"Pilot testing" will begin next year in Silicon Valley on the Daimler-Bosch “collaboration” using Nvidia’s Drive Pegasus artificial-intelligence “brain” for Level 4- and Level 5-scale autonomous vehicle “fleets,” said Nvidia Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress on a Thursday earnings call on quarterly results. Nvidia recently started shipping “development systems” for Drive Pegasus, an “AI supercomputer designed specifically for autonomous vehicles,” said Kress. It's capable of 320 trillion operations a second, so it can handle “diverse and redundant algorithms” in self-driving cars, she said.

Google added an online political ad section to its transparency report, allowing users to determine which groups are spending the most money on digital advertisements, how much spending is focused on each state's races and which search terms are garnering the most attention. Transparency Report Product Lead Michee Smith said Wednesday. Florida ($1.1 million), Tennessee ($593,200) and Ohio ($555,700) had been targeted for the most spending by state since May.

The FTC should conclude its investigation of the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica privacy breach (see 1805020042) and issue a “significant fine” before Sept. 1, 14 groups wrote the agency Thursday. The Electronic Privacy Information Center, Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, Center for Digital Democracy, Consumer Watchdog and Public Citizen were among them. Lack of enforcement “would imperil both European and American consumers and undermine the digital economy,” the groups said, citing implications for the EU-U.S. Privacy Shield (see 1808090015). It’s been four months since the agency opened its Facebook probe, they noted. An FTC spokesperson said the agency received the letter.

Online sales rose 11.3 percent last month year over year, the National Retail Federation said Wednesday. “Uncertainty” over tariffs on Chinese imports (see 1808150043) is the potential “fly in the ointment,” said NRF: “If they escalate, they will no doubt weigh on confidence and household spending.” Tech groups and others are worried, too (see 1808150018 and 1808150009).

Best Buy signed a definitive agreement to buy GreatCall for $800 million cash, said the retailer Wednesday. GreatCall provides connected-health and personal emergency response services to the elderly and has more than 900,000 paying subscribers, it said. It's “a large, growing market where technology can help in particular address the needs of aging consumers, their caregivers, payers and providers,” it said. The GreatCall buy will "augment" Best Buy's “growing business selling health- and wellness-related products,” it said.

Most U.S. manufacturers are stagnating in the initial stages of smart manufacturing technology adoption, the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation reported Monday. Nearly 80 percent of small U.S. manufacturers “lack plans to implement Internet of Things applications over the next three years,” they said. U.S. manufacturers should leverage “smart, cyber-physical systems that combine model-based definitions, an end-to-end digital thread, modeling and simulation, the Internet of Things, artificial intelligence and machine learning, and seamless supply chain collaboration,” ITIF President Robert Atkinson and Vice President-Global Innovation Policy Stephen Ezell said with Korea Institute for Industrial Economics and Trade Executive Director-Center for Global Industrial Strategies Inchul Kim and institute fellow Jaehan Cho.

Cyber criminals will steal more than 33 billion records in 2023, a 175 percent increase from the more than 12 billion records projected stolen for 2018, said Juniper Research in a new report. The projections are based on the amount companies plan to spend on cyber defense. According to the research, more than half the attacks in 2023 will take place in the U.S. Small business is projected to account for 13 percent of overall cybersecurity market in 2018, despite more than 99 percent of all companies being small businesses, the report said.

Launching the Disney-branded direct-to-consumer service late next year will be “the biggest priority of the company during calendar 2019,” said Disney CEO Bob Iger on a Tuesday earnings call. The “first priority” with the new service will be “reaching the core Disney fan, and we certainly have a number of different company touch points to do that,” he said. Though still in the “early days” of the launch of the ESPN+ direct-to-consumer service, “conversion rates from free trials to paid subscriptions are strong and subscription growth is exceeding our expectations,” said Iger. Disney had “relatively modest expectations” going into the ESPN+ launch,” he said in Q&A when pressed for specific subscription numbers. “I'm not going to be specific on numbers. We're just not ready to get into that.” The company is “heartened by the fact that the conversion rates from free to pay have been quite strong and the trends that we're seeing in terms of churn are modest in nature in the sense that they're manageable,” he said. “We feel really good about how we are positioned and we'll continue to look opportunistically in terms of what rights will be available,” he said. “A lot of the rights in sports are already spoken for,” but there are still “opportunities to take some of the rights that we already own for the ESPN primary channels and move them along” to ESPN+, he said.

Without specifically naming Facebook or Google, Apple tried to distance itself from the online platforms Tuesday, telling House lawmakers “the customer is not our product.” Apple’s business model “does not depend on collecting vast amounts of personally identifiable information to enrich targeted profiles marketed to advertising,” Apple Director-Federal Government Affairs Timothy Powderly wrote House Commerce Committee Chairman Greg Walden, R-Ore. The letter was a response to a July 9 query (see 1807090037) to Apple CEO Tim Cook and Alphabet CEO Larry Page from Walden and Reps. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn.; Gregg Harper, R-Miss.; and Bob Latta, R-Ohio. The lawmakers accused Apple of collecting “non-triggered” user audio from mobile devices without disclosing the practice to users, and Google of inappropriately scraping email data. “We believe privacy is a fundamental human right and purposely design our products and services to minimize our collection of customer data,” Powderly wrote. “When we do collect data, we're transparent about it and work to disassociate it from the user.”

Only 34.5 percent of nearly 500 professionals involved in general data protection regulation (GDPR) compliance efforts say their organizations can defensibly demonstrate compliance with the new data privacy rules today, according to a Deloitte online poll released Tuesday. One-third of respondents (32.7 percent) hope to be compliant within 2018, it said. And 11.7 percent plan to take a "wait and see" approach amid uncertainty over how EU regulators in various countries will enforce the new regulation. "That the GDPR effective date has come and gone and many are still scrambling to demonstrate a defensible position on GDPR compliance reflects the complexity and challenges as the world of privacy rapidly changes," said Rich Vestuto, a Deloitte Risk and Financial Advisory managing director. The poll of more than 490 professionals involved in their organizations took place June 22. GDPR took effect May 25.