Tech

Spotify announced the purchase of Podz, a podcast discovery app. Read the announcement below:

At Spotify, we are investing to build and scale the world’s best (and most personalized) podcast discovery experience—and we’ve acquired Podz, a small, talented team of entrepreneurs, engineers, and designers, to help make that experience even better.

Spotify has had machine learning experts focused on improving audio discovery for almost a decade, but there is more work to be done. We believe that Podz’ technology will complement and accelerate Spotify’s focused efforts to drive discovery, deliver listeners the right content at the right time, and accelerate growth of the category worldwide.

Powered by state-of-the-art machine learning technology, Podz generates high-quality clips that give users the opportunity to preview key moments from podcast episodes, encouraging them to discover and listen to new podcasts. This capability, combined with Spotify’s 2.6 million podcasts on the platform, learnings from our work in music discovery, and current investments in podcast recommendation, will take podcast discovery to the next level—making it easier for listeners to find the content they want to listen to, and for creators to be discovered and build a fan base.

We plan to integrate Podz’ technology into the Spotify experience, and listeners should start seeing elements of that work before the end of the year.

Fox Business is reporting that Facebook may be releasing a smart watch next year.

According to the report, Facebook is looking to compete with Apple in the smart watch market. Facebook hasn’t announced the project yet, but the concept would add cameras to smartwatches. The Verge reports that the watch would come with two detachable camera and would be able to share photos and videos directly to Facebook owned applications.

“We’ve said we want AR glasses to be truly useful — we’re investing in technologies across the board that will make that interaction feel more natural and intuitive,” Andrew Bosworth, vice president of Facebook Reality Labs, tweeted Wednesday. “This includes research like [electromyography], haptics, adaptive interfaces that could come together in a wrist-based form factor.

Facebook is looking to the mobile carriers to see which of them could sell the watch for them. The plan is to have the watch work with wireless data and not have to be tied to a phone or WiFi.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk said the company will resume taking Bitcoin once he can confirm miners are more energy efficient.

“When there’s confirmation of reasonable (~50%) clean energy usage by miners with positive future trend, Tesla will resume allowing bitcoin transactions.”

Tesla purchased $1.5 billion in Bitcoin. Musk had opened Bitcoin transactions until they discovered that the energy being used to mine Bitcoin was astronomical.

“We are concerned about rapidly increasing use of fossil fuels for Bitcoin mining and transactions, especially coal, which has the worst emissions of any fuel,” Musk said in May.

Autonomous ride sharing company Cruise has been given a permit to begin taking passengers in California.

Cruise is a subsidiary of GM with the backing of Softbank Vision Fund, Microsoft and Honda. The permit that they have received allows the company to shuttle companies in their test vehicles without a human safety operator. This means that the company is able to go fully autonomous.

The permit is issued by California’s Public Utilities Commission. This is permit is part of the commissions driverless pilot program. Cruise is also the first company to be able to gain the permit.

“In order to launch a commercial service for passengers here in the state of California, you need both the California DMV and the California PUC to issue deployment permits. Today we are honored to have been the first to receive a driverless autonomous service permit to test transporting passengers from the California PUC,” Prashanthi Raman, Cruise’s director of Government Affairs said according to TechCrunch.