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Good afternoon. Google is bringing Lens, its visual search tool, to the desktop version of Chrome. That's great and all, but it’s time to give the people what they really want, an algorithm powerful enough to answer: “What's the song that goes bum bum dum dummm, bum dum dum dumm?” Every time, without fail.
In today’s edition:
 In-car radar vision
 Autonomous vehicles in NYC??
 Spyware infiltrates iPhones
—Hayden Field, Ryan Duffy, Jordan McDonald, Dan McCarthy
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Oculii
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There’s a major debate in the autonomous vehicle space over which vision tech will get us to true autonomy: regular ol’ cameras or lidar (light-emitting optical sensors).
But the conversation generally skips right over radar, which emits radio waves rather than light and is the cheapest and most ubiquitous detection system available today.
Enter Oculii: Founded in 2015, the US-based startup uses AI to dress up the 70-year-old sensing system that is radar, and to help autonomous vehicles “see.” Its name, a spin on the plural of “oculus,” was inspired by the company’s goal to serve as the eyes for future autonomous systems. Its partnerships include Great Wall Motors, Baidu, and Nvidia, and it has raised more than $76 million to date.
And Oculii’s cofounder and CEO Steven Hong exclusively told us the company just struck a partnership with Geely, one of China’s largest automakers—and the startup’s biggest automaker partner yet.
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Geely owns Volvo and has invested $9 billion in Daimler, the maker of Mercedes-Benz.
- Last year, Geely linked up with Intel’s autonomous driving unit, Mobileye, for advanced ADAS.
Through the partnership, Geely will integrate Oculii’s technology into cars it makes in China, though Oculii wasn’t able to provide further details on the extent or length of the partnership at this time.
So, how does this all work?
Hong broke down Oculii’s tech for us in an easy-to-understand Q&A—below are three quick highlights, and here’s the extended version.
On radar’s appeal: “Today, if you look at lidars, they're probably too expensive to put on your passenger consumer vehicle. ...But that Honda Civic already has several radars. And by adding in our software, we can now enable it to have similar types of resolutions, similar types of performance...compared to an optical sensor.”
On radar vs. lidar performance: “I would say that from a resolution standpoint, our radar is still not as good [as lidar] in the 0-to-50 meter range—but from the 50-to-450- or 500-meter range, our radar actually outperforms even the median and high-end lidars.”
On Oculii’s value prop: “Every radar that's ever been built over the last decade-and-a-half has followed a very similar principle, in the sense that radars are traditionally what we call ‘dumb’ sensors. ...Our software breaks this fundamental design choice in radar, which is that you ‘should’ send the same signal out over and over.”
Click here to read the full interview.—HF
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Mobileye, an Intel Company
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...self-driving test vehicles?!
After receiving a New York state permit, Mobileye has started testing a small fleet of autonomous vehicles on NYC streets. The Intel subsidiary is also actively testing in Detroit, Munich, Tokyo, and cities across China and its home country, Israel.
The main business
Mobileye develops advanced driver assist systems (ADAS), and sells both specific components and white-labeled stacks to automakers.
Business is booming: Mobileye’s Q1 revenue jumped 48% year over year to $377 million, good for a $1.5-billion ’21 run rate. For reference, Intel paid $15.3 billion to acquire Mobileye in 2017. As Intel Fellow and Mobileye VP Jack Weast recently told us, the company is using ADAS to “cash-flow the investment in a driverless future.”
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It's unclear if the ADAS revenue covers all of its self-driving expenses, but most AV outfits are unmitigated money pits at this point. Mobileye is not.
Tesla has made serious strides toward vertically integrated automated driving, but in a bygone era, Mobileye was its ADAS supplier. The two companies share a similar AV strategy: gather real-world road data at scale and ladder up from driver-in-the-loop systems to autonomy. From a technical POV...
- Tesla is using a camera-only “pure vision” approach in its latest “Full Self-Driving Beta” V9 software architecture.
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Mobileye is (impressively) testing camera-only in NYC, and in parallel, honing a radar/lidar-only system in Israel, Intel spokesperson Robin Holt told the Brew. “We will eventually bring the two subsystems together but not at this point,” Holt said.
Bottom line: As far as US roads are concerned, Manhattan is AVs’ final boss mode. Mobileye CEO Amnon Shashua says it’s been “very challenging” so far. We’ll take his word for it, and won’t hold our breath for unsupervised AVs in the Big Apple any time soon.—RD
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We don’t need to tell you how difficult it is to run a small biz. Unfortunately, we do need to tell you that cyberattacks on small businesses are on the rise.
We’re not talking Nigerian prince email scams, either. Attackers are developing new methods faster than we can type "your small IT team needs the right proactive defense.”
CrowdStrike’s guide for small businesses lays out everything you need to know to protect your biz, including:
- The top 5 cybersecurity misconceptions that put you at risk
- Real-world examples of cyberattacks
- How the right combo of tech, people, and processes can offer the best protection
Don’t let cybercriminals hold critical data for ransom or freeze your operations to the point of shutting things down.
Read the full “Cybersecurity for Small Businesses” report here.
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Francis Scialabba
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An investigation from French journalism nonprofit Forbidden Stories and Amnesty International uncovered a list of 50,000 phone numbers from 50 countries that have been targeted and possibly breached by Israeli firm NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware.
The problem: NSO Group’s spyware enables the remote monitoring of smartphones. The Israeli government classifies Pegasus as a weapon and requires military permission to license it to other governments. The Amnesty report claims NSO’s customers used Pegasus to target human rights advocates, journalists, and public officials around the world.
The hacks, which targeted iPhones and Android phones alike, are initiated with “zero-click” attacks, which don’t require the victim to click a link or access their phone like in a traditional phishing attack.
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The spyware unlocks root access to a device, meaning the user can see the target’s emails, call logs, social media, passwords, pictures, video, sound recordings, and browsing history—including apps with end-to-end encryption, like WhatsApp and Signal, per WaPo.
- Of the 34 iPhones examined by Amnesty’s Security Lab, 23 were found to have been successfully breached by Pegasus.
Looking ahead: Apple has worked hard to establish a reputation for delivering complete and absolute privacy to the users of its products, and news like this jeopardizes that perception.—JM
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Formula One
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Stat: In the process of developing its 2022 race car, Formula One put the model through 7,500 simulations.
Related quote: “Our cars would draw, on any [given] race weekend, [from] about 500 different sensors and data channels.”—Mercedes F1 boss Toto Wolff, speaking with Ryan in October 2019
Watch: The above-mentioned interview.
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*This is sponsored advertising content
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SPONSORED BY WEBEX BY CISCO
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Argo will deploy autonomous Ford vehicles on Lyft’s network in Miami this year and in Austin starting early 2022.
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Apple is delaying return-to-office plans until October, amid a surge in the Delta variant.
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Tesla will sell a “Full Self-Driving” subscription for $199/month. Previously, the option was only available for a lump-sum payment of $10,000.
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iOS and Android are virtually equal in US market share.
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Venmo is (finally) axing its global public payments feed, in a UX overhaul that will more prominently feature its debit/credit cards and crypto features.
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Aerial, an SF-based sustainability startup, rolled out a carbon offset tracking tool for cryptocurrency.
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Intel is one of the most successful and storied American companies, and it’s been making moves lately. How well do you know its past and present?
Click here to take the quiz.
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The Biden admin appointed two more tech critics to senior positions yesterday:
Rashida Richardson, a lawyer and AI researcher who has produced influential work on algorithmic bias and fairness, will join the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy as senior policy advisor. The WHOSTP has said it will take on algorithmic bias.
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Back in May, Richardson told us, “There is not going to be any universal model to AI regulation, and to figure out the right configuration of policy, you need to see theoretical ideas in practice."
Jonathan Kanter, an antitrust lawyer who has represented smaller tech firms, will reportedly get the nod for the DoJ’s top antitrust gig. Kanter would join FTC Chair Lina Khan and White House policy advisor Tim Wu as yet another longtime critic of Big Tech on antitrust grounds.
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Catch up on the top Emerging Tech Brew stories from the past few editions:
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