A New Mobile Office

Happy Monday.

Apple has started the week communicating a $2.5B plan to help California’s housing crisis. This on on the heels of similar $1B infusions from Facebook and Google in recent months.

The Apple fund will include a $1B affordable housing investment fund, and a $1B first-time homebuyer mortgage assistance fund.

Up in Redmond, Microsoft has unveiled a new office app for iOS and Android, one which sees Word, Excel, and PowerPoint combined into a single download. The new version features a prominent actions section that makes key features more easily accessible (like transferring files from your smartphone to your desktop).

Monday Fund-day: South Korea’s CODE42 has raised $25M in a pre-Series A funding round led by Kia Motors. CODE42 is an autonomous transportation startup and will use the funding to build its Urban Mobility Operating System. 

And Casstime, a China-based automotive aftermarket search engine and procurement platform, raised an $80M Series C1. Casstime’s search platform allows users to find unique part numbers by enteringn the VIN and part name, then uses an algo to assign multiple suppliers that have fit the user’s past purchasing behavior.

Where’s My Driver?!

Ars Technica is reporting that Waymo now has cars driving on the public roads in the Phoenix area with no one in the driver’s seat.

Until recently, the story explains, the company’s modified Chrysler Pacifica minivans had a Waymo employee in the driver’s seat ready to take control if the car malfunctioned.

Not anymore. Check out the video here:

Ya kinda have to see it to believe it.

And so it begins.

IBM Integrates With BMW Car Data

IBM announced today that it is a pilot partner of BMW CarData. Recently released, BMW CarData will allow up to 8.5 million BMW customers globally to make use of third party services in a secure and transparent way.

BMW is the first OEM to release an open data platform with the introduction of BMW CarData. BMW CarData gives BMW ConnectedDrive customers the ability to share telematics data from their BMW vehicles with third parties of their choice.

As a pilot partner, IBM has integrated Bluemix with the BMW CarData platform. Vehicle data will be enhanced by IBM Watson IoT, using cognitive and data analytics services to enable third parties, such as automotive repair shops or insurance companies, to develop entirely new customer experiences.

IBM’s cloud platform Bluemix also gives developers access to the entire service catalogue from IBM and its ecosystem partners to build and run innovative new service offerings. Customers will have to actively agree to share their encrypted telematics data when they want to use a specific service from a service provider.

In addition, IBM will also act as a neutral server for extended vehicle access. This allows for the gathering of data from BMW vehicles but also vehicles from additional automotive manufacturers.

In this role, IBM will help to realize the vision of a secure and open vehicle data platform as demanded by many players in the mobility ecosystem. The first use cases and client services are expected to launch in the fall of 2017.

Bluemix has rapidly grown to become one of the largest open, public cloud deployments in the world. Based in open standards, it features more than 150 tools and services spanning categ

A Chorus Of Artificial Intelligence

It was a big weekend in music… and in artificial intelligence.

Ford Motor Company announced that it had made Detroit’s biggest investment yet in self-driving technology, acquiring a majority stake in artificial intelligence startup Argo AI for $1 billion.

Silicon Angle reported that Argo was founded by veterans of self-driving car projects at Google and Uber, and that Argo AI will become a subsidiary of Ford under the new deal.

“As Ford expands to be an auto and a mobility company, we believe that investing in Argo AI will create significant value for our shareholders by strengthening Ford’s leadership in bringing self-driving vehicles to market in the near term and by creating technology that could be licensed to others in the future,” said Ford President and Chief Executive Mark Fields.
– via SiliconANGLE

On a related AI front, Chorus.ai, a sound-centric AI firm looking to extract insights from audio, garnered a $16M Series A.

TechCrunch is reporting that Chorus will join conference calls, record and transcribe content in real-time, and then have its platform flag important action items and topics that came up over the duration of calls.

At press time, it was not yet clear what Chorus.ai would make of toilet sounds flushing in the background for those individuals who forgot to go on mute, but this blogger suspects it could lead to a whole other content types with respect to conference call actions.