Robots strut their stuff at $3.5M DARPA Robotics Challenge in Pomona

Running Man, from the Institute of Human and Machine Cognition out of Pensacola, FL, exits a vehicle as it navigates the course Friday June 5, 2015 during the first day of the DARPA Robotics Challenge 2015 at Fairplex in Pomona. 25 teams from around the world compete for $3.5 million in prizes on a simulated disaster-response course at Fairplex in Pomona at the DARPA ...

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Running Man, from the Institute of Human and Machine Cognition in Pensacola, Florida, breaks through a piece of drywall as it navigates the course Friday at the $3.5 million DARPA Robotics Challenge 2015 at Fairplex in Pomona. will lester —staff photographer

POMONA >> Like something out of science fiction, nearly two dozen blinking, lumbering metal robots — with legs, arms and a spinning sensor for eyes — drove vehicles, stepped over debris, turned valves and cut holes in walls on Friday as part of the two-day, $3.5 million DARPA Robotics Challenge at Fairplex.

The world’s top robotics researchers competed in what has been called a historic effort to develop more robust and advanced robots that could assist humans in the event of a disaster or other emergency.

“We think this is one of the seminal events that we’ll look back on for when humanoid robotics and actually mobile robotics become a more permanent presence in the world around us,” said Paul Backes, program manager at Pasadena’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which entered a monkey-like robot, called RoboSimian.

“The hope is obviously robots will someday be partners with humans, contributing to our well-being obviously in times of disaster and lending us a hand and extending independence to our own personal lives,” said Jared Adams, a spokesman for the Department of Advanced Research Projects Agency, which develops new technology for the Defense Department.

Leader of the robotics pack after Friday’s competition was Team Tartan Rescue from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, followed by Team NimBro Rescue, from the University of Bonn, Germany, and JPL’s RoboSimian, according to a DARPA app for the event.

• Photos: DARPA Robotics Challenge

The competition concludes Saturday. First-place finisher wins $2 million.

Joel Burdick, a Caltech professor of mechanical engineering and robotics, was on the JPL team, helping with programming RoboSimian’s movements.

“This (competition) is the first step to where robots can actually manipulate and maneuver and actually do serious complicated physical tasks,” Burdick said. “This represents where robotics is today with respect to those new challenges that have not been addressed before in an integrated way.”

The semi-autonomous robots, controlled by humans, according to officials, could go into scenarios that would normally be too hazardous for people.

Each team gets two competitive runs, with the first on Friday and the other today.

Bullet train puts California’s future in the hole

The California High Speed Rail Authority is in damage-control mode in Southern California.

Planning is underway for the Palmdale-to-Burbank section of the $68-billion bullet train, and the rail authority is required to solicit community input on proposed routes. On Monday, Team Bullet Train was at the Santa Clarita Activities Center to comply with that legal mandate.

The strain was evident. “Santa Clarita has been very effective at vocalizing its concerns to the High Speed Rail Authority,” a rail official stated with cool irritation.

“I will lead the City Council to file a lawsuit if it goes through Santa Clarita,” Councilmember TimBen Boydston said later.

Public meetings usually feature members of the audience asking questions of a panel of officials and experts. Everyone can hear the answers.

Not this time. The rail authority’s meeting took place in two large rooms, with chairs set up in one room and computer displays in the other. Two officials gave a presentation in the room with the chairs but would not take questions from the people sitting in them.

“We prefer that people ask their questions individually of the experts at the open house,” an information officer said, referring to the room where engineering and environmental consultants stood near their displays like bored vendors at a trade show.

So none of the other people attending the presentation heard the experts tell me that the automobile was “a 50-year experiment that did not work out well,” or that “Ansel Adams opposed the Golden Gate Bridge, and one day opposition to high-speed rail will seem just as ridiculous,” or that “we will learn from the Europeans” how to safely evacuate train passengers from a tunnel 60 feet underground in the event of a fire or explosion.

Actually, automobile sales have been rising since 1892, Ansel Adams was a photographer of nature’s untouched beauty, and the CHSRA’s own literature on project pros and cons lists “Fire & Life Safety” as one of the “cons” of the “HSR deep tunnel.”

In another questionable assertion, the team insisted that the bullet train is financially viable and won’t need taxpayer subsidies to operate. They offered up a stack of year-old letters from private sector companies as evidence.

But the letters are about construction loans, not financial self-sufficiency. In the very first letter a CEO writes, “we believe that long-term funding by the State is needed.”

The second letter says the project could be completed “with funds from the state” in combination with private financing, if the state provides “a multi-year source of repayment.”

The would-be private sector partners were offering to help us borrow money, which we would then give to them to build the bullet train. They were pleased that the state would be able to make loan payments using money collected from cap-and-trade fees assessed on gasoline, diesel fuel and industry.

At a news conference in May, Gov. Jerry Brown was asked about the cap-and-trade spending. A reporter wondered if he had a long-term plan, “because as pollution goes down, the revenues will go down.”

“No, not quite,” Brown answered. “Pollution — we’re not as successful with reducing carbon pollution as we are with what they call ‘criteria’ pollutants, like sulfur, carbon monoxide, NOx, things like that. Carbon pollution is still rising. Worldwide. And so one of the principal strategies is to put a price on carbon. And a price that will rise. To increase the burden of using carbon.”

The reporter asked again, “But these revenues will taper off at some point and begin to go down, yes?”

“I don’t think so,” Brown answered.

“Spending will continue,” the reporter said.

“Spending will continue,” Brown confirmed. “There will be a gradual rise. And I would imagine as, assuming climate change becomes more evident, there will be efforts to ramp up even further the price of carbon.”

The governor is widening the definition of pollution so the penalty fees can go up. The only way to maintain public support for this scheme is to incite guilt and panic with endless warnings that climate change is about to become “more evident.”

Meanwhile, production and transportation will grow more expensive, and California will lose businesses, jobs and revenue. But limits on greenhouse gas emissions can always be tightened further to generate higher penalty fees. Spending will continue.

The bullet train is worse than an unnecessary expense. Funded by debt and fines, it will be a permanent leech on California’s economic lifeblood.

Save the future. Take Southwest.

Susan Shelley is a San Fernando Valley author, a former television associate producer and twice a Republican candidate for the California Assembly.

China suspected in massive breach of federal personnel data

WASHINGTON >> China-based hackers are suspected of breaking into the computer networks of the U.S. government personnel office and stealing identifying information of at least 4 million federal workers, American officials said Thursday.

The Department of Homeland Security said in a statement that data from the Office of Personnel Management and the Interior Department had been compromised.

“The FBI is conducting an investigation to identify how and why this occurred,” the statement said.

The hackers were believed to be based in China, said Sen. Susan Collins, a Maine Republican.

Collins, a member of the Senate intelligence committee, said the breach was “yet another indication of a foreign power probing successfully and focusing on what appears to be data that would identify people with security clearances.”

A U.S. official who declined to be identified said the data breach could potentially affect every federal agency. One key question is whether intelligence agency employee information was stolen. Former government employees are affected as well.

“This is an attack against the nation,” said Ken Ammon, chief strategy officer of Xceedium, who said the attack fit the pattern of those carried out by nation states for the purpose of espionage.

The information stolen could be used to impersonate or blackmail federal employees with access to sensitive information, he said.

The Office of Personnel Management is the human resources department for the federal government, and it conducts background checks for security clearances. The OPM conducts more than 90 percent of federal background investigations, according to its website.

The agency said it is offering credit monitoring and identity theft insurance for 18 months to individuals potentially affected. The National Treasury Employees Union, which represents workers in 31 federal agencies, said it is encouraging members to sign up for the monitoring as soon as possible.

In November, a former DHS contractor disclosed another cyberbreach that compromised the private files of more than 25,000 DHS workers and thousands of other federal employees.

DHS said its intrusion detection system, known as EINSTEIN, which screens federal Internet traffic to identify potential cyber threats, identified the hack of OPM’s systems and the Interior Department’s data center, which is shared by other federal agencies.

It was unclear why the EINSTEIN system didn’t detect the breach until after so many records had been copied and removed.

“DHS is continuing to monitor federal networks for any suspicious activity and is working aggressively with the affected agencies to conduct investigative analysis to assess the extent of this alleged intrusion,” the statement said.

Rep. Adam Schiff, ranking Democrat on the House intelligence committee, called the hack “shocking, because Americans may expect that federal computer networks are maintained with state of the art defenses.”

Ammon said federal agencies are rushing to install two-factor authentication with smart cards, a system designed to make it harder for intruders to access networks. But implementing that technology takes time.

Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr, R-N.C., said the government must overhaul its cybersecurity defenses. “Our response to these attacks can no longer simply be notifying people after their personal information has been stolen,” he said. “We must start to prevent these breaches in the first place.”

Associated Press writers Donna Cassata, Alicia A. Caldwell and Kevin Freking contributed to this report.

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Follow Ken Dilanian on Twitter at https://twitter.com/KenDilanianAP

Robotics Challenge Finals coming to Fairplex in Pomona

Johnny 05 of Team Hector from Technische Universität Darmstadt in Germany. Johnny 05, created in 2014, is 5' and weighs 121 pounds. DARPA Team Description: Team Hector is based at the Department of Computer Science of Technische Universität (TU) Darmstadt in Germany. The team’s mission is to research and develop highly diverse mobile search and rescue robots ...

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POMONA >> If there were an Olympics or a Super Bowl for the most advanced robots in the world, theDARPA Robotics Challenge starting Friday at Fairplexcould be it.

Officials at The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Defense Department’s wing for the advancement of new technology, hope that the kind of robots appearing at the two-day competition in Pomona will help in the event of a natural or a man-made disaster.

“Humanitarian assistance and disaster response is one of the 10 primary missions of the U.S. Defense Department,” said Gill Pratt, program manager at DARPA and coordinator of the DARPA Robotics Challenge. “When we go and help with disasters around the world, it helps if we have a way of mitigating the severity of the disaster as it is evolving.”

• PHOTOS: Meet the 25 robot competitors

Teams made up of some of the most advanced robotics researchers in the world have developed, in a short amount of time, the hardware, software, sensors, and human-machine control interfaces to allow their robots to complete a series of tasks related to disaster response.

Robots must be able to run, drive cars, turn valves, pick up debris, navigate through obstacles and climb stairs and ladders.

During the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011, the amount of radiation at the damaged plant following the earthquake and tsunami in Japan was dangerous for humans, but according to DARPA officials, an advanced robot would be able to withstand such conditions.

DARPA officials, inspired by the need for such robots after the disaster, said they hope the competition will result in the development of such technology.

“Robots for disaster response have to be able to adapt to the austere circumstances around themselves,” said Pratt. “As an example, this could be different debris that has fallen down on the ground, difficulty gaining traction on stairs and (moving) through areas ruined by fires or chemicals.”

Self-driving cars, now approved for legal operation in the city of Mountain View, were developed in part as a result of research that took place during an earlier DARPA prize competition to come up with such technology, according to DARPA spokesman Rick Weiss.

The top prize for the Pomona competition is $2 million. The runner-up will receive $1 million and the third-place winner will receive $500,000.

Weiss said technology competition prizes tend to attract innovators who might not normally think about contracting with the government because they think it’s too complicated or difficult. Also, companies are willing to invest more in development because they’re interested in attaining the bragging rights of being a winner.

“The government gets a lot of bang for its buck,” Weiss said. “For all those reasons, prizes can sometimes be the best approach, especially when you know exactly what you’re trying to achieve. ... In a case like this, a prize is a real inspirational and motivating way to accelerate a field of research. It also tends to create communities of researchers who come together for a common cause to try to win a prize.”

Among those competing for the top prize in Pomona is Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s RoboSimian, with its long limbs inspired by the physical form of monkeys and apes. Team leader Brett Kennedy said the form-factor came from the need for the robot to navigate around debris, ladders and stairs.

“Looking at the problem of disaster response ... if you assume a fair level of destruction, you would spend most of the time climbing up, around and over things as opposed to walking, so you might as well be designed around the climbing idea as opposed to walking,” said Kennedy of the RoboSimian robot, which unlike its competitors, is less human in shape.

Scott Boskovich, a professor of computer engineering and robotics at Cal Poly Pomona, said the competition is a good way for the research teams to push each other.

“We’re going to see a lot of good robotics coming forward,” Boskovich said. “I think this is a very small milestone along a series of milestones we’ve already had, and will continue to have. As we continue to have these milestones, we’ll continue to see the advancement get even better.”

Opening ceremonies for the robotics challenge are at 7 a.m. Friday at Fairplex, 1101 W. McKinley Ave., with competitions starting at 8. Admission is free but there is a $10 parking fee. Entrance is at Gate 17, which opens at 6 a.m. and closes at 8 p.m. Day 2 of the competition kicks off at 8 a.m. Saturday. Prize presentations are at 7 p.m. Saturday at the Fairplex grandstand.

Zingy app delivers on-demand dog walking service

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Zingy app delivers on-demand dog walking service

Bret-O Kennedy, one of Zingy’s walkers, walks an American Pitbull in Los Angeles on May 13. Zingy Pet Inc. is a Los Angeles-based company that has developed an app with an on-demand dog walking service. Customers can either have a Zingy walker come to where they are to get the pet, or a new Home Access service allows the walker to walk the dog while the owner is away from home. 

Southern Californians have come to depend on their smart phones for virtually everything, and now they can add on-demand dog walking to the list.

Zingy Pet Inc. has expanded its app-based dog walking service with a new Home Access feature that allows dogs to be walked while their owners are away.

So a client could schedule someone to walk his or her dog while they are at work. And they could keep on working while a Zingy walker takes Fluffy out for some much needed exercise.

Think Uber for dogs.

Zingy CEO Tobi Skovron said the service — now available in most of the greater Los Angeles area — is perfect for people with busy schedules.

“Everything is on demand,” he said. “You can book a walk now and someone will be at your house within two hours. It’s great for people who are running late, in a bind, stuck at a meeting or maybe they just really want to go to the gym and don’t want to have to go home to let the dog out.”

Jenny Evans uses Zingy’s service for Lola, her small pug.

“Zingy is incredibly convenient as I bring her to work everyday,” the Marina del Rey resident said. “I work at a day spa and most days I am back-to-back with clients with no break. Before Zingy, I would rush my dog between clients and not be able to give her a proper walk. Zingy helps me rest assured that Lola B is getting her needs met with the leisure walk she deserves.”

When a client requests a walk for their dog, a Zingy walker will show up at the home or business and first make sure the dog is comfortable with them. If that goes well the walk will commence and a home access menu screen is set up for subsequent walk requests, allowing pet owners to decide how a walker will access their dog when they are not home.

Access to the home or business can be gained in a variety of ways, including a Realtor lock box, a gate code (for apartment complexes and offices), a key with a doorman or by using a key that’s hidden somewhere.

Trust plays an important role in the transaction.

“Nothing is more important,” Skovron said. “All of the access information to your home is encrypted and the person who services the home is monitored by GPS. And the most important factor is that if anything goes wrong — whether it’s a problem with the pet or something gets smashed in the home — everything is covered by our liability insurance policy.”

Zingy’s dog walkers are carefully vetted.

“There are six points they must go through before they are allowed to take the job,” Skovron said. “It includes a background check and a face-to-face interview. We’ve had about 1,775 people apply and we have 500 to 600 walkers. Zingy takes on all of the liability if something goes wrong. And we have our own academy to train the walkers.”

Bret-O Kennedy, 40, of Silver Lake is one of them.

“I’ve been doing this for about three months now and it’s great because I have the opportunity to get outside all day,” he said. “It forces me to get some exercise I wouldn’t ordinarily do.”

Kennedy has walked all kinds of breeds and said each dog has its own personality.

“I’ve walked big dogs that are super calm and little dogs that just want to pull and pull,” he said. “And I walk a husky that gets really excited for the first 10 or 15 minutes before he calms down a bit.”

Kennedy said he does as many as 10 walks a week and as little as four or five. The walks aren’t exactly cheap. A 30-minute walk is $25, a 40-minute walk is $27.50, a 50-minute outing is $30 and a one-hour walk is $32.50.

Evans’ dog gets short walks.

“Lola B is a very slow walker and has a bad hip, so the 30-minute stroll is more than enough,” she said. “Knowing that the Zingy walkers have gone through a background check and proper training makes me feel super confident.”

Last week Zingy announced yet another expansion to its service — DASH stands. Those are valet stands that are now available to pet owners at select farmers’ markets, shopping centers and office complexes. Dog owners just open the app when they’re near a DASH stand and they can immediately arrange a walker.

For more information on Zingy Pet Inc., visit www.zingypet.com.

Q&A with Spokeo founder Harrison Tang on funding a startup, challenges and secrets of success

Harrison Tang is CEO of Pasadena-based Spokeo, an online people search engine. Leo Jarzomb — Staff photographer

Funding a startup isn’t easy. We asked Spokeo founder and CEO Harrison Tang to talk about that and how he keeps his company moving forward.

Q: You founded Spokeo in 2006 before the recession hit. How did you acquire your initial funding to start the business?

A: We secured our initial funding from our families and friends in 2006. We ran into hard times a bit later and almost ran out of money in 2008. When I approached my dad with the news he replied, “I wrote off the investment the moment I gave it to you, so just do what you think is right.” Taking this advice, we managed to find a sustainable business model, and we have been funding our growth without any outside funding ever since.

Q: Do you think it would be tougher to acquire the needed funding to start a business today as compared with back in 2006? If so, why?

A: I believe it is actually easier to acquire the seed funding (the money needed to start a business) today than in 2006. As tech startups have risen in popularity, there are more angel investors today than before, and they are more willing to give entrepreneurs money prior to a proof of concept.

Q: What has been your biggest challenge in starting the business and keeping it going?

A: The biggest challenge in starting a business is just to start. Initially we could not convince anyone to join us. Once we assembled a team, we could not find funding. After we managed to build a product used by thousands of users, we could not monetize the service and were about to run out of money. Challenges are a daily part of being an entrepreneur, and the first step in solving problems is just to start solving them.

Q: Spokeo closed out 2014 with its most successful year ever. The company posted a 159 percent increase in revenue growth between 2012 and 2014. What’s the secret to your success?

A: The secret to our success is our vision. We interpret “vision” as “doing something bigger tomorrow than what you are doing today,” so we are constantly trying to tackle bigger problems and build cooler stuff. We started as a social network aggregator in 2006, pivoted into a social search engine in 2008, launched a people search engine in 2010, and introduced our universal search engine in 2013.

Q: What do you like most about running Spokeo?

A: I like building cool stuff, and Spokeo gives us the opportunity to build new things every day. Spokeo helps more than 18 million people per month with researching and reconnecting with their long-lost families, friends, colleagues, and even ancestors.

Uber just found another way to anger Mexico City’s taxi drivers

Taxis and a bus ride along the streets of Mexico City.

Taxi drivers in Mexico City are going on strike today, so naturally the people over at Uber decided to offer free rides.

The publicity-hungry company made the announcement on their Mexico City blog — promising their customers that they wouldn’t allow a little labor dispute interfere with their services.

Mexico’s capital — like some other cities in Latin America — has been considering a ban on the popular service, which has drawn outrage from its taxi drivers.

According to Excelsior, a Mexican daily newspaper, approximately 5,000 taxi drivers are on strike today. According to CNN’s Spanish language channel, the taxi drivers are protesting against the car sharing service.

Back in March, the fight between Uber and local taxi drivers turned violent. A group of taxi drivers used baseball bats to attack an Uber driver’s car.

The city’s 140,000 taxis have been the focus of reforms as a part of a plan to “regularize” transportation.

Hailing a taxi in Mexico City and elsewhere in Latin America can be dangerous. As GlobalPost’s Simeon Tegel explains, in some cases passengers risk crossing paths with violent criminals who carry out what is known as an “express kidnappings”:

Mexico City is perhaps the world capital of this kind of crime, and no self-respecting guidebook fails to warn of the danger. Passengers are taken at gunpoint on a forced ATM tour.

The battle between taxi drivers and Uber isn’t exclusive to Latin America — it’s a face-off taking placearound the world. We’ll see if Mexico City becomes the next place to crackdown on the ride sharing app.

YouTube’s 1st decade shows sharing free content pays off

This Wednesday photo shows, Connor Franta’s “Coming Out” video playing on YouTube displayed on a computer screen in Los Angeles. YouTube, which is celebrating its 10th anniversary throughout May, has in recent years propped up YouTubers like Franta - “creators,” the site calls them - who attract millions of subscribers that regularly watch their online videos and the advertising attached to them. Their popularity is still eclipsed by music videos, which continue to account for the site’s most watched clips. Richard Vogel — The Associated Press

By Michael Liedtke, The Associated Press

POSTED: 05/24/15, 11:47 AM PDT | UPDATED: 2 WEEKS, 5 DAYS AGO

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This Thursday photo shows a DudePerfect YouTube marketing billboard in Culver City Google has opened production facilities in London, Los Angeles, New York, Tokyo and Sao Paulo for creators who have more than 5,000 subscribers to film videos. The studios are equipped with sets and equipment that transcend most YouTubers’ living rooms and webcams and the spaces serve as social hubs for creators. Several of them will host 10th anniversary parties on May 27. Nick Ut — The Associated Press

SAN FRANCISCO >> YouTube’s legacy extends beyond its pioneering role in the Internet’s video revolution. The 10-year-old site provided a stage for exhibitionists, narcissists and activists to broadcast their opinions, show off their talents, expose abuses or just pass along their favorite clips of movies, TV shows, music, cute kittens and other interests.

The rampant sharing on YouTube quickly attracted a massive audience that loved watching what they wanted when they wanted, even if much of the material was being contributed by amateurs.

YouTube’s rapid rise demonstrated that influential media hubs could be built around free content supplied by an Internet service’s users. Other companies that went on to embrace a similar strategy included Facebook, which limited its online social network to college and high school students until opening up the service to anyone 13 or older beginning in September 2006. That was just before YouTube’s whirlwind success culminated in its $1.76 billion sale to Google Inc.

In the spirit of sharing popularized by YouTube, here are a few moments to remember from the site’s first decade:

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MAJOR MILESTONES

YouTube’s potential to transform people’s viewing habits became apparent during the autumn of 2005 when a Nike soccer shoe ad called “Touch of Gold” became the first video on the site to be watched 1 million times.

The dance video “Gangnam Style” became the first YouTube video to surpass 1 billion views in 2012. The clip from South Korean rapper Psy still reigns as YouTube’s most-watched video at 2.3 billion views. The only other video to break the billion barrier so far has been “Baby” by Justin Bieber, but YouTube expects clips by singers Katy Perry, Shakira, Taylor Swift, Meghan Trainor and Miley Cyrus to eventually join the exclusive club.

In 2007, about six hours of video footage was being transferred to YouTube every minute. Now, about 300 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube each minute, or about 432,000 hours per day. That means it would take about 49 years to watch all the videos posted on YouTube on a typical day.

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VIDEO VILLIANS

Most TV and movie executives initially reviled YouTube, contending the site’s early success stemmed from its lax controls against video pirates posting copyrighted clips. Even Google initially viewed the video site as a “‘rogue enabler’ of content theft,” according to internal documents that surfaced in a copyright lawsuit filed against YouTube.

YouTube steadfastly denied wrongdoing and, as a defense, pointed to its policy of removing pirated video whenever asked by a copyright holder.

Shortly after being bought by Google, YouTube built an automated detection system that prevents most unauthorized clips from appearing on its site.

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THE BIG WINDFALL

In need of additional computing power and legal protection against the pirating claims, YouTube’s founders decided to sell in 2006. They negotiated the Google deal in a series of meetings in a Denny’s restaurant in Palo Alto, California, instead of YouTube’s dinky office located above a pizza parlor in nearby San Mateo. The purchase price was originally set at $1.65 billion in Google stock, but the value of the shares had climbed by the time the deal closed in November 2006 to set the final price at $1.76 billion.

The biggest winners were co-founders Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim , who collectively received nearly $700 million in Google stock. Hurley now runs a mobile video site called MixBitApp. Chen is an entrepreneur-in-residence at Google’s venture capital arm. Karim is financing and advising startups at Y Ventures.

YouTube employed fewer than 70 people at the time of the sale, and at least 18 of them became millionaires. Other early investors in the site who pocketed smaller windfalls included TV talk show host Maury Povich and former network TV news broadcaster Forrest Sawyer.

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WHAT IT’S WORTH NOW

Google has never disclosed how much money YouTube brings in or even if the site is profitable. The research firm eMarketer projects YouTube will sell about $4.3 billion in advertising this year, after subtracting commissions and licensing fees. That would translate into about 7 percent of Google’s projected revenue of $60 billion this year after subtracting advertising commissions.

If it were an independent company, YouTube likely would be worth at least $20 billion, based on investors’ assessment of Netflix — the Internet’s leading video subscription service. Netflix currently has a market value of $37 billion, or about five and half times its projected revenue this year.

Apple makes Jonathan Ive its chief design officer

LONDON — Apple innovator Jonathan Ive says he’s been promoted to the company’s chief design officer, making him one of the most powerful people in the world’s most valuable company.

Ive, who as a lead designer with the company helped conceive the iconic Apple looks of products like the iPod, iPad and Apple Watch, confirmed the promotion in an interview published Tuesday in the Daily Telegraph.

The role is a newly created position within Apple and will establish Ive’s leadership.

Two others were also promoted: Richard Howard will become head of industrial design and Alan Dye will be the head of user interface. Ive will oversee both departments.

The designer from northeast London has led Apple’s design team since the mid-1990s and was considered a confidante of the late Steve Jobs.

Mexico City could be the next to ban Uber

Taxis and a bus ride along the streets of Mexico City. (Omar Torres/AFP/Getty Images) 

Rio de Janeiro taxi drivers and their supporters staged a small rally and partial road blockage a day before the start of the World Cup last June in protest against Uber. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images) 

LIMA, Peru — If there’s anywhere on Earth that needs Uber, it’s probably Latin America.

Catching a cab in the street here is often the equivalent of dicing with death. That’s partly because of driving standards that are through the floor and lax regulation of taxis.

But it’s also because taxis in Latin America — statistically the world’s most homicidal region — are frequently used by violent criminals to kidnap and rob unsuspecting passengers.

Mexico City is perhaps the world capital of this kind of crime, and no self-respecting guidebook fails to warn of the danger. Passengers are taken at gunpoint on a forced ATM tour (this has happened to more than one friend of mine). Often, they are held captive past midnight so they can be forced to withdraw a second day’s worth of cash.

Uber and other taxi apps, such as Cabify, all but eliminate that danger by keeping a record of which drivers picked up which passengers.

And Latin American customers seem to appreciate the difference. Uber has made rapid progress in the region, and now operates in 11 cities in Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Panama and Peru.

Yet despite their grim reputation, Mexico City cab drivers have been howling in protest at Uber’s incursion into their megalopolis. They launched this lawsuit against the app complaining that it’s pirating away customers and violating fare rules.

That case is still ongoing. So is another one in Sao Paulo, Brazil, the only Latin American metropolis larger than Mexico City.

This week a Sao Paulo appeal court overturned an eye-watering ruling against Uber. The ruling had ordered the car service company to stop operations immediately, or face a $34,000 daily fine. It had also obligated Apple, Samsung, Microsoft and Google to stop offering the Uber app. The Sao Paulo taxi workers union is looking at ways to appeal.

These battles are part of a growing backlash, from Europe to India, against Uber for allegedly competing unfairly with street cabs.

Drone use poised to expand to newsrooms despite FAA limits

The Inspire 1, a drone manufactured by DJI, is flown March 10, 2015, in Davenport, Calif.Marcio Jose Sanchez — The Associated Press

try practice, but how the technology can actually be used to cover the news of the day is murky given its legal limitations.

The emerging technology has been used in wars, to deliver packages and, occasionally, for causing a ruckus, but the Federal Aviation Administration has also approved more than 200 commercial uses since September for movies, real estate and infrastructure.

Among those approvals, two companies identified newsgathering as their primary mission, according to the FAA website.

Las Vegas-based ArrowData said it’s looking to franchise its drone ability to news organizations.

The company wants to sell the drones to newsrooms and then train journalists to carry out an operation. It doesn’t have any contracts yet but said it is seeking out broadcast and newspaper outlets.

“It’s a tool that television is looking at — local television, national television, everybody’s looking at it,” said Ron Comings, who is the news director of KLAS-TV in Las Vegas and has been in talks with ArrowData.

But the practicality of using drones, formally known as unmanned aerial vehicles, to cover the news of the day is still murky.

The FAA has strict restrictions on drone operations, and a news organization would need deep pockets to afford the equipment and manpower for what is now a limited purpose.

Cinestar drones can cost as much as $50,000, depending on the intended use, said Ron Futrell, an ArrowData spokesman. The company, which got FAA approval two weeks ago, hasn’t worked out the training costs.

The FAA also requires at least a three-person crew to use a drone for news, including a licensed pilot to fly it, a camera operator to direct the footage and a spotter to manage the scene, officials said.

Meanwhile, the journalism bread-and-butter of breaking news probably can’t be covered by a drone.

Flights must be preapproved days in advance by the local airport and federal authorities, which will make covering unpredictable situations such as crime scenes and natural disasters nearly impossible.

Social media and mourning: Funerals may be the last frontier

Mourners leave a memorial service for SurveyMonkey CEO David Goldberg on Tuesday in Stanford. Goldberg, the 47-year-old husband of “Lean In” author and Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg, died in an accident while exercising at a Mexican vacation resort. Noah Berger — The Associated Press

By Leanne Italie, The Associated Press

POSTED: 05/07/15, 8:41 AM PDT | UPDATED: ON 05/07/2015

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NEW YORK >> Taya Dunn Johnson has been living large online for years, embracing Facebook, Twitter and other social streams to frequently share her most mundane and intimate moments.

Her husband — her high school sweetheart and an IT specialist — was an offline kind of guy, though he was surrounded by post-happy loved ones, colleagues and friends and had no problem with that.

Then he died suddenly of a heart attack at age 37 and his wife found herself entrenched in what just might be the last frontier for privacy, his funeral.

“I held two services and had to ask several people not to take photos of his casket,” said Johnson, a 38-year-old administrative assistant who lives in Baltimore with her 6-year-old son. “The idea of it disturbed me. Days later, I noticed several people had ‘checked-in’ from the funeral home on a couple of platforms.”

• SHERYL SANDBERG’S LOSS: How to grieve and work

Actively using social media as she did when tragedy struck in 2012, and as she still does, Johnson understands why Facebook exec Sheryl Sandberg asked mourners, tech powerhouses included, to stay off social media from her husband David Goldberg’s memorial service Tuesday.

“It’s a slippery slope,” Johnson said. “We share everything from our new car to our meal to our new dress. Somehow those things have become interchangeable with death.”

Ann Bacciaglia, a customer support worker for a large corporation in Ottawa, was also an avid social media user when her husband of 18 years died suddenly of an undiagnosed brain cyst in 2011. He was 44.

Like Johnson’s husband, he had no interest in social streams, which didn’t keep Bacciaglia from announcing his death on Twitter. It never occurred to her to ask their loved ones to refrain from pulling out their phones at his funeral. None did.

In the year after his death, she publicly blogged about her grief and leaned even more heavily on her online followers and friends for support. Other young widows reached out, and helping them through their losses was her best medicine.

“Social media just wasn’t something my husband saw the point of, but it’s a huge part of how I grieved and continues to be very important to me,” Bacciaglia said.

Offline or on Facebook, crass is crass when it comes to funerals and memorial services, said David Ryan Polgar, a lawyer and former college professor in West Hartford, Connecticut, who blogs about tech and ethics.

Apple's mystery vans are all about improving Apple Maps

Remember those mystery Apple vans tootling around the States a few months ago? No one was quite sure what they were up to, but it's now become clear that they're part of Apple's continued push to get its own mapping service up to scratch.

Thanks to some diligent digging by 9to5Mac we know that these camera-equipped automobiles are capturing 3D street view imagery, stills of storefronts, and more besides. The general idea is that Apple gradually reduces its reliance on third-party providers.

As 9to5Mac explains, Apple wants its own in-house maps data by 2018. That means collecting its own points of reference at the lowest levels and would eventually result in more control for Apple over the quality of its Maps app.

Street with a view

Since Apple Maps launched in 2012 it's been lagging behind Google Maps in terms of scope and accuracy. Google Maps, meanwhile, is adding new features all the time, and Apple doesn't want to fall further behind.

One of the features Apple's unmarked fleet of vans is collecting data for is a 3D Flyover mode for individual streets. Together with high-quality still images for businesses and landmarks, Apple is hoping to outdo Google Street View.

We should hear more about Maps and iOS 9 at WWDC from 8 June - apparentlypublic transport timetable integration is on the way as well as a number of other new features. We will of course keep you updated as next week's event unfolds.

• WWDC 2015: What to expect at Apple's iOS and OS X keynote