Monday, March 27, 2017

Uber's self-driving tests pause and resume. It's The Daily Crunch.

THE DAILY CRUNCH
MONDAY, MARCH 27 2017 By Darrell Etherington

Uber has an accident, Lyft looks like a real hero and Elon Musk puts money where his mouth is when it comes to keeping an attentive eye on AI. All that and more in The Daily Crunch for March 27, 2017.

1. Uber's self-driving car has an accident in Arizona

Uber temporarily halted all operation of its self-driving car test fleet after an accident in Arizona over the weekend. The car, a Volvo SUV, flipped on its side while in self-driving mode.

The accident was the result of a human-controlled car "failing to yield" and T-boning the Uber car, but the company still stopped its vehicles while it investigated. As of Monday morning, however, it's back to operating the self-driving test fleet in San Francisco.

2. Lyft improves its image as rival falters

Lyft's playing up its "good guy" image, with a new program it will introduce in the coming weeks that lets riders round up their fare to the nearest dollar and donate the difference to charity. It's putting the gas down on being the anti-Uber, but where it could really stand to benefit is with international growth: Launching in new markets outside the U.S. could help it draw users away from Uber where there aren't currently any good alternatives.

3. Spotify picks up a TV content recommendation service

Could Spotify be branching out into more traditional TV and movies? The company picked up MightTV, a recommendation service for video content that used a Tinder-like interface to glean user taste in movies. It sounds like this could be more about those mechanics, and building demographic profiles, than about video or TV.

4. Trump tech team to be headed by Kushner, include Elon Musk, Tim Cook, Ginni Rometty Bill Gates and Marc Benioff

Tech companies might be signing all kinds of official testimonials opposing Trump's executive orders, but apparently they're still willing to play ball with the dude in a more official capacity as part of a new innovation council led by Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner.

5. NASA taps mixed reality for astronaut training

Mixed reality has plenty of potential for field training when the field is... hard to access. The latest effort from NASA to use mixed reality to train astronauts for life on the space station is a perfect example.

6. Elon Musk invested in an AI startup to get a sense of AI's progress

Tesla's CEO is famously worried about the potential for an AI apocalypse – so much so, it turns out, that he invested early in DeepMind prior to its acquisition by Google to get an inside track on the progress of AI tech development. What he saw was not reassuring, it would seem.

7. The Galaxy S8 is coming

This is the week Samsung will make the Galaxy S8 official. The company's event is on Wednesday, March 29, and all will be revealed, but we know a lot already. Looks like a good phone, FWIW.

Get more stories at techcrunch.com 

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