New WI-FI chips

Qualcomm on Tuesday announced a new range of Wi-Fi chips designed to work with Wi-Fi 6, the newest version of the technology and one that Qualcomm hopes will help boost sales of its separate 5G chips. Qualcomm is the biggest supplier of mobile phone chips but has been looking to expand beyond that as the global phone market has stagnated in recent years. The San Diego-based tech company has been pushing instead into chips for automobiles, headphones, laptops and other devices. Its Wi-Fi chips are found in devices such as the “mesh” Wi-Fi routers made by Alphabet's Google and designed to help provide better coverage over an entire household. Separately, Qualcomm is also working with phonemakers such as Samsung Electronics to bring chips for 5G, the next generation of wireless data networks, to phones. With the new series of Wi-Fi chips, Qualcomm is hoping its two lines of business will one day come together. Both Wi-Fi 6, a new standard expected to fully roll out by 2022, and 5G technology differ from their predecessors in that they are designed to work more closely together, allowing Wi-Fi routers to more seamlessly hand off connections with mobile phones and other devices that use both kinds of networks.

Moreover, unlike previous 4G technology where the networks were primarily owned by telecommunications companies, 5G technology will allow businesses to build their own private 5G networks to better connect large campuses, factories and other locations that remain difficult to blanket with Wi-Fi. Cristiano Amon, Qualcomm's president and chief of its chip division, said the company hopes to one day sell chips for both technologies to the makers of business networking gear. “You should expect in the future to see us talking about integrated platforms that have both millimeter-wave [5G technology] and Wi-Fi 6,” Amon told Reuters in an interview.

Local Emergency Feature.

Facebook announced on Tuesday that it was rolling out a tool that aims to provide users with potentially life-saving information in emergencies, as it seeks to improve its public image and play down its reputation as a network that aids the spread of misinformation. Local Alerts, which it has been testing since last year in 300 cities including Charlotte, St. Louis and Miami and now plans to offer across the United States, is intended to provide reliable information to people caught up in events such as mass shootings and extreme weather, it said in a blog post. Alongside other social media companies, Facebook has faced a barrage of international criticism for the way its platform has been used to spread conspiracy theories and extremist views and it is keen to focus attention instead on its role as a connector of friends and family. The world's largest social media network already offers users the ability to let friends know they are safe during emergencies with a feature called Safety Check, but said it wanted to do more.


With Local Alerts, Facebook account holders in local government and among first responders such as the police and fire departments can send out messages that are then spread more widely by Facebook. It was not immediately clear how useful the service was in its pilot phase. When asked if Local Alerts to date have been deployed quickly enough to make a difference or have been employed in situations where users were in danger, Facebook declined to give examples, citing the privacy of its account holders. It also said the speed at which alerts were disseminated was dependent on the account holders.

In one example, when a disgruntled student opened fire during the last day of classes at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte in April, the City of Charlotte Government's Facebook page sent a Local Alert notifying nearby residents when it was safe to return. The alert was posted more than two hours after the shooting, said Ken Brown, Charlotte's Interim Media Relations Manager. Some local authorities contacted by Reuters said they were using Local Alerts alongside other services to warn citizens of danger. Mt. Juliet Police Department in Tennessee said it uses a combination of Facebook Local Alerts, mobile text messages through the Nixle platform, and posts on local community media service Nextdoor to send emergency notifications. The local authorities said they had sent alerts over emergencies including road closures, bad weather, and missing people. "I grew up in Kansas and this is the time of year when we get a lot of tornadoes," Jimmy O'Keefe, Facebook's head of Product Marketing for News Publishing, said. "This tool would have given us a lot of peace of mind if it was around back then."

Air Taxies.

The Dubai Civil Aviation Authority (DCAA) has begun testing on a proof-of-concept autonomous air taxi, flying for five minutes approximately 650 feet above a windy residential neighborhood. The air taxis (AATs) are built by the German company Volocopter. Looking like a helicopter with a drone's rotors attached at the top, it is meant to seat 2 with 18 propellors. Unmanned for its first run, the test and surrounding ceremony was arranged by Dubai Crown Prince Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed."After the remarkable success of the first driverless metro in the region, we are glad to witness today the test flight of the Autonomous Air Taxi," Sheikh Hamdan said in a statement. "This is another testament to our commitment to driving positive change. We are constantly exploring opportunities to serve the community and advance the prosperity and happiness of society."

The test offered only a partial look at what both Volocopter and Dubai hope the AAT can do. The ultimate goal is a 30-minute trip with actual people inside, their confidence buoyed by numerous safety measures including back-up batteries, rotors and, just in case, a pair of parachutes. The taxis plan on entering services under Dubai's Road and Transport Authority (RTA), one of the most aggressive local transit authorities in the world when it comes technological innovation. It hopes to transition at least one-fourth of its passenger travel to autonomous transportation by as early as 2030. Dubai has embraced technological salves of many stripes, also turning to self-driving cars for mobile police surveillance. Mattar Al Tayer, Director-General of the RTA, said in a statement that the AAT "has a variety of unique features that include top security and safety standards, and multiple redundancies in all critical components...It is also fitted with optional emergency parachutes, nine independent battery systems, and a battery quick-charge and plug-in system, which takes two hours to reach full charge in the prototype version, a time that will be significantly reduced in the production version." Ideally, Volocopter says it would launch the taxi service within five years. "It already is capable of flying based on GPS tracks today," says CEO Florian Reuter of the AAT, "and we will implement full sense capability, also dealing with unknown obstacles on the way."