Wednesday, February 5, 2020
Big auto back to the future with startups and tech companies
Auto Expo 2020: 11 electric vehicles from Maruti, Mercedes-Benz and other unveiled
Twilio announces Q4 revenue of $331.2M, up 62% YoY, 2019 total revenue of $1.13B, up 75% YoY, ends Q4 with 179K+ active customer accounts; forecasts loss in Q1 (Larry Dignan/ZDNet)
Twilio announces Q4 revenue of $331.2M, up 62% YoY, 2019 total revenue of $1.13B, up 75% YoY, ends Q4 with 179K+ active customer accounts; forecasts loss in Q1 — Twilio is posting strong revenue growth but its earnings outlook for the first quarter and fiscal 2020 fall short of expectations.
Child safety experts from 102 countries urge Facebook to halt plans for encrypted messaging across its apps until it addresses child exploitation concerns (Hannah Murphy/Financial Times)
Child safety experts from 102 countries urge Facebook to halt plans for encrypted messaging across its apps until it addresses child exploitation concerns — Nearly 130 charities and academics around the world have urged Mark Zuckerberg to halt plans to introduce encrypted messaging across Facebook's trio …
In a filing, Qualcomm discloses it is being investigated by the European Commission for anti-competitive behavior over its radio frequency chips (Stephen Nellis/Reuters)
In a filing, Qualcomm discloses it is being investigated by the European Commission for anti-competitive behavior over its radio frequency chips — (Reuters) - Qualcomm Inc on Wednesday detailed the first significant sales gains from a new category of chip it is selling to mobile phone makers …
Realme C3 to Launch in India Today: How to Watch Live Stream
Ecomm predatory pricing complaints being examined: Piyush Goyal
Tata Cliq turns direct seller too
Ancestry lays off 6% of staff as consumer genetic testing market continues to decline
Excitement in the consumer genetic testing market continues to show signs of slowing down.
In the past two weeks layoffs have hit two of the biggest consumer genetic testing services — 23andme and Ancestry — with the latter announcing that it would slash its staff by 6% earlier today, in a blog post.
In her blogpost announcing the layoffs, Ancestry chief executive Margo Georgiadis wrote:
… over the last 18 months, we have seen a slowdown in consumer demand across the entire DNA category. The DNA market is at an inflection point now that most early adopters have entered the category. Future growth will require a continued focus on building consumer trust and innovative new offerings that deliver even greater value to people. Ancestry is well positioned to lead that innovation to inspire additional discoveries in both Family History and Health.
Today we made targeted changes to better position our business to these marketplace realities. These are difficult decisions and impact 6 percent of our workforce. Any changes that affect our people are made with the utmost care. We’ve done so in service to sharpening our focus and investment on our core Family History business and the long-term opportunity with AncestryHealth.
The move from Ancestry follows job cuts at 23andMe in late January, which saw 100 staffers lose their jobs (or roughly 14% of its workforce.
The genetic testing company Illumina has been warning of softness in the direct to consumer genetic testing market, as Business Insider reported last August.
“We have previously based our DTC expectations on customer forecasts, but given unanticipated market softness, we are taking an even more cautious view of the opportunity in the near-term,” the company’s chief executive Francis deSouza said in a second quarter earnings call.
Consumers seem to be waking up to the privacy concerns over how genetic tests can be used.
“You can cancel your credit card. You can’t change your DNA,” Matt Mitchell, the director of digital safety and privacy for the advocacy organization Tactical Tech, told Business Insider earlier in the year.
And privacy laws in the U.S. have not caught up with the reality of how DNA testing is being used (and could potentially be abused), according to privacy experts and legal scholars.
“In the US we have taken to protecting genetic information separately rather than using more general privacy laws, and most of the people who’ve looked at it have concluded that’s a really bad idea,” Mark Rothstein, a law professor at Brandeis and the director of the University of Louisville’s Institute for Bioethics, Health Policy and Law, told Wired in May.
The investigation into the “Golden State Killer” and the eventual arrest of Joseph James DeAngelo thanks to DNA evidence collected from an open source genealogy site called GEDMatch likely helped focus consumers thinking on the issue.
In that case a relative of DeAngelo’s had uploaded their information onto the site and investigators found a close match with DNA at the crime scene. That information was then correlated with other details to eventually center on DeAngelo as a suspect in the crimes.
While consumer genetic testing services may be struggling, investors still see increasing promise in clinical genetics testing, with companies like the publicly traded InVitae seeing its share price rally and the privately held company, Color, raising roughly $75 million in new capital from investors led by T. Rowe Price.
Electronics manufacturing has created more than 1,20,000 jobs: Ravi Shankar Prasad
India’s eHealth market to touch $16 billion over the next five years
Twitter to start labeling its user-generated content
Images obtained of two stars in the process of a merger
Enlarge / Some of the structures present in the area around the recently described star system.
We know two facts about our galaxy that are, in isolation, mundane. One is that many stars are part of a two-star system and may orbit each other at distances similar to those of the planets in our own Solar System. The second is that stars that are similar in mass to the Sun will end their fusion-driven existences by expanding into bloated red giants. Put those two facts together and you have an inescapable and intriguing consequence: a lot of stars are going to end up expanding enough to swallow their neighbor.
What happens then can be hard to understand, in part because there are so many potential options. If the companion star is massive enough, the transfer of mass could trigger its explosion. It's also possible that friction could bleed energy from the orbit of the companion star, reducing its orbit until it is merged. Or, because the outer layers of the red giant are so diffuse, it's possible that the cores of the two stars could end up sharing a single envelope, continuing to orbit each other.
While it's easy to know when we've observed an explosion, it's much harder to figure out when we're looking at either of the latter two options. Normally, we'd rely on physical models to tell us what would happen in these cases, but generating a model of these conditions has turned out to be pretty complex. Now, however, some researchers are suggesting that a common-envelope binary star is the best way of explaining an object they've imaged.
Read 12 remaining paragraphs | Comments
After layoffs at 23andMe, Ancestry says it is laying off 6%, citing slowdown across entire DNA testing category, now that most of early adopters have enrolled (Christina Farr/CNBC)
After layoffs at 23andMe, Ancestry says it is laying off 6%, citing slowdown across entire DNA testing category, now that most of early adopters have enrolled — - Ancestry, following 23andMe, made the decision to lay off some employees. It confirmed to CNBC that the cuts affected 6% of its workforce.
Finland, Canada, the US, and other countries are testing tech for passport-free travel, including facial recognition and a "digital travel credential" (Matt Burgess/Wired)
Matt Burgess / Wired : Finland, Canada, the US, and other countries are testing tech for passport-free travel, including facial recogniti...
-
Jake Offenhartz / Gothamist : Since October, the NYPD has deployed a quadruped robot called Spot to a handful of crime scenes and hostage...
-
Answers to common questions about PCMag.com http://bit.ly/2SyrjWu https://ift.tt/eA8V8J
