SMART DEVICES

Smart Fitness, but Make It Vertically Integrated

Tired: Apple should acquire Peloton and roll up smart bikes in its hardware + services subscription bundle.

Wired: Peloton should acquire tech startups to bolster its own hardware + services subscription bundle. 

The first sentence was a possibility cheered on by a certain set of investors and commentators, but the second represents reality. On Monday, Bloomberg reported that Peloton acquired three tech companies over the past six-ish months. 

Peloton’s new fit fam 

• Aiqudo, acquired in February, makes a voice assistant platform. Specifically, the California AI company develops white-labeled digital assistants for other companies. 
• Atlas Wearables, acquired late last year, does what it sounds like. The Austin, TX, company makes rep-counting, workout-logging smartwatches. Its latest product, the Multi-Trainer, can identify exercises through movement recognition and provide step-by-step workout navigation. 
• Otari Studio, also acquired late 2020, makes (prototypes?) an interactive workout mat with “live AI pose feedback.” The project first began as an Indiegogo campaign in June 2020, and although it was fully funded in thirty minutes, backers never received the mat. 

Feel good, look good, do better

Combined, these deals are smaller than Peloton’s $420 million purchase of fitness equipment maker Precor. Still, Peloton is certainly on a buying spree. 

In the run-up to its August 2019 IPO, Peloton insisted that it was first and foremost a technology company. Fast forward to now, and the category-defining fitness company is making it seem less like a marketing play and more of a reality:

1. Peloton could enhance its current product portfolio, which consists of a connected bike, a smart treadmill, and an app. These become more appealing with computer vision and voice interactivity, which unlock new personalized features. 
2. Peloton may be warming up for an expansion, integrating new features by default into whatever at-home hardware it has in the pipeline. If Peloton has wearables in its arsenal, it could extend a relationship with users beyond the home.  

Zoom out: If Peloton wants to be the Apple of fitness, layering more advanced technology end-to-end doesn’t hurt its chances. 

AR

Unleash the Pikmin

Say the world is locked down during a pandemic. Bad news for a gamemaker that wants you to go outside, right? 

Wrong. Niantic shipped updates to make Pokémon GO playable indoors, stayed plenty busy with tech development, and, yesterday, announced a partnership with Nintendo. The two will co-develop mobile AR apps, starting with a Pikmin game launching later this year. 

• “The app will include gameplay activities to encourage walking and make walking more delightful,” Niantic says. 

Nintendo has been leaning into AR projects, from an enhanced roller coaster that opened at its Osaka theme park last week to the Mario Kart mixed-reality Switch game released last year. 

Who better to tap than Niantic? The studio makes the most recognizable mobile AR games in the world. The tech startup is also developing powerful occlusion capabilities (which could let digital Pokémon move behind real-world objects) and talking about planetary-scale AR. 

Our read: Niantic’s partners bring powerful IP to the table, allowing the AR publisher to focus on tech rather than entirely new storylines. In turn, Niantic’s user base is also validating AR gaming and helping it build a digital twin of the world. 

SPONSORED BY WORKIVA

Dear Data,

It’s complicated. 

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Just look at Slack, Google, and TomTom. They seem happy, don’t they? That’s because they all use Workiva to simplify changing data, regulations, and the way they work.

And from here on out, dear Data, it’s going to be all about transparency; wrong numbers have nowhere to hide. Workiva’s auditability of collaborative reports shows where numbers changed, when, and by whom.

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AI

Hugging Clouds

Remember Hugging Face from Monday’s newsletter? If not: The NYC startup, which specializes in open-source natural language processing (NLP), has a popular machine learning library.

Yesterday, Hugging Face selected Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its “preferred cloud provider.” AWS users will be able to quickly train and deploy models on Amazon’s cloud machine-learning platform. 

• Now, Hugging Face wants to meet more users where they naturally spend their time: AWS. Plus, Hugging Face’s language models are getting hangrier and hangrier for storage and compute power. 
• AWS, on the other hand, can use this opportunity to rent cutting-edge AI language models to large customers and turnkey services to smaller users.

Sound familiar? Last September, Microsoft said it would exclusively license OpenAI’s GPT-3. Now, AWS is seriously stepping up its NLP game.

Want more? We chatted about AI, the cloud, and more with Jeff Boudier, who leads product and growth at Hugging Face, and Bratin Saha, VP of Machine Learning at Amazon AI. 

Find our full convo here. 

FROM THE CREW

We Are Once Again Asking You to RSVP for Our Virtual Event

Plenty of commonly used algorithms seem to know things, like whether that’s a cat or a dog in your selfie, or which new artist is right for you. These systems are powerful, but they don’t ultimately “know” the answer to a question—they’re just really good at predicting what it will be. 

Wait a sec...just what constitutes knowledge anyway? Isn’t predicting someone’s preferences a form of knowledge? And who is even deciding these things? 

Excellent questions. To close out our Demystifying Algorithms series, we’re bringing in two AI experts to try and answer all of that, and more. On Wednesday, March 31 at 1pm ET, Hayden and Ryan will (virtually) sit down with... 

• Aleksandra (Saška) Mojsilović, IBM Fellow, head of Trusted AI Foundations at IBM Research, and co-director of IBM Science for Social Good. 
• Mark Riedl, Associate Professor, College of Computing, School of Interactive Computing, and director of the Entertainment Intelligence Lab at Georgia Institute of Technology.

Click here to RSVP for our first-ever Explorations event. 

BITS & BYTES

Stat: Two-thirds of Google searches don’t end in a click, per SparkToro and SimilarWeb. The search giant uses AI systems that extract and provide the answer to your query right on the search landing page. 

Quote: “We need social networks where bad things happen less.“—Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, in an interview with the Guardian. 

Ponder: The Boston Fed and MIT are planning to release prototypes for a digital dollar (or Fedcoin) as soon this July. “Wall Street is not thrilled,” Bloomberg writes. Thanks for playing, banks?

Input: Asana’s Anatomy of Work 2021 report is dropping new stats on the latest work challenges—like how 70% of knowledge workers experienced burnout in the last year. Check out the full report.*

^{*This is sponsored advertising content.} 

SPONSORED BY BRIGHTCOVE

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WHAT ELSE IS BREWING

• Pat Gelsinger, Intel’s new CEO, says the chipmaker will invest $20 billion to build two new factories in Arizona.
• AWS has a new boss: Adam Selipsky, current CEO of Tableau and former VP of AWS sales, marketing, and support.
• TuSimple, an autonomous trucking startup, filed to go public on the Nasdaq. 
• Apple’s HomePod mini has a secret temperature and humidity sensor, according to an iFixit/Bloomberg teardown. While currently disabled, this undisclosed sensor could be activated in a future software update. 
• TSMC chip manufacturing capacity is fully booked through the first six months of 2022.
• Vietnam’s new prime minister published a national AI strategy. 

MARKET RESEARCH

• “Facial recognition systems now automatically identify people, pets, and even Disney characters.”
• “Smart eyewear will rely in part on advanced voice technology, so expect investment and advancements in natural language processing and generation, and emotive recognition.”
• “Healthcare is the next battleground for Big Tech companies.”
• “The global quantum computing race is on.”
• “You can now sequence your complete genome for $299—less than the price of a TV.”

ICYMI

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

• Battle of the bans
• Facebook’s “intelligent click”
• Our self-driving poll of US adults

✢ A Note From Workiva

Slack is a registered trademark and service mark of Slack Technologies, Inc. Google is a registered trademark of Google LLC. TomTom is a registered trademark of TomTom International BV.