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Amazon’s cashierless checkout technology is coming to its new supermarkets | CNBC.com
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Digital Asset Holdings LLC, the blockchain software developer that caters to corporate applications, raised more than $120 million from investors 7Ridge and Eldridge. Investors have poured record funding into cryptocurrency and blockchain-related companies this year. In the first quarter, 129 startups focusing on digital technology raised about $2.6 billion, according to CB Insights.
CoinSwitch Kuber, a startup that allows young users in India to invest in cryptocurrencies, said on Thursday it has raised $25 million in a new financing round as it looks to expand its reach in India, the world’s second-largest internet market. Tiger Global financed the entire Series B funding round of CoinSwitch Kuber and valued the three-year-old Indian startup at more than $500 million. The announcement of the Series B comes just three months after CoinSwitch closed its $15 million Series A round from Ribbit Capital, Sequoia Capital India and Kunal Shah. The Bangalore-based startup has raised $41.5 million to date.
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Amazon’s cashierless checkout technology could soon be coming to its growing line of Fresh grocery stores. Features of Amazon’s automated checkout technology called “Just Walk Out,” appear in planning documents for a store under construction in a suburban shopping plaza in Brookfield, Connecticut. The technology allows customers to skip the checkout line by tracking any items they grab and charging them when they leave.
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Back in November, the computer scientist and cognitive psychologist Geoffrey Hinton had a hunch. After a half-century’s worth of attempts—some wildly successful—he’d arrived at another promising insight into how the brain works and how to replicate its circuitry in a computer. Hinton wrote up his hunch, and posted a 44-page paper on the arXiv preprint server in February. He began with a disclaimer: “This paper does not describe a working system,” he wrote. Rather, it presents an “imaginary system" named "GLOM." Hinton thinks of GLOM as a way to model human perception in a machine. It also gets at the elusive goal of modelling intuition—our ability to effortlessly make analogies to make sense of the world. Hinton hopes GLOM might be one of several breakthroughs that he reckons are needed before AI is capable of truly nimble problem solving
