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Thursday, October 11th, 2018
| Time | Event |
| 12:03a | Automated Warehouse In Tokyo Managed To Replace 90 Percent of Its Staff With Robots Japanese retailer Uniqlo in Tokyo's Ariake district has managed to cut 90% of its staff and replace them with robots that are capable of inspecting and sorting the clothing housed there. The automation also allows them to operate 24 hours a day. Quartz reports: The company recently remodeled the existing warehouse with an automated system created in partnership with Daifuku, a provider of material handling systems. Now that the system is running, the company revealed during a walkthrough of the new facility, Uniqlo has been able to cut staff at the warehouse by 90%. The Japan News described how the automation works: "The robotic system is designed to transfer products delivered to the warehouse by truck, read electronic tags attached to the products and confirm their stock numbers and other information. When shipping, the system wraps products placed on a conveyor belt in cardboard and attaches labels to them. Only a small portion of work at the warehouse needs to be done by employees, the company said." The Tokyo warehouse is just a first step in a larger plan for Uniqlo's parent company, Fast Retailing. It has announced a strategic partnership with Daifuku with the goal of automating all Fast Retailing's brand warehouses in Japan and overseas. Uniqlo plans to invest 100 billion yen (about $887 million) in the project over an unspecified timeframe. (The Japan News reported that it costs about 1 billion to 10 billion yen to automate an existing warehouse.) Uniqlo believes the system will help it minimize storage costs and, importantly, deliver products faster around the world. The company has set a target of 3 trillion yen (about $26.6 billion) in annual revenue. Last year its revenue was about 1.86 trillion yen (pdf). 
Read more of this story at Slashdot.  |
| 1:25a | Magic Leap Expands Shipments of Its AR Headset To 48 US States At the company's first developer conference, Magic Leap announced they are opening orders of the Magic Leap One Creator's Edition headset to the 48 contiguous states of the USA. If you're in Hawaii or Alaska, no dice. TechCrunch reports: Previously, you had to be in Chicago, LA, Miami, NYC, San Francisco or Seattle in order to get your hands on it. Also, if you had previously ordered the headset in one of those cities, someone would come to you, drop it off and get you set up personally. That service is expanding to 50 cities, but you also don't need to have someone set it up for you in order to buy one now. It's worth reiterating that this thing costs $2,295. The company is doing a financing plan with Affirm so that interested buyers can spread the cost of the device over 24 months.
Read more of this story at Slashdot. |
| 1:45a | Microsoft Passes Acer To Become Top 5 PC Vendors In the US During the 3rd Quarter of 2018, Microsoft reportedly broke into the top five list of PC vendors in the U.S. for the first time, thanks to its line of Surface computers, laptops, and tablets. VentureBeat reports: Q3 2018 was flat; it did not continue the growth we saw in the previous quarter. Gartner estimates that worldwide PC shipments increased 0.1 percent to 67.2 million units while IDC counts a 0.9 percent decline to 67.4 million units. Gartner's top five vendors were Lenovo, HP, Dell, Apple, and Acer (in that order) while IDC's were Lenovo, HP, Dell, Acer, and Apple (also in that order). But Gartner also provides a U.S. breakdown every quarter, and Q3 2018 was the first time that Microsoft made an appearance, displacing Acer. Microsoft is still a far cry from the other players in the top 5, and its shipments were in fact only up slightly by 11,000 units, gaining just 0.1 percentage points (to 4.1 percent market share). Still, Dell and Apple were down, and the overall U.S. market was flat (down some 50,000 units) in Q3 2018, so in that context, Surface sales are doing just fine.
Read more of this story at Slashdot. |
| 2:05a | Google Home Hub Is Nothing Like Other Google Smart Displays On Tuesday, Google announced the Google Home Hub, a 7-inch display that gives you visual information, making it easier to control smart home appliances and view photos and the weather. The unusual thing about it is that it doesn't run the smart display software that it introduced for third-party OEMs. Ars Technica explains: First, let's talk about what the third-party smart displays run. When Google created its smart display software, it also came up with a turnkey solution for OEMs. So far, we've seen Lenovo, LG, and Samsung's JBL all produce devices on the same basic platform. Just like with smartphones, these devices are all an extension of the Android/Qualcomm partnership -- they run Android Things on Qualcomm's SD624 Home Hub Platform. Android Things is Google's stripped-down version of Android that is purpose-built for IoT products, and the third-party smart displays are the first commercial devices to run the OS. Unlike regular phone Android, Android Things is not customizable by third-parties. All Android Things devices use an OS image direct from Google, and Google centrally distributes updates to all Android Things devices for three years. Android Things doesn't really have an interface. It's designed to get a device up and running and show a single app, which on the smart displays is the Google Smart Display app. Qualcomm's "Home Hub" platform was purposely built to run Android Things and this Google Assistant software -- the SD624 is for smart displays, while the less powerful SDA212 is for speakers. When it came time to build the Google Home Hub, Google didn't use any of this. After talking to Google's VP of product management, Diya Jolly, Ars Technica's Ron Amadeo discovered that the Home Hub is actually built on Google's Cast platform and uses an Amlogic chip instead of Qualcomm's SD624 Home Hub Platform. When asked why Google was using a totally different platform from the third parties, Jolly told Amadeo, "There's no particular reason. We just felt we could bring the experience to bear with Cast, and the experiences are the same. We would have easily given the third-parties Cast if they wanted it, but I think most developers are comfortable using Android Things." Amadeo seems to think it has to do with the low price, as it undercuts the cheapest third-party Google smart display (Lenovo's 8-inch model) by fifty bucks.
Read more of this story at Slashdot. |
| 7:00a | Razer Phone 2 Launches With Notch-less Display, Wireless Charging, and RGB Lighting Last November, Razer unveiled a smartphone designed for gamers who value performance and power over bells and whistles like waterproofing and wireless charging. At an event Wednesday night, Razer took the wraps off its successor, aptly named Razer Phone 2, which sports a brighter, notch-less, 5.72-inch IGZO LCD display with a 2560x1440 resolution and HDR, wireless charging, IP67 water- and dust-resistance rating, and RGB lighting behind the Razer logo on the rear. Given the addition of waterproofing and wireless charging, the Razer Phone 2 appears to be much more well-rounded than its predecessor, making the decision all the more difficult when shopping for a premium, high-end smartphone. AnandTech reports: This display is rated at 645 nits peak, up to 50% higher than the previous Razer Phone, and also supports HDR. Razer states that the display also has wide color gamut, which turns out to be 98.4% of DCI-P3. Also on the front, it has two front facing speakers in identical positions to the previous generation, and it has a front facing camera and sensor (albeit with swapped positions). That front camera is an 8MP f/2.0 unit, capable of recording at 1080p60, a user-requested feature for streaming and selfie recording. The front of the device is Corning Gorilla Glass 5, an upgrade from GG3 in the last generation. When we move to the rear, things change much more noticeably. Instead of the aluminum rear, Razer has a full Gorilla Glass 5 back, which helps enable Qi Wireless Charging, a much requested feature. This is alongside QuickCharge 4+ through a Type-C cable. On the rear we have the dual cameras, this time placed in the center just above the logo. This time around Razer has gone with a 20MP Sony IMX363 f/1.75 main camera with OIS, and an 8MP Sony IMX 351 f/2.6 telephoto camera to enable some extra zoom functionality. Below the cameras is the Razer logo, which has a full 16.8million color RGB LED underneath which users can adjust through the onboard Chroma software. The Razer Phone 2 is still very much power-focused, as it features Qualcomm's latest Snapdragon 845 CPU with a "vapor chamber cooling" which can allow the phone to draw 20-30% more power than other flagships. There's 8GB of LPDDR4X memory, 64GB of UFS storage with support for a microSD card, and a whopping 4,000mAh. Razer says their new smartphone will be priced at $799 and will start shipping in mid-November.
Read more of this story at Slashdot. |
| 8:07p | Boston Dynamics' Robot Went From a Drunk Baby To a Nimble Ninja in a Matter of Years In a new video from robotics company Boston Dynamics, which Alphabet sold to SoftBank last year, a robot is shown hopping over a log and then up a series of blocks, an activity called parkour. From a report: In previous videos, the robot did a backflip -- now it's leaping over obstacles and climbing up large, uneven stairs with fleet-footed ease. But Atlas wasn't always so graceful. In some of the first videos where Boston Dynamics' robots could walk upright, way back in 2015, Atlas lumbered through the woods, looking like it was narrowly avoiding falling with each step, rather than moving with any kind of purpose.
Read more of this story at Slashdot. |
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