The Year Of The SPAC And What It Means For Hardware

CBS MarketWatch declared 2020: The Year of the SPAC (Special Purpose Acquisition Corporation). A record 219 companies went public through this fundraising vehicle that uses a reverse merger with an existing private business to create a publicly-listed entity. This accounted for more than $73 billion dollars of investment, providing private … Read More

The New Restaurant Experience: Robot Servers, Cooks And Hostesses

At the new Alibaba restaurant, Robot.he, in Shanghai the human hostesses have been relegated to smiling and pointing at touch screens. The hard work of interacting with guests and serving dinner is done by mobile phones and mobile robots that look oddly similar to Amazon’s warehouse rovers. Cao Haitao of Robot.he … Read More

Get Ready For Humanoids

Memphis at 1am is quite possibly the busiest airport without passengers on the globe. Touring the 880 acre FedEx facility, I marveled at the speed and efficiency of the automation technologies that can process close to a half a million shipments an hour and 250 flights a day. The cargo hub … Read More

Making Pepper Walk, Understanding Softbank’s Purchase of Boston Dynamics

It is unclear if Masayoshi Son, Chairman of Softbank, was one of the 17 million YouTube viewers of Boston Dynamic’s Big Dog before acquiring the company for an undisclosed amount this past Thursday. What is clear is the acquisition of Boston Dynamics by Softbank is a big deal. Softbank’s humanoid robot … Read More

Living with Social Robots

A couple of years ago, I had coffee with the Heather Knight, author of the infamous paper, “How Humans Respond To Robots.“ When we met in 2014, we begun our discussion with “in the future…” people will rely on robots for everyday tasks. However, today the future is yesterday and social … Read More

The Job Report: Robots On The Rise

Hey, we all feel the Bern (good or bad), but I have one thing to say to Larry David: “be careful what you wish for.” Raising the federal minimum wage to $15 will only exasperate the robot takeover of America’s dull, dirty, and dangerous jobs. I am typically the first person … Read More