GM President Dan Ammann.
Roku landed publication Thursday of a U.S. patent application describing an “example apparatus” for skipping portions of content on a streaming device that are “of little or no interest to the user,” using metadata stored in the device’s database for triggering a “skip command.” On-demand availability of content “is commonplace,” but the “electronic and computerized storage and delivery of content offers the potential for far more than just the availability and vanilla playback of content,” said the application (2018/0152489) filed in November 2016, listing CEO Anthony Wood and Vice President-Intellectual Property Joseph Hollinger as inventors. “It is possible to generate content recommendations that are tailored for individual users, as well as to customize the viewing experience to each user's personal preferences.” Existing devices and services “fall short in many areas” in that regard, it said. Many force users to experience content in a “linear manner, requiring them to view portions of content having little or no interest,” it said. “Too often, media systems and services fail to leverage the immense knowledge base of the Internet and other sources when presenting content to users.” Though streaming content may be readily available on an on-demand basis, “related information is not, at least not in an easily accessible manner,” it said.
U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer should “do everything possible” to address China’s allegedly unfair trade practices without “imposing tariffs” or enacting measures that “might harm large numbers" of U.S. workers, consumers and businesses, said a Wednesday letter signed by 34 House Democrats and Republicans and released Thursday. The letter to Lighthizer comes before the USTR's office releases its final list of duties by June 15 and a day after the White House announced its decision to proceed with the tariffs on Chinese imports (see 1805290046).
New “trade taxes” will “increase consumer prices, decrease jobs and weaken the US economy,” tweeted CTA President Gary Shapiro Tuesday, hours after the White House announced it will go through with 25 percent tariffs on Chinese imports after the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative releases its final tariffs list by June 15 (see 1805290046). CTA otherwise was silent on the Trump administration's decision to proceed with tariffs, while other tech groups denounced it. CTA "remains opposed" to the use of tariffs to address the "imbalance" in the U.S.-China trade relationship "because of the high likelihood of short- and long-term negative consequences to our own economy and to our member companies," it testified May 16 at a USTR hearing (see 1805160020).
Analog Devices is participating in “virtually all” the 5G “field trials" that are taking place "across the globe,” said CEO Vincent Roche on a Wednesday earnings call. Roche's "sense" is that the U.S. and China will take the lead in “trialing” some 5G “particular applications” in the 2019-2020 “time frame,” he said. “China will get faster to mass market, I think, with what they call 5G, which is really to me 4-and-a-half-G with massive MIMO.” Roche sees “pure 5G” taking shape commercially in the 2024-2025 time frame, he said. That’s when “the core network gets changed,” he said. With 5G, “an entirely new wireless and wireline network architecture will ultimately be needed to meet the demands for orders-of-magnitude increases in bandwidth-hungry areas,” such as HD video streaming, said Roche. Though 5G will provide “revolutionary capabilities,” the transition “will be evolutionary,” he said. Adding massive MIMO will be the “first phase” and will “provide a significant increase to the capacity of the current 4G wireless network,” he said. A massive MIMO system “can deliver a greater than 3X data capacity increase in the same spectrum of a current 4G base station,” he said.
Much of the tech industry -- though CTA was silent -- blasted the Trump administration Tuesday for announcing it plans to go ahead with 25 percent Trade Act Section 301 tariffs on $50 billion worth of Chinese imports. The products affected won’t be known until the U.S. Trade Representative's office releases its final tariffs list by June 15. Tariffs will be imposed “shortly thereafter,” said the White House.
CTA, the National Retail Federation and 50 other trade groups from various industries want the U.S. Trade Representative’s office to “immediately make public” the details of the Trade Act Section 301 "process" it will use to add more Chinese-sourced products to the proposed 25 percent tariffs list, if it heeds the suggestions of "several stakeholders” to do so, they said in comments posted Thursday in docket USTR-2018-0005. “We strongly believe there needs to be additional public input for any products that USTR is considering adding to the proposed list,” said the comments, which also were signed by the Information Technology Industry Council, the Internet Association and the Telecommunications Industry Association.
Since KFPH-CD Channel 35, a Univision-owned Class A station in the Phoenix market, became “the first stick to go up” in the Pearl TV-led ATSC 3.0 model-market project (see 1804080002), “we’re getting a lot of emails from consumers,” Pearl Managing Director Anne Schelle, told the ATSC Next Gen TV Conference Monday. In the emails, initiated through the model-market project website that went live during last month’s NAB Show, consumers are “asking when they can buy this new service,” said Schelle.
Looming commercialization of consumer 8K displays is stirring cinematographer debate, David Stump, director-photography for the American Society of Cinematographers, told a Display Week conference in Los Angeles Monday. Resolution in 8K “exceeds the human visual acuity and therefore is trying to solve a problem, at least in some display cases, that doesn’t exist,” said Stump, whose credits include X-Men. “I’m working with a company who are building a 16K camera and who are specifically tailoring that 16K camera to a giant LED display system that is pixel for pixel the same resolution as the camera itself.” For Hollywood, “there comes a tradeoff in economics,” said Stump. “Is the amount of storage required to shoot a 4K or even an 8K project justified in the face of where it will be displayed and at what size it will be displayed? How many screen heights away from the screen do we sit on average to actually view content?”
The mobile business “is standing on the cusp of its own quantum leap” with the looming introduction of 5G, said Sumit Sadana, Micron Technology chief business officer, at a company investor day Monday. “If you see the type of improvement in download speeds that are possible with 5G,” 100 times those of 4G/LTE, “the important thing here is any time networks speeds go up by such a big magnitude, it enables massive amounts of innovation that are very difficult to foresee,” said Sadana. The 5G connections will be “significantly faster” than all the “high-bandwidth wired connections all of you have at home,” he said. “Imagine having all of that capability in your cellphone and all around us for machine-to-machine communication, which is going to become really a big growth driver once 5G comes along and is deployed in full volume.” 5G is “an extraordinarily important development which will enable you to download a 4K movie onto your mobile device within seconds -- just amazing capability,” he said. Micron sees 5G as bringing “really a complete transformation of important applications that drive real value for our customers, and that is not going to be possible without more memory and more storage inside the smartphone,” he said. The company thinks the 1-terabyte smartphone will become “pretty common” in the 2021 “time frame,” he said.