This week on Between the Bytes Ford is sampling some exoskeletons for their employees in the factories, more Elon Musk news, Netflix trying a few new tactics for their adult movies, and some Silicon Slopes updates as well.
Welcome to Between the Bytes where we are not as smart as your average nerd. I’m Gary Arnold and I’m Arash Bakhshandehpour.
TECH NEWS
Our first bit of news is about Ford. Ford has recently been experimenting with exoskeletons. That’s right, the robots that you’ve heard about from Ironman or The Day After Tomorrow, all these things are real and they’ve actually been around for a long time. Companies have been experimenting more and more with this type of technology and they’re using it to help workers in industry and assembly line type of environments. Ford, in particular, is using a type of exoskeleton that is a vest that helps support the shoulders, arms, and back of workers that are doing a lot of manual lifting and it makes it so that injuries decrease dramatically. Workers have a lot more energy and are a lot more productive. With the particular suit that they’re using, the vests only weigh 9 pounds but it costs $6,500 so it’s pretty impressive. They are not the only company that’s experimenting with exoskeletons as there are other companies that are looking at medical applications for helping people that are paralyzed or with other medical needs that are more full bodysuits and will help with things like that. It’s definitely a growing industry and something that we can probably look forward to seeing more of down the line and it’s gonna be really interesting seeing how they use this technology going into other fields as well like you’re talking about and medically helping people with it as well.
Something that we’ve actually discussed here on between device before is that Netflix has tested some choose-your-own-adventure shows. It’s similar to novels when you were a child and it told you to go forward X amount of pages if you wanted to do story A or B. Netflix tested this with some children’s movies and they were a huge hit and they’re now trying to sample it with some adult demographics as well. I actually went and played it with my kid and he had fun choosing the things, as an adult though I kind of wanted to sit back and watch. I don’t want to have my hand on the remote the whole time so maybe if they make it interesting we’ll see. It was one thing with the cartoon we’ll see with a live-action.
Elon Musk is back again in our headlines. His boring company (that’s what he’s called it) has announced their new routes in Los Angeles for their underground Hyperloop tunnels. The Hyperloop is a new system of transportation designed to eliminate the traffic and to go way faster than normal. You can drive your normal car onto it and it’s basically on electric type skates that then goes super fast under the tunnel. It can go up to 150 miles per hour and it released a map of the proposed routes they’d like to make in Los Angeles in the whole area and then they are also looking at planning to expand in Washington DC and New York. Right now they only have a proof-of-concept 500-foot tunnel but Elon has been going at it with this boring company so stay tuned for more of that.
For some local news, Silicon Slopes very own team is partnering with Amazon actually to develop and help implement Alexa for business going forward. It is going to be a partnership with Amazon to help create skills for Alexa specific to businesses. Together with GE they are actually developing the technology and have started to develop the technology where you can voice activate meetings, appointments, and scheduling assisting through electrical business. It’s really cool and it’s gonna help make things a lot easier on the office work team. It’s pretty handy, we use it here at Executech and it’s exciting to see how it works with Alexa.
Our last bit of news, as promised we’re here to announce the winner of the Amazon Echo. We’ve been running a competition the past couple weeks to subscribe and like to our YouTube channel and we have a winner. Dalton Watson who commented that his favorite app was the Box app on his phone. You are the winner of the Amazon echo so congratulations and thank you to everyone who entered and participated. Stay tuned we will probably have more contests before the end of the year and of course next year lots of new things to come and more free things.
TECH HISTORY
This week’s Between the Bytes Tech History on December 5th, 1969 the University of Utah was added as an ode to the ARPANET. This was as we all know the beginnings of the Internet and in 1965 a Richard Wetzel Black was the first person to earn a computer science degree and he earned it from the University of Pennsylvania. As we know, computer science has come a long ways since then. The 60’s were good for computers apparently. That’ll do for this week’s episode of Between the Bytes. Once again please feel free to subscribe to our YouTube channel as well as follow us on social media to stay updated with any Tech News insights as well as any prize giveaways going forward.
