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W W W.T I M E S O F O M A N . C O M MONDAY, DECEMBER 5, 2016
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A TIMES OF OMAN HANDS-FREE DRIVING INITIATIVE
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SOFTBANK TECH FUND ‘OVERSUBSCRIBED’ SoftBank Group is close to tying up $100 billion for a technology fund that it announced with the government of Saudi Arabia, the Japanese company’s founder and Chief Executive Officer Masayoshi Son said. “I am talking to a few investors and I think we are oversubscribed,” Son said at an event in New Delhi on Friday, without providing detail. — Bloomberg News
T E C H U P D AT E S
Twitter buys little-known startup to gain new head of product Twitter is hiring Keith Coleman, who has a decade of experience at Alphabet’s Google, to oversee products, filling a position that’s been empty since January. Twitter bought Coleman’s little-known startup, Yes Inc., as part of the deal. The company’s apps, designed to help people meet up, will be closed. At Google, Coleman led product for Gmail and related services, according to his LinkedIn profile. On Monday, he will start as Twitter’s sixth head of product in as many years. The San Francisco-based social media company has cycled through leaders in the role while struggling to grow its audience. Coleman will report to Adam Messinger, chief technology officer, Twitter said. — Bloomberg News
Facebook’s WhatsApp plans stumble on EU privacy woes
New robot to relieve you of your laundry with partners, it said on its website. First units should ship by 2018 and cost $700 to $850. With Laundroid, users won’t have to clip clothes onto the machine. “The biggest challenge has always been the folding itself, both in terms of planning the fold and then manipulating the piece of clothing and actually performing the folding,” said Jonathan Roberts, a professor of robotics at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia. “Others have tried using robotic arms. This is the first time I have seen sliding plates used. That sounds innovative.”
Laundroid is a robot that will not only wash and dry garments, but also sort, fold and neatly arrange them. The refrigerator-size device could eventually fill the roles of washing machine, dryer and clothes drawer in people’s homes.
YUJI NAKAMURA & HIROYUKI NAKAGAWA
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ate doing laundry? Shin Sakane has a solution. The Japanese inventor received 6 billion yen ($53 million) from partners, including Panasonic, last month to advance “the Laundroid” — a robot Sakane is developing to not only wash and dry garments, but also sort, fold and neatly arrange them. The refrigerator-size device could eventually fill the roles of washing machine, dryer and clothes drawer in people’s homes. Sakane, whose earlier inventions include an anti-snoring device and golf clubs made of space materials, said the funding will bring closer his dream of liberating humanity from laundry. Among his inspirations for the project is the 1968 Stanley Kubrick sci-fi classic “2001: A Space Odyssey.” Laundroid was designed to resemble the mysterious objects in the film that brought technology to prehistoric humans, and the project was originally code-named “Monolith.” IPO plans The funding brings total capital raised to 7.5 billion yen. Nomura Holdings has been hired for an initial public offering in the “not too distant future,” Sakane said, adding that Seven Dreamers Labora-
tories is currently valued at about 20 billion yen. While the full product is slated for release in 2019, an early version that can only sort and fold clothing goes on sale worldwide in March. Sakane wouldn’t disclose how Laundroid works, but patents show that users dump clothes in a lower drawer and robotic arms grab each item as scanners look for features such as buttons or a collar. Once identified, the clothes are folded using sliding plates and neatly stacked on upper shelves for collection. Through the wringer “We tried so many things and none of them worked,” Sakane said last week. “A ton of team members quit, saying it’s impossible or that I’m crazy. But the ones who remained came up with some truly brilliant ideas.” The goal is to eventually get the price of the full version to less than about 300,000 yen ($2,700). The model going on sale in March will probably cost significantly more due to higher initial production costs. Panasonic is slated to handle manufacturing. “We decided that by combining Panasonic’s washing and drying machine technology and 7D’s folding technology, it is possible to bring an all-in-one product to the market early,” said Kyoko
Ishii, a spokeswoman for Osakabased Panasonic. Users will still have to do some tasks, such as partially buttoning shirts, ensuring clothes aren’t inside out, and bunching socks before putting them inside the machine. That’s because even the best machine-learning applications can’t figure out how to fold a pair of socks. Each item takes about 10 minutes to fold, which Sakane attributed to the time necessary to scan each part of the clothing and communicate via Wi-Fi with a central server. He is working to get it down to 3-to-5 minutes, but said the robot was designed to be used passively while users are doing something else or out of the house. Cheaper, faster Sakane isn’t the only one trying to reinvent the washing. FoldiMate, an Oak Park, California-based rival, said it will take about half a minute to de-wrinkle and fold each garment through its dryer-size machine. It’s received more than 160,000 registrations of interest in its laundry-folder, which will require users to clip clothes onto a conveyor-belt from which a robot takes, treats, de-wrinkles and folds each item onto a neat pile. The company will start accepting pre-orders in 2017, once a manufacturing plan has been finalised
Cost-prohibitive? Still, it’s questionable whether consumers will spend thousands of dollars for such a device, Roberts said, adding that the world is probably “many years away” until a robot system can do the task cheaply enough. That’s not deterring Sakane. He plans to work with apparel makers and app developers to create software that makes use of the data the robots collect, such as the clothes worn and how often, which could be invaluable to both marketers and consumers. The robot is just the latest in a series of products from Sakane. After earning a doctorate in chemistry in the US, he worked at his father’s research firm and developed a more-efficient version of guide wires used in surgery. ‘Zero-synergy’ Taking over as CEO a few years later, he bought a company that makes materials used in space satellites and re-purposed them for golf. Two years ago, he began selling an antisnoring product — a tube inserted through the nose — that has become one of his top sellers. “We’re a zero-synergy company,” Sakane jokes. The wide-range of products is a result of a philosophy to tackle anything as long as it’s a completely new concept. — Bloomberg News
Facebook’s stalled plans to leverage WhatsApp’s user data are about to hit another regulatory bump in Europe. Isabelle Falque-Pierrotin, who heads a panel of Europe’s privacy watchdogs, said Facebook will probably face “additional action” over using WhatsApp’s data for its own advertising purposes when the group of regulators meets next month. Facebook has stopped merging some of the messaging service’s data with its own, but not necessarily all of it, she said. “Looking at the evidence we have, the companies have stopped merging data but possibly not for all WhatsApp services,” Falque-Pierrotin, who also heads France’s data privacy authority CNIL, said in an interview in Paris. “It’s probably a bit more complicated than that.” Facebook already suspended its policy shift after European privacy regulators warned last month they had “serious concerns” about the sharing of WhatsApp user data for purposes that weren’t included in the terms of service and privacy policy when people signed up to the service. But Facebook’s response to the letter needs a much closer look, said Falque-Pierrotin. The merging of WhatsApp’s data is the first step by Facebook toward monetising the platform since the social network’s Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg bought the company for about $22 billion in 2014. The EU’s 28 privacy commissioners, who meet regularly as the so-called Article 29 Working Party, coordinated their actions against Facebook and in their October letter urged the Menlo Park, California-based technology giant to better explain its plans. — Bloomberg News
Amazon promotes new tool to protect cloud customers Amazon.com unveiled a new security tool for cloud customers, part of a slew of product announcements this week designed to fend off competition from Microsoft, Alphabet’s Google and others in the fast-growing cloud computing market. Chief Technology Officer Werner Vogels announced Amazon Shield, new layers of protection designed against service interruptions like the cyber attack that took down top websites and affected some Amazon Web Services customers in October. “This will really help you protect yourselves even against the largest and most sophisticated attacks we’ve seen,” he said on Thursday at AWS re:Invent, a conference in Las Vegas that drew 32,000 attendees. Making the cloud secure is a major part of persuading companies to shift their data and computing workloads from on-premise servers they control to rented resources accessed via the Internet. Renting servers through the cloud offers lower costs, greater speed and flexibility. AWS has clients in a broad range of sectors, including health care, financial services, retail and transportation, highlighting rapid adoption of this approach to computing. Public cloud spending is expected to increase almost 17 per cent to $204 billion this year, according to researcher Gartner. — Bloomberg News