PROMISING OUTLOOKS FOR TECH
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Traveling for the Holidays? Google Maps Uncovers 'Hidden Gems' to Add to Your Route Now |
Given much of the Holiday Season is spent on the road, to help make the experience as easy as possible, Google has unveiled some new features for Google Maps. In the mobile app, users can discover "hidden gems" or interesting stops they would have otherwise missed while road-tripping, including local favorites, coffee shops, rest stops, restaurants, and more. To surface these hidden gems, enter your location as usual and tap the new "Add stops" button. You can select from one of the prepopulated options or type into the search bar anything you want to see or are looking for; Google will find you spots that are conveniently along your route. If you don't know exactly what you are looking for, scroll to the bottom of the screen. There, you will see local selections organized by topic, including restaurants, points of interest, and fast food. Another handy addition is a new search feature that allows you to search Google Maps for a specific product. Maps will then tell you which nearby stores have in stock so you can pick it up. (https://www.zdnet.com/article/traveling-for-the-holidays-google-maps-uncovers-hidden-gems-to-add-to-your-route-now/)
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Waymo Robotaxis Ready for Anyone in L.A. Who Wants a Driverless Ride |
Waymo recently opened its robotaxi service to anyone who wants a ride around Los Angeles, marking another milestone in the evolution of self-driving car technology since the company began as a secret project at Google 15 years ago. The expansion comes eight months after Waymo began offering rides in L.A. to a limited group of passengers chosen from a waiting list that had ballooned to more than 300,000 people. Now, anyone with the Waymo One smartphone app will be able to request a ride around an 80-square-mile territory spanning the second largest U.S. city. Before deciding to compete against conventional ride-hailing pioneers Uber and Lyft in California, Waymo unleashed its robotaxis in Phoenix in 2020 and has been steadily extending the reach of its service there ever since. Waymo says it now transports more than 150,000 weekly trips in its robotaxis, a volume of business numbers that helped the company recently raise $5.6 billion from its corporate parent Alphabet and a list of other investors that included venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and financial management firm T. Rowe Price. (https://www.inc.com/associated-press/waymo-robotaxis-ready-for-anyone-in-l-a-who-wants-a-driverless-ride/91018299)
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Health Systems Band Together to Test and Publicly Rank Top AI Models |
As Google, Amazon, Microsoft and OpenAI rapidly expand their suite of artificial intelligence offerings, healthcare providers say they don't know how to compare the efficacy of products or determine which tool might best meet their specific needs. A group of health systems, led by Boston-based Mass General Brigham, is hoping to solve that problem. Recently, the academic medical center launched the Healthcare AI Challenge Collaborative, which will allow participating clinicians to test the latest AI offerings in simulated clinical settings. Clinicians will pit models against each other in head-to-head competition and produce public rankings of the commercial tools by the end of the year. Participating health systems say that the chance to directly compare AI products is overdue. (https://www.ciodive.com/news/healthcare-AI-challenge-collaborative-mass-general-brigham/733011/)
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Global Cloud Spend to Surpass $700B in 2025 as Hybrid Adoption Spreads: Gartner |
Gartner expects end-user cloud spending to increase 21.5% globally to $723 billion in 2025, after reaching nearly $600 billion this year, according to a recent report. Spending on SaaS applications will approach $300 billion next year, up from just over $250 billion in 2024. Infrastructure and platform services, the second and third largest segments, are the fastest growing markets with expected year-over-year spending increases of 25% and 22% respectively. Enterprise AI adoption is helping to drive cloud growth: "The use of AI technologies in IT and business operations is unabatedly accelerating the role of cloud computing in supporting business operations and outcome," Sid Nag, VP analyst at Gartner, said in the report. (https://www.ciodive.com/news/cloud-spend-growth-forecast-2025-gartner/733401/)
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Oxide Cloud Computer to be Installed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory |
Oxide Computer Company and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) are teaming up to bring on-premises cloud capabilities to the LLNL supercomputing center. The startup will deploy its rack-scale Oxide Cloud Computer at LLNL's high performance computing (HPC) center in Livermore, California, to enable Livermore Computing users to access virtualized services alongside HPC workloads. Users will be able to run typical HPC batch workloads for scientific simulations while also accessing cloud-like services such as databases, Jupyter notebooks, orchestration tools, and Kubernetes clusters while remaining secure and on-premises. "On-premises environments are the next frontier for cloud computing," said Steve Tuck, CEO at Oxide Computer Company. "LLNL is tackling some of the hardest and most important problems in science and technology, requiring advanced hardware, software, and cloud capabilities. We are thrilled to be working with their exceptional team to help advance those efforts, delivering an integrated system that meets their rigorous requirements for performance, efficiency, and security." (https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/oxide-cloud-computer-to-be-installed-at-lawrence-livermore-national-laboratory/)
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GOVERNMENT & TECHNOLOGY
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Federal CIO Focused on Cyber, Smooth Transition to New Administration |
As the White House gets ready to "pass the baton" to the incoming Trump administration, Federal CIO Clare Martorana said she is focused on cybersecurity issues and making sure her team does everything it can for their replacements to be set up for success. Over the remaining two months of the Biden administration, Martorana said in an interview with FedScoop that cyber is her top area of focus because "you need security, engineering, [and] competencies when you are contemplating the problem set in the solution you're trying to design." Martorana said the nation's data are its "crown jewels," and she's especially mindful about protecting health care and social security data. Before her departure, Martorana said she wants to make sure that cybersecurity is not a "bolt-on thing at the end" but instead is a core component of product development for American citizens. Ultimately, she's "really excited" about what's possible from a tech standpoint for the incoming administration. (https://fedscoop.com/federal-cio-focused-on-cyber-smooth-transition-in-months-ahead/)
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National Cyber Director Calls for Streamlined Security Regulations |
The U.S. must take collective action to address "unacceptable" cybersecurity risks to the country, National Cyber Director Harry Coker Jr. said in a speech at Columbia University's Conference on Cyber Regulation and Harmonization in New York City. Coker called for federal authorities to work together with critical infrastructure providers, private sector companies and other stakeholders. Cybersecurity threats like the China state-linked Volt Typhoon present unacceptable risks to the U.S., Coker said, and more investments are required to build long term cyber resilience. As part of that strategy, companies need to ensure that cybersecurity is as much of a focus as quarterly profits. At the same time, Coker called for the government to streamline its regulations and harmonize compliance demands for the benefit of the private sector and critical infrastructure providers. This could allow CISOs and other security leaders to spend more time mitigating their own organizational cyber risk, he said.
Federal agencies have begun rolling out sector-specific regulations to set minimum security standards and are trying to leverage the government's IT spending power to ensure widely used tools have security built into their product design. Their aim, among others, is to reduce the burden on under-resourced users. At the same time, Coker called for the government to streamline its regulations and harmonize compliance demands for the benefit of the private sector and critical infrastructure providers. This could allow CISOs and other security leaders to spend more time mitigating their own organizational cyber risk, he said. (https://www.cybersecuritydive.com/news/national-cyber-director-streamlined-regulations/732950/
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US Government Commission Pushes Manhattan Project-Style AI Initiative |
A U.S. congressional commission has proposed a Manhattan Project-style initiative to fund the development of AI systems that will be as smart or smarter than humans, amid intensifying competition with China over advanced technologies. The bipartisan U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission (USCC) stressed that public-private partnerships are key in advancing artificial general intelligence, but did not give any specific investment strategies as it released its annual report. The Manhattan Project was a large-scale collaboration between the U.S. government and the private sector during World War II that produced the first atomic bombs. Noting that energy infrastructure is a significant bottleneck for training large AI models, Jacob Helberg, a USCC commissioner, suggested that streamlining the permitting process for data centers might be an example of how a public-private partnership could accelerate AI development. ChatGPT maker OpenAI, which last week released a proposed blueprint for U.S. AI strategy, has also called for more government funding for artificial intelligence. (https://www.reuters.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/us-government-commission-pushes-manhattan-project-style-ai-initiative-2024-11-19/)
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