Archives for May 29, 2017

By Alan Ohnsman and Matt Drange

As Uber fights claims that it stole self-driving vehicle trade secrets from Alphabet Inc.’s Waymo, the rideshare giant quietly dropped the name for its driverless truck unit, “Otto.” The change was made last month in the wake of a trademark infringement dispute with a similarly named Canadian company that markets its own robotic vehicle technology.

Uber consolidated Otto’s activities under its Advanced Technologies Group, or Uber ATG, in April and “retired the Otto name,” it said without elaborating. The change came shortly after the dismissal of a trademark infringement suit brought by Kitchener, Ontario-based Otto Motors, a unit of Clearpath Robotics that makes autonomous vehicles for warehouses and industrial facilities.

The suit was dismissed without prejudice in February. Spokespeople for both Clearpath and Uber confirmed the dispute over the Otto name had been resolved. Neither confirmed details of any potential settlement. Since last month, the ot.to website has redirected visitors to the Uber ATG homepage.

“We are continuing to operate under the OTTO brand, whereas Uber has recently announced on its website that it is retiring the OTTO name,” Otto Motors spokeswoman Meghan Hennessey said in a written statement to Forbes.

Uber paid $680 million for the tiny startup Ottomotto LLC, or Otto, in August 2016 which at the time had 90 employees and little more than a plan to develop and sell hardware and software kits to convert semi-trucks to drive themselves. Its co-founder Anthony Levandowski is the former Google engineer at the center of Waymo’s lawsuit against Uber and Otto that’s inching toward a trial later this year in a U.S. District Court in San Francisco.

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Uber recently informed officials at the California Department of Motor Vehicles of its decision. “Otto called us a few weeks ago and said they were changing their name,” DMV spokeswoman Jessica Gonzalez said, adding that the company did not inform officials of the trademark infringement dispute that preceded the change.

The DMV is reviewing whether Otto broke state law by operating automated trucks without permission. Otto contends that trucks tested in California with advanced safety technology are not operated without human control.

The name change was also news to David Kidd, a research scientist with the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, an industry group that’s helping to shape nascent testing guidelines for self-driving vehicles in California and elsewhere. Kidd recently met with the Otto team, but said he was unaware of the unit’s new name until he was contacted by Forbes.

Prior to being purchased by Uber, Otto made a splash in May 2016 with video footage of a driverless Volvo semi rolling through Nevada. Otto drew even more attention in Oct. 2016 when it completed its first paid delivery, a shipment of Budweiser beer hauled through Colorado.

Waymo, created in December 2016 to commercialize Google’s self-driving vehicle system, sued Uber and Otto in late February, claiming Levandowski accessed an internal Google database and downloaded 14,000 technical documents. That occurred about six weeks before Levandowski resigned from Google, and then quickly created Otto.

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Although the federal judge in that case has ordered Uber and Levandowski to return the stolen materials to Waymo, that hasn’t happened. Uber says it doesn’t have the documents and Levandowski refuses to comply with the order, citing his Fifth Amendment right against self incrimination. On Thursday, the judge overseeing the case took Levandowski to task for submitting essentially useless information related to the documents at issue. While neither Uber nor Waymo dispute that Levandowski took technical documents from Google, Uber said it hasn’t used this information in its own autonomous technology R&D efforts and doesn’t possess the data.

Separate from self-driving truck operations, Uber stepped into the commercial-hauling business this month the creation of Uber Freight, a platform to connect independent truck operators with trucking companies to arrange shipments in much the same way its rideshare platform connects drivers and passengers.

Though the Otto name was formally dropped in April, Uber told Forbes it retained “Ottomotto LLC” for its carrier operations. The change was visible on the side of a pair of semis parked on Thursday at the Uber ATG San Francisco lot, formerly Otto’s headquarters.

Matt Drange/Forbes An Uber ATG truck, parked outside the unit’s garage in San Francisco on May 25, 2017.

Taking a look back at seven days of news and headlines across the world of Android, this week’s Android Circuit includes hacking the Galaxy S8 Iris scanner, details on the new Google Pixel 2, leaked images of the Nokia 9, rumors of the Galaxy S8 Active, how OnePlus is catching up to Samsung, a review of the BlackBerry KeyOne, and Microsoft continuing to build its Android base.

Android Circuit is here to remind you of a few of the many things that have happened around Android in the last week (and you can find the weekly Apple news digest here).

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How To Beat The S8 Iris Scanner

Samsung has put a lot of stock in the security that comes with the Galaxy S8 handsets, with the iris scanner being a focus of the marketing. That makes the three-step process to defeat the scanner – an infra-red camera, a printer, and a contact lens – somewhat embarrassing. Ian Morris reports on the issue, including Samsung’s response:

“We are aware of the issue, but we would like to assure our customers that the iris scanning technology in the Galaxy S8 has been developed through rigorous testing to provide a high level of accuracy and prevent attempts to compromise its security, such as images of a person’s iris. If there is a potential vulnerability or the advent of a new method that challenges our efforts to ensure security at any time, we will respond as quickly as possible to resolve the issue.”

Google’s Pixel Will Change The World

Google’s hardware teams are set to release a number of projects this year that will alter the Android landscape, including an updated Google Home device, a virtual reality headset, and of course new Pixel handsets and tablets. Rob Price looks at the upcoming releases, including what could be the killer smartphone of 2017:

Google has confirmed it will be launching a second-generation Pixel (and the Pixel XL, its larger-screened sibling) in 2017. Major slated changes include an almost edge-to-edge screen (like the one found in the Samsung Galaxy S8 and rumoured to be a feature of the forthcoming iPhone 8), waterproofing, and boosted internal specs.

It’s also rumoured to ditch the headphone jack, like the iPhone 7 did in 2016 — a move that may prove controversial.

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Ewan Spence HMD’s Nokia 6 (photo: Ewan Spence)

Tiny Hints Of The Finnish Flagship

It might be stuck inside a blue box, it might not be parading the presumed curves that echo the Nokia N9 from many generations and it leaves many questions unanswered, but this week’s leak of HMD Global’s Nokia 9 handset is a tantalising look at a potential flagship. I’ve taken a closer look at the leak here:

There’s no clear image of the entire phone as it is safely enclosed in arguably the world’s ugliest blue case…

What we can see are the details around the camera – notably the dual-lens system, the LED flash, and 4K recording. The Nokia brand name is associated with powerful and accurate imaging hardware and software. How the Nokia 9 will compare to the likes of the Galaxy S8 and the iPhone 7 (or the soon to arrive Galaxy Note 8 phablet and Apple’s 2017 editions of the iPhone) remains to be seen and no doubt will be one of the key areas that reviewers will focus on.

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Article by: Laurie Winkless

New data suggests that the days of using variable speed limits to manage traffic could be over

I think you probably know by now that I’m not a fan of the hype the floats around driverless cars. Don’t get me wrong, I love the tech behind them, and I am genuinely excited about the impact they could have on tomorrow’s cities. That’s why I wrote about research from MIT that showed that driverless cars might not need traffic lights. And why I highlighted work from Duke University that explored how driverless cars could best communicate with pedestrians.

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But I am a natural-born skeptic. And as I pointed out in this article, many of the remaining questions this young industry faces have nothing to do with the tech at all. And in my book, I expressed concern that the benefits of driverless vehicles wouldn’t be felt until every car on the road is autonomous.

Well, on that point, I may just have been proven wrong!

Before we can understand why, we need to talk about why traffic jams form (and this bit features an excerpt from Science and the City)

We’ve all been stuck in a horrible city-center traffic jam, and found ourselves wondering how hard it can actually be to manage traffic. Well, it turns out, it’s very difficult indeed, and it requires a lot of mathematics.

Most of the time, traffic congestion occurs when vehicular density exceeds a critical threshold – in other words, when there are too many cars on not enough road. Or occasionally, there might be an accident or roadworks are to blame. But you’ve probably also witnessed a so-called ‘phantom traffic jam’ too, where for no discernible reason, traffic builds up and then eases. A number of years ago, a group of Japanese physicists rented a closed circular track to investigate what would happen to traffic flow in the absence of a bottleneck. In the now famous experiment, twenty-two volunteers in different cars were instructed to get up to 30kph (just under 20mph) and maintain that speed at a safe distance from the car in front. Very quickly, the system broke down, with some cars at a standstill while others sped up.