Honda Self-driving Cars

The president of Honda Motor Company has said his firm will aim to develop fully self-driving cars by around 2025, amid increasingly fierce international competition to produce autonomous vehicles.

“We hope to establish technologies (for fully automated cars) by around 2025,” President Takahiro Hachigo told reporters earlier in the week at the company’s research and development center in Tochigi Prefecture.

Honda is now aiming to develop fully automated “level 4” cars that require no steering wheel or brake operations under specific conditions such as the time of day, location and type of weather. “Level 4” cars are just one step short of “level 5” vehicles, which make driving completely autonomous with no restrictions.

Japan’s third-largest automaker by volume is struggling to gain a competitive edge in self-driving technology over its global rivals.

Nissan Motor and U.S. electric vehicle maker Tesla are already selling their respective “level 2” cars, which offer automation of multiple functions including control, acceleration and steering.

U.S. automaker Ford Motor and German carmaker BMW are aiming to produce fully driverless cars by 2021.

Honda currently aims to launch self-driving vehicles that can drive and switch lanes on highways by around 2020, the year of the Tokyo Olympics.

“We will take (our self-driving cars) to local streets after realizing (self-driving) on expressways,” Hachigo said.

Smart Speakers

Competition is heating up in the global market for AI-powered smart speakers, as more global tech companies introduce new devices to rival forerunning voice-activated home speakers -- Amazon’s Echo and the Google Home.

This week, US tech giant Apple unveiled HomePod, the firm’s first voice-activated standalone speaker running on Apple’s artificial intelligence software Siri. It is equipped with Apple-engineered audio technology and advanced search algorithms.

The $349 Apple HomePod, available in black or white, will begin sales starting from December, initially in Australia, the UK and the US, Apple said in a press release.

Given Siri, already available on iPhone devices, currently supports more than 30 languages including Korean, Apple’s smart speaker is widely expected to hit other international markets in the near future.

Apple’s foray into the AI-powered home speaker segment comes as many competing tech giants around the world are also launching their own products with aims to grab a share of the growing market.

Amazon’s Echo, released in 2015, currently dominates markets like the US where home speakers are growing in popularity. According to market research firm eMarketer, Amazon will capture 70.6 percent of all voice-enabled speaker users in the US this year.

The remaining portion will be shared among smaller players, such as Lenovo, LG, Harmon Kardon and Mattel, it said.

Despite Amazon’s dominance, the smart speaker market is still considered a worthwhile investment due to its growth prospects. According to eMarketer, 35.6 million Americans are expected to use a voice-activated assistant device at least once a month this year, marking a 128.9 percent growth from last year.

“Consumers are becoming increasingly comfortable with the technology, which is driving engagement,” Martin Utreras, vice president of forecasting at eMarketer said in a statement. “As prices decrease and functionality increases, consumers are finding more reasons to adopt these devices.”

Eyeing this growth, not only Apple but also other tech giants including Samsung Electronics and Microsoft are preparing to launch smart speakers of their own this year.

Microsoft and Harman Kardon, a subsidiary of Samsung Electronics, are slated to release a voice-enabled speaker that plays music and handles everyday lifestyle tasks like managing calendars and checking for traffic this fall.

Moore's Law Lives

IBM Research and partners GlobalFoundries and Samsung have created transistors for a 5-nanometer semiconductor chip.

It’s a remarkable technical achievement, though a commercial version of the chip may not be possible for a while. Still, it should enable chips with 30 billion transistors, the on-off switches of electronic devices, on a fingernail-sized chip. Researchers say this kind of achievement should enable the $330 billion chip industry to stay on the path of Moore’s Law, or the prediction made in 1965 by Intel chairman emeritus Gordon Moore that the number of transistors on a chip would double every couple of years.

IBM is presenting details of its research on its “silicon nanosheet transistors” at the 2017 Symposia on VLSI Technology and Circuits conference in Kyoto, Japan. The development comes less than two years after IBM researchers made a 7-nanometer test node chip with 20 billion transistors. (A nanometer is a billionth of a meter, and a 5-nanometer device is just a few atoms thick.)

Right now, the most advanced semiconductor chips use a FinFET process with circuitry that is 10 nanometers in width. Companies such as Intel can build chips with 10 or 15 billion transistors using that process.

A 5-nanometer chip could perform about 40 percent faster than a 10-nanometer chip, given the same power settings, said Mukesh Khare, vice president of semiconductor technology research at IBM Research, in an interview with VentureBeat. Or a chip could be 75 percent more power efficient.

“This is a major innovation for scaling beyond 7 nanometers,” Khare said. “It’s an innovation in design and how you pack more and more transistors together. This transistor structure will enable a path to true five nanometers.”

Digital Experience - Part 5

By Bayle Emlein

Kingston first released high performance HyperX memory modules in 2002. One thing leads to another, especially in gaming. HyperX was so successful in improving gaming performance that, after a decade, Kingston split off HyperX into its own, focused division.

In addition to blazing fast Fury DDR4 memory, the current HyperX line includes the Cloud Stinger gaming headset, the Pulsefire FPS gaming mouse, and HyperX Alloy FPS Mechanical gaming keyboard with backlit keys and color- and texture-coded gaming keys to make the most of the gaming experience.

If you take gaming seriously, you’ll want the spatial accuracy of a gaming headset, a mouse and keyboard that respond instantly to your every gesture with no miscues. Because gaming isn’t just a game.

Digital Experience - Part 4

By Bayle Emlein

Kingston Technology is approaching its 30th birthday in a setting where most of the companies who pitch at trade shows don’t even make it all the way to market. Insofar as is imaginable in an environment that defines the logarithmic speed of change in the post-industrial world, Kingston is still in the same business--manufacturing the memory components that hold it all together. Details have changed, but the focus on reliable leading-edge memory remains at the core. In addition to finding Kingston memory embedded in devices you purchase, you’ll want to add DataTraveler flash drives and Kingston SD cards, USB flashcards and readers to your shopping list. For the dad or grad who has everything except enough space, any of these make a perfect way to show you remember; and it’s not too early to start thinking about holiday shopping.

The current star is the 2TB DataTraveler Ultimate, proving that digital memory is just like storage in a new home: no matter how much space there is, you’ll find that in a week you can collect enough valuable items to fill to capacity and want even more storage. Legendary Kingston reliability means that I have a better chance in the digital world of finding my stuff than I do in the closets and cupboards of my dwelling, where I would like just one more closet please.

More RadioShack Closures

RadioShack has been in the retail business for almost 100 years. The end isn't nearly as promising as the beginning.

Over the Memorial Day weekend, RadioShack—which filed for bankruptcy twice in two years—closed over 1,000 stores, leaving just 70 corporate locations and 500 dealer stores in operation across the U.S. Throughout the weekend, the consumer electronics retailer announced a liquidation sale that played out on social media. Social media represents a new plot twist for America's dying retailers: How do you toast a brand's final days when the world is watching?

RadioShack opted for unadulterated bleakness. The company's social media handle on Twitter shared photos that depicted the sale of store fixtures, $25 grab bags stuffed with items pieced at $5 apiece, and deeply discounted printers. Here are some tweets that highlighted the carnage.

RadioShack, which generated nearly $6.3 billion in revenue at the company's peak in 1996, saw sales sputter to under $3.5 billion less than two decades later as it failed to respond to the migration of consumer spending to online channels like Amazon.com.

Electronics were one of the earliest consumer product categories to sell strongly online, resulting in price transparency that made it hard for physical retailers to compete. Best Buy has done a better job innovating to stay competitive, partly because it has focused on services to help it differentiate from the crowd.

But RadioShack, which operated over 7,300 stores at the company's peak, will now only have 570 stores in total after the Memorial Day weekend closures. The press release it issued ahead of the weekend was equally bleak: "We all remember coming into RadioShack whether it was for the battery-of-the-month, new walkie-talkies, or to check out the newest RC toy cars. Many of these nostalgic items will be up for auction over the next 30 days."

Lenovo's Plans

After a bruising fall from its spot as the world's third-largest mobile phone maker following its acquisition of Motorola three years ago, China's Lenovo Group Ltd is counting on a push upmarket to stop the bleeding in its smartphone business.

While the company, which vies with HP as the world's largest PC maker, returned to profit in the year to March, losses in its smartphone business worsened as marketing expenses for new products and key component costs increased.

The group's phone problems started after it acquired Motorola Mobility from Google for $2.9 billion in 2014 but struggled to integrate the assets. That, combined with fierce competition from lower-end manufacturers in its home base of China such as Xiaomi and Oppo, saw its global position fall to eighth in 2016.

A recently announced reorganisation of its China business aimed at sharpening the PC brand's consumer focus comes amid an ongoing effort to tighten its mobile branding and shift the focus to pricier models under its Moto brand.

"Our strategy is to prioritise mature markets ... which need brands and innovative products, whereas emerging markets need efficiency," Chairman Yang Yuanqing said of Lenovo's mobile business at a press conference in Hong Kong on Thursday.

"So we will have two teams catering to the two kinds of markets with different product lines."

Lenovo faces its toughest battle in its home base of China, where it has slipped out of the top 10 smartphone vendors. Shipments domestically declined 80 percent year-on-year or 55 percent quarter-on-quarter in the first quarter of 2017, according to data from Canalys.

The company currently has three phone brands in China - the premium Moto brand, the cheaper Lenovo series, and an online-focused ZUK brand launched in 2015.