In The Future Of Used Smartphones we look at the growth of the used smartphone market, Amazon’s DeepLens AI camera, Waymo’s progress with it’s self-driving car testing, the growth of solar power in the U.S. and Nikolas Badminton on the state of education in technology.

The Surprising Growth of Used Smartphones

According to the latest research from Counterpoint’s Refurbished Smartphone tracker, the global market for refurbished smartphones grew 13% y/y in 2017, reaching close to 140 million units. This was in contrast with the global new smartphone market that grew a scant 3% last year (see here), thus being outpaced by refurbished “second life” smartphones.
Refurbished smartphones are pre-owned smartphones that are collected, rejuvenated or repaired to be sold again in the market. Only 25% of all pre-owned phones are sold back into the market. Of these, only some are refurbished. The result is that there are many grades of refurbished devices that attract different price points depending on available quantity and demand for a specific model or variant (color, memory storage, etc.).
Read more at Counterpoint Research

Amazon starts shipping its $249 DeepLens AI camera for developers

Back at its re:Invent conference in November, AWS announced its $249 DeepLens, a camera that’s specifically geared toward developers who want to build and prototype vision-centric machine learning models. The company started taking pre-orders for DeepLens a few months ago, but now the camera is actually shipping to developers.
Read more at Techcrunch

Waymo has been testing self-driving cars with 400 riders in Phoenix for a year. Here’s what it’s learned so far

For slightly more than a year, 400 volunteers have tested out Waymo’s self-driving car service in Phoenix, Arizona, for free, letting the driverless vehicles whisk them to work, shopping centers, the bar, or anywhere else within a 100-square-mile area.
In that time, these riders have been filing the non-technical equivalent of bug reports, using the cars’ rider support call buttons and in-app feedback forms to point out issues with the service and highlight use cases that Waymo researchers might have missed.
Through their experiences, Waymo has learned a few things:

• It needs to get better at designating specific pick-up entrances at a store so that frustrated riders won’t have to lug shopping bags through the hot sun to reach a car
• On narrow streets, riders prefer to cross the road to reach a car, instead of having it drive to the end of a road, turn around and come back
• It needed to figure out how to accommodate people with service animals (it figured this out after a query from a passenger)
• The best way to wake sleeping passengers is with a little chime sound.

Read more at CNBC

The US has added more solar power than any other type of electricity in 2018 so far — more evidence of an energy revolution

The US added more solar power than any other type of electricity in the first quarter of 2018.
According to a new report from the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA), a nonprofit group, the US solar market added 2.5 gigawatts of new capacity in the first three months of 2018, up 13% from the first quarter of 2017.
That accounts for 55% of all US electricity added in the first quarter of 2018, including fossil fuels and other forms of renewable energy.
Read more at Business Insider

Nikolas Badminton VLOG – Universities are dying in the world of tech

Nikolas is a world-leading Futurist Speaker and is available to speak at your event. Contact him to discuss how to engage and inspire your audience. You can also see more of Nikolas’ thoughts on my Futurist Speaker VLOGs as I publish them in this Youtube playlist. Please SUBSCRIBE to my Youtube channel so that you don’t miss any as they come up. You can see more of his thoughts on Instagram, Twitter, and bookmarked research on Tumblr.