Insights April 5th, 2018

In The Future of the Apple iPhone we see speculation on Apple’s new iPhone directions, SpaceX launching every two weeks, Open Data Cam, Bitcoin Mining while you brush your teeth (too stupid not to share), and YOLOv3.

Apple is working on iPhones with designs and features like nothing we’ve ever seen

Bloomberg on Wednesday issued a new report that may offer some insights into Apple’s plans for the iPhone of the future. We’re not talking about the distant future here, but rather a few years from now. The site has a good track record when it comes to Apple’s unannounced plans, so this may indeed be our first taste of things to come from the most successful consumer tech company in the world.
According to the report, Apple is working on both new designs and new features for its iPhone lineup that are unlike anything we’ve seen before from the Cupertino, California-based company. Bloomberg says Apple is internally developing “touchless gesture control” features that would let an iPhone user “perform some tasks by moving [his or her] finger close to the screen without actually tapping it.”
It’s unclear what exactly would be gained by moving one’s finger in front of the screen rather than tapping it. Apple does have several patents on glasses-free 3D display technology, however, and the company has also been researching various holographic display features. It’s possible that these touchless gestures could be tied to one of those solutions, though Bloomberg’s report makes no mention of holographic displays or glasses-free 3D images. The report does cite one unnamed source as indicating that this technology won’t make its way into Apple’s iPhone lineup for “at least two years,” if at all, so we’ll undoubtedly learn more about it soon.
Read more at BGR

SpaceX reaches the promised land of launching every two weeks

SpaceX has long talked a good game about increasing its launch cadence, but the company now appears to be delivering in a big way. After two launches in four days, the California-based company has now flown seven rockets in 2018—six Falcon 9 missions and one Falcon Heavy. That breaks down to one launch every 13 days this year.
This is a significant number because it brings the company within its longstanding goal of launching a rocket every two weeks. Indeed, at this pace, SpaceX will launch a total of 27 rockets in 2018, which is consistent with expectations set by the company’s president and chief operating officer, Gwynne Shotwell.

At the end of 2017, when the company was in the midst of shattering all of its previous launch records by flying 18 missions, Shotwell said SpaceX would aim for more in the coming year. “We will increase our cadence next year about 50 percent,” Shotwell told Space News. “We’ll fly more next year than this year, knock on wood, and I think we will probably level out at about that rate, 30 to 40 per year.”
Read more at ArsTechnica

‘Open Data Cam’

‘Open Data Cam’ is a tool that helps to quantify the world. The best thing about it: You can make it yourself! With computer vision ‘Open Data Cam’ understands and quantifies what it sees. The simple setup allows everybody to become an urban data miner.
The idea behind ‘Open Data Cam’ was to create a free, easy to use platform for detecting objects in urban settings. Creating data through real time detections can change the way we make decisions and perceive our urban surroundings. With these tools at hand, it’s up to you what you want to quantify. ‘Open Data Cam’ might help you automatically turning traffic into data or might even turn mobility into a game.
You can find out more here

BitBrush

New technology is an electric toothbrush that can mine cryptocurrency whilst you brush your teeth, incentivizing dental health with financial rewards:

bitbrush is the first toothbrush to transform your mouth into a smart mouth—converting brushing into dental currency. We call it cryptohygiene. A way to turn fighting plaque into an opportunity by mining cryptocurrency as you brush. Brushing that adds up the average person spends 852 hours brushing their teeth over their lifetime. the bitbrush makes that time work for you.

Read more here

YOLO v3

New release of Object Recognition framework offers faster and improved realtime performance:

You only look once (YOLO) is a state-of-the-art, real-time object detection system. Prior detection systems repurpose classifiers or localizers to perform detection. They apply the model to an image at multiple locations and scales. High scoring regions of the image are considered detections.
YOLOv3 uses a totally different approach. We apply a single neural network to the full image. This network divides the image into regions and predicts bounding boxes and probabilities for each region. These bounding boxes are weighted by the predicted probabilities.
 

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