Kiran Upadhyay

For someone who claims to be working for the American people, FCC Chairman Ajit Pai sure doesn’t seem to care what they have to say. In his announcement today that the Commission would vote whether to roll back net neutrality rules on December 14, he made no mention of the inconvenient and embarrassing fact that his proposal had attracted historic attention, garnering over 22 million comments — the majority of which opposed it. The statement mentions benefiting or protecting consumers five times, so clearly the idea here is to help the users of internet services. Yet those very same consumers wrote the Chairman by the millions to say that they felt the existing rules protect them very well and that to remove them would be detrimental to their safety and privacy. Just like when their safety and privacy were put at risk by the elimination of the Broadband Privacy Rule earlier this year. Strangely enough, the Chairman didn’t listen to the outcry then, either. The response has bee...

Uber has entered into an agreement with carmaker Volvo to purchase 24,000 of its XC90 SUVs between 2019 and 2021 to form a fleet of autonomous vehicles, according to Bloomberg News. The XC90 is the base of Uber’s latest-generation self-driving test car, which features sensors and autonomous driving computing capability installed by Uber after purchase on the XC90 vehicle. The deal is said to be worth around $1.4 billion, per the Financial Times, with the XC90 starting at $46,900 in the U.S. in terms of base model consumer pricing. Uber is already testing the XC90 in Arizona, San Francisco and Pittsburgh in trials with safety drivers on board to help refine and improve their software. Uber also paired up with Volvo to jointly develop autonomous driving and a vehicle ready for self-driving implementation, with investment from both sides committed last year. Uber’s new fleet of XC90s will go further than the existing test vehicles, in that they will incorporate redundant systems fo...

Though a lot has changed since 2016, not much has changed for energy economics in the US. The cost of wind generation continues to fall, solar costs are falling, too, and the cost of coal-power energy has seen no movement, while the cost of building and maintaining nuclear plants has gone up. And none of those conclusions reflect subsidies and tax credits applied by the federal government. The conclusions come from Lazard (PDF), an asset management company that publishes cost estimates for various types of electricity-generation assets each year. Lazard’s numbers reflect the Levelized Cost of Energy (LCOE), which averages the estimated costs of construction, maintenance, and fuel for electricity-generating assets over the number of megawatt-hours that each asset is expected to produce over its lifetime. In other words, the LCOE is the lifetime cost of a turbine divided by the amount of energy that turbine will produce over its lifetime. LCOE is a good way of comparing electricity...

If you’re a company working on an electric skateboard that’s already raised nearly $500,000 on Kickstarter and slayed the Shark Tank sharks what do you do for an encore? The answer, at least for Inboard Technology, is to go out and raise $8 million in a new round of venture funding to become the Tesla of skateboards. Founded in 2014 by Ryan Evans and Theo Cerboneschi, the company began with Cerboneschi’s collegiate vision of zooming around campus on an electric skateboard. Evans, the former president of the action sports gear maker Pure Action Sports, met Cerboneschi, who had become a professional kite-boarder, when the two worked together at Pure Action. Both men shared a love of skateboarding and both loved the idea of a rugged, software enabled electric skateboard and from that, Inboard Technology was born. Based in Santa Cruz, Calif., the company has skated from success-to-success culminating in this most recent round, led by Los Angeles-based Upfront Ventures. Kobie F...

Facebook wants to turn mindless, passive video consumption into “time well spent,” and now it’s giving social media stars a powerful tool to foster communities around their content. Today Facebook launches Facebook Creator, offering influencers Live Creative Kit for adding intros and outros to broadcasts, a unified inbox of Facebook and Instagram comments plus Messenger chats, cross-posting to Twitter and expansive analytics. Facebook promised the Creator app back in June at VidCon and today it launches globally on iOS with Android planned for the coming months. It’s actually a rebrand and update of the 2014 Facebook Mentions app that was only available to verified public figures and Pages, but now is open to everyone. Weirdly, it still appears as “Mentions” in the App Store for now.

Tesla’s Semi is off to a promising start, despite there being no official pricing information available yet: In addition to a Walmart pilot, Canadian grocery giant Loblaw is purchasing 25 of the heavy duty all-electric transport trucks (via Canadian Press), with a $5,000 deposit for each upfront even though pricing is TBD for the vehicle, which is supposed to start shipping in 2019. Loblaw has a target of running a fully electric vehicle fleet to support its stores, as part of a goal of reducing its emissions impact by 2030. The plan is to eventually have as many as 350 zero-emission vehicles in operation by that time, and taking those diesel cars off the road could help it reduce its carbon footprint by the equivalent of taking around 20,000 consumer cars with internal combustion engines off the road. Tesla has said that its cost of operation for the Semi will help shippers save money on a per mile basis right away, and that’s likely meant to help lessen the impact of sticker s...

Parkour! That’s what we should all be devoting our combined robotics expertise towards. There’s no nobler human pursuit, so of course we should create a robot that can master the so-called ‘sport of kings.’ And yes, that is the true sport of kings. Boston Dynamics has shown off its new version of SpotMini, a robot dog that’s slightly less intimating cased in its more consumer friendly rounded future armor. But now it’s also catching us up on what’s been going down with its bipedal Atlas bot, the most humanoid of its creations. Atlas can now jump from elevated block to elevated block, and do a complete about-face in the air. It can leap pretty high, and also do a backflip – and then celebrate its backflipping ability. I could do without the grandstanding, future destroyer of worlds.