[HN Gopher] Apple has reportedly acquired Datakalab
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Apple has reportedly acquired Datakalab
Author : mikece
Score : 132 points
Date : 2024-04-22 13:49 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (9to5mac.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (9to5mac.com)
| BelleOfTheBall wrote:
| Seems like they will really push VisionOS, which is cool.
| Hopefully this leads to innovative ways to use it, because those
| initial videos of pasta timers and "smarter" vacuuming were not
| at all what I wanted.
| azinman2 wrote:
| What do you want instead?
| orangepanda wrote:
| I want a mini game as I chop cucumbers. And a wall of my
| achievements that's shared with anyone in proximity.
| soraminazuki wrote:
| Distracting people with mini games while they're holding a
| knife sounds like a bad idea.
| sunshinerag wrote:
| EU is coming up with a consent popup to fix this
| situation. It will flash a hazard warning and will turn
| on haptic feedback till you drop the knife.
| hn_acker wrote:
| Nitpick: The EU didn't mandate intrusive consent popups.
| That was malicious compliance and/or laziness by
| advertisers, GDPR "tool" developers, and website owners.
| Website developers could've put an "opt in to tracking"
| option in a separate settings page that users would click
| on a gear icon in the top right corner to access.
| hightrix wrote:
| Why does it have to be a "distracting" experience? What
| if the game was showing you where to cut to get uniform
| slices and grading the uniformity of your cuts? Then
| you'd be focused on the activitiy at hand while still
| enjoying that sweet sweet gamified dopamine hit.
| xattt wrote:
| I prefer the count-the-rice-grains-in-a-sushi-roll genre
| instead.
| anthomtb wrote:
| People should really use a mandoline rather than a knife
| while playing mini games. You'll slice both your cukes
| and fingers much more evenly.
| mrcwinn wrote:
| If I were within your proximity, I can assure you I have no
| interest in your minigame progress while you chopped
| cucumbers. I would however hope that you had avoided
| physical injury.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I think it was juicy sarcasm. I laughed!
| asoneth wrote:
| Apologies for explaining the joke, but pretty sure the
| cucumber chopping and wall of achievements is a reference
| to https://vimeo.com/46304267
| vik0 wrote:
| Oh wow, it's been a while since I've seen a vimeo link.
| Can't believe it's still a thing
| EasyMark wrote:
| This sounds like a great way to chop off fingertips. Take
| it from someone who has done "just the tip" once, a sharp
| knife will do it with almost no effort, just like slicing
| through a tomato
| dewey wrote:
| Personally for me: A real smart assistant that knows all the
| context, calendar invites, messages, photos from using Apple
| products for many years.
|
| Alternatively: Siri that can reliably turn lights on and off
| again.
| bombcar wrote:
| At this point I'd be satisfied with a Siri is that just a
| literal link to a command line. It's horribly useless as it
| is now, 80% or less accuracy on basic things.
| pulvinar wrote:
| I want that too, but it'll have to be a lot more secure,
| as now it would be trivial to record me saying Hey Siri
| and play that back.
| agys wrote:
| Games! This device begs for high end VR games!
| croes wrote:
| Without controllers?
| mrguyorama wrote:
| With a 2 hour battery life?
| throwaway5959 wrote:
| Can it not be plugged in and operated with a very long
| cable? That's what I do with my Quest 3.
| hwbunny wrote:
| After social media depleted the dopamine receptors, now time
| to give in the final punch :D.
| twodave wrote:
| I want to force kitchen staff to wear this and have it remind
| them to change gloves based on what they've touched either
| being a potential allergen or contaminant. Makes me cringe
| when I see people who work with food also working the
| register, for instance. Too easy to get lazy and not change
| the gloves.
| fooker wrote:
| Sounds dystopian. Would you want to be forced to wear a
| heavy headset that nagged you to comment your code and
| write unit tests?
| viscanti wrote:
| If it means that I get to work with well commented and
| tested code, that might be worth it.
| fooker wrote:
| It's an interesting philosophical dilemma.
|
| What else would you be willing to force on everyone to
| improve (in your opinion) your circumstances?
|
| We clearly do this a bit (taxes, vaccines, etc), but
| finding the threshold is very tricky, and can lead to
| pretty authoritarian environments.
| hhshhhhjjjd wrote:
| Well, as someone living in the United States, I live with
| the saddening understanding that our military spending
| indicates that we're willing to immiserate large swaths
| of the world's population for increasingly diminishing
| returns.
|
| It's authoritarian enough that I have no choice but to
| support our military decisions through the taxes I pay.
| fooker wrote:
| It's colonialism without the responsibility of
| administering large populations.
|
| I don't know if there's a solution though, there are
| other sharks vying to do far worse.
| twodave wrote:
| We've already agreed to certain food standards. The fact
| that people don't follow them is enough for me to say we
| need something more strict. Is it a headset? Maybe not.
| But periodic training and availability of PPE aren't
| doing the job either. The shortage of labor at the low
| end of the market doesn't help, either. What I'd rather
| have than a germophobic headset is for people to take
| pride in their work (whether you serve food or write
| code), but that also seems to be a lost cause. I'm lucky
| if I can get a restaurant to count the number of items in
| the bag before handing it to the delivery driver.
| GrinningFool wrote:
| If it meant that my code wouldn't make other people
| sick...
| twodave wrote:
| Who says it has to be heavy? While I'm wishing I'll wish
| for it to weigh the same as a regular pair of glasses...
| 0x457 wrote:
| > Makes me cringe when I see people who work with food also
| working the register, for instance. Too easy to get lazy
| and not change the gloves.
|
| Where did you see that? I've seen people not change gloves
| before touching the register, but definitely change gloves
| after.
|
| Seems a horrible use case.
| EasyMark wrote:
| this seems like micromanagement taken to the next level and
| I hope if any such thing becomes "normal" that legislation
| will stop it. We aren't robots meant to react to green and
| red spots on an AR headset.
| supportengineer wrote:
| This joke gets made a lot, but I _really_ don 't want to
| live on this planet any more.
|
| I've spent a lifetime in software and what I want more than
| anything is to shut it all _off_.
| vundercind wrote:
| Around 2000-2005 I was in the "plug my brain into the
| Internet!" crowd.
|
| Now if you gave me a magic button that could permanently
| un-invent the whole thing... I really might press it.
| elsonrodriguez wrote:
| You might want to read Manna.
|
| https://marshallbrain.com/manna1
| sharpshadow wrote:
| Do they have to disclose how much they paid?
| ru552 wrote:
| Not if the acquired isn't public.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Apple is publicly listed, so Apple would have to disclose it
| if it was material (sufficiently high price).
| airstrike wrote:
| As a rule of thumb, not if immaterial to their financials,
| which in often the case for Apple given their size and M&A
| strategy (they rarely go for any sizeable acquisitions)
|
| Sometimes you can find a reference to it in the buyer's the
| next quarterly (10-Q) or annual (10-K) filing, but since again
| this is small, Apple will likely only mention it in passing and
| any sum paid will either be missing or lumped with a bunch of
| items to make it undiscernable. No upside in disclosing
|
| And then there's the issue of value vs dollars. Even if we knew
| how much they paid in dollars, we wouldn't know how much it was
| worth without some metric for _what_ they bought.
|
| The vanilla public-to-public case for stable industries like
| widget manufacturers is one company buys another for their
| future earnings or cashflows, hence ratios like P/E (Price per
| share divided by earnings per share) or Enterprise Value/EBITDA
| ((Market Cap+Debt+SimilarStuff)/EBITDA, with the usual caveat
| that EBITDA is not a perfect proxy for cash flow but it's
| somewhat more observable)
|
| In this case they likely bought IP and possibly some talent, so
| valuation there is a bit different. I don't have much
| experience with acquihires but I guess it just comes down to
| how much these specific folks required to take the deal rather
| than walk away...
| sharpshadow wrote:
| Thanks for the explanation. I figured it should appear in
| their quarterly and annual filing as u said.
|
| Since the startup is quite young I would also agree Apple
| could be interested in their talent.
| nxobject wrote:
| Interestingly, not the founders:
|
| > The report says that Datakalab's two founders did not
| join Apple, but multiple other employees did make the jump.
|
| Perhaps they're interested in IP, too. In any case, I don't
| quite know how to read Apple's strategy of picking small
| startups (PA Semi and Anobit being, in retrospect,
| surprisingly small for their impact).
| filoleg wrote:
| To the European Commission, yeah. To the public, no.
| breck wrote:
| Their website (2021 version):
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20210311020240/https://datakalab...
| kristjansson wrote:
| Not Mistral, for anyone else that reads the comments first.
| mritchie712 wrote:
| If the author was smart, they left the name out on purpose so
| people would click to check if it was mistral.
|
| You saved me that click.
| cdelsolar wrote:
| What is mistral
| littlestymaar wrote:
| French LLM company, founded by former meta engineer + a
| former French minister for good political leverage, they
| made the news after they raised EUR105M on a slide deck
| last June. They are quite close to the state of the art in
| terms of LLMs, both closed and open weights.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| somehow the BLOOM model was designed and implemented in
| France quite a long time ago (in LLM years).. so there is
| an informed crowd making leadership allocations..
| throwaway4220 wrote:
| Does clickbait still work? I feel like I am savvy to it but
| maybe it's an illusion ha
| chuckadams wrote:
| I clicked to see if it was Mistral, so yep, it works.
| OJFord wrote:
| I don't think it is in this case, it's just expecting that
| the reader hasn't heard of Datakalab and that the interesting
| thing is Apple and speculating about what they want with
| whatever they buy.
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| 1. I read the comments first
|
| 2. I was wondering if it was Mistral
| bratwurst3000 wrote:
| Thanks. That was my question
| yoh2292 wrote:
| So do we know how much it cost
| nennes wrote:
| Mandatory IT crowd reference:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UsP_2IGx1aU
| bratwurst3000 wrote:
| Does this mean Siri can soon do more than setting a timer ? ...
| even that doesn't work sometimes
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| Probably not, since this seems to be about on-device computer
| vision.
|
| Maybe Siri will be able to see that users are pissed off at it
| though?
| JacobiX wrote:
| One interesting coincidence is that the CEO worked previously at
| a startup that was also acquired by Apple (Emotient)
| seydor wrote:
| correlation implies causation
| boringg wrote:
| Second time makes the process a lot easier!
| zitterbewegung wrote:
| Less training and culture fit.
| BonoboIO wrote:
| You know the guys, you speak the same language and
| everybody likes money. Perfect fit.
| gcervantes wrote:
| Interesting. 2 times acquired haha.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Harbinger of Applocalypse?
|
| (For customers; I have no doubt investors and the core team are
| happy.)
| paxys wrote:
| Coincidence or the fact that he already had the insider
| connections to make the second deal happen?
| Raed667 wrote:
| 11 employees on Linkedin
| martinlexow wrote:
| From a developers perspective, Apple's computer vision frameworks
| are already top-notch. I'm wondering how AI could further enhance
| the experience on the Apple Vision Pro. The greatest deficiency
| seems to me currently to lie in ideas for how this technology can
| be used sensibly.
| figassis wrote:
| Jarvis OS?
| roody15 wrote:
| Apple Vision Pro in its current state almost looks like a
| parody of future tech. Heavy.. bulky ... limited battery...
| limited peripheral vision. Just watch YouTube videos of people
| using the device. So far version 1.0 is a swing and a miss in
| my book.
| macintux wrote:
| If you consider it a development kit (albeit a very expensive
| one) it makes more sense.
|
| Just like the first iPhone wasn't practical for everyone,
| this will require a few more generations.
|
| (Although I suspect it's never going to be useful for me,
| with my weird prescription.)
| jackstraw14 wrote:
| True, but it seems more like it's placing a bet in the VR
| space like the first iPhone did. No one wanted iPhone v1
| forever, and so I think the next few versions of the Vision
| Pro will be pretty interesting if this is the starting point.
| It also raises the bar of expectation for other VR/AR
| headsets. Seems like a net benefit for an area of tech that
| has been pretty stagnant for a while.
| cm2187 wrote:
| iphone 1 was way better than any of the alternatives at the
| time. Probably a better analogy were the bulky portable
| phones of the early 90s, which ultimately became
| smartphones, but after two decades!
| jackstraw14 wrote:
| Well, my point was that the first iPhone set a standard
| for smartphones that wasn't there before. After iPhone
| v1, people knew that "apps" were how things were going to
| be packaged and sold in the App Store and other app
| stores. It was better than anything else at the time like
| the Vision Pro seems to be also.
| threeseed wrote:
| Vision Pro is way way better than the alternatives.
|
| And the original iPhone was almost unusably slow and
| really didn't do much.
|
| Waiting half a minute for NYT to load and then seeing
| constant checkerboards got old very quickly.
| axoltl wrote:
| I use my Vision Pro every single day. I love sitting in my
| yard in the sun with my Mac mirrored in the center, a music
| player hanging out on my left, a web browser with
| documentation on the right. Using the double loop strap I
| don't even notice I'm wearing it after a few minutes and I
| treat the battery more as a UPS than something to run off of
| except for when I go make myself coffee and play a game or
| watch a video while doing so.
|
| Having used other VR headsets (like the Valve Index) the
| Vision Pro is clearly leaps and bounds ahead of the
| competition, not just in hardware but software as well. After
| using the index for a bit everything would always feel a bit
| "weird" after taking the headset off. I don't get that at all
| with the Vision Pro.
|
| I can't wait for VisionOS 2.0 to deliver a closer macOS
| integration (being able to give individual macOS applications
| their own windows (a la VMWare Fusion), and use eye tracking
| as the cursor) but even the current version is - for my
| specific use case - an absolute game changer.
| baxtr wrote:
| Can you elaborate on the "sensible" part? Do you not see
| applications for it or do you believe the applications are
| dangerous or not useful.
| esafak wrote:
| Never heard of them. Anything particularly interesting about this
| acquisition; they do many?
| xyst wrote:
| The death of a company is when it's acquired by
| Google/Microsoft/Apple. Founders get the golden parachute,
| investors get their 100X exit.
|
| Whoever is left after the acquisition is left to babysit the
| dinosaurs. Maybe leadership decides to shelve the IP, kill the
| project and any active development. Move promising assets to
| other teams or transfer them as backfill.
|
| After dust settles. The "dead weight" is killed off.
| esafak wrote:
| Are WhatsApp, Yoube, and Instagram dead? All acquisitions.
|
| Consider also that many companies would never be started if
| their founders had no option of selling them.
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