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Amazon's Casting Revolution 📡, Wi-Fi 7's Speed Leap 🌀, Microsoft's AI Battery Breakthrough 🤖
1/10/2024
Tech News 📡
Amazon introduces Matter casting to its Prime Video app, allowing users to cast content to Amazon hardware devices like Echo Show 15 and soon, Fire TVs. This feature, part of the Matter smart home standard, is an open protocol that simplifies app-to-app communication and is not limited to specific phone OSes or partnerships.
Walmart expands its drone delivery program to cover 75% of the Dallas-Fort Worth area, partnering with drone startups Wing and Zipline. This service allows customers within 10 miles of a participating Walmart to receive items like cold medicine and eggs in 30 minutes or less.
Trending Startups📱
FullEnrich offers a platform for B2B contact enrichment, aggregating contact information from over 15 premium vendors. It provides tools for building lead lists with contact info directly from LinkedIn, spreadsheets, and Zapier, aiming to enhance lead generation and outreach efficiency.
Rainex is a subscription management and billing platform designed for both B2B and B2C businesses. It offers features like multi-language and multi-currency support, seamless integration with various payment gateways, and customizable notifications for efficient billing and subscription management.
AI 🤖
Microsoft, in collaboration with Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, used AI to discover a new solid-state electrolyte for batteries. This material could lead to safer, more efficient batteries with less lithium usage, marking a significant advancement in battery technology.
Intel introduces AI-focused chips for the automotive sector, enhancing in-car experiences like navigation and voice assistants. The first company to use these chips is Zeekr, aiming to redefine software-defined vehicles with improved safety features and energy management.
Coding & Development 🖥️
Pure functions, a fundamental concept in functional programming, are deterministic and have no side effects. They always produce the same output for the same input and do not modify any external state. This makes them easy to trust, combine, test, debug, and parallelize.
The US IT job market added only 700 jobs in 2023, a sharp decline from the previous year's 267,000. This slowdown is attributed to pandemic overhiring corrections and the increasing replacement of entry-level IT jobs with AI, leading to a skills mismatch in the industry.
Miscellaneous 🌀️
Wi-Fi 7, officially known as 802.11be, has been introduced, offering speeds up to 5.8 Gbps. It features increased channel bandwidth, 4K QAM, Multi-Link Operation (MLO), improved latency, and enhanced MU-MIMO, promising faster and more stable wireless connections.
Dutch startup Nuwa is launching the Nuwa Pen, claimed to be the 'world's most advanced pen', in March. This smart pen digitizes handwritten notes using an inbuilt camera system, motion sensors, and algorithms. It's compatible with any paper and integrates with over 50 apps.
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