Apple Appears to be Building an Apple Car. Is that as Crazy as it Sounds?

As reported by the Vox: We've known since last week that Apple was working on some sort of car-related project. The big question was whether Apple was working on a line of car accessories — perhaps expanding on its existing CarPlay platform — or whether the company was going to start building its own cars.

New reporting from 9to5Mac provides strong evidence that Apple is working on an Apple Car.

Cars are complicated, and building one requires skills that a high-tech company like Apple doesn't normally have. According to 9to5Mac, Apple has been snapping up engineers with expertise in motors, transmissions, drive trains, car interiors, and so forth.

The list includes four people with experience at Ford, four who previously worked at Tesla, a former CEO of Mercedes-Benz, and a General Motors employee. Apple has also hired an engineer from auto-part maker EMCO Gears and multiple engineers from A123 Systems, which makes batteries for hybrid and electric cars (A123 has sued Apple over these hires).

It's unlikely that Apple would hire people like this if it were only working on car accessories. And it wouldn't hire hundreds of people just to work on a pilot project. Granted, Apple CEO Tim Cook could still decide to cancel it if the results aren't up to Apple's standards. But there's a good chance we'll see some kind of Apple Car in the next few years.

Apple is well-positioned to create a new kind of car

Apple may be better positioned to jump into the car business than almost any other Silicon Valley company. Most tech companies focus on one relatively narrow piece of the technology "stack." You've got Intel and AMD making computer chips, Dell and Samsung building devices, Google and Microsoft developing software, and so forth.

Apple is virtually alone in building its own products from top to bottom. An iPhone is based on an Apple-designed chip and runs Apple-designed software. This philosophy makes Apple particularly good at re-inventing product categories, as it did with the iPod, iPhone, and iPad. It can build exactly the right hardware to support its software, and vice versa, creating a seamless user experience.

This kind of tight integration between hardware and software will be particularly important for cars, where reliability and energy-efficiency are major priorities. Apple's work on iPhones, iPads, and MacBooks also means the company has experience with batteries and power management, which are also crucial to building electric cars.

Indeed, this could be a weakness for Google, which has traditionally created software that runs on other peoples devices. Combining Google's self-driving software with a conventional car might produce a less appealing product than having one company design the whole product.

It won't be easy for Apple to catch up to Google on self-driving technology

By the time Apple brings a car to market, partially self-driving cars will be commonplace and fully autonomous vehicles may be right around the corner. To compete with Google, it will have to build its own self-driving technology. And that won't be easy.

Google has a five-year head start creating self-driving cars. It also has a fleet of Street View cars that will allow it to produce detailed 3D maps of the world's streets, which will be essential to helping self-driving cars stay on the road. Apple doesn't have a great track record with maps — Apple has struggled to produce a mapping app that rivals Google Maps.

Google also has a culture that prizes tackling difficult engineering problems — dubbed "moon shots" — like building a self-driving car. In contrast, Apple has traditionally been focused on building beautiful, user-friendly gadgets. When it has tried to expand outside of that core area — as with iCloud and its predecessors — the results have often been disappointing.

On the other hand, building a beautiful, reliable, and energy-efficient electric car would be a major feat in its own right. Even if Apple struggles to catch up on the self-driving front, it could still sell a lot of conventional vehicles before autonomous vehicles become ubiquitous.

NASA Preparing to Reassemble the International Space Station for Space Taxis

As reported by UPI: On Friday, astronauts aboard the International Space Station will initiate the station's first reassembly in several years. The station will be reconfigured to create two new docking ports for the space taxis NASA hopes to have launched by the end of 2017 as part of its Commercial Crew program.

The first of three assembly spacewalks will be conducted on Friday by NASA astronauts Barry Wilmore and Terry Virts. While outside the station, they will begin work installing cables and communications equipment for the two new berthing slips.

Wilmore and Virts won't be able to ready the two new ports without new equipment, however. Two International Docking Adapters are needed to turn what were once parking spots for NASA's Space Shuttles into docks capable of accepting future U.S. commercial crew vehicles. The two adapters will be launched by SpaceX resupply missions later this year.

"This is quite a bit of work," Mike Suffredini, NASA's ISS program manager, told Discovery News. "Our plan has always been to have a docking capability in place and operational by the end of 2015, and we're on track to do that."

NASA is anxious to have its space taxis up and operational. Since the Space Shuttle program ended in 2011, NASA has had to rely on Russia to ferry its astronauts to and from the space station. Last year, NASA awarded major contracts to Boeing and SpaceX to construct space taxis.

The combination of space taxis and reconfigured ports will not only make NASA's ISS missions more autonomous, but also bolster their size and scope.

"They will permit the standard station crew size to grow from six to seven, potentially doubling the amount of time devoted to research aboard the orbiting laboratory," NASA officials said in a recent press release.

Friday's spacewalk will be televised by NASA TV. It will be Wilmore's second career spacewalk and the first for Virts.

The Identity of Things (IDoT) is Necessary for the Internet of Things (IoT)

As reported by Virtualization Review: The Internet of Things (IoT) is a growing area of the increasingly connected universe. Its advantages are many, but with those gains come new challenges. One of the biggest is security, in particular identity management. And because this is the IT world, analyst firm Gartner Inc.  has spawned a new acronym with which to tag this challenge: IDoT -- the Identity of Things.

In the past, Gartner has used another acronym, IAM, to describe what it calls "Identity and Access Management." IAM needs to significantly evolve, reports Gartner, because typical solutions can't scale to IoT size.

"IAM leaders must reconsider how traditional approaches to cybersecurity and IAM work in a world where devices and services are so abundant, in so many different forms and positioned at so many different points within the IT ecosystem," Earl Perkins, research vice president at Gartner, said in a press release. 

   Gartner describes the rationale behind the new acronym:

The Identity of Things (IDoT) is a new extension to identity management that encompasses all entity identities, whatever form those entities take. These identities are then used to define relationships among the entities -- between a device and a human, a device and another device, a device and an application/service, or (as in traditional IAM) a human and an application/service.

New ways must be developed to handle security in the IoT, Gartner says, emphasizing the relationships between devices and objects, and not just their identities. Doing that, Perkins said, "… allows the IDoT to exist and become part of new responsibilities for IAM in the enterprise."

Gartner has previously predicted a huge spike in the IoT in 2015, with a bump of 30 percent in connected devices like automobiles, refrigerators, wearable devices and even coffee makers. This year, Gartner expects there to be about 4.9 billion "things," with a value of $69.5 billion.
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission released its own report earlier this year that addressed IoT security, listing a number of concrete steps companies developing IoT devices should take. 

They include a defense-in-depth strategy using multiple layers of security; monitoring connected devices throughout their expected lifecycle; and building security into devices from the beginning, instead of tacking it on at the end.

Elon Musk is Designing a Tesla Battery to Power Your Home

A Tesla Model S vehicle battery pack.  Designs for the home battery pack have not yet been released.

As reported by Quartz: In all the excitement over the looming battle for supremacy in electric cars between Tesla and Apple, some pretty important comments last week from Elon Musk were largely overlooked.

During Tesla’s quarterly earnings call, Musk said his car company is progressing with plans to sell a lithium-ion battery for energy storage in homes and businesses.

We’re going to unveil the Tesla home battery, or the sort of consumer battery that will be for use in people’s houses or businesses, fairly soon. We have the design done, and it should start going to production, probably in about six months, or so. We’re trying to figure out a date to have the product unveiling, but it’s probably in the next month or two months. And it’s really great; I’m really excited about it.

We’ve known about this for a while, of course. As I wrote last year, Tesla’s batteries could be huge—and possibly a much bigger product than its cars.

In theory, a homeowner could capture energy in a solar panel on their roof (maybe made by Solar City, which Musk chairs) and store it in a Tesla battery. This is key, because at the moment, one of the main problems with solar power is that, as The Verge neatly put it, “the sun isn’t always shining when you need power, and sometimes the sun is shining when you don’t need power.”

There’s a lot of hype about what kind of threat Tesla could pose to electricity utilities by helping people go off the grid. Morgan Stanley estimated last year that by 2028, Tesla’s US fleet of cars will have an energy storage capacity of 237GW which it said was equal to 22% of US production capacity, and nearly 10 times larger than existing US grid storage capacity. (That analysis doesn’t even take into account batteries sold separately from cars).

In reality, mass defections off the electricity grid aren’t likely. Solar City CTO and Musk’s cousin Peter Rive has said he has “no interest” in such a scenario, because “the grid is a network, and where there are networks, there are network effects.” Also, it seems to be illegal in some states.

Tesla is actually working closely with utilities on the home battery product. “There’s a lot of interest, and a lot of utilities working in this space, and we’re talking to almost all of them,” chief technology officer JB Straubel said on the conference call. More likely, the batteries will help people sell excess energy back into the grid, and save money on their electric bills.

Rive envisages a scenario where batteries with storage capacity were optimized across the grid, allowing utilities to direct clean solar electricity more efficiently, lowering costs for everyone and helping the environment. “We can do so much more working together than we can working alone.”

Smartphone Startups Handle Calls With Wi-Fi to Push Service Pricing to $5 per Month

As reported by Slashdot: two companies, Republic Wireless and FreedomPop, that reduce cellphone costs by relying on strategically placed Wi-Fi routers are at the forefront of a tantalizing communications concept that has proved hard to produce on a big scale. 

The concept championed by the two little companies in their nationwide services is surprisingly simple. They offer services that rely primarily on Wi-Fi networks, and in areas without Wi-Fi, customers can pull a signal from regular cell towers. 

"Wi-Fi first is a massive disrupter to the current cost structure of the industry," says Stephen Stokols. "That's going to be a big shock to the carriers." For $5 a month, customers of Republic Wireless can make calls or connect to the Internet solely over Wi-Fi. 

For $10 a month, they can use both Wi-Fi and a cellular connection from Sprint in Republic's most popular option. Republic Wireless's parent company, Bandwidth.com, a telecommunications provider with about 400 employees, developed a technique to move calls seamlessly between different Wi-Fi networks and cell towers. 

"You can't pretend these companies are major players by any stretch. But I think their real importance is proof of concept," says Craig Moffett. "They demonstrate just how disruptive a Wi-Fi-first operator can be, and just how much cost they can take out."

In major cities, the Wi-Fi-first network makes sense. People use smartphones frequently while sitting around their offices and apartments, and Wi-Fi can handle the job just fine. But once people start moving around, it is not so simple. 

The benefit of a cell service is that your phone can switch among multiple towers while you are on the go which wi-fi is not designed to handle. Google may be experimenting with a hybrid approach similar to the small companies'. 

A person briefed on Google's plans, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the conversations were private, says the company wants to make use of the fiber network it has installed in various cities to create an enormous network of Wi-Fi connections that phones could use to place calls and use apps over the Internet. 

In areas out of reach, Google's network would switch over to cell towers leased by T-Mobile USA and Sprint. Still many wonder if even the biggest companies could make a Wi-Fi-based phone network work. "There are just so many places where Wi-Fi doesn't reach," says Jan Dawson "and the quality of Wi-Fi that you can find is often subpar."

Clever Vehicles

The way we go online in our cars makes no sense.

As reported by MIT Technology Review: Most of us are now used to having the Internet and the cloud with us as we drive. The problem is that we’re doing it the wrong way. We “import” the Internet into the car via our smartphones, which is not just inefficient but dangerous: it takes our focus off the road and overloads us with distracting information.

Instead, we should be building sensors and networking technology right into the car—essentially making the vehicle itself our way of interacting with the online world (see “Car-to-Car Communication”). This kind of in-car system is becoming more and more common. It gathers data about the environment around the car, allowing vehicles to sense, know, and predict.

The safety implications of such systems are massive. Our cell phones are a distraction when we should be concentrating on the road. Yes, we all want to be connected all the time, and the time we spend in the car shouldn't be any exception—we just have to be smart about it. You don’t want to be taking a sales call when you’re making a left-hand turn at an intersection. An intelligent system would enable the car to prioritize data about the car itself and about the environment around the car, delivering only the information the driver needs at the exact moment it’s needed.

A car equipped with such technology could initiate the appropriate communication when, say, a driver is returning home and wishes to turn up the thermostat there. The human driver would not have to think about it. The car would be able to fuse real-time data from a controller area network with mapping and timing data to “predict” that the driver was heading home.

A smart system wouldn't just remove distractions—it could help us avoid dangerous conditions that we can’t see. This will be increasingly true as more vehicles are equipped with longer-range sensors and the ability to communicate with each other. Cars on the street will form networks—thanks to other cars on the road, your car can tell you about the road conditions you’re about to encounter, accidents that you can avoid or just can’t see, or congestion that’s just in the process of developing.

We already live in an online world. It’s only natural that our cars will become part of that world. A vehicle should be no different from an office, a home, or an airport. The technology to establish this consistent data flow in, around, and beyond the car is ready, and it’s about time we started taking advantage of it.

New Map Shows America's Quietest Places

As reported by ScienceMag: Craving some silence? Head (quietly) toward the blue regions on the map above. Based on 1.5 million hours of acoustical monitoring from places as remote as Dinosaur National Monument in Utah and as urban as New York City, scientists have created a map of noise levels across the country on an average summer day. 

After feeding acoustic data into a computer algorithm, the researchers modeled sound levels across the country including variables such as air and street traffic. Deep blue regions, such as Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming and the Great Sand Dunes National Park in Colorado, have background noise levels lower than 20 decibels—a silence likely as deep as before European colonization, researchers say.

That's orders of magnitude quieter than most cities, where noise levels average 50 to 60 decibels, scientists reported here today at the annual meeting of AAAS (which publishes Science). The National Park Service is using the map to identify places where human-made noise is affecting wildlife—animals such bats and owls, whose ears are up to 20 decibels more sensitive than human ears, for example, are affected by human-made noise because it drowns out the faint rustles of insects and rodents they need to hunt, they say.

This also seems to match up well with States that have a significant percentage of Federally owned land: