In 2016, Walter Scott laid a hand on a white semi-truck parked outside DigitalGlobe’s Colorado HQ. He gave the truck one last pat before it drove away.

Scott and his satellite-imagery company were the first-ever customers for Amazon Web Services’ “Snowmobile,” a new way to physically transfer large amounts of data: via a 45-foot shipping container on wheels.

• The truck’s cargo: DigitalGlobe’s 16-year library of Earth and space images.
• Its destination: a cluster of Amazon data centers, where all that data would be uploaded to cloud storage.

For DigitalGlobe, this was a high-stakes bet and a one-time occurrence. For AWS’s data-transfer truck, which offers armed guards and a temperature-controlled chamber, it was the inaugural journey of a high-dollar data-transfer service.

A fast-growing market

While other tech giants may lack the 18-wheeler and guarded escort vehicle, they also tend to offer a range of physical data-transfer options for customers with lots of information to migrate, limited connectivity, or both—e.g., data that could take months or years to upload online.

• The global cloud computing market is a $270 billion example of how physical infrastructure—servers, data centers, and, yes, data-transfer devices—powers not only the tech we use every day, but also the data storage that allows those platforms to operate.

How it works: A data-transfer device is typically shipped—or in Snowmobile’s case, driven—to the customer, who loads it up with data before securely sending it to the company’s upload facility. After the data is processed, the device is wiped before being sent out on its next job. But the process doesn’t come cheap.

Depending on the cloud-storage provider, the customer, the geographic region, and the amount of data to migrate over, the process can be pricey—for example, Google’s 40-terabyte device costs at least $300 for 10 days of use (plus shipping). Physical device options range from shippable, handheld hardware to AWS’s hulking 18-wheeler.

• Think of it like moving day—but instead of boxing up your clothes and books, you’re packaging up data for cloud storage. And whether you need a suitcase or a moving truck simply depends on how much stuff you’ve got.

“Maybe you have hundreds of petabytes that need to be moved, but it’s a long-term process—you’re moving a data center,” Wayne Duso, AWS’s VP of storage, edge, and data governance, told us.

Click here to read the full story.—HF

After years of being scolded for the damage listening to loud music in Apple’s headphones would do to your ears, AirPods might now, ironically, be one solution to help improve your hearing.

Apple is reportedly exploring turning AirPod Pros into hearing-aid devices, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The company launched “Conversation Boost”—a feature that increases the volume and clarity of the person speaking in front of the wearer—last week. This new capability is aimed at those who have minor hearing impairment, but it can be used by anyone.

Inside the strategic shift

It’s not yet clear whether Apple plans to market Conversation Boost as a hearing aid or further develop hearing assistance features. The company is expected to present its AirPods-as-health-devices pitch on Monday at the Apple Unleashed event.

If hearing-enhancement features are one day built into every pair of AirPods, people who weren’t even seeking treatment “might end up with a hearing loss solution just by way of buying a device that has other uses,” Abram Bailey, an Austin, Texas-based audiologist, told Emerging Tech Brew. “I think that may end up being a bigger impact than just changing the affordability.”

Big picture: The move is part of Apple’s larger effort to incorporate health and wellness components into its products. The Apple Watch can already detect heart rate and irregular heart rhythms, provide ECG readings, measure blood oxygen levels, and track sleep.

• Apple is even working on technology that would use iPhones to help diagnose mental health concerns like depression and cognitive decline.

+ While we’re here: The FDA is currently crafting new rules that would allow companies like Apple, Bose, and Samsung to sell over-the-counter hearing aids in order to increase competition and lower prices.

Click here to read the full story.—GD

It’s that time of year again: Pumpkin spice permeates the air, Thanksgiving flight prices are on the rise, and the annual State of AI report is fresh off the presses.

Spoiler alert: Transformers are in, semiconductors are hot, and AI + structural biology make a great couple.

Top takeaways

Quick recap: Every year, Emerging Tech Brew digs into the report, which has been published by UK investors Nathan Benaich and Ian Hogarth since 2018. For the authors’ 2020 predictions, nearly six out of eight became a reality, including a new structural-biology breakthrough from DeepMind and Nvidia’s failure to complete its Arm acquisition.

Let’s break down a few of this year’s top AI takeaways...

Archi-tech-ture: Transformers, a popular architecture used to create models for natural language processing, are now being applied to many other machine learning use cases, like protein structure prediction and computer vision.

• Benaich told us that the expansion of use has “unlocked many of the critical breakthroughs in AI at a faster rate than anyone predicted.”

AI safety: Although AI safety is making headlines, “fewer than 50 researchers” are working on it full-time at the largest AI labs, according to the report—meaning there are a lot more people whose full-time job it is to build this tech rather than think about potential consequences.

Chips on chips: Semiconductors are hot, hot, hot—and the global chip shortage is only increasing demand. Startups in the space are accelerating in a big way, and both countries and corporations are looking to make the semi supply chain more efficient.

We’ll see you back here next year to see how these sectors of AI move forward—and, of course, which of the report’s predictions came true.

Click here to read the full story.—HF

Stat: A machine-learning analysis suggests that 85% of the global population could already be experiencing climate-change effects.

Quote: “I hope I never recover from this. I hope that I can maintain what I feel now. I don’t want to lose it.”—William Shatner of Star Trek fame, immediately after his trip to space

Read: How Amazon prioritizes its own brands over better-rated independent products, according to a Markup investigation.

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Three of the following news stories are true, and one...we made up. Can you spot the odd one out?

• Iceland’s first electric vehicles hit the road this week.
• Real dogs aren’t sure how to react to Boston Dynamics’ robo-dogs.
• Drones are delivering sushi and ice cream in Tel Aviv.
• Robots can now both slackline and skateboard.

These companies have invested the most money in driverless car tech since 2014, according to a recent study.

1. Samsung, $8B
2. Toyota, $5B
3. General Motors, $4.9B
4. Softbank, $3.6B
5. Hyundai, $3B

Samsung’s purchase of US connected car technology company Harman for $8 billion in 2017 puts it at the top of the list. While five automakers rank in the top 10 (Volkswagen at No. 6 and Honda at No. 10), tech giants are also betting big on the driverless future: Uber, Amazon, and Apple have all spent at least $1 billion on self-driving investments.

Catch up on the top Emerging Tech Brew stories from the past few editions:

• Report: AI jobs are growing fast—much faster than education and workforce policy
• Lithium for EV batteries could face a shortage by 2023. This startup wants to help.
• Biden wants to build 500,000 EV chargers by 2030. The question is where to put them.