Despite all the advances of technology and transportation, what hasn’t transformed is the amount of time it takes the average person to get to work, says Dara Khosrowshahi, the CEO of Uber.
Access to a city’s centre is a greater success factor than education, he told the Uber Elevate conference in Washington last week. “It Is the key to success in society.”
If you blinked last night you might have missed Apple’s mention of tvOS, the operating system being used to run the Apple TV. The company doesn’t typically place a massive emphasis on the operating system, perhaps because it’s not quite as… sexy as iOS and macOS. But Apple’s looking to change that, thanks to the new Apple TV features announced in March this year.
Another day, another Lego store opening. Okay, that makes two Lego Certified Stores in South Africa, with more on the way. This one, launched today for media and partners ahead of an official opening on 1 June, is in Tshwane/Pretoria at the Menlyn Park shopping centre
It’s a fact that just about all the tech we make use of will eventually become obsolete. Unless you’re the US Military or NASA, in which case you’ll be using the same operating systems long after the rest of us are done. Hey, some of those probes were programmed in the 1970s — doubtful there’s gonna be an OS update for those things. WhatsApp is moving at a bit of a faster clip, though. Several older versions will soon see no further updates, which means the service will likely stop working.
A sister company of Google, Alphabet’s Wing Aviation, just got federal approval to start using drones for commercial delivery. Amazon’s own drone-delivery program is ready to launch as well. As drones take flight, the world is about to get a lot louder – as if neighborhoods were filled with leaf blowers, lawn mowers and chainsaws.
A blue moon, if you’re being technically correct (the best kind of correct), is the second full moon to appear in a single calendar month. A Blue Moon, though, is the lunar lander unveiled by Amazon head and Blue Origin founder, Jeff Bezos.
Quantum mechanics is a branch of physics that attempts to understand and apply mathematical, verifiable rules to the behaviour of nature at the smallest end of the spectrum – on the scale of atoms, electrons and photons. It was first developed at the beginning of the 20th century, and has been very successful in describing systems on the microscopic level.
When Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was released 50 years ago, flying cars were a flight of fancy. Now, these futuristic vehicles are entering the outer fringes of reality. According to a new study published in Nature, for some journeys flying cars could eventually be greener than even electric road cars, cutting emissions while also reducing traffic on increasingly busy roads.
Today, quantum computing is in its infancy. Quantum computation incorporates some of the most mind-bending concepts from 20th-century physics. In the U.S., Google, IBM and NASA are experimenting and building the first quantum computers. China is also investing heavily in quantum technology.
This week on Light Start, we go up in the air (twice — once for drones, the other for photos), check out some Swedish sci-fi, and download The Division 2.