Category: Technology

It has exceptional passenger roominess and looks dirt-road ready.

The 2024 Honda Prologue is an all-electric, 2-row midsize SUV and the automaker’s first electric SUV of any sort. It will compete with the growing group of electric SUVs priced between $40,000 and $50,000, and likely offer a max range of beyond 300 miles when it goes on sale in 2024.

How much will the Honda Prologue cost?

We expect the Honda HMC, 2.42% Prologue electric vehicle to start in the mid-$40,000 range. For reference, the Ford F, -1.28% Mustang Mach-E currently starts at $46,895, and the Hyundai HYMTF, +2.40% Ioniq 5 kicks off at $39,950.

When does the Honda Prologue go on sale?

The Honda Prologue debuted in October 2022, and Honda says it will go on sale in 2024. Because it’s also a 2024 model, we expect it will start hitting dealerships early that year.

How big is the Honda Prologue?

The 2-row, 5-passenger Prologue is notably longer and a bit taller than presumed competitors like the Hyundai Ioniq 5 and Ford Mustang Mach-E. It’s also longer than Honda’s own Passport midsize SUV, but not as tall. A long wheelbase of almost 122 inches promises exceptional passenger roominess.

Wheelbase: 121.8 inches
Length: 192.0 inches
Width: 78.3 inches
Height: 64.7 inches
Wheel diameter: 21 inches
Attractive exterior

Honda played it pretty safe with the Prologue’s exterior design, but we definitely like the look. It’s clean, substantial, and has a few premium-like elements, angles, and features. It also looks ready and willing to venture down some dirt roads, not just capable of doing so.

In back, the Honda badge has been replaced with “Honda” spelled out. But instead of using all capital letters, as it’s typically done, Honda’s execution features a capital H followed by lower-case letters. So Honda.

Sleek interior

The Prologue’s passenger cabin combines familiar Honda interior design sensibilities with two large screens and what looks to be an accommodating center console. It looks more like a contemporary Honda than a futuristic EV, which we suspect many buyers will appreciate.

Range and charge times

While Honda has yet to release any Prologue range, charging, or battery details, we can look to the forthcoming Chevy Blazer EV for clues. Why the Blazer EV? Because the Prologue is the product of a partnership with GM GM, -0.65% and is built on its new electric vehicle platform. We expect the Prologue to be sized and priced similarly to the Blazer EV, which offers about 250 miles of range on the low end, and up to 320 miles at the top end of the lineup.

As for charging, the Prologue’s platform-mate has an 11.5 kW onboard AC charger for plugging in at home, and DC public fast-charging capability of up to 190 kW. Depending on the model and the charger, the lithium-ion battery can absorb 87 miles worth of electricity in just 10 minutes. We wouldn’t be surprised to see the Prologue post similar figures all around.

Source: finance.yahoo.com

The concept of smartphones and electric cars seemed like a pipe dream 20 years ago, but today, nearly 6.92 billion people, or 86.4% of the global population, have personal smartphones. Governments worldwide are moving toward a green future by encouraging the use of electric cars instead of vehicles with combustible engines.

Investing in burgeoning technologies could increase your wealth within the next two decades. Take look at some of the most promising technologies poised to catch on.

Generative Artificial Intelligence

In recent months, generative artificial intelligence (AI) has taken a much larger role in daily life than normal. ChatGPT is rewriting curriculums and being used at publications like Buzzfeed Inc. But that’s just the beginning. While ChatGPT has been growing in prominence, other aspects of the field have been under-reported.

For example, RAD AI is a startup using generative AI to increase the efficiency of marketing campaigns with the world’s first AI marketing platform built to understand emotion. The startup is raising on startup investing platform Wefunder and has raised over $2.5 million from everyday investors.

Other types of generative AI examples include programs used to generate images, paintings, drawings, text-to-speech and full videos using nothing but AI.

Commercial Space Exploration

2021 was a pivotal year for commercial space exploration, with startups such as Jeff Bezos-backed Blue Origin LLC and Elon Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SpaceX) successfully kickstarting commercial space travel. Virgin Galactic, backed by billionaire Richard Branson, also launched the first fully crewed flight to the edge of space in July 2021.

These startups are gearing up to begin commercial space travel by 2024. But given recession concerns and supply chain issues, no concrete plans have been made. Many companies delayed their schedules by at least a year as the macroeconomic headwinds piled on.

With tickets priced at nearly $500,000 each, commercial space travel is currently only accessible to high-net-worth individuals. But you can expect prices to drop over the next two decades, as companies invest heavily to develop sustainable space stations and other infrastructure. China Business Knowledge predicts space travel to become more affordable over the next 15 to 20 years, stating, “Many people alive today will have a real chance of traveling to space in their lifetimes.”

Green Hydrogen

The majority of policies developed by nations over the past two years has been focused on transitioning to carbon-neutral energy. While the energy crisis resulting from the prolonged Russia-Ukraine war has thrown off the timeline, several countries have pledged to phase out fossil fuel emissions to eliminate their carbon footprints by 2050.

Solar, wind and geothermal energy are at the forefront of this transition, and the popularity of hydrogen as an alternative source is peaking. Green hydrogen has immense applications across the agriculture, manufacturing and transportation industries. Boston-based startup Electric Hydrogen, which produces green hydrogen from water, raised $198 million in Series B funding last June.

While green hydrogen production is expensive, scientists worldwide are working toward developing ways to produce carbon-neutral hydrogen commercially. Norwegian fuel cell company Nel ASA, the world’s largest manufacturer of electrolyzers, expects green hydrogen production costs to become equivalent or lower than fossil fuel production by 2025 at the earliest.

Private Equity Secondary Market

The private equity market is dominated by venture capitalists and angel investors. This has been a point of contention for retail investors for some time. It triggered the meme stock rally in the last two years as retail traders used social media to create immense selling pressure on institutional investors.

But with the rising popularity of startup investments among everyday investors, companies are working on establishing a solid secondary market for reselling private equity assets. Startups typically remain private for 10 to 12 years before becoming mature enough to go public while seed money invested remains locked in. But with the development of a secondary trading market, institutional and retail investors do not have to wait for an initial public offering (IPO) to cash in their investments.

StartEngine, the largest equity crowdfunding startup in the U.S., is working toward developing an inclusive secondary market for trading such securities. As the private equity market rapidly evolves, secondary trading markets facilitating reselling of such asset classes are expected to be one of the biggest advances in the retail investing space.

Source: finance.yahoo.com

There may still be life for Apple’s long-rumored foldable iPhone. On Monday The U.S. Patent Office published that it awarded the tech giant a patent for a display with touch sensors. Apple (AAPL) specifically refers to a foldable electronic device in the patent’s abstract.

UBS analyst David Vogt says that while there’s no indication that we’ll see a foldable iPhone this year, the introduction of such a product in the future could help boost iPhone sales around the world.

“We believe that a foldable iPhone model could lead to an uptick in consumer purchasing and upgrade rate within the smartphone segment,” Vogt wrote in a note to investors. “If a foldable device compresses the upgrade rate for iPhones or attracts ‘switchers’ from the Android ecosystem, iPhone unit growth could come in above our 238 million estimate in [fiscal 2024] given an installed base of roughly 1.2 billion iPhones and roughly 1.3 billion smartphones shipped a year.”

Rumors of a foldable iPhone have been circling for years. In April 2022, FT International analyst Ming-Chi Kuo predicted that the folding smartphone would hit stores in 2025, potentially as a foldable iPhone/ iPad hybrid.

In 2021, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, who is known for accurately reporting Apple products before the company announces them, said it would be two to three years before the company launches a foldable device.

Apple rival Samsung already has two foldable smartphones: the Galaxy Z Fold 4, which has a vertical crease down the center of the display that makes it fold like a book, and the Galaxy Z Flip 4, which features a horizontal crease that allows it to fold like a makeup compact. Both phones, however, are marketed as premium devices, with the Z Flip 4 starting at $999, and the Z Fold 4 starting at $1,799.

Introducing foldable smartphones, however, could help goose Apple’s iPhone sales at a time when global phone sales are coming off of pandemic highs. According to IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker, smartphone shipments fell 11.2% in 2022. Apple, alone, saw a 14.9% decline in Q4.

Apple’s iPhone revenue in Q1, which includes sales during the holiday, meanwhile, missed analysts’ expectations, coming in at $65.7 billion versus the $68.3 billion Wall Street was anticipating.

Still, the smartphone maker, like other tech giants, regularly files for and receives patents for technologies that never reach consumers. In other words, a folding iPhone could just be something the company is taking seriously enough to patent, but not necessarily make. And while iPhone sales did decline in Q1, much of that was seemingly tied to manufacturing issues caused by COVID lockdowns and worker protests in China.

What’s more, as Vogt points out, in a survey of 7,000 smartphone users in the U.S., U.K., and China, UBS found that a folding phone was the least important feature customers were looking for in a new handset.

Despite that, Apple could still launch a foldable phone in the coming years as the technology becomes more affordable for consumers. Or maybe the company will just end up abandoning our phones for the metaverse. Who knows?

Source: finance.yahoo.com

The age of generative AI is upon us, and this week alone Google and Microsoft made major announcements around their respective products for the masses. While Google unveiled an “experimental conversational AI service” called Bard, Microsoft had a fuller slate of news to share at its event in Redmond, WA yesterday. Through a partnership with ChatGPT maker OpenAI, Microsoft is adding more advanced AI conversation models to power updates to Bing and Edge.

Bing improvements

In general, there are four new areas of change coming to Bing (and we’ll get to Edge later): Search, Answers, Chat and Create. The first update is the new search box. Instead of your typical long, one-line bar, there is now a box more similar to those on Twitter or Facebook that prompts you to ask Bing anything. The character limit is now 1,000. The idea is to make the process of looking for answers something more conversational — similar to Google’s approach for years now.

When you submit your query, results are now displayed a bit differently. On the left is a column with your typical “answers” just like how you see it on Bing now. On the right, however, is a box that explains how the system found those answers and also starts a chat. I initially thought this was similar to what Google does in its “About this search” panels, but I was wrong. This box is a home for the AI and fills up with text that appears in real time, complete with animation and a “Stop responding” button in case you don’t have the patience to see the AI’s explanation. In my time with the preview so far, these new features didn’t happen on my first few searches, but did appear subsequently.

Chat and create in Bing

The third and fourth parts are the more interesting updates. Chat, for example, is a new way you can get solutions to the problems you’re looking to solve. You can access the Chat page from the Bing results page by tapping the Chat button above the answers or by scrolling up (swiping down on touchscreens). When you’re there, you can continue the conversation about your ongoing search, or use the Broom icon next to the text input field to clean the slate.

This page is a more practical manifestation of the notion of an AI copilot — it’s basically ChatGPT or any other chat bot you may have interacted with while getting tech support from your bank or shopping website. But the results Bing’s Prometheus model has been able to return are definitely more impressive. The outputs it can return along with the inputs it can understand make it much more versatile and therefore more useful.

For example, you can tell it to create travel itineraries or meal plans with specific parameters and it’ll actually give you lists with what to do or make each day. The demos I saw included coming up with “3-day itinerary for Snoqualmie” or “vegetarian meal plan with chocolate included in the dessert” and each time Bing delivered the requested plans in plain, legible English that not only met the requirements but also cited its sources. It also didn’t take very long for the system to produce the results — we only had to wait between five and ten seconds on the demo Surface laptop. When the system is processing, you’ll also see the “Stop responding” button to give up waiting for results, just in case you’re running short on time.

I asked Bing to propose itineraries for a six day family trip to Los Angeles, which would have come in handy during my vacation last week. It took two attempts with different wording before I got the results I expected, but Bing got there. It suggested destinations and sights that my cousin also recommended, which is nice, though I have yet to closely scrutinize the program to see if it makes sense geographically and on timing.

I also used one of the suggested prompts in the preview to get Bing to create a 30-minute workout for me, focusing on arms and abs using no gym equipment and excluding situps. The resulting plan of several exercises, including three sets of 10 reps of dips, crunches and more all seemed sound. Bing pulled from various publications in generating this program and cited its sources as it churned out the words, meaning it was actually doing some work compiling instead of just regurgitating a single article.

Like other conversational assistants, Bing’s chat is capable of understanding context. In the demo, Saunders asked for spots to take photographs after first requesting a 3-day itinerary for Snoqualmie, and Bing replied with scenic locations in the same region. After my query about a 30-minute workout for abs and arms, I followed up with “how about an hour” and Bing was actually smart enough to follow up by telling me to add more exercises, suggested more things to do, as well as suggest I simply do the initial workout twice.

I did a lot of follow-up questions to other searches, and to list them all would take forever. Suffice to say that the conversations generally felt very natural and contextually rich, in a way that few other AI chatbots have achieved.

The Edge browser with an AI copilot built in

With the new Edge, a button on the top right will allow you to access the new Bing’s chat feature within your browser. But it goes beyond just answering your questions without having to leave the pages you’re browsing. Edge can help make sense of the sites you’re looking at and make research or multitasking much easier.

During its keynote yesterday, Microsoft showed how it was able to use Bing to summarize Gap Inc’s quarterly report and extract not only key takeaways but also financial highlights. When I opened the PDF from Gap’s investor relations page and asked Bing (in Edge) to give me the key takeaways, it told me about the company’s performance in digestible snippets. I then asked for “financial highlights” and the system gave me six bullet points listing the net sales, net loss, gross margin, operating loss, cash and cash equivalents and free cash flow. Each item listed the dollar amount as well as how that compared to last year’s performance.

What’s more impressive is that Edge can also find another company’s earnings report from this chat window, without having to open another tab, and compare the results. You can also then tell the browser to create a table analyzing the two companies side by side. The fact that this worked during my own testing of the new Edge left me very impressed, and I can already see myself using this to compare specs of new phones in future.

Finally, at least for this hands-on article today, I checked out the new Compose function, which you can use to come up with posts, emails or essays. I asked Bing to write an email for me to convince our video producer Brian Oh to come on this work trip to Microsoft in Seattle with me. There were several options to choose from for parameters like tone (funny, professional, casual, informational or enthusiastic), format (paragraph, email, blog post or ideas) and length (short, medium or long). At the bottom is a “Generate draft” button, which delivers the text in a box below it, under which is a button for you to “Add to site.” Clicking on that sends the generated words over to the website where your cursor is.

The resulting prose read like a human person wrote it, with proper grammar and punctuation (except in places where it would be more natural to ignore grammatical rules). I set the tone to “funny” and while some of the AI’s efforts at comedy were kind of cringe-worthy, it was fairly subtle. For example, at the end of a 4-paragraph letter extoling the virtues of Seattle and Microsoft, the system wrote “So, what do you say? Are you in or are you out? Please say yes, because I already booked your ticket and hotel room. Just kidding, I didn’t.”

That’s not my style but it’s definitely something a somewhat funny human might write. For anyone that’s ever played with ChatGPT, this will feel somewhat familiar. The integration into the browser, which allows for easy transferring of the AI-produced content into, say, emails and social media sites, makes things very convenient.

Source: finance.yahoo.com

More than half of the institutional traders surveyed by global financial services giant JP Morgan said that artificial intelligence and machine learning will be the most influential technology in shaping the future of trading over the next three years—cited four times more often than blockchain and distributed ledger technology.

JP Morgan’s e-Trading Edit report is now in its seventh year, the latest report drawn from a January survey of 835 institutional traders in 60 global markets. The annual assessment of trader sentiment spans several asset classes and is intended to reveal “upcoming trends and the most hotly debated topics.”

The tumultuous bear market in crypto—coupled with the recent consumer and commercial hype over accessible AI technology like ChatGPT—seems to have shifted the outlook of financial industry professionals. Last year, blockchain and distributed ledger technology tied for second with AI and machine learning with 25 percent of respondents declaring them key to the future. Mobile trading applications came in first, with 29 percent.

Now, AI dwarfs every other major category of technology, its 53% citation rate far and away ahead of API integration (14%) and blockchain (12%). The top 2022 technology, mobile apps, fell to 7%, along with quantum computing and natural language processing.

Why Is Crypto Twitter Obsessed with ChatGPT?

Tackling crypto specifically, JP Morgan found that 72% of traders “have no plans to trade crypto [or] digital coins,” with 14% predicting they plan to trade within five years.

Even so, respondents clearly felt that other players were bullish on the space.

“Crypto and digital coins, commodities, and credit are predicted to have the biggest increases in electronic trading volumes over the next year,” the report notes, with participants predicting 64 percent of their activity will be in the crypto space by 2024.

While the survey found traders were unanimous in their belief that electronic trading will continue to grow, they also expected rough weather ahead. When asked which potential developments will have the greatest impact on the markets in 2023, the top answers were recession risk (30%), inflation (26%), and geopolitical conflict (19%).

The e-Trading Edit report is only the latest of several studies and reports that JP Morgan has released in the past month relating to cryptocurrency and digital assets. Last week, the firm predicted “significant challenges” for Bitcoin and Ethereum and noted that Solana, Terra, and tokens were gaining traction in the world of decentralized finance (DeFi) and non-fungible tokens (NFTs).

JP Morgan also looked at the prospects for leading crypto exchange Coinbase last month, saying the upcoming Shanghai update for Ethereum “could usher in a new era of staking” for the firm.

Source: finance.yahoo.com

Memory-chip prices, which dropped steeply over the past year, are expected to keep falling in the first half of 2023, putting more pressure on an industry that has already cut investments and jobs.

Average prices for the two main types of memory chips used in everyday electronics—from smartphones to personal computers and TV sets—are projected to experience double-digit percentage declines this quarter, industry analysts say. That comes after prices dropped by more than 20% in the last three months of 2022 from the previous quarter, according to analyst data.

Memory-chip makers, many saddled with large inventories, have also issued grim outlooks as the slump in demand for gadgets persists after a pandemic boom.

Micron Technology Inc., MU -2.46%decrease; red down pointing triangle SK Hynix Inc., 000660 -0.87%decrease; red down pointing triangle Western Digital Corp. WDC -1.65%decrease; red down pointing triangle and Tokyo-based Kioxia Holdings Corp. have unveiled plans to reduce their investments aimed at capacity expansion or to lower output to address a supply glut that is getting worse. Last month, Micron Technology said it would cut jobs and spending for the year to reduce costs after reporting a loss in its most recent quarter.

Memory chips are considered a bellwether for the semiconductor industry because they are more commoditized and sensitive to shifts in supply and demand.

Samsung Electronics Co., SSNHZ 0.00%increase; green up pointing triangle the world’s largest producer of memory chips, reports earnings Tuesday after saying earlier this month that its operating profit for the October-to-December quarter was expected to drop by 69% from a year earlier to 4.3 trillion won, which is equivalent to roughly $3.5 billion.

SK Hynix, which reports earnings Wednesday, is expected to report a fourth-quarter loss of around 812 billion won, or about $661 million, according to analyst projections averaged by FactSet.

Companies making other types of semiconductors are also caught up in the downturn. On Thursday, Intel Corp. reported a fourth-quarter loss and said poor market conditions would persist through the first half of the year.

Memory prices peaked during the early Covid-19 pandemic due to strong demand for tech products and they began falling in late 2021. Quarter-on-quarter declines got steeper through the second half of last year, as macroeconomic woes and rising interest rates combined with geopolitical uncertainties from the Russia-Ukraine war and China’s Covid lockdowns.

The memory-chip industry started 2023 with high inventories, said Kim Soo-kyoum, associate vice president covering memory semiconductors at International Data Corp., a tech market research firm. With demand still sluggish, memory prices are expected to keep declining throughout this year, though the quarterly drops could narrow or flatten in the second half depending on how soon buyers come back, Mr. Kim said.

Average contract prices for the two main types of memory chips, DRAM and NAND flash, dropped by roughly 23% and 28% respectively during the October-to-December period from the prior quarter, according to TrendForce, a Taiwan-based market researcher that tracks memory prices.

DRAM memory enables devices to multitask, while NAND flash memory provides storage capacity on devices.

Prices for both will likely keep falling through the first half of this year, TrendForce said. DRAM prices are expected to drop—on a quarterly basis—by 20% in the first quarter and 11% in the second quarter, while NAND flash prices during the same time frame are projected to drop by about 10% and 3%, respectively.

Inflation, high interest rates and weak economies are expected to continue to drive pullbacks in corporate and consumer spending on products including smartphones, PCs and data servers that are the biggest users of memory chips, TrendForce said.

DRAM prices are expected to continue dropping through the second half of this year and production cuts on a massive scale would be needed to shore them up, said Avril Wu, a TrendForce senior vice president.

Prices of NAND flash, however, could start to rebound starting in the second half as steeper price falls in recent months had prompted vendors to pursue more aggressive supply cutbacks for 2023, Ms. Wu said.

Samsung, the biggest producer of both types of memory chips, hasn’t publicly committed to moves that could reduce supply. In its last earnings call in October, Samsung’s memory-business Executive Vice President Han Jin-man said the firm was “not considering any artificial reduction in production for the sake of short-term, supply-demand rebalance.”

A Samsung spokeswoman said the company’s stance hasn’t changed.

In a report last month, Goldman Sachs forecast Samsung’s semiconductor unit’s operating profit for the October-to-December quarter would be around 1.5 trillion won, or roughly $1.2 billion, an 83% drop from a year earlier. It also projected Samsung’s memory business would record an operating loss starting from the first quarter of this year due to steep losses in the NAND flash business.

Global tech demand could recover later this year, aided by factors like China’s reopening after a period of strict Covid-19 restrictions which could revive consumer spending on products like smartphones, said David Tsui, senior credit analyst at S&P Global Ratings.

For now, it isn’t clear how quickly and to what extent consumer behavior would change in the country, he said.

Source: finance.yahoo.com