Robotics & AI

This robotic dog can walk over just about any terrain • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 16, 2022Posted in carnegie mellon university, Hardware, Robotics & AI, uc-berkeleyNo Comments

Quadruped robot developers like Boston Dynamics have taken great pains to develop systems capable of traversing all manner of terrain. For the right price, you can pick up a robotic dog that can take a kick, get back up and get back on its way. A team comprised of researchers at Carnegie Mellon and UC Berkeley have developed their own system for teaching these sorts of robots to make their way over tough ground. The list includes stairs, curbs and uneven and slippery terrain. Rather than relying on the more standardized method of using cameras to map the world in front of them, the team trained the roots using simulators: four thousand virtual clones were sent on their way across all manner of different terrain. Image Credits: CMU The researchers say the method allowed them to effectively reproduce six years of walking experience in a single 24-hour period. The data collected in the simulations was then fed into a neural network and loaded on the robot. With the on-board learning, the system can react to its environment in real time and adjust its legs accordingly. The team claims that the system can bring down the cost of robots substantially. “This system uses vision and feedback from the body directly as input to output commands to the robot’s motors,” researcher Ananye Agarwal said in a post tied to the research. “This technique allows the system to be very robust in the real world. If it slips on stairs, it can recover. It can go into unknown environments and adapt.” Assistant professor Deepak Pathak says the system works in similar ways to real animals like cats. “Four-legged animals have a memory that enables their hind legs to track the front legs. Our system works in a similar fashion.” In additional to being able to climb stairs nearly its own height, the system is also able to operate in the dark, though the vision system is still required for improved performance.

Microsoft and Nvidia team up to build new Azure-hosted AI supercomputer • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 16, 2022Posted in AI, Enterprise, Microsoft, nvidia, Robotics & AI, supercomputerNo Comments

Roughly two years ago, Microsoft announced a partnership with OpenAI, the AI lab with which it has a close commercial relationship, to build what the tech giant called an “AI Supercomputer” running in the Azure cloud. Containing over 285,000 processor cores and 10,000 graphics cards, Microsoft claimed at the time that it was one of the largest supercomputer clusters in the world. Now, presumably to support even more ambitious AI workloads, Microsoft says it’s signed a “multi-year” deal with Nvidia to build a new supercomputer hosted in Azure and powered by Nvidia’s GPUs, networking and AI software for training AI systems. “AI is fueling the next wave of automation across enterprises and industrial computing, enabling organizations to do more with less as they navigate economic uncertainties,” Scott Guthrie, executive vice president of Microsoft’s cloud and AI group, said in a statement. “Our collaboration with Nvidia unlocks the world’s most scalable supercomputer platform, which delivers state-of-the-art AI capabilities for every enterprise on Microsoft Azure.” Details were hard to come by at press time. But in a blog post, Microsoft and Nvidia said that the upcoming supercomputer will feature hardware like Nvidia’s Quantum-2 400Gb/s InfiniBand networking technology and recently-detailed H100 GPUs. Current Azure instances offer previous-gen Nvidia A100 GPUs paired with Quantum 200Gb/s InfiniBand networking. Notably, the H100 — the flagship of Nvidia’s Hopper architecture — ships with a special “Transformer Engine” to accelerate machine learning tasks and — at least according to Nvidia — delivers between 1.5 and 6 times better performance than the A100. It’s also less power-hungry, offering the same performance as the A100 with up to 3.5 times better energy efficiency. One of the first industrial-scale machines to sport H100 GPUs, the Lenovo-built Henri system operated by the Flatiron Institute in New York City, topped the list of this year’s most efficient supercomputers. As part of the Microsoft collaboration, Nvidia says that it’ll use Azure virtual machine instances to research advances in generative AI, or the self-learning algorithms that can create text, code, images, video or audio. (Think along the lines of OpenAI’s text-generating GPT-3 and image-producing DALL-E 2.) Meanwhile, Microsoft will optimize its DeepSpeed library for new Nvidia hardware, aiming to reduce computing power and memory usage during AI training workloads, and work with Nvidia to make the company’s stack of AI workflows and software development kits available to Azure enterprise customers. Why Nvidia would opt to use Azure instances over its own in-house supercomputer, Selene, isn’t entirely clear; the company’s already tapped Selence to train generative AI like GauGAN2, a text-to-image generation model that creates art from basic sketches. Evidently, Nvidia anticipates that the scope of the AI systems that it’s working with will eventually surpass Selene’s capabilities. “AI technology advances as well as industry adoption are accelerating. The breakthrough of foundation models has triggered a tidal wave of research, fostered new startups and enabled new enterprise applications,” Manuvir Das, VP of enterprise computing at Nvidia, said in a statement. “Our collaboration with Microsoft will provide researchers and companies with state-of-the-art AI infrastructure and software to capitalize on the transformative power of AI.” The insatiable demand for powerful AI training infrastructure has led to an arms race of sorts among cloud and hardware vendors. Just this week, Cerabras, which has raised over $720 million in venture capital to date at an over-$4 billion valuation, unveiled a 13.5-million core AI supercomputer called Andromeda it claims can achieve more than 1 exaflop of AI compute. Google and Amazon continue to invest in their own proprietary solutions, offering custom-designed chips — e.g. TPUs and Trainium — for accelerating AI training in the cloud. The push for more powerful hardware will continue for the foreseeable future. A recent study found that the compute requirements for large-scale AI models has been doubling at an average rate of 10.7 months between 2016 and 2022. And OpenAI once estimated that, if GPT-3 were to be trained on a single Nvidia Tesla V100 GPU, it would take around 355 years.

Boston Dynamics sues Ghost Robotics over robot dog patent infringements • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 15, 2022Posted in boston dynamics, ghost robotics, Government & Policy, Hardware, military, patent litigation, Robotics & AINo Comments

If you know anything about Ghost Robotics, it’s likely one of two things: 1) They make robot dogs. 2) Sniper rifles can be mounted to those robots. A majority of the Philadelphia firm’s press coverage has revolved around these facts, along with some coverage of its systems being used to patrol the U.S. border. That last bit was enough to grab the attention of Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who tweeted: It’s shameful how both parties fight tooth + nail to defend their ability to pump endless public money into militarization. From tanks in police depts to corrupt military contracts, funding this violence is bipartisan + non-controversial, yet healthcare + housing isn’t. It’s BS. Ghost has thus far not demonstrated any manner of ethical qualms when it comes to its work with military and law enforcement — but it’s the company’s product design that could ultimately get it in hot water. Boston Dynamics filed a suit in the Delaware court system on November 11, alleging Ghost of infringing on multiple patents. “Boston Dynamics’ early success with the Spot robot did not go unnoticed by competitors in the robotics industry, including Ghost Robotics,” the suit notes. It goes on to call out two specific models, Vision 60 and Spirit 40, both “dog”-style quadrupeds. While Boston Dynamics tells ZebethMedia it doesn’t comment on pending legislation (understandable), it adds: Innovation is the lifeblood of Boston Dynamics, and our roboticists have successfully filed approximately 500 patents and patent applications worldwide. We welcome competition in the emerging mobile robotics market, but we expect all companies to respect intellectual property rights, and we will take action when those rights are violated. The suit notes that Boston Dynamics sent Ghost a letter on July 20, asking the company to review its patents. This was followed by multiple cease and desist letters. The filing then goes on to offer a fairly comprehensive catalog of alleged infringements. While Boston Dynamics’ Spot robot has been deployed by law enforcement agencies like the NYPD, the company has been vocal in its opposition to weaponizing robots. Last month, it joined Agility, ANYbotics, Clearpath Robotics and Open Robotics in penning an open letter condemning the practice. It noted, in part: We believe that adding weapons to robots that are remotely or autonomously operated, widely available to the public, and capable of navigating to previously inaccessible locations where people live and work, raises new risks of harm and serious ethical issues. Weaponized applications of these newly-capable robots will also harm public trust in the technology in ways that damage the tremendous benefits they will bring to society. Contracts with agencies have — of course — played a major role in the growth of robotics firms, including Boston Dynamics, which relied on DARPA as a major source of funding in its early days (though deals were sunset when the company was acquired by Google). Any firm willing to build the machinery for autonomous warfare stands to make a lot of money, assuming they’re not sidelined by ethical misgivings. Ghost gained prominence late last year when images emerged from a trade show featuring one of its robots with a SWORD Defense Systems Special Purpose Unmanned Rifle (SPUR) mounted to its back. The firm’s then-CEO Jiren Parikh told me at the time: We don’t make the payloads. Are we going to promote and advertise any of these weapon systems? Probably not. That’s a tough one to answer. Because we’re selling to the military, we don’t know what they do with them. We’re not going to dictate to our government customers how they use the robots. We do draw the line on where they’re sold. We only sell to U.S. and allied governments. We don’t even sell our robots to enterprise customers in adversarial markets. We get lots of inquiries about our robots in Russia and China. We don’t ship there, even for our enterprise customers. The suit asks the court to award unspecified damages for the alleged infringements. We’ve reached out to Ghost Robotics about Boston Dynamics’ filing and will update the story accordingly as we hear back.

TheGist taps AI to summarize Slack channels and threads • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 15, 2022Posted in AI, aleph, App, Apps, Enterprise, Robotics & AI, slack, summarization, TheGistNo Comments

Itay Dressler and Itzik Ben Bassat, who’ve held various software engineering and executive roles at startups together over the years, are accustomed to exchanging brief messages. Ben Bassat has ADHD, and for that reason prefers to keep texts on the shorter side. But as he and Dressler were faced with wrangling an increasing number of tools at their employers, they came to realize they weren’t the only ones who could benefit from more succinct updates. So they founded TheGist with the grand mission of “simplifying information consumption in workplace communications and data” through instant highlights. The startup’s first product uses AI to scan Slack messages and provide a personalized summary, aiming to filter out noise. And in the enterprise, there’s plenty of noise to filter. According to a 2021 report in Tech Republic, a survey of remote workers showed that 18% suffered from “information overload” while 8% were overwhelmed by the amount of data and apps they were meant to check each day. “There’s an overload of software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications that aren’t deeply integrated. Different teams use different tools to create information silos,” Ben Bassat told ZebethMedia in an email interview. “The integration between those SaaS tools makes the information overload greater, not smaller. There is no reason that in 2022, using AI, employees can’t get the information they need to make better decisions in a short and personalized form.” Installing TheGist’s Slack app — which can summarize both channels and threads — is a straightforward-enough process. Once connected to a workspace, the app can be added or invited to channels that a user wishes to summarize. Typing the command “/gist” summons it, generating a fresh summary — generally a bullet point or two in length — of what happened in the channel, visible only to the person who requested it. Image Credits: TheGist TheGist Slack app can provide summaries covering time scales from one day to several weeks. Beyond this, it can summarize particularly long individual Slack messages. Service is free for up to five summaries but unlimited summaries requires a premium subscription, which starts at $10 per user per month. “We wanted to release a tool that highlights the need for shortening the information overload in companies,” Ben Bassat said. “TheGist is a game changer for decision makers as we enable managers to dramatically increase the amount of workplace information they can consume by digesting it and personalizing it … For employees, we serve them the information they need when they need it so they can be aligned with the organization and make better and more knowledgeable decisions.” That’s a lot to promise. AI, while improving by leaps and bounds, has its limitations; TheGist’s summaries are bound to contain mistakes from time to time. And from a security standpoint, companies might be loathe to let a third-party app process the internal messages — particularly companies in highly regulated industries. Ben Bassat didn’t provide much in the way of detail around TheGist’s AI systems and their development, save that it’s leveraging “multiple open source large languages models” with “specific in-house fine-tuning.” “We are using statistical models to evaluate our models’ output and assess correctness,” Ben Bassat said. “As in every product which is generated by AI, results can have summary errors, and our users are made aware of that.” On the compliance question, Ben Bassat claims that TheGist doesn’t store Slack data other than the specific messages users ask to summarize, which it deletes after the summaries are generated. “We only store analytical and usage data in order to improve our product and personalize the user experience. Users can ask to delete their data according to our privacy policy,” Ben Bassat added. There aren’t a lot of competitors in the Slack summarization space. But there are a few, it’s worth noting. Frame summarizes the previous day’s Slack activity, providing metrics including team responsiveness and auto-detected “high” and “low” moments. Grok, a Slack app, provides summaries of Slack conversations and threads generated by OpenAI’s GPT-3 API. There’s also TLDR, which uses algorithms to spit out Slack message summaries. Image Credits: TheGist But Ben Bassat and co don’t see TheGist’s first app as the endgame. In parallel to it, Ben Bassat says that the company’s on the cusp of releasing “proprietary generative AI solutions” for different platforms in the near future — although it’s not clear for which platforms and what types of generative AI. Ben Bassat didn’t have much to say on the subject, which suggests that the specifics are in flux. “The goal of our platform is to enable anyone to be informed with short updates from any app they use for communication or productivity: Email, texts, project managing tools, doc files and more. Solving this challenge requires a lot of technological focus with a high level of expertise,” Ben Bassat said. “Our vision is to provide accurate summaries and actionable insights across all information-producing apps.” The success of TheGist’s Slack app aside, generative AI is probably a wise path to take. It’s the hot new thing in tech, to be sure, with startups like Jasper, an AI copywriting app for marketers, recently raising $125 million at a $1.5 billion valuation. VCs are certainly excited by the prospect; Sequoia Capital said in a blog post from September that it thought generative AI could “create trillions of dollars of economic value.” For its part, TheGist has raised $7 million to date in pre-seed funding co-led by StageOne Ventures and Aleph. Eden Shochat, a partner at Aleph, said via email: “TheGist’s debut tool is only the starting point, and there is so much more to come. In a world where companies create excessive amounts of data, across multiple tools, employees only want to zero in on the insights that matter to them, at the point in time when they are relevant. TheGist is on a mission to create magical tools that work for the user, rather than the other way around.”

AI-powered media editing app Descript lands fresh cash from OpenAI • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 15, 2022Posted in Descript, media, Media & Entertainment, OpenAI Startup Fund, podcasts, Robotics & AI, Startups, VideoNo Comments

Descript, the audio and video editing platform founded in 2017 by former Groupon CEO Andrew Mason, has raised $50 million in a Series C round led by the OpenAI Startup Fund, a tranche through which OpenAI and its partners, including Microsoft, are investing in early-stage companies. Descript is the second startup to receive a cash infusion from the fund after AI note-taking app Mem, and Mason says it reflects OpenAI’s belief in the future of Descript’s AI-powered features. “I founded Descript with the idea of building a simple, intuitive, fully-powered editing tool for video and audio — an editing tool built for the age of AI,” Mason told ZebethMedia in an email interview. “We’re on the verge of a generational change in the way we create content — fueled by AI. That includes the kind of tools like creators are already using in Descript, and emerging stuff like generative AI. The challenge for companies like ours is how to make that technology useful and accessible.” Mason wouldn’t reveal Descript’s valuation post-money, but he noted that the funding — which also had participation from Andreessen Horowitz, Redpoint Ventures, Spark Capital and ex-Y Combinator partner Daniel Gross — brings the company’s total raised to $100 million. According to a report from The Information in October, OpenAI had agreed to lead funding valuing Descript at around $550 million, over double the startup’s valuation as of January 2021 ($260 million). “We started the OpenAI Startup Fund to accelerate the impact companies building on powerful AI will have on the world, and we’re particularly excited about tools that empower people creatively,” OpenAI COO Brad Lightcap, who manages the OpenAI Startup Fund, said in a press release. “It’s clear from using Descript and talking to customers that Descript is breaking down barriers between idea and creation by extending video editing capabilities to an entirely new class of creators.” Descript was created as a spin-off of Mason’s audio-guide business Detour, which Bose acquired in 2018. The platform, geared toward podcasters and videographers unfamiliar with professional-level editing tools, lets users create instant transcriptions of audio and video that can then be cut and paired with music, photos and other content using drag-and-drop tools. Coinciding with the new cash, Descript today unveiled a host of editing features — some powered by AI — and a redesign intended to make editing video “as easy as editing a doc or slides,” in Mason’s words. That might be overpromising a bit. But the new capabilities do indeed streamline aspects of content creation that have historically been arduous. For example, Descript now offers a background removal feature that lets users put their videos in any setting they want. And with write mode, users can edit scripts in Descript, tapping the platform’s Overdub voice cloning tech to scratch a voiceover. Descript’s redesigned editing interface, rolling out today, which adds features like templates and background removal for video. Image Credits: Descript Other highlights in the latest release of Descript, called Descript Storyboard, include multitrack screen recording — the recorder is now integrated into the editor, with separate tracks for screen and camera — and free access to stock sound effects, videos, images and music tracks. Descript also now provides new video transitions and animations and various templates, including layouts, titles sequences and social clips, along with the ability to create custom project templates. With the redesign, Mason says that the goal was to both complement and augment Descript’s transcript-based editor while leaving core functionality intact. A new experience called Scenes allows users to break scripts composed in write mode into scenes and then arrange the visuals they same way they’d work with slides in a deck. Scenes keeps voiceovers from Overdub aligned with the script, letting creators swap a scratch clip with the final recording, for example, without having to worry about the tracks falling out of alignment. “We believe video should be in every communicator’s toolkit, as ubiquitous as docs and slides. The tools are the only things preventing that, and we intend to change it,” Mason said. “We think of our main competition as non-editors — people who aren’t making video because the tools are too complex and time consuming.” Descript isn’t the only company competing in the audiovisual content editing space. Besides incumbents like Adobe, there are startups such as Reduct.Video, which uses AI, natural language processing and other tech to automatically create editable transcripts. San Francisco-based Descript, which employs about 100 people, has been aggressively expanding, however, acquiring AI company Lyrebird in 2019 to power its Overdub feature. Initially focused on audio editing, Descript launched its first video editing features two years ago, chasing after a digital video market that’s estimated to be worth more than $20 billion. The strategy appears to be working for Descript so far, which counted NPR, VICE, The Washington Post and The New York Times among its customers as of 2021. While Mason wouldn’t answer questions about revenue, he says that Descript’s client base has expanded in recent months to “major universities and nonprofits,” as well as organizations in the public sector. “The pandemic changed the way we all create and collaborate — a lot of people cooped up at home got more curious about video, and a lot of people started exploring the creator economy,” Mason said. “Companies started using video for more of their async communications. Around the same time, individual creators stopped respecting the boundaries between media; YouTubers started podcasts, podcasters flocked to TikTok and so on. Our new funding, plus the fact that all those things I just mentioned are only gaining energy, puts us in a great position to weather any headwinds.”

Attabotics raises another $71M to grow its vertical robotic warehouse solution • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 15, 2022Posted in attabotics, Hardware, Robotics & AI, warehouse, warehouse roboticsNo Comments

“Amazon remains the best member of our business development team,” Attabotics founder and CEO Scott Gravelle says with a hint of snark, “as companies go look for alternatives and look for ways to stay competitive. Amazon has been setting customer expectation in North America for years. They’re the benchmark.” It’s a familiar story for anyone in the fulfillment space. Amazon’s success in warehouse robotics has effectively created its own industry. Many have followed in the company’s footsteps with Kiva-style robots, but Calgary-based Attabotics believes it has built out a new paradigm for the category. The company builds densely packed vertical storage structures that utilize robots and AI to find and fetch items. The company says it’s able to accomplish this in 15% of the standard warehouse space by building up. One of the major appeals of such a cost-saving system is that you can bring it to more densely packed urban environments. That means, among other things, bringing fulfillment centers closer to customers. The strategy has helped the firm drum up a good amount of funding since its 2015 founding. This week it announced a $71.7 million Series C led by Export Development Canada and featuring Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan Board. That brings its total funding up to $165.1 million. It’s a less than ideal time to be out there looking for funding, but Gravelle tells ZebethMedia that time was of the essence. “We’re not at the stage where we could have [waited],” he explains. Gravelle adds, “We’ve got some great traction with some great customers. We signed a deal with the DoD. So now it’s time to go from making stuff work to growing the business and deploying it and executing it.” In September, the firm announced Attabot 2022, the first commercialized version of its technology, which began rolling out to select customers a month prior. Per the company: Attabot 2022 is equipped with a flexible payload to accommodate larger bins up to 16” tall at 100lb – an increase of 25% from Attabotics’ previous robot release. Its ultra-lean, modular design translates into 60% fewer parts than the previous beta model and allows for further flexibility and forward compatibility. The company is continuing to grow its headcount — albeit cautiously — as it looks to fill 30 positions and expand beyond its engineering core. Attabotics’ current headcount is around 300.

Pickle picks up $26M for its truck unloading robots • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 15, 2022Posted in Hardware, Pickle, Pickle Robot Company, robotics, Robotics & AI, truck, warehouseNo Comments

Fulfillment has arguably been the hottest robotics category over the past two years, as companies have looked to stay competitive with Amazon, even amid ongoing labor shortages. Still, one of the most important links in the chain remains one of the least addressed. Truck unloading isn’t a particularly easy problem to solve, but Pickle Robot Company is single-mindedly focused on it. When I paid a trip to the company’s offices on my trip to Boston last week, Pickle pointed out precisely how large of a problem this has become. Warehouse jobs are tough enough to fill these days, but unloading pallets and trucks bring their own spate of issues, including repetitive heavy lifting and wildly fluctuating temperatures. Imagine stepping foot inside a shipping container that’s been sitting in direct sunlight all day. Traditional heavy equipment like forklifts come with their own issues. The company describes their offering thusly, “Pickle is founded by a cast of MIT alumni. We are teaching off-the-shelf robot arms how to pick up boxes and play Tetris.” The company notes that it has “unload[ed] tens-of-thousands of packages per month at customer sites,” primarily in Southern California. The work thus far has been part of a pilot with United Exchange Corporation, which has deployed the system in a distribution center. Today Pickle is announcing a $26 million Series A raise led by Ranpak, JS Capital, Schusterman Family Investments, Soros Capital and Catapult Ventures. Image Credits: Pickle Robot Company “Customer interest in Pickle unload systems has been incredibly strong, and now that we have our initial unload systems out of the lab and into customer operations we have a clear path to broad commercialization,” said founder and CEO AJ Meyer. “The early customer deployments, financing and leadership additions set the stage for us to accelerate customer acquisition and build the company infrastructure we need to deliver more systems to more customers in the coming months.” That last bit is especially important. As you’re most likely aware, now is not a great time to be raising — even in a booming category like warehouse automation. But given the size and breadth of Pickle’s testing, putting funding off in hopes of better economic conditions isn’t necessarily an option when you’ve got product to deliver. And besides, Pickle’s not the only game in town either, figuratively or literally. Boston Dynamics notably chose truck unlocking as the focus for its second commercialized robot, Stretch. Unlike that solution, however, Pickle’s is tethered. Agility has also explored truck unloading for its Digit robot. Even with that added competition, we’re talking about a huge total addressable market, with room for more than one player.

Meeting camera startup Owl Labs lands $25M and partnership with HP • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 14, 2022Posted in Enterprise, funding, HP, Matrix Partners, playground global, Robotics & AI, Spark Capital, startup, StartupsNo Comments

Owl Labs, a startup developing a linuep AI-powered meeting hardware, today announced that it raised $25 million in a Series C round led by HP Tech Ventures (HP’s venture capital arm) with participation from Sourcenext, Matrix Partners, Spark Capital and Playground Global. The closing of the tranche marks the start of a strategic partnership with HP, Owl Labs CEO Frank Weishaupt says, which will see HP invest in Owl Labs’ various product offerings while providing sales coverage and outreach with enterprise customers. HP, notably, recently acquired Poly, which developed a range of video and voice devices and software for virtual conferencing. Weishaupt sees no conflict, arguing that Poly’s products are complementary with Owl Labs’ and show “HP’s commitment to transforming the workplace to a hybrid model.” “The funding will allow Owl Labs to continue its accelerated growth … Owl Labs will use the investment to support product development and increase global adoption of the company’s products, including the [Owl Labs’] product line,” Weishaupt told ZebethMedia in an email interview. “The funding will also be used to expand Owl Labs’ global footprint and deepen go-to-market partnerships starting with a commercial agreement between Owl Labs and HP France, where HP will sell Owl Labs’ products through their local sales team.” Owl Labs was founded by Mark Schnittman and Max Makeev in 2014, who sought to develop a better videoconferencing experience than cameras at the time could achieve. (Weishaupt, a former CarGurus exec, joined Owl Labs as CEO in early 2019.) Drawing on their work at iRobot, the Schnittman and Schnittman created Owl Labs’ first product, the auto-swiveling Meeting Owl Pro, after testing the concept by putting a laptop on a spinning stool. Today, Owl Labs sells several products, including a dedicated whiteboard camera, meeting room control console and its latest-generation meeting camera, the Meeting Owl 3. The Meeting Owl 3 features a mic and speaker array paired with a 360-degree camera, which zooms in on whoever’s speaking. There’s countless “intelligent” meeting cameras on the market, including from heavy hitters like Microsoft and Google. But Weishaupt makes the case that Owl Labs’ software is a differentiator. Called the Owl Intelligence System, it allows customers to connect up to two Meeting Owls to expand their video and audio range and add facial recognition including for masked faces. “Meeting Owl 3 is the only 360-degree videoconferencing device on the market that can be connected to others to expand reach in larger spaces,” Weishaupt said. ” Owl Labs’ technology learns the space to create a more seamless experience, getting smarter over time.” Owl Labs got caught in a negative press cycle earlier this year when a security firm, Modzero, uncovered vulnerabilities in several models of the Meeting Owl and whiteboard camera that attackers could’ve exploit to obtain sensitive data. Owl Labs patched the exploit, which doesn’t appear to have majorly dented sales — Weishaupt says that over 130,000 organizations are using Owl Labs products including 84 Fortune 100 companies. “We can share that we’ve had a solid growth trajectory with more than 3x revenue growth year-over-year and 7x revenue growth since the pandemic began,” Weishaupt said, declining to share more precise revenue figures. “Owl Labs became the first company to build AI-powered, 360-degree video conferencing solutions for hybrid organizations. Owl Labs as a company was hybrid pre-pandemic and are experts at using technology to bridge the gap between remote and in-person work environments.” To date, Boston-based, over-100-employee Owl Labs has raised $47 million in funding.

Facing economic headwinds, Amazon consolidates robotic projects • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 11, 2022Posted in Amazon, amazon robotics, Hardware, Rivian, robotics, Robotics & AINo Comments

Westborough, Massachusetts is a quiet town of 22,000, 40 minutes by car southeast of Boston. BOS27 is among the town’s newer residents. The 350,000-square-foot Amazon facility opened its doors a little over a year ago. It’s a hulking, gray addition to the tree-filled scenery. Inside is a state of the art facility that — along with a space on the opposite side of Boston in North Reading, Massachusetts — forms the beating heart of the company’s lofty robotics ambitions. In the decade since the company acquired Kiva Systems for $775 million in cash, it’s grown itself into one of the world’s leading robotics firms. Ask any founder in the warehouse robotics space, and they’ll quickly credit the company as the driving force in the space. “We look at Amazon, probably as the best marketing arm in the robotics business today,” Locus Robotics CEO Rick Faulk said at our robotics event in July. “They have set SLAs that everyone has to match. And we look at them as being a great part of our marketing team.” Amazon has set package delivery expectations at once-seemingly-impossible next or same day, and an entire industry has grown up around it, in hopes of keeping smaller firms competitive with the retail giant. Image Credits: Brian Heater What strikes you as soon as you walk through the doors at BOS27 is how much the space resembles one of the company’s many fulfillment centers. It’s cavernous and buzzing with robots and their human counterparts. The space, which was built to accommodate a business that had grown too large for just the North Reading location, is where the company develops, tests and builds its robotic systems. (Another space has recently opened in Belgium, as well, courtesy of Amazon’s September acquisition of Cloostermans.) This week, the company opened its doors to a handful of press members, including ZebethMedia. The “Delivering the Future” event was, by any measure, a PR push. It was an opportunity to show off the company’s shiny new production facility and a chance to present a kind of unified front for Amazon Robotics, a category that now encapsulates every element of the Amazon retail experience from the moment a consumer hits “buy now.” Image Credits: Amazon A couple of guided tours around the floor showcased the company’s growing army of wheeled robots built atop the Kiva platform, including the ubiquitous blue Hercules (the fourth-gen version of the product), and the mini conveyor belt sporting Pegasus and Xanthus, which is, for most intents and purposes, a lightweight version of the latter. Newer on the scene is Proteus, which arrives in a nearly neon green (“Seahawks green” as one executive joked today), with a small LED face and full autonomy — meaning it can safely operate outside the structured confines developed for the older models. Image Credits: Amazon Amazon also showed off a trio of robotic arms, which follow a similar evolutionary trajectory as their wheeled counterparts. There’s Robin, which debuted around 18 months ago and is now installed in 1,000 warehouses across the world. Its successor Cardinal adds a level of efficiency to the system, as it tightly packs boxes to send across the fulfillment center. A third, Sparrow, debuted at today’s event. As with its predecessors, Sparrow is effectively a souped-up version of a Fanuc off-the-shelf industrial robotic arm. The system is still in very limited pilots, including a facility in Texas and behind a safety cage at BOS27. What sets it apart from standard Fanuc arm deployments, however, is two-fold. First is the suction cup gripper, which utilizes pneumatics to pick up a wide range of different objects. The real secret sauce is the software of course. Amazon says the AI, coupled with a range of different hardware sensors, allows the system to identify around 65% of the inventory offered through the retailer. It’s a mindboggling figure. The system uses things like bar codes, size and shape to identify individual objects. Image Credits: Amazon Robin and Cardinal deal exclusively in boxes — of which Amazon has around 15 basic models. Sparrow has the far more complex task of picking up the products themselves. Beyond identification, this introduces its own spate of different challenges. If you’ve ever purchased anything from the company, you know how wildly these things fluctuate in size, shape and material. Hypotheticallym the same arm is picking up a bowling bowl and a bag of cotton swabs. That’s where the suction cup system comes in, offering a far greater range of picks than a rigid robotic hand. All told, the company has deployed more than 520,000 robotic drives since Amazon Robotics’ 2012 founding. It says that more than 75% of products ordered through its site come into contact with one of its robotic systems at some point in the process. Image Credits: Amazon Last-mile was the other of focus of today’s event. That starts with the 1,000 Rivian EVs the company has begun deploying to meet holiday demand. “Customers across the U.S. will begin to see custom electric delivery vehicles from Rivian delivering their Amazon packages, with the electric vehicles hitting the road in Baltimore, Chicago, Dallas, Kansas City, Nashville, Phoenix, San Diego, Seattle and St. Louis, among other cities,” the company noted in July. “This rollout is just the beginning of what is expected to be thousands of Amazon’s custom electric delivery vehicles in more than 100 cities by the end of this year — and 100,000 by 2030.” Image Credits: Amazon Somewhat surprisingly, Amazon is still very bullish on the future of drone deliveries. “A demonstrated, targeted level of safety that is validated by regulators and a magnitude safer than driving to the store,” Prime Air VP David Carbon said during a keynote. “Delivering 500 million packages by drone annually by the end of this decade. Servicing millions of customers, operating in highly populated, suburban areas such as Seattle, Boston and Atlanta. Flying in an uncontrolled space autonomously.” Image Credits: Amazon But while a rendering of its MK30 drone —

Thomson Reuters to acquire tax automation company SurePrep for $500M • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 11, 2022Posted in Enterprise, Fintech, Robotics & AI, SurePrep, thomson reutersNo Comments

Thomson Reuters has announced plans to acquire SurePrep, a tax automation software company based in Irvine, California. The transaction, which Thomson Reuters said it expects to close in Q1 2023, values SurePrep at $500 million, which will be paid entirely in cash. Founded in 2002, SurePrep is one of numerous software providers that help tax professionals and accountants gather and file 1040 tax returns on behalf of their clients. Integrating with existing tax software systems, SurePrep offers various products that support uploading documents at regular intervals through the year via automated document requests, with support for mobile scanning, esignatures, and more. Built-in AI smarts also automatically extracts and repopulates data in companies’ tax compliance software of choice, removing many of the manual paperwork steps involved. SurePrep’s TaxCaddy product SurePrep is the latest in a long recent line of tax management software companies to be acquired. In August, Vista Equity Partners announced plans to acquire automated tax compliance company Avalara for $8.4 billion, while earlier this month private equity firm Cinven revealed it was buying online tax preparation software provider TaxAct for $720 million. Last year, Stripe bought TaxJar for an undisclosed amount. Thomson Reuters, though perhaps best known for its news agency, has a number of business units including legal, government, and tax and accounting. Indeed, it has been partnering with SurePrep for the past six months, according to Thomson Reuters, “providing complementary solutions” for tax and accounting workers — this has effectively meant Thomson Reuters serving as a reseller for SurePrep’s software. For SurePrep, the deal will give it extensive reach into Thomson Reuters’ existing customer base, while for Thomson Reuters it gets an arsenal of automated tools to bolster its existing tax products.