Tesla’s new V3 Supercharger can charge up to 1,500 electric vehicles a day

Tesla has opened a massive next-generation electric vehicle charging station in Las Vegas that combines the company’s core products into one sustainable energy ecosystem, fulfilling a vision CEO Elon Musk laid out nearly three years ago.

The new V3 Supercharger, which supports a peak rate of up to 250 kilowatts, is designed to dramatically cut charging times for its electric vehicles. Tesla unveiled its first V3 Supercharger in March at its Fremont, Calif. factory. A second V3 Supercharger is located in Hawthorne, Calif., near the Tesla Design Studio. Both of these locations, which were initially used as test sites, lack two key Tesla products.

This new location in Las Vegas is considered the first V3 Supercharger. It’s notable, and not just because of the size — there are 39 total chargers in all. This V3 Supercharger also uses Tesla solar panels and its Powerpack batteries to generate and store the power needed to operate the chargers. The result is a complete system that generates its own energy and passes it along to thousands of Tesla vehicles.

The new Supercharger, located off the Las Vegas Strip, below the High Roller on the LINQ promenade, was built on Caesars Entertainment property. The site is part of Caesars Entertainment’s goal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 30% by 2025.

There are caveats to the capabilities of this Supercharger station. Only one Tesla vehicle — the Model 3 Long Range iteration — can charge at the peak rate of 250 kW. The 250 kW results in up to 180 miles of range added to the battery in 15 minutes on a Model 3 Long Range.

The company’s new Model S and Model X vehicles can charge up to a 200 kW rate.

However, even older Model S and X vehicles and more basic versions of the Model 3 will experience faster charging rates at this location because there is no power sharing, a standard practice at Tesla’s other charging stations.

Improvements to charging times are critical for the company as it sells more Model 3 vehicles, its highest volume car. Wait times at some popular Supercharger stations can be lengthy. Early adopters might have been content to wait, but as new Tesla customers come online that patience could dwindle. And as more of these V3 Superchargers come online, potential customers might be encouraged to buy the pricier long range version Model 3.

Tesla has said in the past that these improvements will allow the Supercharger network to serve more than twice as many vehicles per day at the end of 2019 compared with today.

The V3 is not a retrofit of the company’s previous generations. It’s an architecture shift that includes a new 1 MW power cabinet, similar to the company’s utility-scale products, and a liquid-cooled cable design, which enables charge rates of up to 1,000 miles per hour. Tesla uses air-cooled cables on V2 Superchargers.

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Tried to Bring "A Bit of the Monkey": His Dark Materials' Ruth Wilson

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Oppo K3 With Snapdragon 710 SoC Set to Launch in India Today

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Chrome and Firefox extensions with up to 4M installs leaked sensitive data, including names and passwords, to marketing intelligence service Nacho Analytics (Geoffrey A. Fowler/Washington Post)

Geoffrey A. Fowler / Washington Post:
Chrome and Firefox extensions with up to 4M installs leaked sensitive data, including names and passwords, to marketing intelligence service Nacho Analytics  —  As many as 4 million people have Web browser extensions that sell their every click.  And that's just the tip of the iceberg.

WeWork CEO Adam Neumann has reportedly cashed out of over $700 million ahead of its IPO

Adam Neumann, the co-founder and chief executive of the international real estate co-working startup, WeWork, has reportedly cashed out of more than $700 million from his company ahead of its initial public offering.

The size and timing of the payouts, made through a mix of stock sales and loans secured by his equity in the company, is unusual considering that founders typically wait until after a company holds its public offering to liquidate their holdings.

Despite the loans and sales of stock, first reported by The Wall Street Journal, Neumann remains the single largest shareholder in the company.

According to the Journal’s reporting, Neumann has already set up a family office to invest the proceeds and begun to hire financial professionals to run it.

He’s also made significant investments in real estate in New York and San Francisco, including four homes in the greater New York metropolitan area, and a $21 million 13,000 square-foot house in the Bay Area complete with a guitar shaped room (I guess a fiddle would be too on the nose). In all, Neumann reportedly spent $80 million on real estate.

Neumann has also invested in commercial real estate (the kind that WeWork leases to provide workspace with more flexible leases for companies and entrepreneurs), including properties in San Joes, Calif. and New York. Indeed four of Neumann’s properties are leased to WeWork — to the tune of several million dollars in rent. According to the Journal, Neumann will transfer those property holdings to a WeWork-controlled fund.

The WeWork chief executive has also invested in startups in recent years. He’s got an equity stake in seven companies including: Hometalk, Intercure, EquityBee, Selina, Tunity, Feature.fm, and Pins, according to CrunchBase.

The rewards that Neumann is reaping from the loans and stock sales are among the highest recorded by a private company executive. In recent years, Evan Spiegel sold $8 million in stock and borrowed $20 million from Snap before its 2017 public offering and Slack Technologies chief executive Stewart Butterfieldsold $3.2 million of stock before Slack’s public offering in June.

The only liquidation of stock and other payouts that have been disclosed which come close to Neumann’s payouts are the $300 million that GroupOn co-founder Eric Lefkofksy’s sold before his company’s IPO and the over $100 million that Mark Pincus took off the table ahead of Zynga’s offering.

WeWork declined to comment for this article.

 

Chinese space station Tiangong-2 is about to burn up over the Pacific

The final hours for China’s Tiangong-2 space station are at hand, as the 8-ton piece of hardware will fall to earth, or rather sea, some time in the next 20 hours or so in a controlled deorbit manuever.  But unlike with its predecessor, it isn’t a mystery where this particular piece of space debris is going to fall.

Tiangong-2 is a small space station that was put into orbit in 2016 to test a number of China’s orbital technologies; it was originally planned to stay up there for two years, but as many a well-engineered piece of space kit has done, it greatly exceeded its expected lifespan and has been operational for more than a thousand days now.

Chinese Taikonauts have visited the station to perform experiments, test tools, orbital refueling, and all that sort of thing. But it’s not nearly as well equipped as the International Space Station, nor as spacious — and that’s saying something — so they only stayed a month, and even that must have been pretty grueling.

The time has come, however, for Tiangong-2 to be deorbited and, naturally, destroyed in the process. The China National Space Administration indicated that the 18-meter-wide station and solar panels will mostly burn up during reentry, but that a small amount of debris may fall “in a safe area in the South Pacific,” specifying a rather large area that does technically include quite a bit of New Zealand. (160-190°W long by 30-45°S lat)

They did not specify when exactly it would be coming down, except that it would be during July 19 Beijing time (it’s already morning there at the time of publishing). It should produce a visible streak but not anything you’ll see if you aren’t looking for it. This visualization from The Aerospace Company shows how the previous, very similar station would break up:

It’ll be different this time around but you get a general idea.

That’s much better than Tiangong-1, which stopped responding to its operators after several years and as such could not be deliberately guided into a safe reentry path. Instead it just slowly drifted down until people were pretty sure it would be reentering sometime in the following few days — and it did.

There was never any real danger that the bus-sized station would land on anyone, but it’s just fundamentally a little unnerving not knowing where the thing would be coming down.

This isn’t the last Tiangong; Tiangong-3 is planned for a 2020 launch, and will further inform the Chinese engineers and astronauts in their development of a more full-featured space station planned for a couple years down the line.

Controlled deorbit is the responsible thing to do, not to mention just plain polite, and the CNSA is doing the right thing here. All the same, Kiwis should probably carry umbrellas tomorrow.

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US Treasury's FinCEN says scammers tried to steal an average of $301M per month via business email compromise scams in 2018, up from $110M per month in 2016 (Ionut Ilascu/BleepingComputer)

Ionut Ilascu / BleepingComputer:
US Treasury's FinCEN says scammers tried to steal an average of $301M per month via business email compromise scams in 2018, up from $110M per month in 2016  —  The frequency of business email compromise (BEC) scams has increased year over year and so did the value of attempted thefts …

Redmi 7A sale to go on sale today at 12pm on Flipkart and Micom: Price, specifications, discount, offer, and others

Redmi’s new entry-level phone, the Redmi 7A, was launched in India on July 4. It went on sale for the first time last week, and now, the phone will be up for grabs again. The sale will be conducted at 12pm on Flipkart and Mi.com. Manu Kumar Jain, Xiaomi India MD, claimed that the phone had gone out of stock within seconds on both Flipkart and Mi.com. Therefore, now the company is further ''increasing its production and more quantity'' and will be made available today. 

Redmi 7A price in India, discount, and offers

The 2GB RAM + 16GB storage variant is priced at Rs 5,999, which can be purchased for Rs 5,799 during the sale as Redmi is offering a Rs 200 discount if you purchase the phone this month. Coming to the sale offers, if you purchase the phone from Flipkart, you can avail an additional 5-percent discount using an Axis Bank Buzz credit card. However, if you decide to buy the phone from Mi.com, you will get an exchange discount as well as 125GB additional 4G data and Rs. 2,200 cashback from Reliance Jio.

Redmi 7A specifications

Redmi 7A features a 5.45-inch HD+ (720x1440 pixels) display with an aspect ratio of 18:9. It is powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 439 chipset, and comes with 2GB RAM and up to 32GB storage. The phone runs on MIUI 10, based on Android 9 Pie. It packs a 4000mAh battery that supports 10W charging.

On the optics front, the Redmi 7A has a 12MP Sony IMX486 sensor at the back along with an LED flash and PDAF lens. At the front, the smartphone sports a 5MP selfie camera, which also supports AI Face Unlock.

In the connectivity department, the phone has 4G VoLTE, Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth v4.0, GPS/ A-GPS, FM radio, Micro-USB, and a 3.5mm headphone jack. Besides, it also features a microSD card slot that supports up to 256GB of storage.

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Honor Smart TV will be the first device powered by Huaweis Harmony OS: Report

If information circulating the internet is to be believed, then Honor is working on launching a smart TV in August 2019. This TV will run on Huawei’s own Harmony OS, more commonly known as the HongMeng OS in China. The TV will be a 55-inch unit and there is no information on when this TV will reach India. It is said that the TV will work as a hub for Huawei’s smart home devices apart from working as a TV. According to the report, the Chinese users have moved away from watching TV and have started using their phone for entertainment and smart appliance controls. According to the source, “Chinese people watch less and less TV as the average daily usage of TV sets dropped in three years from 70 per cent to 30 per cent while the profits of TV manufacturers decreased in tandem each year.”

Huawei has been working on its own Harmony OS since 2012, before the company's US ban. The OS is said to be compatible with Android apps. How that works is something we will know when we get our hands on the OS. 

Using a smart TV as an entertainment device and a console to control your smart appliances is nothing new. In 2019, LG launched its new line-up of TVs powered by the Alpha 9 gen 2 processor that brings with it Google Assistant and Alexa built-in. These capabilities also help users control smart home appliances that are compatible with the Google Assistant or Alexa from the comfort of the living room. The LG TVs have a hub for controlling smart devices and run on the company’s own WebOS. 

Sony, on the other hand, has Android-powered TVs with Google Assistant built-in and if you have any smart appliances that are compatible with the Google Assistant, then you can use your TV to control those as well. 

Put simply, if you have a smart camera at the entrance of your house and when your doorbell rings, you can see who's outside without leaving the comfort of your couch. You can also control your smart lights and to ensure the right mood is set for movie night without leaving the comfort of your couch, ensuring you are a happier couch potato.

Source

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Wavecell, a cloud-communications platform for companies in SE Asia, has been acquired by cloud-based conferencing solutions provider 8x8 in a deal worth ~$125M (Catherine Shu/TechCrunch)

Catherine Shu / TechCrunch:
Wavecell, a cloud-communications platform for companies in SE Asia, has been acquired by cloud-based conferencing solutions provider 8x8 in a deal worth ~$125M  —  Wavecell, a cloud-communications platform for companies in Southeast Asia, announced today that it has been acquired by 8×8 in a deal worth about $125 million.

Georgia Tech’s ant-sized micro-robots move through vibration

The above image is a shot of Georgia Tech’s latest robot posed next to a penny. The 3D printed bot is roughly two millimeters in length — or about the size of the world’s smallest ants, per the school. The tiny devices are designed to move using vibration from a variety of sources, ranging from ultrasound to more traditional speakers.

With the proper source, the bristles allow them to move four times their own size in roughly a second by moving the legs up and down. Different sized legs react differently, responding to a variety of different frequencies The actuators that generate the vibration are outside of the robot, however, since batteries small enough to be housed on their bodies simply don’t exist.

The research team believes robots of this size could ultimately prove useful for a variety of different tasks, ranging from environmental sensing to human body repair. For now, however, we’re just dealing with some tiny prototypes.

“We are working to make the technology robust, and we have a lot of potential applications in mind,” assistantships professor Azadeh Ansari said in a release tied to the news. “We are working at the intersection of mechanics, electronics, biology and physics. It’s a very rich area and there’s a lot of room for multidisciplinary concepts.”