Google heeft de details gepubliceerd van zijn demonstratie voor 'quantum supremacy'. De quantumchip van het bedrijf heeft in tweehonderd seconden een berekening uitgevoerd waarover een klassieke computer tienduizend jaar zou doen. IBM zet kanttekeningen bij de claim.

WeWork's value has tumbled, about 2,000 employees are being cut and many investors are nursing losses after the firm's bailout. But founder Adam Neumann is still a billionaire. From a report: SoftBank's proposed rescue package of WeWork involves Neumann selling about $1 billion of stock and getting a $185 million consulting fee from the Japanese firm even as the deal values the struggling office-sharing company at $8 billion, according to people familiar with the transaction. That's down from an estimated $47 billion at the start of the year. Neumann will leave the company's board though he still can assign two seats. On these terms, Neumann's net worth would be at least $1 billion, according to calculations by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. While that's a fraction of what it was on paper in January -- the last time SoftBank made an investment in WeWork -- it's a remarkable return from a business that has never made a profit and seen its initial public offering spurned by skeptical investors.

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Apple Pay has overtaken the Starbucks mobile app to become the most popular mobile payment system in the United States, claims a new report out today. From a report: According to eMarketer, Apple Pay became the market leader last year, when 27.7 million Americans used the app to make a purchase. Since then, however, Apple Pay has grown even faster than expected. In 2019, Apple Pay will have 30.3 million users, or 47.3 percent of mobile payment users. That compares with Starbucks' 25.2 million customers via its mobile app in the same year, representing 39.4 percent of mobile payment users. "Apple Pay has benefited from the spread of new point-of-sale (POS) systems that work with the NFC signals Apple Pay runs on," said eMarketer principal analyst Yory Wurmser. "The same trend should also help Google Pay and Samsung Pay, but they will continue to split the Android market."

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Google said on Wednesday that it had achieved a long-sought breakthrough called "quantum supremacy," which could allow new kinds of computers to do calculations at speeds that are inconceivable with today's technology. From a report: In a paper published in the science journal Nature, Google said its research lab in Santa Barbara, Calif., had reached a milestone that scientists had been working toward since the 1980s: Its quantum computer performed a task that isn't possible with current technology. In this case, a mathematical calculation that the largest supercomputers could not complete in under 10,000 years was done in 3 minutes 20 seconds, Google said in its paper. Scientists likened Google's announcement to the Wright brothers' first plane flight in 1903 -- proof that something is really possible even though it may be years before it can fulfill its potential. "The original Wright flyer was not a useful airplane," said Scott Aaronson, a computer scientist at the University of Texas at Austin who reviewed Google's paper before publication. "But it was designed to prove a point. And it proved the point." A quantum machine, the result of more than a century's worth of research into a type of physics called quantum mechanics, operates in a completely different manner from regular computers. It relies on the mind-bending ways some objects act at the subatomic level or when exposed to extreme cold, like the metal chilled to nearly 460 degrees below zero inside Google's machine. One day, researchers believe, these devices could power advances in artificial intelligence or easily overwhelm the encryption that protects computers vital to national security. Because of that, the governments of the United States and China consider quantum computing a national security priority. Further reading: Interview of Google CEO Sundar Pichai, who explains why quantum computing could be as important for Google as AI.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Information: There are a lot of ways companies can rack up high bills for using cloud services, sometimes unexpectedly. One particularly stiff expense is the cost of shifting data from one cloud provider's servers to another provider, or to a company's own data center. The Information has learned just how much some companies have had to pay for these "data transfer" costs, as they're called. The chart above shows how much 10 of the top customers of Amazon Web Services -- the dominant cloud provider -- paid for data transfer services in 2017 and 2018. The chart, which is based on internal AWS sales figures obtained by The Information, show that data transfer charges for one customer, Apple, approached $50 million in 2017. That represented about 6.5% of Apple's total AWS bill of $775 million for that year, the sales figures show. Seven of the 10 companies saw increases of at least 50% in their AWS data transfer bills last year compared to the year before. The reason for the high bills could "stem from growth in the number of users on a company's web service, longer-than-average usage sessions and the addition of data-intensive features such as video," the report says.

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