 The Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi alliance will debut its next-generation connected-car platform later this year in the Nissan Leaf electric vehicle and redesigned Renault Clio small car. Dubbed the Alliance Intelligent Cloud, the new platform will help drivers navigate and service their cars while providing the automakers troves of data to channel into self-driving car systems. "This will have a huge impact on the customer experience," Kal Mos, global vice president of connected vehicles at Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi, told Automotive News. "And all this will help us design the car better and better meet customer needs." The technology was developed by the auto group and U.S. technology giant Microsoft using Microsoft's Azure platform. The tie-up was announced in September 2016. The rollout is a step toward positioning connectivity as a cornerstone of alliance automotive technology. At Nissan, for instance, it figures into a brand strategy called Nissan Intelligent Mobility, which prioritizes development of connectivity, electrification and autonomous driving. The alliance wants 90 percent of its new vehicles to be connected by 2022. Microsoft is working on connectivity with other automakers, including Volvo and BMW. But Nissan and Renault will be the first to use Microsoft's entire suite of software. Using Microsoft's cloud technology, the software allows automakers to access the vehicle's data to predict maintenance as well as gather driver data for research. In the future, it might also be leveraged to operate Microsoft services such as Office 365 and the virtual assistant Cortana. It will provide real-time and contextual navigation, helping drivers time traffic lights, dodge highway backups, search for the nearest Starbucks or find the nearest, cheapest fuel station. Learn more from OUR FORUM.  A new patent from Microsoft sheds light on improvements for the audio system for devices emulating an augmented reality. First spotted by us, the patent simply titled ‘Audio augmented reality system’ was published by USPTO on March 19, 2019, and filed by Microsoft in 2018. In the patent application, techniques to enhance the performance of audio augmented reality systems have been described. “Techniques for online information search and retrieval for a query including a digital audio waveform. In an aspect, an audio waveform is received and digitized by at least one of a plurality of audio input devices. The digitized audio waveforms are transmitted to a central processing unit, which formulates and submits a query to an online engine,” Microsoft explains. “The formulated query may include at least one digital audio waveform. The online engine retrieves one or more online results relevant to the formulated query. The online results may include one or more relevant visual results, and/or one or more relevant audio results. The retrieved results are served in real-time back to a user, via a device having audio output capability, and/or a device having visual data output capability,” the company adds. The foldable devices are in vogue this year. Companies like Samsung and Huawei have recently unveiled their foldable display mobile devices. Microsoft is also said to be working on its own foldable device and a new version of Windows optimized for such form factors. Follow along on OUR FORUM.  Third-party advertising technology (ad tech) trackers from 112 companies were found on 89% of official government websites of EU member states by Cookiebot, a cookie, and online tracking consent solution, after scanning 184,683 pages. As discovered by Cookiebot, 25 out of 28 of the EU official government websites it checked came with ad tech trackers, with the German, Spanish, and Dutch governmental websites being the only three on which commercial trackers were not detected. EU government websites do not use advertising revenue for funding and are the ones that should provide an example to all other organizations and companies with an online presence on how GDPR's regulations should be upheld. Despite this, ad tech trackers have found their way in, infiltrating with the help of third-party plugins used to provide various features "such as video players, social sharing widgets, web analytics, galleries, and comments sections." Another category of websites that should not contain any type of ad tech tracker is public health service websites which process sensitive information about their visitors' health condition, a "special category data that is carefully protected under Article 9 of the GDPR." In spite of this, on 52% of them, Cookiebot was able to detect ad trackers, with 73% of the Irish health service featuring trackers, while the one from Germany was on the other end of the spectrum with 33% of all their pages coming trackers.Get the bigger picture by visiting OUR FORUM. |
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