Amazon now has a say in the development of a commonly used smart home standard, giving the company more power as it continues to push smart speakers, cameras, doorbells, and all other kinds of gadgets into its customers’ homes.

As of today, Amazon has a seat on the board of the Zigbee Alliance, which oversees implementation of the Zigbee wireless protocol. Zigbee isn’t nearly as popular as Bluetooth or Wi-Fi, but you can think of it a lot like them – it’s a wireless protocol for letting gadgets communicate. But unlike Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, Zigbee is particularly useful for low-power devices and can travel longer distances, making it ideal for simple smart gadgets like a light switch.

Amazon introduced a version of the Echo, called Echo Plus, with Zigbee support more than a year ago. That support allowed the speaker to directly connect to a new world of smart home gadgets, like light bulbs, power outlets, and tiny sensors that it otherwise couldn’t have reached. The home alarm system for Ring, which Amazon owns, also connects to Zigbee.

It’s a slow start, but Amazon’s ascension to Zigbee’s board suggests the company will want to make more use of the protocol in the future. Other companies on Zigbee’s board include: 1) Samsung-owned SmartThings, which makes a smart home hub; 2) Signify, the company behind the popular Philips Hue smart lights; and 3) Comcast, which uses Zigbee on its Xfinity Home security solution.

Getting onto Zigbee’s board isn’t exactly a feat for Amazon, but it is an obvious and deliberate decision. Getting on the board means becoming one of the Alliance’s highest-paying members – $75,000 per year – and it gives those companies an significant advantage: they’re able to “drive specification development, requirements, and test plans.” Or basically, define where Zigbee goes next.
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If Amazon is paying that money, it means the company wants a say in what future versions of Zigbee can do and how different Zigbee devices work together. It also shows Amazon taking an opinion on which smart home standard it’d like to see win out. Zigbee’s most direct competitor is an alternative called Z-Wave, which hardware makers have criticized for relying on proprietary chips from a single company. Amazon is likely among the many companies in the smart home industry that would rather avoid dealing with the pricey parts that could come along with that if Z-Wave were to grow in popularity.

Drivers will soon have an extra set of eyes on the road, courtesy of Google.

Google’s navigation app, Google Maps, is starting to roll out speed limit and speed trap features. 

With the speed limit feature, drivers using Google Maps will be shown the posted speed limit of the road they’re driving on in the lower left side of the app. Speed traps are designated with a small camera icon and shown on the visible area of the map. The Maps app provides an audio warning for drivers when they are approaching a speed trap.

Users have had the ability to report speed traps in Google Maps since late last year. However, until now, the app wasn’t yet making the reported speed traps visible for users in maps. 

Google Maps users have long wondered when such features were going to make their debut on the service. Crowdsource-powered navigation app, Waze, grew in popularity for providing this sort of detailed information on the road. Google acquired Waze back in 2013 for around $1 billion. 

Now, nearly five and a half years later, some of the Waze features are finally making their way to Google Maps.

IBM recently debuted its System Onequantum computer. It’s not the biggest or most powerful computer the company makes. But IBM thinks it’s the one that’ll end up in a museum 50 years from now, and it’s hard not to agree. The IBM Q System One consolidates thousands of components into a glass-enclosed, air-tight environment.

In a recent interview with IBM‘s CTO, Quantum Computing, Bob Wisnieff he related some interesting insights into what it was like to develop and build the System One. He said the original idea was to show that IBM could make a reliable, functioning quantum computer that existed entirely outside of a laboratory.

IBM‘s System One is unique. It’s a legitimate quantum computing system that exists in a big box. It doesn’t have to be connected to a massive cooling system inside of a lab (it has its own, just like a mainframe or a PC). And it doesn’t require a physicist to dive under the hood every time you want to do something with it.
IBM Q Network organizations can program and run code on it right now.

The big picture wasn’t about what 20 qubits shoved inside a box can or can’t do, Wisnieff said. It’s about the fact it exists at all. He continued:

“What I like best is that we get to be in the right place at the right time for quantum computing, this is a joy project. This design represents a pivotal moment in tech.”

The “pivotal moment” bit might sound hyperbolic. Especially if you’ve seen the System One’s underwhelming coverage. James Vincent at The Verge, in an articleabout the System One, said:

"In the grueling race to build a practical quantum computer, tech companies are keeping their spirits up by loudly cheering every milestone — no matter how small."

Kieren McCarthy of The Register wrote an articleabout the system with the headline: “If you’ve been dying to run some math on a dinky toy quantum computer, IBM may have something for you.”

The quantum team at IBM spent about six months last year tossing ideas around, mostly trying to come up with solutions to the little problems that plague a project like this.

“In one way, you want to isolate the qubits from the universe,” Wisnieff said, before explaining “but you also have to have access to read and measure them.” Just one of many problems faced by an engineering team developing something that’s never been built before.

Once these problems got sorted, the IBM engineers and physicists then began working with design experts from Goppion, the company responsible for some of the world’s most famous museum-quality display cases, Universal Design Studioand Map Project Office. This was Wisnieff’s dream team.

These companies were chosen after IBM‘s Director of Research, Dario Gil, gave Wisnieff carte blanche to find the best designers in the world. Wisnieff said this was because Gil realized the significance of the project.

As Wisnieff explained the process of building the System One, it became clear the intent was never to create a device that would suddenly usher the era of commercial quantum computing into reality. IBM Research is working on that, so are Google and Intel and a bunch of other companies. But that’s not what System One was designed for.

There are plenty of qualified, sane experts who believe quantum computing technology will never amount to anything. Meanwhile, the physicists and engineers working on them understand they’ll be one of the most significant advancements in human history.

That’s a lot for a discerning public to put up with in their daily news feed and monthly science magazine. But when IBM built a functioning quantum computer in a box and demoed it at CES, it showed the entire world that quantum computers are here right now. And they’re only getting started.

It doesn’t matter if it can solve major problems or not. It’s not essential whether the System One will ever be sold as a commercial product or not – it almost certainly won’t. 
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What matters is that IBM took something that looked like this:

It’s real. You can touch it.
Fifty years from now MIT‘s physics lab, Google‘s quantum research center, or IBM’s large quantum lab won’t be faithfully recreated in a giant quantum museum. Instead, an actual quantum computer will sit inside one.
IBM unveiled the world’s first, and only, functioning integrated quantum computer that exists entirely outside of a lab. It’s not the quantum computer that will change everything. But it might be the one your grand-kids read about on page one of that chapter in their science textbooks.

Several companies demonstrated C-V2X (cellular vehicle-to-everything)communications technology developed by Qualcomm at CES 2019. But Ford may be the most aggressive in bringing C-V2X to market. The Detroit automaker will add it to every new car and truck sold in the United States by 2022, Don Butler, executive director for Ford connected vehicle platform and product, wrote in a blog post.

C-V2X is the latest incarnation of so-called vehicle-to-everything (V2X), a communications technology that allows cars to “talk” to each other and infrastructure. The claimed advantage of this technology is that it can warn a driver of things beyond his or her line of sight. If a car is stopped at an intersection with poor visibility, it could, for example, pick up signals from other V2X-equipped cars or sensors mounted on nearby buildings to tell the driver if it’s okay to go.

Vehicles could also communicate with stoplights, telling drivers when a light is about to change. Audi already offers this in the form of its Traffic Light Information system. The system gives a countdown when a light is about to turn green, but it only works in a handful of cities (Audi also offers a built-in toll transponder that relies on V2X tech). Aptiv has placed sensors on traffic lights in Las Vegas to guide its self-driving cars, even when they’re onboard cameras don’t have a direct line of sight to the light.

Ford could take things even further, Butler wrote. C-V2X could be integrated with driver aids, like those in Ford’s recently introduced Co-Pilot360 suite. Or it could be added to self-driving cars. Emergency vehicles could be equipped with C-V2X transmitters, allowing cars to detect their presence and move out of the way.

The difference between the C-V2X tech embraced by Ford and previous systems is that it’s based on 5G. All other V2X systems to-date have used a competing setup called Dedicated Short-Range Communications (DSRC). But that means Ford will have to rely on the smooth rollout of 5G. Even the deployment of DSRC-based V2X vehicles and infrastructure has been slow, and DSRC is based on a more familiar technology derived from Wi-Fi.

“A conducive regulatory environment must be in place for C-V2X to be deployed, which is why we are working just as much with industry and government organizations to create such a technology-neutral environment,” Butler wrote in his blog post. He also told Bloombergthat he hopes other automakers will adopt C-V2X alongside Ford. He added that C-V2X is a simpler solution because telecom companies are already spending billions on 5G cell towers and antennas, while DSRC would require a separate government investment.
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Despite the potential hurdles, Qualcomm expects C-V2X and other related technologies to become a significant part of its business. The company believes that, within five years, 75% of cars will have some form of connectivity. A critical mass of vehicles will be needed to realize the technology’s full benefit since cars that aren’t equipped with C-V2X or similar systems can’t communicate with each other. The more vehicles on the network, the more effective it is.

Google has won approval to bolster work on its Minority Report-style touchless technology, which enables electronics to be controlled by hand gestures.

The Federal Communications Commission has approved Google’s plans to use more powerful sensors for its Project Soli initiative, first unveiled in 2015. The radar-based technology is now poised to kick on to the next level after Google was given special permission to use higher frequencies for its tests.

When Google first showcased the tech in 2015, it came under the X Labs banner and was focused on smartwatches, with specific gestures replacing a physical tap on the touchscreen. For example, it was possible to rub two fingers together in the vicinity of the watch to cycle through menus or turn up the volume of media.

Now the company could expand the operation to enable the sci-fi like air gestures we’ve seen in films like Minority Report and the Iron Man franchise, on larger screens and devices. The waiver granted by the FCCcould also be highly beneficial to tech users with mobility, speech, and tactile impairments.

In a statement (via Reuters), the FCC said: “The ability to recognize users’ touchless hand gestures to control a device, such as a smartphone, could help people with mobility, speech, or tactile impairments, which in turn could lead to higher productivity and quality of life for many members of the American public.”
The regulator also said there’s little chance of Google’s Project interfering with other spectrum users and has approved the tech for use on aircraft.
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Google hasn’t commented on the news yet, but it’ll be interesting to see what the company has in mind for Project Soli moving forward. Hopefully, we’ll find out more in 2019.

Since we’re early in the year, this might be a good time to propose some predictions for tomorrow’s smart home.

Video Kills the Telephone Call. The proliferation of smart speakers has continued unabated nearly since their inception, but recently we’ve seen a new feature taking center stage on these do-it-all devices – video. 

Amazon kicked off the trend, as it often does, with its Echo Show, a variant of the popular Amazon Echo series that featured a forward-facing camera and a tablet-like touchscreen attached to a smart speaker base. It followed up that effort with its reimagining of the alarm clock, the Echo Spot, a smaller orb-shaped smart speaker that includes a circular touchscreen face and similarly positioned camera. 

Google soon followed suit, adding the Google Home Hub, an upgrade of its Google Home smart speaker that, like the Show, featured a touchscreen tablet. Now Facebook has gotten in on the action with the release of Portal, a smart speaker/touchscreen, powered by Amazon’s A.I. assistant Alexa, with a strong focus on video-calling. 

While the merits of video functionality are readily apparent for smart speakers – users can follow recipes with hands-free commands, check the weather or map routes, or just catch up on shows while multi-tasking around the house – there seems to be a real push for these video-equipped hubs to replace the phone as the communication device of choice in homes. 

For Facebook Portal, this is expressly the case, with all other smart speaker features coming almost as afterthoughts to its prime purpose of visual-based communications. So committed to the cause of video chatting is the Portal that the Portal+ device can recognize users as they move and automatically rotate to follow them, allowing chat participants to remain on screen as they move from kitchen to couch. 

While Apple has not announced plans for a video element for its HomePod, the company has recently upgraded the capabilities of its iOS-based video chatting app, FaceTime, allowing users to communicate with up to 32 people on a call at one time. 

It remains to be seen if a rise in video communication-capable devices leads to a growth in video-chatting – consumers often don’t use products in the ways manufacturers intended. But even if an explosion of video-equipped smart speakers doesn’t lead to a golden age of people looking each other in the eye while communicating, at least everyone will be able to watch “The Great British Bake-Off” while making breakfast.
Smart Services. Throughout their history, smart homes have been defined by the intelligent devices they house. Voice-controlled lighting, thermostats that automatically adjust with the weather, coffee pots that begin brewing when they recognize you’re awake – products that save labor, money or time via automation and connectivity. 

But what about those tasks for which no single device will suffice? The chores – laundry, grocery shopping, home maintenance – that, short of a robotic butler, will require some manual labor on the part of the homeowner? 

Brace for the rise of smart services – automated fulfillment of the daily tasks that make an uninterrupted life possible. 

“Replenishment” is one area where these smart services are already established, and we should expect to see further growth. Beyond services like Peapod, you may have noticed that nearly every grocery chain of substantial size is offering some manner of automated ordering – and reordering – and delivery, either via an app or website. This process allows customers with a good grasp of their consumption habits to ensure that their homes are never out of their favorite foods, with specific items in specific quantities being automatically delivered at regular intervals. 

But expect producers to take thinking even further out of the process. Leveraging technologies like Amazon Dash, developers will start programming the household devices to recognize when they are running low on supply and automatically reorder the goods. Like WePlenish, a smart coffee pod container that keeps track of inventory levels and automatically orders more java when needed, so you never have to experience a caffeine-less existence. Will we see the refrigerator that automatically orders tomatoes? Or the soap dispenser that refills itself? The possibilities are endless – and likely, as automated reordering is an activity manufacturers can firmly get behind. 
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Task Oriented. But what about the tasks that keep your house running that require some measure of manual labor, like cleaning and maintenance? Here, too, we should expect to see app- and device-based solutions that call in reinforcements with some measure of regular automation when the chores need to get done. Like Cleanly, an app that allows users to schedule pickup and drop-off of their laundry, fresh and folded, within 24 hours. The latest version of certain home standards, like washers and dryers, can run their own diagnostic programs, identifying errors when they arise – how long before these machines can request their own maintenance when need? How long before a pool probe can send out a call when it needs cleaning? Or gutters can identify when they need to cleared? 

In addition to the rise of these automated services, we should expect to see growth of the technologies that help facilitate them. Technologies like Ring video doorbells or August smart locks, which can allow homeowners to identify who is at their door – like the Cleanly delivery person – and grant them temporary access to your abode. 

That is if a human even delivers your goods anymore. 

Delivery Improvements. Walmart recently announced a pilot programwith Ford and Postmates to examine the automated delivery of groceries via autonomous self-driving vehicles. Likewise, grocery chain Kroger announced a partnershipwith Nuro to tackle the most challenging task of ordering online, “last-mile delivery” – that is, getting the requested goods from the store to the customer’s home, a feat they also hope to accomplish with robotic drivers. 
The result of the endless automation of anything approaching “difficult” should enable individuals to lead lives unhampered in pursuit of their goals – be it increased productivity in matters personal or professional, or the much more noble pursuit of binge-watching Netflix while moving as little as possible.

A team of researchers from IBM, the University of Waterloo, and the Technical University of Munich (TUM) recently published the results of an experiment proving a quantum computer can do things a classical one cannot. This may be a watershed moment in the history of computer science.

The term for a clear case in which a quantum computer can perform computations or run algorithms that no classical computer, now or in the conceivable future, could is “quantum advantage.” Until now, it’s never been achieved.

Sure, there are algorithms that, theoretically couldn’t be run on a classical system. But none of those theories have been proven. Now quantum advantage is no longer up for debate.

One of the authors on the paper, TUM’s Robert Konig, told Phys.org “Our result shows that quantum information processing does provide benefits – without having to rely on unproven complexity-theoretic conjectures.”

The team set out, specifically, to prove that quantum computers can do something (anything, really) regular computers can’t. To do this, they built a quantum circuit that solves a complex algebraic formula through the exploitation of a quantum physics loophole allowing things to be in two places at once – no biggie.

This particular formula, according to the researchers, cannot be solved using classical computer circuits. You can read the whole paper here if you want to know more about how the team demonstrated the actual quantum advantage.

As for what this accomplishment means? Well, there’s nothing tangible to point out. The algorithm that the researchers ran wasn’t an algebraic mystery whose solution will result in any immediate impact – at least as best as we can tell. It was, almost certainly, developed merely to prove that it could be done.

But that’s the point. By showing that the people claiming quantum advantage was a fantasy were wrong and that the research is heading in the right direction, we’re closer than ever to realizing the potential of quantum computing.

The field of quantum computing may be decades from producing something that changes “everything” in the way that media hype and marketing teams would have us all believe. But proof of quantum advantage is the guarantee that this research is going to pay off someday.
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Hats off to the team that made it happen. For more information visit IBM’s blog here.

 The only sure things in this life, according to Ben Franklin, are death and taxes. And a new startup called Visor has just raised $9 million in financing to make one of them as painless as possible.

Unlike Dr. Jack Kevorkian (remember “Doctor Death”), Visor won’t kill anyone, but it may ring the death knell for the high-end tax advisors that most Americans can’t even access to get help filing and paying their taxes.  It’s like having a personalized accountant for the cost of a high-end do-it-yourself tax-prep service.

The $9 million Visor raised came from the venture capital firm, Defy, with participation from Unusual Ventures, SVB Capital and existing investors like Obvious Ventures, Fika Ventures, and Boxgroup, who had put a previous $6.5 million into the company. 

The idea for the company had been percolating for co-founder and chief executive Gernot Zacke since he settled in the U.S. 

Growing up in Sweden, Zacke was exposed to a much different process for paying taxes. “The experience of filing taxes in Sweden is that you receive a message from the government that stated how much you made and how much you were withholding. That’s it,” said Zacke. “Taxes should be as easy as ordering a cab.”

That’s the service that Visor aims to provide.

“If you think about the market there are two ways to get your taxes done. There’s the DIY space, and then there are other online services, but it requires the taxpayer to fill out the forms, and it leaves the taxpayer with a little bit of anxiety,” said Zacke. “We’re delivering the CPA experience through the convenience of a web app and a mobile app.”

On average, Americans spend about 13 hours each year dealing with taxes, and the average American doesn’t have the benefits of a professional advisor who can help optimize the process. That’s what Visor wants to provide.

“You provide the same amount of information you provide to a CPA or TurboTax… we make sure that that information is filed securely on AWS and shared between the docs and the backend,” said Zacke. 

The target customers for Zacke’s services are folks who have had a change to their tax situation – whether moving, buying a home, or any other life event; or people who have had a CPA and don’t want to pay the higher fees, he said.
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Visor currently has an operations team of around 34 people split between San Francisco and Atlanta.
“Taxpayers spend $20 billion a year to get their taxes prepared and are stuck between spending hours filling out DIY tax software and hiring an expensive CPA,” said Zacke, in a statement. “

A lot of people have become bored with SMS messaging, and the tech industry is very aware of it. While services such as Apple’s iMessage, Facebook Messenger, and the WhatsApp app allow you to add photos, GIFs and videos to your messages, they are not universal solutions – for example, you can’t send a WhatsApp message if your correspondent uses Facebook Messenger. The answer – or so Google and other companies are hoping – is Rich Communications Services or RCS.

What is it? RCS is a new online protocol that was chosen for adoption by the GSM Association(CSMA) in 2008 and is meant to replace the current texting standard SMS (Short Message Service), which has been around since the 1990s. The GMSA represents a wide variety of organizations in the mobile industry, including device, software, and Internet companies. Naturally, given all those players, it took a while to come to an agreement, and so it wasn’t until 2016 that the GSMA was able to come up with something resembling a standard.

How is RCS better than SMS? RCS will add a lot more multimedia capabilities to your messaging. Besides the usual texts (plain and fancy), it will make it simple to send GIFs, high-resolution still photos, and videos. It will let you know if the person you’re texting is available and can send you a receipt to prove they received your message. It will allow you to create longer messages and attach larger files. It also enables much better group messaging than SMS can handle. In other words, it can make standard text messaging look and work a lot like iMessage.

As of this writing, support for RCS has been promised by 55 carriers including AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, and a slew of secondary companies; 11 hardware manufacturers such as Samsung, Lenovo, and LG (but not Apple), and both Microsoft and Google.

Is anyone using RCS yet? Google has been a significant backer of RCS and even offers back-end services to carriers to help them quickly spin up support for it. But at the end of the day, it’s the carriers that are responsible for launching and supporting it. The big recent news is that Verizon is beginning its rollout of the service, but only in a minimal way to start. Currently, Verizon only offers it on Pixel 3 and Pixel 3 XL phones – and even then, it hasn’t hit all those customers yet. But because Verizon is supporting the standard, it will work with any other phone that supports it.

Why are people saying it’s not secure? One issue that a lot of security specialists are pointing out is that RCS – and, therefore, apps such as Chat – lack the end-to-end encryption available in some current messaging tools such as WhatsApp. End-to-end encryption means that the message is impenetrable to everyone – including the app vendor and the network provider – except the message sender and receiver. If you want to text someone with no chance that the authorities will ever see it, Chat / RCS is not the way. 
On the other hand, RCS does have all the standard security protocols, including Transport Layer Security (the underlying tech behind HTTPS), and IPsec (Internet Protocol Security), which is used in VPNs. So, for the most part, it’s pretty secure. Whether you’re comfortable using Chat / RCS depends on your security needs.

What’s next? Right now, support for RCS is limited to only a few carriers and even fewer devices, which means that most people can’t yet take advantage of it. Stay tuned to see what – and who – follows.

Honda Research Institute has announced a breakthrough battery chemistry developed in collaboration with Caltech and NASA JPL researchers. The technology, which was detailed in a newly published study, has a better eco-footprint while enabling the use of higher energy density materials in comparison to existing battery tech.

Honda says the new technology sidesteps fluoride-based battery technology temperature limitations. The team successfully demonstrated the operation of fluoride-ion based energy cells at room temperature, opening the door for high energy-density batteries that better meet the high capacity needs of modern technology.

Even better, the researchers say that unlike popular lithium-ion batteries, which are known to be volatile, fluoride-ion batteries are safer without the risk of overheating. As well, this battery technology is better for the environment due to the lower environmental impact of its source materials.
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Batteries created with this new chemistry may have up to 10 times the high energy density of lithium-ion batteries, according to the study. Despite the upsides, this type of battery hasn’t replaced lithium-ion due to its temperature limitations – until now, it has required temperatures above 302º F degrees to work correctly.
Researchers with Honda, NASA, and Caltech, overcame this limitation and developed a fluoride-ion cell that can operate at room temperature. The team achieved this using a fluoride-conducting liquid electrolyte that has high ionic conductivity, as well as a wide operating voltage. Such technology may one day be behind batteries that power everything from consumer gadgets to electric vehicles.