Quick Overview
- COMPUTING: Google launches Stadia game streaming, everyone places bets on how long it’ll take for them to kill it
- COMPUTING: Watch this jaw dropping photorealistic video made with Unreal Engine
- CRYPTO: Uncensorable, unstoppable, satellite delivered news world wide now possible
- CRYPTO: Wild theory of the week that’s no so wild… Facebook is going after the USD
- CRYPTO: Get 6.2% p.a interest on your hodling BTC with BlockFi
- ENERGY: China is saving 190,000+ barrels of diesel a day with its epic electric bus fleet
- ROBOTICS: Clean floors for a living? The robots are coming for you…
- SPACE: SpaceX’s epic Falcon Heavy rocket due to launch a second time on April 7th
- TRANSPORT: Tesla Model 3’s are driving themselves in car parks, video demo!
We believe that everyone’s future can be richer, happier and more efficient, but you can’t embrace that future unless you take the first most crucial step, being informed of it.
Welcome to The Tipping Point, news from the most critical future industries curated for you every week so you can stay informed and prepared. No need to waste hours everyday researching, stay on top of it all with one post and then get back to doing what you do best.
The Tipping point is named after the point at which a new technology goes from being disappointing, expensive and buggy to exciting, exponential, cheap and mainstream. This point of change often sneaks up on and surprises everyone including industry experts!
No matter if you’re personally employed in the industry or just a lurker, The Tipping Point is vital to staying up to date and being ready to transition smoothly rather than getting caught off guard.
This Weeks News!
Google has taken the wraps off its new, game streaming service called Stadia. They’ve also launched their own controller which looks like someone from Apple ripped off a PlayStation DualShock controller and then added a Google Assistant button to it. Promising 4K resolution AAA games at 60 frames per second all without any local hardware they haven’t released pricing yet. Hopefully they get this information out there before they decide to shut down the whole thing down due to not enough use!
COMPUTING: Watch this jaw dropping photorealistic video made with Unreal Engine
Quixel has taken a brief trip to Iceland in order to collect 1,000 scans which it then used to build this amazing cinematic short film. Watch it!
With UE 4.21 at the heart of the real-time pipeline, Quixel’s artists were able to iterate on the go, eliminating the need for previsualization or post-production. The team also built a physical camera rig that was able to capture movements in-engine using virtual reality, adding an enhanced dimension of realism to the short. All post-processing and color grading was completed directly within Unreal.
CRYPTO: Uncensorable, unstoppable, satellite delivered news world wide now possible
The company Blockstream has had its Bitcoin satellite network in operation for a while now beaming out block updates to the globe so that anyone, any where, even without an internet connection can confirm Bitcoin transactions. Now a developer in America is using it to share news headlines and information. The news headlines are encoded into the transmission which is then broadcast out through the satellite network for anyone with a receiver to see. The hope is to allow those in oppressive regimes to still receive uncensorable news headlines about the world. Best of all, it only costs about 500 satoshis!
CRYPTO: Wild theory of the week that’s no so wild… Facebook is going after the USD
If you’re curious about why Facebook is investigating launching a cryptocurrency have a quick read of this very interesting piece by Ted Livingston. Although not rooted in any actual hard evidence, it’s an interesting look at what Facebook may one day try and do.
CRYPTO: Get 6.2% p.a interest on your hodling BTC with BlockFi
Sick of getting 1, 2, 3% interest on your fiat that sits in a bank long term deposit all day long? How does 6.2% p.a sound instead? Well now you can transfer it into BTC, put it in a BlockFi account and earn double or even triple what you might in a regular bank. To be very clear this isn’t investment advice! But it’s extremely interesting to see the types of advantages crypto can have over traditional fiat currencies.
ENERGY: China is saving 190,000+ barrels of diesel a day with its epic electric bus fleet
A new study has revealed that although the move to EV cars is obviously helping the environment, converting dirty diesel busses has a much bigger impact.
The report estimates that “for every 1,000 electric buses on the road, 500 barrels of diesel are displaced each day.” The same number of battery-powered electric vehicles only displaces 15 barrels of oil a day, by comparison.
With China’s huge fleet of EV busses that they already have, they’re starting to make a bit of a dent in diesel usage which is great news both for the Earth and those cities in China that benefit from the cleaner air.
ROBOTICS: Clean floors for a living? The robots are coming for you…
Nilfisk, a Copenhagen, Denmark-based cleaning solutions provider has just partnered up with Brain Corp (yes that’s a real company) to license out their software BrainOS (yes that’s a real AI platform). This new platform is being used to guide it’s robotic floor cleaners however there’s still no Brain-Nilfisk products currently on the market. Nilfisk’s plans though aim for scale production of their Liberty SC50 floor cleaner sometime this year. If you want to see it in action you can click through or check out this video.
SPACE: SpaceX’s epic Falcon Heavy rocket due to launch a second time on April 7/8th
Waaaay back in February of 2018 the SpaceX Falcon Heavy made its first flight, leading to this utterly stunning display of landing two orbital class stage 1 rockets back on Earth – simultaneously. Just for good measure they also launched a Tesla Roadster at Mars too.
Now the Falcon Heavy is gearing up for its first commercial flight, taking the huge, 6,000 kg Arabsat 6A satellite into Geosynchronous Transfer Orbit or GTO. This flight will be using two Falcon 9 Block 5 side boosters and SpaceX are planning to recover all 3 boosters for a later mission. Launching from LC-39A, Kennedy Space Center, Florida hopefully on April 7th (22:36), if you’re anywhere near it check it out as it’ll be one hell of a show!
TRANSPORT: Tesla Model 3’s are driving themselves in car parks, video demo!
Tesla has had its “Summon” feature available to all Tesla owners for quite a while now but now they’re rolling out a software update – Enhanced Summon. This new mode allows you to call for your Tesla from up to 150 feet away. People have started posting demo videos and although it’s a very slow thing to watch it does seem to work excellently. For those who don’t want to run through rain, snow or hail etc it’s a great new feature that will hopefully get even quicker as the fleet learning kicks in.
And that’s it for this week! Hit up the comments if you’ve seen other interesting news others might be interested in and we’ll see you next time!
The benefits include: 1) How to get those silky smooth videos that everyone loves to watch, even if you're new 2) How to fly your drone, from taking off to the most advanced flight modes 3) Clear outlines of how to fly with step-by-step instructional demonstrations and more 4) Why flying indoors often results in new pilots crashing their drone 5) What other great 3rd party apps are out there to get the most out of your drone 6) A huge mistake many pilots make when storing their drone in the car and how to avoid it 7) How to do all of these things whilst flying safely and within your countries laws.
