Month: October 2018

Amazon announced today it would raise its minimum wage for all US employees to $15 per hour. The change will take effect on November 1, and will apply to full-time, part-time, temporary, and seasonal workers. Overall, more than 250,000 Amazon workers will get a pay raise from this, in addition to more than 100,000 seasonal employees that the company hires at various times throughout the year.

— Chance Richie is wearing a dark suit contrasted by a pink shirt and brown shoes with flashy socks. He has pale blue eyes and a firm jaw, looking exactly like the former Navy submariner he once was. These days, he’s leading a car subscription service,

Mobiliti

, a startup company that’s rethinking, well, mobility. The company has 25 employees and more than 1,000 registered users. It’s in four markets with ambitious plans to double that in the near future. We caught up with him in the wood-paneled dining room of the Detroit Athletic Club, where previous generations of auto barons pondered mobility in other eras.

Autoblog:

Give me an overview of how Mobiliti works and what your game plan is.

Chance Richie:

I saw an opportunity to provide customers flexible vehicle access and to provide

dealers

with an incremental profit source. And we do that through the Mobiliti app where we connect dealers and drivers and we make it very simple for someone to go on, select a vehicle, pay for it through our app and then they have their vehicle,

insurance

, maintenance and roadside assistance all bundled into one payment.

AB:

How would you argue this is better than traditional

leasing

? Or car rentals?

CR:

In my mind it’s definitely a lot better than car rental. For one thing, it’s going to be significantly less expensive. If you look at a 30-day or long-term rental from one of the major rental car companies, that’s a very expensive proposition. The Mobiliti program is designed to be cost-neutral and cost-competitive with traditional purchase and lease options. But, with that added element of flexibility and one payment for everything that you need except the gas, we like to say.

AB:

What’s your strategy for going forward and what’s next for you guys?

CR:

We’re in four markets right now. We plan on being in eight markets by the end 2018 and then we want to add eight to 10 markets every year after. We have a nice natural footprint now but we want to fill out and be more ubiquitous across the United States. And the good thing about the Mobiliti subscriptions is one app gives you access to vehicles all across the country.

AB:

Last question, where do you see this space going?

CR:

I think subscription will have an adoption rate probably similar to leasing. If you look at the lease penetration rate nationwide, it’s somewhere around 30 percent and growing. So I see subscription probably following that same trajectory, but within the next few years really being in the consciousness of all Americans that are looking to acquire a vehicle.

Related Video:

The Nobel Prize, though often questionable in its selections, captivates the world each year. While there are now scientific awards with larger monetary prizes, there is no prize so universally and immediately recognized as a sign of prestige.

The 2018 season kicked off on Monday with the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, which this year honors two researchers for their work on cancer therapy. James P. Allison, 70, born in Alice, Texas, and now affiliated with the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center and the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy in San Francisco, splits the prize with Tasuku Honjo, 76, a professor at Kyoto University in Japan. Their joint prize includes 9,000,000 Swedish Krona, which is a bit more than $1,000,000 USD.

In the 1990s, Allison and Honjo did separate but parallel research on the use of the human immune system to fight cancer. Because cancer is a disease caused by the mutation of a body’s own cells, our immune systems rarely offer much assistance. Allison and Honjo showed how two different proteins can, in slightly different ways, pump the brakes on an immune system’s attempts to attack multiplying cancer cells. If someone disabled such brakes, their work suggested, the immune system might have a fighting chance against cancer. The work they and others did at that time led to the development of immunotherapy as a cancer treatment, which is now a quickly growing field. This was the first step toward cancer therapies more precise and less brutal than surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy.

Drugs based on these and similar proteins now help treat several types of cancer, and are known as immune checkpoint inhibitors.

“I’m so thrilled that a Nobel has been awarded for this game-changing cancer therapy,” Dan Davis of the University of Manchester told The Guardian. “It doesn’t work for everyone but lives have been saved, and it has sparked a revolution in thinking about the many other ways in which the immune system can be harnessed or unleashed to fight cancer and other illnesses. I think this is just the tip of the iceberg—many more medicines like this are on the horizon.”

By showing that the immune system can be tweaked to ward off cancer cells, Allison and Honjo also helped inspire the latest generation of gene-edited cancer therapies. Our 2017 Best of What’s New Awards honored Kymriah, the first FDA-approved treatment to utilize gene-edited white blood cells to fight the disease. Its results are astounding, but Kymriah still isn’t a magic bullet for all patients—or even for all types of cancers. Researchers are working on getting Novartis’ Kymriah and Kite Pharma’s Yescarta (two brands of the same therapy, generically known as CAR T-cell immunotherapy) approved for more varieties of the disease, but as PopSci reported back in December, the treatments have a long way to go. When they work, they often work miraculously. When they don’t, they can cause life-threatening side effects. And even patients who seem to do well aren’t always given the life-long bill of health they hope for.

But despite all the typical bumps in the road of a new form of medicine, immunotherapy is undoubtedly our best shot at making cancer—at least as we know it—a thing of the past.

And for what it’s worth, Allison may well be among the best harmonica players in Nobel history:

Google’s long-rumored Yeti streaming service is now official, as the company today announced Project Stream, a service that will allow users to stream games to the Google Chrome internet browser. The first game supported will be Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, which launches on Friday.

“We’ve been working on Project Stream, a technical test to solve some of the biggest challenges of streaming,” Google said in a blog post today. “For this test, we’re going to push the limits with one of the most demanding applications for streaming—a blockbuster video game.”

Anyone who’s accepted into the beta test will be able to play Odyssey in their browsers on a laptop or desktop starting Friday, Google said. They’re looking for people with internet speeds of 25 megabits per second or higher.

As we reported earlier this year, this is the first part of a broader Google initiative to enter gaming in a big way. As I wrote in June:

So what is this streaming platform, exactly? Like Nvidia’s GeForce Now, the Google service would offload the work of rendering graphics to beefy computers elsewhere, allowing even the cheapest PCs to play high-end games. The biggest advantage of streaming, as opposed to physical discs or downloads, is that it removes hardware barriers for games. Games like Call of Duty can reach a significantly bigger audience if players don’t need an expensive graphics card or console to play them. As one person familiar with Yeti described it: Imagine playing The Witcher 3 within a tab on Google Chrome.

Question is, what about input lag? Latency? Will this work as delivered or will it be destined to go the way of OnLive? We’ll be able to see for ourselves starting Friday.