Amazon announced Thursday the launch of its new app for Amazon One, its contactless palm recognition service that allows customers to hover their palm over a device in order to purchase from select places, including over 500 Whole Foods Market stores, Amazon stores, and more than 150 third-party locations.
Instead of signing up for Amazon One at a physical retail location, users can now download the Amazon One app (available for iOS or Android devices) and take a photo of their palm right at home.
The company explains that all palm images taken via the new app are encrypted and sent to a secure Amazon One domain in the AWS cloud.
Amazon says that Amazon One has been used over 8 million times.
The app launch follows Amazon’s expansion of the technology for enterprise identity purposes, which gives companies the ability to authenticate employees when entering.
Google.org, Google’s charitable wing, is launching a new program to help fund nonprofits developing tech that leverages generative AI.
Called Google.org Accelerator: Generative AI, the program is to be funded by $20 million in grants and include 21 nonprofits to start, including Quill.org, a company creating AI-powered tools for student writing feedback, and World Bank, which is building a generative AI app to make development research more accessible.
“Generative AI can help social impact teams be more productive, creative and effective in serving their communities,” Annie Lewin, director of global advocacy at Google.org, said in a blog post.
But there remain significant barriers for nonprofits looking to build their own AI solutions or adopt third-party products — chiefly cost, resources and time.
Nonprofit accelerator Fast Forward said that this year, more than a third of applicants for its latest class were AI companies.
0G Labs, a web3 infrastructure firm,” has raised $35 million in a pre-seed round, the team exclusively told TechCrunch.
“In order to build the basic technology, we wanted to raise $5 million, originally,” said 0G co-founder Michael Heinrich.
0G, sometimes called ZeroGravity, is creating a modular AI blockchain that aims to alleviate the pain points of on-chain AI applications in the web3 ecosystem, like speed and cost efficiency.
On-chain AI and gaming requires a fast data pipeline.
It also plans to enable new use cases and things that were not possible before like on-chain AI, on-chain gaming and high-frequency decentralized finance (DeFi).
Social network X (formerly Twitter) launched new top-up packs for its developer API program on Tuesday.
Last year, Elon Musk curtailed free API access and released new paid tiers with the basic level starting at $100 per month.
With the new top-up launch, the social network said that there are also limits to the number of upgrades developers can purchase.
Developers with basic tier are capped at 10 top-ups and developers with pro tier are capped at 5 top-ups per month.
The company’s alternations to its API rules also impacted researchers and their ability to study the platform’s data.
One Bay Area startup called Amber thinks it can help them navigate that minefield, starting with Tesla owners.
When owners file a claim, Amber works with qualified repair shops to find the right parts and fix what’s wrong, and will transport the vehicle.
AmberCare is the latest addition to a growing economy built around used EVs.
One group is anyone who is looking to buy a used EV but is scared away by the thought of expensive, time-consuming repairs.
There are other unexpected things to consider in the process of repairing an EV that Pak thinks AmberCare can help with, like transportation.
When it comes to design, it definitely looks like a Cowboy bike with its pill-shaped front light, angular design and soft matte colors.
Again, everything has been designed to make the Cowboy Cross more comfortable than existing Cowboy bikes.
There are two designs for the aluminum frame as the Cowboy Cross is available in step-over and step-through variants.
So it’s going to be important to make sure that the Cowboy Cross can easily be maintained over the long haul.
“There was a big overlap of customers considering both VanMoof and Cowboy bikes,” Roose said.
At its GTC conference, Nvidia today announced Nvidia NIM, a new software platform designed to streamline the deployment of custom and pre-trained AI models into production environments.
NIM takes the software work Nvidia has done around inferencing and optimizing models and makes it easily accessible by combining a given model with an optimized inferencing engine and then packing this into a container, making that accessible as a microservice.
Nvidia is already working with Amazon, Google and Microsoft to make these NIM microservices available on SageMaker, Kubernetes Engine and Azure AI, respectively.
Some of the Nvidia microservices available through NIM will include Riva for customizing speech and translation models, cuOpt for routing optimizations and the Earth-2 model for weather and climate simulations.
“Created with our partner ecosystem, these containerized AI microservices are the building blocks for enterprises in every industry to become AI companies.”
India is walking back on a recent AI advisory after receiving criticism from many local and global entrepreneurs and investors.
The Ministry of Electronics and IT shared an updated AI advisory with industry stakeholders on Friday that no longer asked them to take the government approval before launching or deploying an AI model to users in the South Asian market.
Under the revised guidelines, firms are instead advised to label under-tested and unreliable AI models to inform users of their potential fallibility or unreliability.
The revision follows India’s IT ministry receiving severe criticism earlier this month from many high-profile individuals.
Less than a year ago, the ministry had declined to regulate AI growth, identifying the sector as vital to India’s strategic interests.
Proton Mail, the end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) email service from Swiss company Proton, is now officially available via a dedicated desktop app some three months after debuting in beta.
However, despite previous claims that the client would be available to all Proton Mail users in early 2024, the company has decided to restrict it to paying users.
In related news, Proton is also making its email service available via a standalone Linux desktop app, launching today in beta.
It’s worth noting that while Proton Mail has been available to desktop users from the company’s inception, initially through the browser and more recently a “bridge” which opened up access to Proton Mail through third-party desktop clients such as Apple Mail and Outlook, today’s news brings a dedicated Windows and MacOS app to the fray.
This means that emails can be cached and accessed when offline, while users can funnel into Proton Mail directly from the MacOS dock or Windows Start menu.
The halls of Modex this week are lousy with solutions to the problem of inventory.
Recent years have given us drone solutions and Dexory’s massive AMR (autonomous mobile robot) with a telescoping scaffolding structure.
At its core is a tall (but not Dexory tall) AMR that serves as a launching and landing pad for a drone.
You can’t really see it from the image I took, but the drone is actually tethered to the inside of the AMR platform.
The Ottawa-based firm says the drone can operate for up to five hours before needing to return to the base for a recharge.
