DRONES

Walmart's New Delivery Partners

The world’s largest company by revenue is getting serious about drones.

Today, Walmart said it would launch a drone delivery pilot in Bentonville, AR, with unicorn Zipline. Last week, Walmart announced a similar pilot program in Fayetteville, NC, using cloud-connected quadcopters from Israeli startup Flytrex. 

• A Grand Forks, ND, Walmart supercenter is already delivering food packs with Flytrex drones. 

Back to Bentonville...then to Africa

Bentonville = Walmart HQ. The flights in Walmart’s backyard are slated to begin early next year, with deliveries of “select health and wellness products.” Walmart will expand to general merchandise if pilots are successful. 

Zipline, which officially launched in the U.S. in May, is familiar with scaling drone logistics. It serves virtually all of Rwanda and millions of people in Ghana. Zipline’s drones are reusable, electric, autonomous, and capable of servicing a 50-mile radius. In Africa, they drop vaccines, blood, and medication in boxes with parachutes. 

Sky high: Delivery volumes and operational tempo are experiencing hockey-stick-like growth during the pandemic. It took Zipline 3.5 years to reach 100,000 deliveries, then just 3.5 months for 200,000 (announced last week).  

Takeaways

1) Don’t sleep on Zipline.
2) Drone delivery will take flight in rural, exurban, and suburban places, in that order. Population-dense cities can have sidewalk delivery bots, as a treat. 
3) Healthcare-oriented deliveries get the right of way.
4) Drones still face technical and regulatory hurdles that have so far precluded commercial delivery services. 

Even after drilling flashcards all weekend with takeaway #4, I have to say it: Walmart could be laying the foundation for a powerful new logistics play. Its superstores are conveniently located in places conducive to drone delivery. And the retailer sells plenty of health products that pair well with on-demand delivery.

Zoom out and up: Walmart doesn’t want to cede the airspace to Amazon, or Alphabet’s Wing, or UPS, or Wayne Enterprises, or the many others tinkering with drone deliveries.

AI

The Secret Sauce Is Not For Sale

Would you buy a Tesla without the motor and battery pack?  

That’s our spin on, “The car can be sold, but not the engine,” an analogy one source gave the South China Morning Post about TikTok’s algorithm. ByteDance has informed prospective TikTok buyers that the app’s recommendation algorithm is off the table. 

• In definitely unrelated news, Beijing recently tightened technology export restrictions and limited the cross-border transfer of AI. 
• TikTok has essentially become yet another front of the U.S.-China tech proxy war, which extends from semiconductors to 5G. 

With Microsoft out, Oracle is set to be announced as TikTok’s U.S. “trusted tech partner,” per the WSJ. It’s looking like an outright sale is off the table—and Oracle would help run TikTok without the motor. That discounts the final purchase price but adds the opportunity cost of having to re-architect a content recommendation system. 

• Bonus: TikTok did just share new info about how its algorithm works...

Big picture: Due to its engaged user base, TikTok sans algorithm is still valuable. But only if it’s still allowed to operate in the U.S. without a sale.

SPONSORED BY GRAZE

What’s Better Than the Smell of Fresh Cut Grass?

Investing in the fully autonomous commercial lawn mower that cuts it. 

By now you’ve probably (read: definitely) heard about the robotic grass-cutting powerhouse that is Graze. 

And if you like the smell of fresh cut grass, you’ll love a whiff of what it’s like to disrupt a $100 billion market. Graze’s electric, autonomous lawn mowers are designed specifically for the commercial landscaping industry to counter labor shortages and rising wages in the US.

Graze mowers are also greener than the grass they mow. They’re electric with boosted run times from solar panels, so customers save on fuel costs and can operate effectively and quietly at night.

The only downside? 

This is the last week to invest in the holy grail of robotic landscaping technology. 

In other words, time is tickin’, so get clickin’ and invest in the mower of the future here.

CYBERSECURITY

Invasion of the Info Snatchers

Turns out Zoom bombing isn't the only cybersecurity issue that comes with our new normal. 

 As all things digital have soared, so has hacking activity:

• Attacks on collaboration platforms like Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Dropbox are up 300% since February, according to cybersecurity firm Darktrace. 
• Between April and June, 31% of video game login attempts were fraudulent—up from 11% last year, per a report cited by the WSJ.
• About 25 percent of all e-commerce transactions were attacked in H1 2020. 

Most attacks come from the usual suspects: unchanged passwords, DDoS attacks, phishing scams, and malware. 

But... cybersecurity advances mean “hackers have to be more creative in utilizing these old attack measures,” Jerry Irvine, CIO of cloud-based IT firm Prescient Solutions, told us. That means collaboration—e.g., designing automated attacks from large databases of user IDs, passwords, and site vulnerabilities shared on the dark web. 

Zoom out: There’s a reason the global AI cybersecurity market is projected to grow from $12 billion in 2020 to $30.5 billion by 2025, according to VynZ Research. 

• AI is now used to investigate—not just detect—hacks, using unsupervised and supervised ML and deep learning. (Darktrace’s tool learned from 100+ cyber analysts.)

BITS & BYTES

Stat: Largo, a film industry AI company, used its software to analyze actors’ character attributes to predict who would be best-suited to play the next James Bond. The result: Henry Cavill, of Superman and The Witcher, has a 92.3% chance of outdoing Daniel Craig at the box office. 

Quote: “Even with big breakthroughs in battery technology, electric vehicles will probably never be a practical solution for things like 18-wheelers, cargo ships, and passenger jets. Electricity works when you need to cover short distances.”—Bill Gates. (Elon Musk’s Twitter response: “He has no clue.”) 

Read: WIRED digs into how GitHub has become a workaround for COVID-19 info censorship in China, as thousands use it to archive articles, journals, and personal accounts before they’re scrubbed from the internet.

SPONSORED BY CROWDSTRIKE

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WHAT ELSE IS BREWING

• SoftBank agreed to sell Arm to Nvidia for $40 billion.
• Anduril unveiled new software capabilities for its military drones, with CEO Palmer Luckey calling his newest product a “Swiss Army knife that can do everything.” 
• PG&E and other California utilities are using drones and computer vision to try and spot damaged transmission equipment before it becomes a wildfire risk. 
• IBM wants the U.S. Commerce Department to restrict exports of facial recognition technology to countries with a history of human rights abuses. 
• Apple slightly loosened App Store developer rules.
• Elon Musk says his Starship SN8 launch vehicle will attempt a 60,000-foot return flight.

TECH THINGAMABOBS

For changing the face of tech: The weekly newsletter from Girls Who Code features free online and offline coding programming and stories about young women using tech to change the world. Sign up and join the 300,000-strong community.

For the final frontier: Astronomers scanned more than 10 million stars for evidence of alien tech. They didn’t find anything…yet. 

For your K-Pop fix: K/DA, an augmented reality K-Pop group composed of stylized video game characters, has held the No. 1 spot on the Billboard charts for the past two weeks. Take a listen. 

ICYMI

Catch up on the top Emerging Tech Brew stories from the past few editions: 

• Portland Passes Strictest Facial Recognition Ban in the U.S. 
• Commercial Cleaning Bots on the Rise
• How Tech Workers Adapted to Activism From Home