It was recently reported that Apple earlier this year had acquired a computer vision startup called Regaind, located in Paris. The company specializes in AI-driven photo and facial analysis, which could tie nicely into Apple's ARKit and face tracking features built into iOS 11.
Apple may have quietly acquired SensoMotoric Instruments, a German company which can track people's eye movements. MacRumors was first to report yesterday that SensoMotoric has been acquired for an undisclosed sum by Apple's shell company, called Vineyard Capital.
The company holds multiple patents relating to eye tracking and virtual reality.
“Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans,” an Apple spokesperson said in a boilerplate statement issued to Axios.
Gene Levoff, Apple's Vice President of Corporate Law representing Delaware's Vineyard Capital Corporation, granted power of attorney to a German law firm to represent the shell company, which in turn acquired SensoMotoric Instruments on June 16. Levoff even notarized the document in Cupertino, California, where Apple is headquartered.
Tellingly, SensoMotoric recently removed over a dozen pages from its official website. It no longer has a jobs portal, news blog, schedule of events and workshops, contact information, list of distributors and resellers or mailing list signup form.
Their managing director Eberhard Schmidt was replaced by Dr. Ali Sahin, one of the German attorneys representing Vineyard Capital Corporation. Christian Villwock, who was the company's Director of OEM Solutions Business, was removed from the website, too.
Here's an example of SensoMotoric's eye-tracking technology in Samsung Gear.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDvgP2tnMHQ
Another video embedded further below shows off SensoMotoric's eye-tracking glasses with Natural Gaze Head Gear used by young athletes playing tennis to accurately capture their natural gaze, which helps them evaluate and improve their visual performance.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEZP_corY3Q
Proprietary eyeglass hardware that the video's athletes are wearing can capture a person's natural gaze behavior at a rate of 120 scans per second.
On the hardware side, Apple could use SensoMotoric technology in its rumored augmented reality glasses product. Eye-tracking technology can significantly reduce motion sickness for users of virtual reality headsets such as Facebook's Oculus Rift.
One specific aspect of SensoMotoric's technology, called foveated rendering, allows a virtual reality headset to save power by only showing you in high resolution what you're actually looking at, with anything in your peripheral vision being rendered in less high-resolution.
This reduces the amount of processing power needed to render a virtual world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-w7r0IGRlTY
On the software side, Apple could improve iPhone 8's rumored 3D facial recognition security feature through eye tracking and even allow apps and games to track the user's eye movement so that they could, for instance, aim in a game with their gaze.
Founded in 1991, SensoMotoric Instruments is headquartered in Teltow, Germany, with a satellite office in Boston, Massachusetts. The company employs about 60 engineers.
“I do think that a significant portion of the population of developed countries, and eventually all countries, will have AR experiences every day, almost like eating three meals a day,” Apple CEO Tim Cook said last year.
Online retail giant Amazon just made a major retail move by announcing it's acquiring organic grocer Whole Foods Market for $42 per share in an all-cash transaction valued at approximately $13.7 billion.
Whole Foods Market in April reported its sixth consecutive quarter of declining sales. The supermarket chain focuses on organic foods without artificial preservatives, colors, flavors, sweeteners and hydrogenated fats.
The deal, subject to customary closing conditions, should be completed during the second half of this year. The acquisition includes Whole Foods Market’s net debt as well.
Whole Foods Market stores and brand will live on and John Mackey will remain the company's CEO. Whole Foods Market’s headquarters will stay in Austin, Texas.
Jeff Bezons, Amazon's founder and chief executive, said:
Millions of people love Whole Foods Market because they offer the best natural and organic foods, and they make it fun to eat healthy. Whole Foods Market has been satisfying, delighting and nourishing customers for nearly four decades—they’re doing an amazing job and we want that to continue.
As Statista noted, the move gives Amazon almost as many stores as Apple: Whole Foods currently has 456 stores worldwide versus 496 Apple Stores across 21 countries.
The online retailer entered the grocery market in 2007 with the launch of AmazonFresh. In other words, Whole Food products will be available for online ordering through AmazonFresh.
Whole Foods Market is the United States' first certified organic grocer. The company is ranked #28 on Fortune’s list of World’s Most Admired Companies for 2017.
Apple has snapped up an artificial intelligence and machine learning startup, called Lattice Data, for a reported $200 million. They've built an inference engine which turns so-called dark data into structured data sets that can be analyzed easily. Dark data is data stored in computer networks that cannot be analyzed directly because it's not in a proper format.
The acquisition is valued in the ballpark of $200 million.
The deal could bolster Apple's AI efforts and help its software turn things like text and images into structured items that can then be analyzed in traditional manners to derive insights. Apple has confirmed the acquisition with its standard boilerplate message issued to TechCrunch, saying it buys smaller technology companies from time to time.
Apple and Lattice did not immediately return a request for comment.
About 20 engineers from Lattice have now joined Apple. A source said that Lattice had been “talking to other tech companies about enhancing their AI assistants,” including Amazon’s Alexa and Samsung’s Bixby.
As per the story, which cited an anonymous source, the deal closed a few weeks ago.
The Menlo Park, California headquartered startup was co-founded in 2015 by Christopher Ré, Michael Cafarella, Raphael Hoffmann and Feng Niu as the commercialization of DeepDive, a system created at Stanford to extract value from dark data.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_E0CPu-SeU
Company CEO is Andy Jacques, a seasoned enterprise executive who joined last year.
“Lattice turns dark data into structured data with human-caliber quality at machine-caliber scale,” according to the official Lattice website. “We model the known as features and the unknown as random variables connected in a factor graph.”
Lattice's DeepDive framework has been used successfully in a diverse set of projects, ranging from a DARPA-funded human trafficking program to geology and paleontology to medical genetics, pharmacogenomics and more.
According to the website:
Data quality is in the DNA of Lattice. Our goal is not just to match human-level quality, but also to do so at unprecedented speed and scale. We build systems that win competitions and outperform expert readers.
We continuously push the envelope on machine learning speed and scale with our bleeding-edge systems research. For years, we have been building systems and applications that involve billions of webpages, thousands of machines and terabytes of data.
We can only speculate as to how Apple plans to apply Lattice's technology to its products.
It's probably safe to assume that Apple could improve object and scene recognition across its Photos service and the accompanying apps. More important than that, Lattice technology could be used to realize iPhone 8's rumored camera augmented reality features while giving Siri the ability to analyze text and images in Messages.
A recent patent application suggested potential Siri integrations with the iMessage platform. Aside from Messenger-like chatbot functionality for Siri in Messages, Apple's invention could let users, say, ask Siri to send an image of a Volkswagen Beetle to a contact.
Lattice's framework could also help enhance Apple's neural networks and machine learning.
That's because unlike traditional machine learning, Lattice does not require laborious manual annotations. In taking advantage of domain knowledge and existing structured data to bootstrap learning via distant supervision, Lattice solves data problems with data.
Apple's HealthKit, ResearchKit and CareKit frameworks may benefit from Lattice tech, too.
Apple has acquired sleep tracking startup Beddit. The company updated its privacy policy on its website Tuesday to announce the acquisition, saying "your personal data will be collected, used and disclosed in accordance with the Apple Privacy Policy."
Apple has acquired the powerful automation app Workflow, reports TechCrunch. The outlet received a statement from the developers, as well as Apple, confirming the deal, but the financial details are not yet known.
For those who aren't familiar with the app, Workflow is similar to the popular IFTTT service in that it allows you to create custom recipes to perform complex tasks. The app was designed by former jailbreak developers.
Mozilla, the non-profit organization behind the Firefox browser, has acquired the read-later service Pocket for an undisclosed sum. The deal files as Mozilla's first acquisition and was confirmed by both Mozilla and Pocket.
I've been a longtime Pocket user because their elegantly designed cross-platform apps let me easily save stripped down versions of articles from online publications for reading later, even without an Internet connection.
Pocket will continue on as a wholly-owned, independent subsidiary of Mozilla. Pocket has native apps on App Store and Mac App Store, plus a browser extension.
Hot on the heels of multiple reports calling for some sort of facial recognition on iPhone 8 to potentially augment or supplant Touch ID, news reaches us that Apple has acquired RealFace, a machine learning and facial recognition company hailing from Israel.
The Tel Aviv-based startup, founded in 2014 by Adi Eckhouse Barzilai and Aviv Mader, was bought for $2 million, according to the Times of Israel. Hebrew-language financial outlet Calcalist pegged the deal's value at several millions dollars. RealFace is innovating user authentication with what it calls the worlds leading facial recognition technology.
Apple's boss Tim Cook said on a recent earnings call with investors and analysts that his company on average acquired between fifteen to twenty smaller companies per year for the last four years, noting that Apple looks for startups of all sizes. “There's not a size that we wouldn't do based on just the size of it, it's more about the strategic value of it,” he said.
A new report Wednesday from Bloomberg alleges that Apple's reluctance to cooperate with third-party advisers like investment banks, risk aversion and internal acquisition strategy are standing in the way of large takeovers.
U.S. wireless carrier Sprint announced Monday that it's buying one-third of Tidal, Jay Z's music-streaming service, in a bid to give customers exclusive content not available anywhere else. That's right, Tidal and its artists will produce exclusive content that will only be available to current and new Sprint customers.
While Sprint now owns 33 percent of Tidal, Jay Z & Co. will continue to run the artist-centric service. Sprint’s CEO Marcelo Claure will join Tidal’s Board of Directors.
Spotify, the world's top on-demand music service, is not buying Berlin, Germany-headquartered audio distribution platform SoundCloud after all, TechCrunch has learned.
Spotify has reportedly given up on its latest effort to buy SoundCloud realizing, after months of talks, that any such deal would probably negatively impact its impending initial public offering (IPO) and expected expansions in China, Russia and South Korea.
Fitbit, the maker of popular activity and fitness trackers, has officially acquired Pebble. The deal was finalized this morning, both companies have said.
The acquisition includes all of Pebble's software assets, but excludes any hardware. Yup, that's right—looks like the Pebble smartwatch is officially dead.
“Due to various factors, Pebble is no longer able to operate as an independent entity,” the company said. “We have made the tough decision to shut down the company and no longer manufacture Pebble devices.”