While Amazon was shocking New York this week by ditching its plans to place a second headquarters there, it has been spending lavishly on another front: the automotive sector. U.S. electric pickup truck maker Rivian Automotive on Friday announced an equity investment of $700 million, led by Amazon.
Reuters reported on Tuesday that Amazon and General Motors were in talks to invest in Rivian in a deal that could value the company between $1 billion and $2 billion. Both Rivian and Amazon declined to comment on the valuation.
The investment comes on the heels of Rivian unveiling its all-electric R1T pickup and R1S SUV at the Los Angeles Auto Show last November, the company said.
The funding will be a major boost for the Plymouth, Michigan-based startup, which aspires to be the first carmaker to the U.S. consumer market with an electric pickup.
Last week, meanwhile, Amazon invested $530 million in self-driving car startup Aurora Innovation. The new funding brings Aurora’s valuation to more than $2.5 billion.
Aurora Chief Executive Chris Urmson, who earlier led Alphabet’s self-driving program, said the financing allows Aurora to expand and refine the testing and development of its autonomous driving system, and to hire, growing its staff of more than 200 people spread between offices in Pittsburgh, San Francisco and Palo Alto, California.
Rivian’s existing financial backers include Saudi auto distributor Abdul Latif Jameel Co, Sumitomo Corp of Americas and Standard Chartered Bank.
The third season of Stranger Thingswon’t arrive until July, but you might be able to while away some of the time by checking out the Dungeons and Dragons adventure the gang plays in the first episode. Hasbro is releasing a D&D starter kit based on "Hunt for the Thessalhydra" on April 22nd.
The $25 pack includes D&D basics such as character sheets, dice and a rule book, so Hasbro is making sure beginners can join in. There are also five Stranger Things character sheets based on those used in the show, including Will the Wise and Dustin the Dwarf.
A Stranger Things x D&D crossover always seemed inevitable. It was from D&D that the boys borrowed the name for the violent Demogorgon monster in Season 1. Naturally, there’s a place for the creature in this kit. It includes two Demogorgon figures, one of which is prime for painting. You’ll also have to battle the beast if you’re to be successful in "Hunt for the Thessalhydra." Hasbro unveiled the kit at the New York Toy Fair, and you can preordera set now.
Elsewhere in Stranger Things games news, an ’80s-themed version of Trivial Pursuit is on the way. It includes questions on pop culture, famous people, events, trends, technology and, yep, Stranger Things. There’s a twist, as there are several portal spaces dotted around the board. Land on one, and you’ll have to flip the board so that every player will be in the Upside Down, a place where you can lose those all-important wedges if you get questions wrong. It also ships April 22nd, and you can pre-order itfor $20.
That’s not all, though, as a mini arcade console will be available on that same date. It has 20 games, including 16 Stranger Things-themed titles along with Pac-Man, Dig Dug, Galaga and Galaxian. It will cost $30. Meanwhile, if that’s not enough Stranger Things to add to your life before Season 3, there are also official tie-in novels.
Update, 2/14/19, 3:30PM ET: Updated to change release date from May 1st to April 22nd, per full details we received from Hasbro. Also, Hasbro says that the mini arcade console isn’t a Target exclusive, but instead will be available at "most major retailers nationwide."
Researchers in France are calling their six-legged creation the “AntBot.” This 9-inch robot doesn’t just skitter around like a desert ant, though—it also borrows their unique navigational skills.
If you’re a runner or cyclist visiting a new city, or even just exploring a different part of your own town, heading out for some impromptu exercise can feel like a bit of a gamble: If you’re lucky, you might chart a long, uninterrupted course along safe streets or well-worn trails. More likely, though, you’ll find yourself dodging traffic on a path punctuated with stop lights, detours, and blind alleys.
Finding new places to ride or run can be such a pain that, even in their own neighborhoods, many athletes resort to traversing the same handful of routes over and over and over. “I’m stuck on the same two loops,” says James Quarles, CEO of Strava, the GPS-powered, workout-tracking social network for the aerobically inclined. He lives in a suburb south of San Francisco, where he says a lot of the streets disappear and dead-end, which is why he’d rather retread the routes he knows than waste time finding new ones.
Rarely is the most direct path from A to B ideal for running or biking; Strava’s data reveals the paths that athletes actually spend time on.
It’s a shame—not just for the head Strava but anyone who enjoys exercising outside, one of the greatest joys of which is finding fresh perspectives on one’s surroundings.
Strava
To make it easier for the fleet of foot to find new places to rack up miles, Strava today unveiled a handy beta feature it calls Route Builder for Mobile. The straightforwardly named tool, which lives inside the Strava app, is purpose-built for smartphones and makes finding new routes as simple as tracing your finger over a map: Just draw where you want to go and it spits out an ideal path.
Strava assembles that path from fragments of the billions of rides and runs stockpiled on its servers. Strava’s database is perhaps the largest repository of geotagged fitness data on earth. It contains trillions of GPS points from user-uploaded activities. That data hoard is what makes a tool like Route Builder more useful to athletes than, say, Google Maps. Rarely is the most direct path from A to B ideal for running or biking; Strava’s data reveals the paths that athletes actually spend time on.
But the mobile Route Builder’s real draw is how easy it is to use. Tools for creating routes have existed on desktop for years through programs like Google Earth and websites like plotaroute.com, but using them is a bit of a chore: You mark the start of your activity by placing a pin on a map, then drop a second pin a little ways up the street, a third pin a little beyond that, and so on. It’s time-consuming, attention-hungry work—the kind of point-and-click task a researcher might use to evaluate your fine motor skills. Plus, there are often few clues that the path you’ve drawn onscreen is any good for getting around by foot or by bike.
Strava
Strava’s new tool is a lot simpler to use. Faster, too. To build a route, start a workout, select the route icon, and tap the plus sign in the upper right corner of the screen. Position the map however you like, then use your finger to trace a route. You can make it squiggly or straight. Plot a point-to-point path or a closed loop. Whatever you draw, Route Builder takes your input and refines it by comparing your drawing against its database of recorded activities. A few seconds later, your rough sketch snaps into place along run- or ride-friendly streets and trails.
Plot Points
Frankly, it’s a little surprising this tool didn’t exist before now. The same stockpile of anonymized user activity that makes it possible also powers Strava’s Global Heat Map, a color-coded visualization of the world’s most frequented running and cycling routes. (Last year, the map lit up the locations of clandestine military bases and patrol routes around the world, but enterprising Strava users have been using it to discover places to ride and run since before it was identified as an OPSEC liability.) It’s also the data set behind Strava’s browser-based Route Builder, which, despite being more powerful and more user-friendly than most desktop-based activity mappers, still requires plenty of pointing and clicking and thus feels clunky and restrictive in all the ways that swiping your finger across a screen does not. Scribbling a route on your phone and watching it snap to a coherent path isn’t just efficient, after all: “It’s also kinda fun,” says Strava engineer Drew Robb.
Its obvious advantages are why it’s taken a matter of weeks for the feature to go from a concept to a usable tool. Robb, who years ago built the company’s routing platform, pitched the idea in December at one of the Strava’s quarterly hackathons. “Everyone in the company gets three days to work on whatever they want,” Robb says. “It’s a nice way to press pause and work on something you think we should have.”
For him, that meant dusting off some old routing code and figuring out how to implement it on mobile. It took him a couple of days to build a prototype, and, after the higher-ups fast-tracked it, a small team of engineers another month to produce a working beta.
That beta is available starting today to English-speaking members of Summit, Strava’s paid subscription service, which starts at $3 per month. The plan is to see how subscribers use the feature and solicit their feedback on where it could improve. “We want it to get better and better over time,” Quarles says.
Running Things
The trick for Strava will be to determine whether and how to add to the feature without bogging it down. “We want this to work everywhere, for everyone,” Quarles says—but not all runners and cyclists value the same things in their routes. The browser-based Route Builder, for example, lets users control for things like elevation gain and total mileage. Strava made the mobile version quicker and easier to use, but at the expense of such adjustability. In Oakland, where I live, the feature has helped me discover some new, albeit very hilly, routes. In San Francisco, where I work, it has revealed corridors I’d never considered taking before—though it usually over- or undershoots my desired distance by a few tenths of a mile. If you’re the kind of person who minds such things, Strava’s mobile Route Builder, in its current form, might not be for you.
But if you’re the kind of person who’s unintimidated by the prospect of a surprise hill workout, you’ll want to give Route Builder for Mobile a whirl. It’ll help you ride and run more like the locals when you travel, and add some variety to your routine at home—no pointing and clicking required.
If your vision of the flying future involves whooshing about in an air taxi while chuckling at the car-bound suckers below, Elroy Air is not here to help. But if you dream of a world of smooth logistics, where emergency supplies, firefighting chemicals, and all the crap you order online moves through the world faster and cheaper than ever, then 2019 might be your year.
“We’re developing a big cargo drone,” says Elroy CEO Dave Merrill. One that will carry 500 pounds and fly 300 miles at a time. One he intends to start testing this year and to put into service come 2020.
The aerospace engineers staffing the San Francisco-based startup have spent the past two years developing that drone, the Chaparral. Like most of the new aircraft being proposed for moving people and their stuff these days, it will take off and land vertically, like a helicopter, using six rotors. Those draw power from a battery mounted near the nose of the catamaran-like craft. When it turns to horizontal flight, a seventh, tail-mounted rotor—Elroy calls it the “pusher”—will go to work, with lift coming from the 29-foot wing. That rotor is powered by a gas-powered internal combustion engine that sits near the tail.
Cargo won’t go inside the Chaparral itself, instead riding in a pod attached to the aircraft’s belly. When it shows up, the Chaparral uses a grasping mechanism to grab the pod, winches it in until it’s snug against the fuselage, and then it latches on. (Merrill declined to describe the system in detail.) This way, a pod can be fully packed or unpacked on the ground while the drone is carrying a full pod wherever it needs to go. The idea is to minimize turnaround time, and it’s the same thinking that led Airbus to patent a patently absurd idea for detachable, swappable airplane cabins.
As for what goes inside those pods, Merrill points to the potential for moving humanitarian supplies, like food, water, and blood. But he sees commercial cargo as the biggest opportunity, as in helping move all the stuff you order online: clothes, books, gadgets, whatever. So, while the Chaparral could fit into a landing zone the size of six car parking spaces, it’s not about to land in your front yard. Merrill is targeting what he calls “internal legs.” So when you order your new smartphone, an ocean freighter or cargo plane takes it from the factory in China to the US, along with a billion other things. Then, Elroy would carry a portion of those goods to the distribution center nearest you. From there, a smaller vehicle, maybe a van, maybe a robot reminiscent of a toaster, would bring your package to your door. Merrill says he has had quite a bit of interest from potential customers.
Like a similar concept from Boeing, Elroy’s model could also work well for places that are hard to reach: small islands, oil rigs, areas with poor road infrastructure, and places hit by natural disasters. “We don’t need an airport to be at point A or point B,” Merrill says.
Elroy will, however, need to accomplish a lot more testing before it can start running its aircraft in a commercial service. That program should begin this year, gradually proving that the aircraft is safe, reliable, and as capable as the team says. Then comes certification, likely to be an expensive and time-consuming process. And then building a sustainable business in a market overflowing with would-be players. But with a relatively simple design and a focused business plan, the company looks to be starting from solid ground.
Elsewhere in Stranger Things games news, an ’80s-themed version of Trivial Pursuit is on the way. It includes questions on pop culture, famous people, events, trends, technology and, yep, Stranger Things. There’s a twist, as there are several portal spaces dotted around the board. Land on one, and you’ll have to flip the board so that every player will be in the Upside Down, a place where you can lose those all-important wedges if you get questions wrong. It also ships April 22nd, and you can 
