Tesla.com

With Christmas being, Elon Musk still is feeling the urge to give presents.

Kamil Podworski

In one of recent tweets, the Tesla CEO wrote about company’s plans for next year – covering the whole Europe with the Supercharger network, “from Ireland to Kiev, from Norway to Turkey.”  Such a station can charge a vehicle to around 80 percent battery capacity in 40 minutes, it’s the fastest and most widespread system in the world.

Those news fit with claims from November, earlier this year, that Tesla is going to double the amount of Superchargers by end of 2019. This means that chargers would be “within range of 95% to 100% of population in all active markets.”

Despite big news,  lets not forget that Musk often over-promised many things in Tesla history. It’s obvious that amount of charging points grown in rapid pace, but the company originally had plans of creating up and running 18000 stations by the end of this year and ended up with 6000 less.

If news about Europe wasn’t enough, following tweet spreads news about Africa.

Apparently, Tesla is going to start setting up chargers in Africa by 2020 but there is no specific data given. According to their coverage map, currently the tech- giant doesn’t have any points on that continent.

Still, if you want to check out Tesla full expansion plans, they cover it on their site.

Sources

Twitter.com

Tesla.com

Businesses using Facebook as a big advertising platform is nothing unusual for ordinary internet user, but as targeted marketing is developing, the social media giant is restructuring their other platforms in order to push paid traffic even more.

Kamil Podworski

At first, Instagram didn’t have any marketing capabilities, it even wasn’t connected to Facebook’s Business Manager. Then slowly, Zuckerberg’s company started to notice its potential, which eventually led to adding simple options of getting paid traffic and pushing stuff in front of people. Stories were the most noticeable advertising move that Facebook added recently – try looking through your friends stories without seeing at least one paid campaign. Advertisers could also use simple options such as adding “Buy Now” links underneath promoted posts.

Now Instagram is testing out new feature, it was spotted this week on Hard Rock Hotel Daytona Beach post. A big “Book Now” button which is a direct link to hotels booking site, appeared below the picture. This feature is widely used on facebook and it’s called “call to action”, Facebook has many of different options available to Pages, for example the ability to book services, make purchases, download apps or contact a business.

Current options that Instagram gave to businesses weren’t as useful as those on Facebook, platform allowed to add various types of purchase options, implementing new features might be a good call for non-retail companies such as hotels.

This might be a sign that Instagram will sooner or later become as ad-driven platform as its bigger brother, which eventually might cause people discouragement.

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AIRBUS.COM

A.I. in space by most of us is imagined as a super inteligent on-board computer with unlimited knowledge which is going to take over the ship and try to destroy humanity. Yes, we will never grow up and visions straight from Sci-Fi movies won’t leave our man-child brains.

However, nobody has sent a real HAL 9000 to space (yet).

KAMIL PODWORSKI

CIMON (Crew Interactive Mobile Companion) is a newborn child of Airbus, IBM and German Aerospace Center, is’s a floating, self-aware, intelligent robot which is designed to help astronauts with their stay in space. The space travellers new buddy is slightly larger than a volleyball, it has an eight inch screen, observes the world with numerous sensors and moves freely using fans and fins. Also the bot has an IBM “brain” connected to an enormous database, which allows him to constantly learn and develop.

Although CIMON UI looks like if it would be from 90s Sci-Fi movie, don’t let that mislead you, it’s a really intelligent robot running on Ubuntu and powered by IBM Watson supercomputer. It can interact with people, develop social skills and has huge potential to be important part of space travelling development.

“It’s a kind of flying brain” – Manfred Jaumann, Airbus’s head of microgravity payloads

The bot is supposed to be scientific and logistical help but also an emotional support for International Space Station crew. It can  follow astronauts, respond to voice commands and among others, play your favourite tunes. Currently its knowledge and possibilities are limited to basic tasks, but its creators believe that development is a matter of time and tests.

“Don’t you like it here with me?” – CIMON

A video of CIMON in action was recently uploaded to ESA youtube channel. We can see how the bot is engaging with European Space Agency crew member, Alexander Gerst, accusing the astronaut of being mean and blasting Kraftwerk tunes.

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