It turns out Apple could build its new campus in North Carolina

The Washington Post reported just yesterday that Apple was talking with Virginia officials for a new campus in Northern Virginia. But WRAL is now reporting that Apple is about to announce a new campus in North Carolina.

According to WRAL’s sources, it’s “a done deal.” The company and legislators plan to talk about a tax break to seal the deal. If North Carolina agrees to reduce the taxes, Apple could create a new campus in the Research Triangle Park.

Multiple tech companies already have offices in the Research Triangle Park as it is close to top universities (Duke University, NC State University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill). IBM and Cisco have established huge offices in the region.

It’s also worth noting that Apple CEO Tim Cook got his MBA at Duke University.

This report doesn’t necessarily mean that Apple didn’t talk with Virginia officials. The company could be considering opening a big office in one of those two locations and a smaller one in the other.

Apple has been looking for a new location for its new campus. The company already has thousands of employees in Cupertino and Austin. Apple expects to hire 20,000 employees over the next five years in those three locations.

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Apple brings its coding lessons to schools for students who are blind and deaf

Apple this morning announced another expansion of Everyone Can Code, bringing its Swift coding curricula to a number of US schools focused on students who are blind and deaf. The current list includes eight schools in California, New York, Florida, Illinois, Massachusetts and Texas.

“Apple’s mission is to make products as accessible as possible,” Tim Cook says in the announcement. “We created Everyone Can Code because we believe all students deserve an opportunity to learn the language of technology. We hope to bring Everyone Can Code to even more schools around the world serving students with disabilities.”

According to a release issued around the news, the lessons will be augmented for students using Apple’s accessibility, and tailored to individual needs with help from teachers. VoiceOver will play a key role here, reading step by step on-screen instructions for students with visual impairments. For students with hearing impairments, the Swift curricula will utilize captions, LED flash alerts and iPhone compatible hearing aids.

The company is also marking today’s Global Accessibility Awareness Day with events in its retail and corporate locations.

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Apple reportedly looks to Virginia for another US campus

It seems Virginia is for tech lovers.

According to a report in The Washington Post, Apple has been searching for places to put hubs as it contemplates how to spend the $30 billion it has committed for new facilities and 20,000 new employees in the U.S. over the next five years — and it looks like Virginia is on the list.

If Virginia makes the cut, Apple would be the second large tech company to call the state a (second or third) home, as Amazon is also reportedly looking at Virginia as a site for its second U.S. headquarters.

The Post is reporting that Apple could seek to put up to 20,000 employees in a potential Northern Virginia campus that would total 4 million square feet of office space.

Citing conversations between the company and Virginia Governor Ralph Northam, the Post reported that state officials had proposed several sites for the Apple campus, which would be two-thirds the size of the Pentagon and half of what Amazon is looking for in its new HQ.

All of the attention from Amazon and Apple speaks to the new realty for tech companies, which is that Washington, DC has its eye on them… and, conversely, these companies need to have a closer eye on Washington.

Facebook and Google, which is owned by parent company Alphabet, have both also expanded their presence in the DC area. Four years ago, Google opened new offices in the capital to much fanfare and ballyhoo, while Facebook plans to site a $1 billion data center in the Richmond area.

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Hear from the executives of Innoviz and Oryx Vision about the eyes and ears of the new automobile in Tel Aviv

The success of the autonomous vehicle revolution relies on complicated systems of sophisticated sensors working in harmony to provide the magic of sight to machines.

OmerKeilaf, chief executive, Innoviz

In Tel Aviv, we’ll hear from experts in the field as they discuss the technological marvels that are the driving force behind the transformation of mobility in the modern world.

Omer David Keilaf, the chief executive of Innoviz, comes to us with some significant recent wins under his company’s belt. The Innoviz LIDAR technology has been selected by BMW to power its Level 3 to Level 5 autonomous vehicle systems.

The company’s solid-state LiDAR sensor, available as a built-in device beginning next year, is much smaller than traditional LIDAR and is stationary.

Before founding Innoviz, Keilaf led the system and product definition efforts at the world’s first handheld molecular sensor for mobile devices with ConsumerPhysics. Previous roles include leading the system architecture and engineering teams at bTendo (acquired by ST Micro) and Anobit (acquired by Apple).

Rani Wellingstein, chief executive, Oryx Vision

No less impressive is the work of fellow panelist Rani Wellingstein of Oryx Vision, whose company is developing its own novel LIDAR technology. Oryx’s LiDAR uses antennas in place of photodetectors to retrieve both range and velocity information for the points of light in its high-resolution scans of its surroundings. The company claims that its technology is a million times more sensitive than existing LiDAR systems, and is better able to deal with interference from sunlight, and from other LiDARs in operation on the road.

A serial entrepreneur, Wellingstein’s last company, Intucell, was sold to Cisco for $475 million in 2013. At Cisco, Wellingstein served as the vice president and business unit manager of Cisco’s self optimized networks business unit.

 

Israel is driving autonomous innovation and we’re excited to talk to the folks behind the wheel of the nation’s innovative companies. Join us. You have just 48 hours left to score the early-bird ticket price — 265 ILS. So buy your tickets now.

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Music payments startup Exactuals debuts R.AI, a “Palantir for music royalties”

Exactuals, a software service offering payments management for the music industry, is debuting R.AI, a new tool that it’s dubbed the “Palantir for music”. It’s a service that can track songwriting information and rights across different platforms to ensure attribution for music distributors.

As companies like Apple and Spotify demand better information from labels about the songs they’re pushing to streaming services, companies are scrambling to clean up their data and provide proper attribution.

According to Exactuals, that’s where the r.ai service comes in.

The company is tracking 59 million songs for their “Interested Party Identifiers” (IPIs), International Standard Work Codes (ISWCs), and International Standard Recording Codes (ISRCs) — all of which are vital to ensuring that songwriters and musicians are properly paid for their work every time a song is streamed, downloaded, covered, or viewed on a distribution platform.

Chris McMurtry, the head of music product at Exactuals explained it like this. In the music business, songwriters have the equivalent of a social security number which is attached to any song they write so they can receive credit and payment. That’s the ISI. Performers of songs have their own identifier, which is the ISWC. Then the song itself gets its own code, called the ISRC which is used to track a song as it’s performed by other artists through various covers, samples and remixes.

“There’s only one ISWC, but there might be 300 ISRCs,” says Exactuals chief executive, Mike Hurst.

Publishing technology companies will pay writers and performers based on these identifiers, but they’re struggling to identify and track all of the 700,000 disparate places where the data could be, says McMurtry. Hence the need for r.ai.

 

The technology is “an open api based on machine learning that matches disparate data sources to clean and enhance it so rights holders can get paid and attribution happens,” says McMurtry.

For publishers, Exactuals argues that r.ai is the best way to track rights across a huge catalog of music and for labels it’s an easy way to provide services like Apple and Spotify with the information they’re now demanding, Hurst said.

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Didi Chuxing can now test self-driving cars in California

Quite a number of companies — 53, to be exact — have received permits to test self-driving cars with a safety driver in California. One of the more notable companies that has received a permit is China-based Didi Chuxing, which officially opened up its U.S.-based research lab last March.

Also on the list of permit holders is Udacity, which partnered with Didi last year to host a contest for the development of an Automated Safety and Awareness Processing Stack.

In April, the California Department of Motor Vehicles introduced some new regulations and permit application processes for self-driving car companies. The new system entails three autonomous vehicle permit options: testing with a driver, driverless testing and deployment. Most of the new elements of the regulations are around driverless testing and deployment.

For example, in order to conduct driverless testing, companies must have previously tested the vehicles in controlled conditions. The vehicles must also, among many other things, meet the definition of an SAE Level 4 or 5 vehicle. With deployment, companies need to ensure cars can detect and respond to roadway situations, meet best practices to detect cyberattacks and more.

Another notable permit holder is Apple, which in January expanded its fleet to include 27 cars. Missing from the list, unsurprisingly, is Didi rival Uber.

Last week, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said Uber will bring back its self-driving cars “within the next few months, I don’t know.”

To be fair, Khosrowshahi didn’t sound 100 percent confident in his answer. That’s just to say I wouldn’t be surprised if it takes Uber longer than a few months. He went on to say that when Uber does bring its cars back on the road, “it’s going to be in as safe of a way as possible.”

Uber pulled its self-driving cars off the roads following the March fatal crash. Later that month, Uber decided not to reapply for a self-driving car testing permit in California. Uber’s previous permit expired March 31.

If Uber wants to continue its tests in California, it will need to apply for a new permit, as well as “address any follow-up analysis or investigations from the recent crash in Arizona,” DMV Deputy Director/Chief Counsel Brian Soublet wrote in a letter to Uber in March. Uber may also need to set up a meeting with the DMV.

I’ve reached out to Didi to learn more about its plans for self-driving cars in CA and will update this story if I hear back.

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Apple’s App Store redesign improved app discovery, report finds

When Apple introduced its completely redesigned App Store last fall, one of its goals was to improve app discovery by placing a larger emphasis on editorial content – including things like “app of the day” picks, lists, how-to’s and even interviews with app developers, among other things. Now, a new study from Sensor Tower reveals those changes appear to have been working.

According to Sensor Tower’s findings, more apps are being discovered by way of browsing the App Store following the redesign launched in September.

Before, browse-driven downloads accounted for around 10 percent of all downloads. With the new App Store, they’ve grown to more than 15 percent. And that increase has held steady into 2018, even as the initial excitement around the App Store revamp has worn off.

Despite the growth in app discovery by browsing, searching for app by typing keywords into the search box is still, by far, the primary way consumers are finding and downloading new apps. Today, search accounts for 65 percent of downloads – well ahead of browse, referrals, or other methods.

Sensor Tower based its findings on data collected on app downloads between May 2017 and April 2018, it says.

The report also delved into the differences between how consumers discover apps and games.

As it turns out, browsing plays a much more significant role in game discovery than it does for non-game apps. Only 56 percent of game downloads came from search, compared with 69 percent for non-games. Meanwhile, browse contributed to 24 percent of game downloads, compared to just 9 percent of non-game downloads.

What this seems to indicate is that iOS users are turning to the App Store and its editorial recommendations in greater numbers to learn about what new game to try next. Plus, the fact that games can now include a video preview, and labels like “Editor’s Choice” are better highlighted in the new App Store also likely help people get a better sense of which ones to install, as they browse.

Sensor Tower’s findings about game downloads line up with research released last month where it found that games that were featured as the “Game of the Day” could see their downloads increase by 802 percent, compared to the week prior to being featured. Apps, by comparison, saw boosts of 685 percent.

The new report’s findings are good news for Apple which had a sizable challenge to tackle with its App Store redesign. Its app marketplace had grown almost over-crowded over the years. And even after the big app cleanup, it still stands at over 2 million apps. Finding a way to better introduce favorites and newcomers to iOS users at this scale was a tall order, but the growth in apps discovered by way of browsing indicates Apple has seen some success on this front. 

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