Month: June 2016

Watch out! Once you drink Amazon Prime's kool-aid, you may find yourself renewing the service... forever. (Or, at least, for a third year.) (credit: Rachel Murray / Getty Images)

Amazon isn't likely to release granular data about its Prime subscribers anytime soon, which means a privately run survey has a little more weight than we might otherwise give it—especially with a conclusion as resounding as the one drawn by Consumer Intelligence Research Partners on Tuesday. The firm's latest report estimated an Amazon Prime retention rate that may only be rivaled by alcohol, cigarettes, and other drugs: 96 percent.

That's how many Prime members elect to renew the service after two full years of use, according to CIRP's estimate (which it surveys of 2,108 users. CIRP's numbers also found that 91 percent of one-year subscribers elect to renew for a second Prime year, while 73 percent of the service's free-trial users decide to pay for Prime.

The survey tracked renewal rates in all three of those cases, dating back as far as the second fiscal quarter of 2014, and it found that 30-day trial upgraders slowed down from June of 2014 until September of last year—which CIRP's study authors attributed to the March 2014 bump in Prime fees from $79 to $99. The rates slowly climbed from that point on, and they've had an upward trend in the other categories, as well—one-year renewals are up from 81 percent in early 2014, and two-year renewals have climbed from 81 percent that year, as well.

(credit: L'Ubuesque Boîte à Savon)

On Wednesday afternoon, Uber said that it had received a $3.5 billion investment from the Saudi Arabia Public Investment Fund. That makes it the biggest investment ever raised in a single round by a venture-backed company. In exchange, a managing director at the Saudi fund, Yasir Al Rumayyan, will take a seat on Uber’s board, according to the New York Times.

Uber has been a presence in Saudi Arabia since 2014, and it’s grown rapidly from there. In the country, women aren’t allowed to drive and their travel is often restricted without the permission of a male guardian. To get around, women either hire private drivers or go through licensed taxi or limo companies to travel throughout the country’s major cities. Speaking to male strangers is also verboten, and according to Fast Company, Uber only works through those licensed limo companies that had been operating with the monarchy's permission for years before Uber’s arrival. The company has said that approximately 80 percent of riders in Saudi Arabia are women.

Uber’s value proposition is that it consolidates taxi and limo information, making it easier to order a car and reducing wait times for rides. The company also helps with residency and work permit paperwork for foreign drivers in the country.

Enlarge / The current (chunky, old) Thunderbolt Displays. (credit: Apple)

Remember the Thunderbolt Display? Because sometimes it seems like Apple doesn't; it's been nearly five years since the last time the monitor-plus-laptop-dock was updated, and it's increasingly an anachronism as high-resolution Retina displays take over the lineup. For some time now, the Thunderbolt Display has actually been larger and heavier than the 27-inch iMac, which has a whole computer inside of it.

One of the roadblocks to releasing a new 5K Retina-capable version of the Thunderbolt Display is the DisplayPort graphics interface, which in its current iteration (1.2) is only capable of driving a 4K display at 60Hz over a single cable. Even if Macs picked up Thunderbolt 3 ports, they still wouldn't support DisplayPort 1.3. Apple had to develop its own timing controller to make the built-in display work on the 5K iMac, but it can't drive an external display of the same resolution, nor can any current Apple laptop.

One potential solution, according to a report from 9to5Mac, is to put a dedicated GPU in the display itself—this would allow Apple to use the same timing controller from the 5K iMac to drive a 5K Thunderbolt display. This might have seemed like a strange solution a year or two ago, but Thunderbolt 3's adoption in the wider PC industry is already making it possible to use external graphics enclosures like the Razer Core to add dedicated graphics to thin-and-light Ultrabooks and mini PCs. Changes coming to OS X will allegedly allow hot plugging of one of these displays, switching seamlessly from the integrated GPU in the laptop to the dedicated GPU inside the monitor. Whether that dedicated GPU could simultaneously drive the Thunderbolt Display and the laptop's built-in panel isn't clear, but it should at least be technically possible since none of Apple's current laptops have 4K-or-greater displays.

Theranos CEO and founder Elizabeth Holmes. (credit: Max Morse for TechCrunch)

With bunk blood tests and medical equipment, possible federal sanctions, a criminal probe, voided patient reports, and possible class action lawsuits, Theranos has taken quite the hit.

On Wednesday, Forbes put dollar values to that hit. The business magazine reported that the company’s valuation—based on “a dozen venture capitalists, analysts and industry experts”—has been downgraded from its $9 billion estimate 2014 to just $800 million now. And because Forbes’ valuation of Theranos CEO and founder, Elizabeth Holmes, was based solely on her 50 percent stake in the company, their estimate of her net worth dropped from $4.5 billion to “nothing.”

In 2015, Forbes ranked Holmes the number one self-made women in America.

An artist's rendering of a brain tumor that can be killed off with the help of a virus. (credit: C. Bickel / Science Translational Medicine (2016))

To defeat the deadliest of cancers, it's time to unleash the viruses.

In a small clinical trial with brain cancer patients, a tumor-seeking virus successfully invaded cancer cells and smuggled in molecular detonators, allowing doctors to selectively blast the deadly growths with a toxic drug. In the trial’s 45 participants, who were fighting the most aggressive forms of brain cancer known, the virus-drug combo nearly doubled their average survival time while showing no dangerous side effects. The finding, published Wednesday in the journal Science Translational Medicine, demonstrates the utility of such viruses and also provides a green light for the treatment strategy to move on to more trials.

These brain cancers usually have few treatment options and lead to “dismal clinical outcomes,” the authors wrote. However, this new viral therapy has “the potential to fill this medical need,” they concluded.

Don't expect to see cars like this on Parisian streets after this summer (unless it's a weekend). (credit: Don O'Brien @ Flickr)

Parisians with cars built before 1997 are going to need to head to the nearest car dealership if they want to keep driving in the city after July 1.

The French capital has experienced quite horrific air pollution in the last few years, and there was a massive spike in March 2015 that saw the city's air quality drop lower than that of Beijing, China. After trying out temporary restrictions to vehicle traffic, Les Echos reports that the city has decided to implement new rules that will ban older and more polluting vehicles from its streets on weekdays. Those restrictions will also tighten over time; in 2020, only cars built since 2011 will be allowed.

The vehicle classification scheme means you get one of these window stickers based on which Euro emissions standard your vehicle complies with.

This announcement follows a decision by the French government to finalize a nation-wide scheme of ranking vehicle emissions (the system is based on the European emissions standards). Any vehicle made on or before December 31, 1996 was built to conform with Euro 1, the weakest of these standards, and it's these cars that are no longer allowed in the capital. Pre-2000 motorbikes and other two-wheeled vehicles are also on the hit list.

(credit: Lee Hutchinson)

When it comes to succeeding in the marketplace with an alternative energy vehicle, building a good car is only one part of the equation. If you want lots of people to adopt the new technology, they have to be able to recharge it regularly and with ease. It's arguably a reason that Tesla's cars have been such a hit. Fifteen minutes on a supercharger will give an empty Model S or Model X a range of more than 100 miles, enough to reach the next supercharger (lather, rinse, repeat).

Even more appealing is the fact that those Model S and Model X drivers don't have to pay anything for the privilege; access to the company's supercharger network is factored into the purchase price (although it was a $2,500 option for the less-powerful Model S at one point). Unfortunately for the more than 400,000 people who've ordered a Model 3, this won't be the case. During a shareholder call on Tuesday, Elon Musk explained that economics mean that Tesla is not going to offer that same deal to customers of the $40,000 electric vehicle.

The cheapest Model S costs $71,500 before any tax incentives or rebates, and most customers spend a lot more than that to buy the more powerful 90kWh version. By contrast, the Model 3 will almost cost half that amount, produced in much larger volume. It is likely that Tesla will offer Model 3 customers a cost option for lifetime access to the network, but Musk told shareholders that the company will have to charge Model 3 owners something, because it hasn't worked out how to do it for free.

Enlarge / Guys, I need you to squeeze closer together if we're going to get all of you in one photo!

Since Overwatch's launch last week, there has been a proliferation of online lists ranking the game's 21 characters on their raw power, or their effectiveness in certain modes, or their ability to counter certain other characters, or whatever metric you'd like.

Those lists are useful and fine for what they are. But after playing the game extensively for the last week or so (and seeing our beta impressions validated in a post-launch environment), we thought it would be more useful to rank the characters by how much fun we've had playing as each of them.

Below, Ars gaming contributor Steven Strom and I place every single Overwatch character into one of three self-explanatory tiers: "Fun," "Meh," and "Not Fun." These rankings are based partly on how useful the characters are to helping the team (because winning is fun), but they're more focused on how interesting and versatile they are for inventive and satisfying play. The rankings all assume the character is filling a needed hole in the team, too. A team of six Tracers is a lot less fun than a team where other characters can help protect her, for example.

Mare Island in Vallejo, CA has been an abandoned naval shipyard for years. (credit: Thomas Hawk)

Electric vehicle startup Faraday Future doesn’t have a production-ready car yet, but it has said it wants to get to that milestone within two years. The company just broke ground on a $1 billion (£0.7 billion), 3 million-square-foot factory in North Las Vegas in April, and now it wants another factory on Mare Island, a former naval shipyard located in Vallejo, a city north of San Francisco.

On Tuesday evening, the Vallejo City Council unanimously approved a six-month exclusive negotiating contract with FF LLC, a special-purpose subsidiary of Faraday Future, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Over the next six months, the company will solidify its proposal for the 157-acre site and present it to third-party lawyers and consultants representing the city. Faraday Future has agreed that it will pay the city’s legal and consulting fees as well as a $200,000 non-refundable negotiation fee, the Times says.