Ethics and morality have been having a hard time of it lately.
And no, I'm not specifically referring to Elon Musk buying Twitter.
I fancy, though, that many will have strong opinions about the apparent happenings at certain Apple stores lately.
The stores were filled with mesmerized Apple customers, performing their social duty by browsing and perhaps buying a new iPhone.
The refurbished electronics company, Back Market, secured $510 million in funding on Tuesday from investor Sprints Capital. The funding makes Back Market now worth $5.7 billion.
The funding follows a $335 million Series D round last May and will be used to hire more people and expand the already growing customer base that spans 16 markets and five regions. Back Market co-founder and CEO Thibaud Hug de Larauze told ZDNet that a major focal point for the company this year would be expanding brand awareness and the benefits of refurbished devices.
I've gone through phases when it comes to buying used computer gear. Way back at the dawn of time, the only items I could afford were used. In fact, I couldn't even afford working computer gear, so I'd scavenge broken machines and combine parts to make them work. It was frustrating, highly educational, gave me confidence around the gear, and was the only way I was able to get my hands on what I needed.
For full article
So you want (or need) a new iPhone? But what if one of those brand new iPhone 13 devices isn't your only choice? What if an iPhone 12 or even an iPhone 11 will do?
Also, if you would like to see more coverage of Back Market, click here.
The computer science research arm of Sony has launched a cloud-based AI music production tool called Flow Machines Mobile (FM Mobile) to help musicians generate ideas for new melodies, chords, and basslines.
The Sony Computer Science Laboratories (CSL) FM Mobile app, available on the Apple App store and compatible with a range of digital audio workstation (DAW), features a machine learning model that analyses musical data based on the style palette that users select to match the genre and chord progression of the song they want to create. Users can create their own original style palette in the app or choose from various preset palettes created by Sony CSL.
When users press the compose button, the AI will generate eight-bar melodies according to the selected chord progression, Sony CSL said.
"There are parameters such as note duration and melodic complexity, which allows users to have proposals from AI matching their intention," the company added.
Users can then save their creations and import it to their DAW using Flow Machines Professional (FM Pro), a plugin that Sony CSL developed in 2019 for use in a DAW, or into Apple's GarageBand.
FM Mobile has been launched in Japan and the United States. The app will also be released in Europe, Sony CSL said, but a date has not been set.
Meanwhile, the Japanese conglomerate's semiconductor business is set to release two types of stacked event-based vision sensors designed for industrial equipment.
The two sensors, Sony said, employ the company's copper-to-copper connection technology to provide electrical continuity between the pixel chip and the logic chip, and feature pixel size of 4.86 μm.
These features enable the sensors to detect changes in luminance, as well as sense slight changes in vibration, abnormalities for use in predictive maintenance of equipment, and changes in sparks produced during welding and metal cutting, Sony said.
Additionally, Sony boasted the two sensors are equipped with event filtering functions developed by Prophesee.
"Using these filters helps eliminate events that are unnecessary for the recognition task at hand, such as the LED flickering that can occur at certain frequencies (anti-flicker), as well as events that are highly unlikely to be the outline of a moving subject (event filter). The filters also make it possible to adjust the volume of data when necessary to ensure it falls below the event rate that can be processed in downstream systems (event rate control)," Sony said.
Lenovo and Mercedes-Benz have also signed up as new members in the INRC neuromorphic community project.
Intel has released new performance benchmarks for the Loihi neuromorphic computing processor, revealing improvements in power consumption and efficiency.
Since Delair first launched in 2011, it has grown from a small drone startup into a global unmanned aircraft systems and asset-management company, with headquarters in Toulouse, France, and offices in Belgium, Singapore, and the US.
Copyright ©2026 | Wired Island PR. All Rights Reserved
Privacy Policy