Oleg Zabluda's blog: December 11, 2016

Oleg Zabluda's blog

Sunday, December 11, 2016

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Netflix [...] runs 100,000 EC2 instances in the AWS public cloud. Its AWS bill alone is 800 million lines long - running into the hundreds of gigabytes of data every month.
[...]
Netflix has just unplugged its last data centre, the final phase in a huge migration to the cloud that began back in 2008. The company has since become of the biggest consumers of AWS public cloud services.
"""
http://www.itnews.com.au/news/dev-like-netflix-top-tips-from-the-worlds-savviest-engineers-444163/page0
http://www.itnews.com.au/news/dev-like-netflix-top-tips-from-the-worlds-savviest-engineers-444163/page0

Labels: Oleg Zabluda

The Lowballing of Kodak's Patent Portfolio
The Lowballing of Kodak's Patent Portfolio
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284 Partners used [...] a discounted cash-flow analysis, which estimated the expected income from monetizing Kodak’s patents through licensing and, if necessary, legal action. [...] 284 Partners interviewed Kodak managers, read claims and court filings, reviewed previous licenses and projections, checked royalty rates, and examined key patents. [...] Ultimately, it projected cash flows from the patents of $3.07 billion from 2012 to 2020, giving the portfolio a present value of $2.2 billion to $2.6 billion. Lasinski thought that estimate “very conservative” given Kodak’s existing licensing and future plans.
[...]
The potential bidders, it turned out, had organized into two camps. In one, Adobe, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft formed a consortium led by Intellectual Ventures. In the other, RPX mustered Amazon, Google, HTC, Samsung, and the photo-printing website Shutterfly. Each participant in such a consortium gets to keep a share of the patents and a license for the rest. The cost to each is relatively low, and all gain the protective power of the entire portfolio. [...] Kodak balked at the offers. [...] The logical solution was for Intellectual Ventures and RPX to form a superconsortium. And so they did. With the two aggregators at the helm, the consortiums merged and acquired three new members: Fujifilm, Huawei, and RIM. [...] The new, more powerful superconsortium was hardly going to make a worse deal than before [...] Kodak was up against a wall, its single possible buyer a consortium that included almost everyone who might want what it was selling. Inevitably, a deal was struck. In mid-December, Kodak sold its imaging and printing portfolio and a license to all of its remaining patents to the superconsortium for a total of $527 million. The portfolio itself earned the company just $94 million—about 4 percent of 284 Partners’ initial valuation. Although the financial breakdown of the deal is subject to a nondisclosure agreement, the 12 superconsortium members each received licenses to more than 20 000 Kodak patents for an average of $44 million. That’s less than one-tenth of what Samsung paid to license just two Kodak patents, including 218, back in 2009.
"""
http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/innovation/the-lowballing-of-kodaks-patent-portfolio
http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/innovation/the-lowballing-of-kodaks-patent-portfolio

Labels: Oleg Zabluda

The Unknown Start-up That Built Google’s First Self-Driving Car
The Unknown Start-up That Built Google’s First Self-Driving Car
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Two of Google’s signature innovations, Street View cameras and self-driving cars, were actually developed by 510 Systems, a small start-up that the tech giant quietly bought in 2011
[...]
The purchase of 510 Systems and its sister company, Anthony’s Robots, in the fall of 2011 was never publicly announced. In fact, Google went so far as to insist that some 510 employees sign agreements not to discuss that the acquisition had even occurred. Google’s official history of its self-driving car project does not mention the firm at all. It emphasizes the leadership of Sebastian Thrun, the German computer scientist whose Stanford team won the autonomous-driving Grand Challenge in 2005, sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
[...]
Though Google has portrayed Thrun as its “godfather” of self-driving, a review of the available evidence suggests that the motivating force behind the company’s program was actually Levandowski.
[...]
In October 2011, 510 Systems quietly joined Google as a key part of the company’s semisecretive Google X “moon shot” division. The Pribot, long since bolstered by Google’s powerful software, written by Thrun’s team, came along with the acquisition.
[...]
Google’s secrecy over the 510 Systems acquisition might be best understood through the lens of publicity. In 2010, a journalist at The New York Times, John Markoff, discovered the existence of Google’s self-driving car program. He was given a ride in one of 510’s Priuses and told that the project was the brainchild of Sebastian Thrun, director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and winner of the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge.

Maybe Google thought a famous prize-winning professor would be a more credible leader than the entrepreneurial runner-up Levandowski. Or perhaps the company simply wanted to avoid awkward questions about how the robot cars it had been secretly testing on public roads had actually been built in a Berkeley start-up. Either way, 510 Systems was neatly written out of the creation myth of Google’s self-driving cars long before it was acquired.

Most of 510 Systems, including all three founders—Levandowski, Schultz, and Droz—are still working on self-driving cars at Google. Levandowski remains the overall product lead, Schultz oversees embedded systems and electronics, and Droz manages 10 engineers. Majusiak eventually left Google in January to work at Blue River Technology, a start-up bringing robotics to agriculture.
"""
http://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/artificial-intelligence/the-unknown-startup-that-built-googles-first-selfdriving-car
http://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/artificial-intelligence/the-unknown-startup-that-built-googles-first-selfdriving-car

Labels: Oleg Zabluda

Meet Zoox, the Robo-Taxi Start-up Taking on Google and Uber
Meet Zoox, the Robo-Taxi Start-up Taking on Google and Uber
http://spectrum.ieee.org/transportation/advanced-cars/meet-zoox-the-robotaxi-startup-taking-on-google-and-uber
http://spectrum.ieee.org/transportation/advanced-cars/meet-zoox-the-robotaxi-startup-taking-on-google-and-uber

Labels: Oleg Zabluda

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