Month: January 2022

Enlarge / A VW ID Buzz prototype equipped with Argo AI’s autonomous driving hardware and software, on the streets of Munich, Germany. (credit: Argo AI)

This week, Volkswagen Group CEO Herbert Diess set a date for the launch of what might be the most eagerly anticipated of VW’s new battery electric vehicles. The retro-styled ID Buzz concept car blew so many socks off when we first saw it in 2017, and we’ll get our first proper look at the production version on March 9, according to Diess’ Twitter feed.

The legend returns on 03/09/22! pic.twitter.com/Q4hFyCN5mr

— Herbert Diess (@Herbert_Diess) January 6, 2022

Intentionally or not, Volkswagen’s ID Buzz concept might be the most successful aspect of the company’s post-Dieselgate charm offensive. VW has had to pivot hard into electrification, applying its proven strategy of building many different styles of vehicles from the same family of parts and designs.

Most of those vehicles have been pretty conventional, like the ID.3 hatchbacks that are starting to get thick on the ground in Europe or the designed-with-the-US-in-mind ID.4 crossover. Then there are the less conventional concepts—try as they might, the engineers couldn’t make a business case for the ID Buggy.

Enlarge / Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, center, and her family leave the Robert F. Peckham Federal Building and US Courthouse after the jury found her guilty on four counts in San Jose, Calif., on Monday, January 3, 2022. (credit: Dai Sugano/MediaNews Group/The Mercury News)

When jurors deliberated the case of Elizabeth Holmes, the founder of failed medical diagnostic startup Theranos, two pieces of evidence helped them convict her of fraud: a faked pharmaceutical company report and inflated financial projections.

Holmes was convicted earlier this week of one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and three counts of wire fraud, all involving investors. She was acquitted of defrauding patients, and the jury deadlocked on charges that she defrauded three other investors. The four women and eight men who served as jurors reached their decision after more than 50 hours of deliberations.

On the four guilty counts, jurors found the evidence clearly convincing, with one juror describing two pieces as “smoking guns” in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. One piece was a Theranos-authored report that Holmes gave to investors; it had a Pfizer logo at the top of every page, making it look like the pharmaceutical company had either written or approved its findings. The second was a set of financial projections that Holmes shared with investors, including Lakeshore Capital Management, the DeVos family office. 

Enlarge / The new Nest Audio. (credit: Google)

Following a preliminary ruling in August, the US International Trade Commission has issued a final decision saying that Google infringed five Sonos smart speaker patents. It would be possible for this ruling to result in some products like the Nest Audio, Chromecast, and Pixel line being banned in the US, but Google has prepared ITC-approved software downgrades, which remove the infringing features from users’ products.

Sonos essentially invented the connected speaker category for streaming music, but the advent of voice assistants has led to Big Tech stomping all over Sonos’ territory. Sonos says that while it was pitching Google for support of Google Play Music, Google got a behind-the-scenes look at Sonos’ operations in 2013. Sonos says Google used that access to “blatantly and knowingly” copy Sonos’ features for the Google Home speaker, which launched in 2016. Sonos sued Google in early 2020.

Eddie Lazarus, the chief legal officer at Sonos, told The New York Times, “We appreciate that the ITC has definitively validated the five Sonos patents at issue in this case and ruled unequivocally that Google infringes all five. That is an across-the-board win that is surpassingly rare in patent cases.”