Spotify is having a great debut on the public-market, Google’s machine learning software can now identify ramen by shop, and a medical supply drone will be making its debut in countries like the U.S. soon after a lot of success in Rwanda.
 |
 |
 |
From LinkedIn – Spotify made its debut on the New York Stock Market yesterday, and you won’t find anyone over at the music streaming service complaining about how things turned out. Despite an initial reference price of $132 a share, trades opened at $165.90. That means that the company value is $29.5 billion, which is nearly four times more than its last valuation in 2015. Currently, Spotify is the world’s largest music streaming service with 159 million ad-supported free listeners, and 70 million paying users as of this past January. The company was founded in Sweden in 2006, and is available in 61 countries.
From Google Trends – Google’s machine learning software can now identify which shop a picture of ramen is from. Data scientist Kenji Doi used Google’s AutoML Vision to identify every menu item from a Tokyo-based chain of 41 ramen shops called Ramen Jiro. He gathered 1,170 photos from each shop to create a dataset of 48,000 ramen photos for the Google software. Then after the 24 hours that it took to train the data, the model that was created could predict which shop a picture of ramen from any of the 41 ramen shops was from with a 95 per cent accuracy. Talk about a creative use of this technology.
And from Reddit – A startup called Zipline has been using drone technology to deliver medical supplies in Rwanda, and with its latest drone, the Zip 2, the company plans on expanding to new markets in 2018, including the U.S. Zipline was founded in 2011 to create and use drones for social good by engineers from SpaceX, Boeing, Google, and Willow Garage. The Zip 2 will be capable of flying at speeds up to 79 miles per hour, or about 125 kilometers per hour, carrying 3.85 pounds of cargo, and in Rwanda, that means the Zip 2 can deliver a unit of blood to a hospital within 15 to 30 minutes nearly anywhere in the country. And with top speeds like that, Zipline hopes to expand that type of service globally. They’ll begin their pilot program in the U.S. later this year.
That’s what’s trending this week. Hashtag Trending is produced by IT World Canada. Today’s episode is sponsored by the IT World Canada Podcast Network. Check out our weekly podcast, Tech in Sports, for all your updates on technology within the realm of sports and health and fitness. You can find it on your podcast service of choice or as a daily version on Alexa and Google Home devices.
If you enjoy Hashtag Trending, please be sure to give us a rating and a review on Amazon, Apple Podcasts, Google Play, or wherever else you get your podcasts from.