Microsoft’s HoloLens headset has been slowly pivoting towards commercial markets over the past year. NASA, Volvo, Lowe’s, Audi, and Volkswagen are all testing HoloLens for various reasons, and now Ford is expanding its use of Microsoft’s headsets after an initial pilot phase. Ford is using HoloLens to let designers quickly model out changes to cars, trucks, and SUVs. This allows designers to see the changes on top of an existing physical vehicle, instead of the traditional clay model approach to car design.

https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/21/16343354/microsoft-hololens-ford-augmented-reality

Remote technical interviews are often full of friction, requiring candidates to flip between their video chatting and testing apps. In a bid to solve that problem and gain a competitive edge in the crowded enterprise chat space, Microsoft has built a new code editor into its Skype calling platform.

https://www-geekwire-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/www.geekwire.com/2017/skype-launches-integrated-code-editor-remote-technical-job-interviews/amp/

As AI rises in popularity, there are a slew of businesses new and old looking to market themselves as “AI companies.” But Andrew Ng, one of the founders of the Google Brain team and a luminary in the space, said that there’s more to being an AI company than just using a neural net.

https://venturebeat.com/2017/09/19/you-might-use-ai-but-this-doesnt-mean-youre-an-ai-company/

https://techcrunch-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/techcrunch.com/2017/09/15/why-dropbox-decided-to-drop-aws-and-build-its-own-infrastructure-and-network/amp/

Chinese maze: Village makes giant tech code from trees – http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-41277549

In October 2016, inside a sold-out arena in Zurich, a man named Numa Poujouly steered his wheelchair up to the central podium. As the Swiss national anthem played, organizers of the world’s first cyborg Olympics hung a gold medal around Poujouly’s neck. The 30-year-old, who became paralyzed after a bicycle accident in his teens, had triumphed in the tournament’s most futuristic event: a video-game-like race in which the competitors controlled their speeding avatars with just their minds.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/biomedical/bionics/how-we-won-gold-in-the-cyborg-olympics-brain-race?utm_source=TechAlert&bt_alias=eyJ1c2VySWQiOiAiZjY3YTc2MjEtZTY0MS00N2M3LThmMTgtMzBkNDQ4NjAxMzhmIn0%3D&utm_medium=BTtrigger&utm_campaign=TAWinback&utm_content=blast1

https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/13/ford-disguised-a-man-as-a-car-seat-to-research-autonomous-driving/

https://goo.gl/wUve1B
The implications of AI in consumer technology are far-reaching, but Russian president Vladimir Putin says that AI could also lead to global domination.