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Capital One Plans Hiring Spree; Google to Help Insurers
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Welcome back. Technology investments made by companies across industries during the Covid-19 pandemic are fueling growth as the economy reopens. Capital One’s hiring plans are a case in point. After shifting all of its information-technology systems last year to Amazon.com’s Amazon Web Services, the market’s largest cloud provider, the bank says it is now looking for software engineers—a lot of software engineers. Specifically, Capital One recruiters are after workers skilled in artificial intelligence, hoping the increased functionality of cloud-based IT will attract the best and brightest.
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Capital One is relying on the public cloud more than many other banks do, analysts say.
PHOTO: DREW ANGERER/GETTY IMAGES
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Capital One Banks on Engineers
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In the wake of a massive cloud migration, Capital One Financial Corp. is aiming to hire thousands of technology workers by the end of the year, with a focus on building out its AI bench, WSJ’s Sara Castellanos reports.
How many jobs. The bank wants to hire more than 3,000 tech workers in 2021, about 1,000 more than in previous years, bringing its total technology head count to roughly 14,000.
Why now. Capital One completed shifting all of its data, applications and information-technology systems to Amazon Web Services, moving away from using its own private data centers.
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ASML employees working on the company’s semiconductor lithography system in the Netherlands in 2019.
PHOTO: BART VAN OVERBEEKE/AS/REUTERS
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Extending Trump administration efforts, the White House wants to block sales of Dutch-made one-of-a-kind chip machines to China, a move that would deny Chinese firms crucial technology needed to make smart chips used in AI platforms and other digital tools, The Wall Street Journal reports.
Key chip makers. Known as extreme ultraviolet lithography systems, the 180-ton machines are essential for the kinds of microprocessors used by Intel Corp. and other tech firms to make advanced semiconductors.
Line in the sand? ASML’s machines print the world’s thinnest lines on silicon, enabling manufacturers to pack more transistors on a single chip and make them more powerful.
What’s at stake. China wants the $150 million machines for domestic chip makers, so smartphone giant Huawei Technologies Co. and other Chinese tech companies can be less reliant on foreign suppliers.
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The world-wide semiconductor shortage is causing a slowdown in smartphone shipments and rising prices, as strained supply chains have even the biggest phone manufacturers hunting for parts, The Wall Street Journal reports.
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PHOTO: JUNG YEON-JE/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES
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Dialing back production. After a strong start this year, some smartphone makers have had to gear down manufacturing plants and delay new releases, including an expected 20% drop in shipments by industry leader Samsung Electronics Co.
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Smart, but not smart enough. For much of the year smartphone makers avoided the parts disruptions faced in the auto, personal computer and home-appliance industries by stockpiling supplies months in advance.
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Uneven impact. Apple Inc., which accounts for about a sixth of the 1.3 billion smartphones sold annually, has stayed out of trouble given its supply-chain clout, according to industry analysts.
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Five
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The width of a line in nanometers that ASML Holding NV’s extreme ultraviolet lithography machine is able to print on a silicon chip. By comparison, a strand of human hair is 75,000 nanometers wide.
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ZoomInfo Technologies helps sales and marketing teams improve their pitches to potential customers.
PHOTO: SCOTT EISEN/BLOOMBERG NEWS
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ZoomInfo to Buy Chorus.ai
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Business-intelligence platform ZoomInfo Technologies Inc. is using proceeds from $500 million in debt raised last week to purchase Chorus.ai, a startup that uses AI to analyze customer calls, meetings and emails, The Wall Street Journal reports.
Added features. ZoomInfo, which went public last year, says it plans to offer Chorus’s services alongside its own application, which helps sales and marketing teams improve pitches to potential customers.
Busy year. The deal comes on the heels of a record-breaking first half of the year for mergers and acquisitions involving U.S. companies.
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Alphabet Inc.’s Google plans to use AI to help insurers more accurately measure occupancy limits in buildings where they are on the hook for slip-and-fall accidents and other risks, as part of a partnership with insurance-tech firm BlueZoo Inc., The Wall Street Journal reports.
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PHOTO: DAVID PAUL MORRIS/BLOOMBERG NEWS
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How it works. BlueZoo sensors placed in buildings listen for WiFi probes spontaneously emitted by mobile phones, sending the data back to analytics servers in Google Cloud to generate metrics, including the number of visitors and visits.
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Catching on. The use of AI by insurers is spreading across the industry, including systems that analyze aerial photography for home and other property insurers to assess fire risks of individual residences in wildfire-prone communities.
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“While insurers may occasionally send risk engineers to assess a particular building, BlueZoo measures risk continuously, making it possible to more accurately price risk or work with building owners to mitigate risk.”
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— Henna Karna, managing director of insurance at Google Cloud.
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Chicago-based Fast Radius uses its cloud platform and manufacturing techniques including 3-D printing to accelerate product development for customers.
PHOTO: FAST RADIUS
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Fast Radius fetches lofty valuation. Chicago-based digital manufacturing firm Fast Radius Inc., which uses 3-D printing and AI software to make unique parts for customers like Colgate-Palmolive, has reached a deal to go public via a special-purpose acquisition company ECP Environmental Growth Opportunities Corp., that values the company at about $1.4 billion. (The Wall Street Journal)
Video-game characters smarten up. Game developers are using AI to create more intelligent, reactive and creative characters for so-called open-world games, where players take part in increasingly complex narratives. (The Guardian)
Faster protein analysis. Researchers at the Institute for Protein Design at the University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle are leveraging advanced AI software to compute the makeup of protein structures in less than 10 minutes, a capability that could accelerate the development of treatments for everything from Covid-19 to cancer. (SciTechDaily)
Some reservations. A new film about Anthony Bourdain is raising ethical concerns about the use of AI to simulate the late celebrity chef’s voice, making it appear as though he is uttering phrases he never said. (CBS)
Wildfire prevention goes digital. Researchers at the University of California, San Diego, are feeding AI models with data about past wildfires to determine where to focus preventative measures like controlled burns. (The New York Times)
Google boss touts AI. Sundar Pichai, the chief executive of Google owner Alphabet Inc., said in a recent podcast interview that AI will have a bigger impact than most major scientific breakthroughs in history. (BBC)
New AI research center set to open. The University of Indiana’s 58,000-square-foot Luddy Center for Artificial Intelligence, funded by a $35 million donation from alumnus Fred Luddy, is on track to open in August, school officials say. (Indiana Daily Student)
DHL to deploy more drones. Logistics giant DHL, part of the Deutsche Post DHL Group, is working with Bulgarian aircraft developer Dronamics to ease strained supply chains by rolling out a fleet of inter-city and cross-border drones. (Reuters)
Floating an idea on Web access. Ron DeSantis, Florida’s Republican governor, called on the White House to greenlight a plan to use high-altitude balloons to provide Internet connectivity to people in Cuba, where online access is controlled by the government. (Associated Press)
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Apple Inc. told real-estate developers it wants to lease a large production campus in Los Angeles for its growing entertainment operations, according to people familiar with the matter, a move that would further deepen big tech’s presence in Hollywood. (The Wall Street Journal)
Zoom Video Communications Inc., the videoconferencing service that became a household name globally during the pandemic, plans to parlay some of the resulting rise in its share price into a $14.7 billion acquisition to secure growth. (The Wall Street Journal)
The Biden administration publicly blamed hackers affiliated with China’s main intelligence service for a far-reaching cyberattack on Microsoft Corp. email software this year, part of a global effort by dozens of nations to condemn Beijing’s malicious cyber activities. (The Wall Street Journal)
Trading app Robinhood Markets Inc. expects its coming initial public offering to give it a market value of about $33 billion, lower than the level previously anticipated. (The Wall Street Journal)
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