Month: February 2020

Enlarge / Akio Toyoda, president of Toyota Motor Corp., left, shakes hands with Kazuhiro Tsuga, president of Panasonic Corp., during a joint news conference in Tokyo, Japan, on Wednesday, Dec. 13, 2017. (credit: Tomohiro Ohsumi/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

On Monday, Panasonic and Toyota announced that they are creating a new joint venture to develop and build advanced batteries for electric vehicles. The new company will be called Prime Planet Energy and Solutions, and when it starts operating in April of this year, it will work on the development and production of prismatic lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles. It will also develop and manufacture more advanced energy storage technologies like solid state batteries. And this tech won't just be for Toyota vehicles—the announcement states that "the joint venture will supply batteries not only to Toyota but also, broadly and stably, to all customers."

Industry watchers may well have been expecting this news. Back at the beginning of 2019, we discovered that a joint venture between Panasonic and Toyota on battery tech was in the works, and most of the information we learned back then appears to have panned out. Prime Planet Energy and Solutions is 51 percent owned by Toyota and 49 percent owned by Panasonic, it will build batteries in Japan and China (employing around 5,100 people), and it plans to develop and build advanced high-capacity batteries including solid state cells.

It's not the only recent Panasonic/Toyota tie-up. Last May, the pair revealed plans to create another joint venture to fuse together Toyota's "mobility" initiatives and Panasonic's "lifestyle updates" (yes, I can hear you rolling your eyes) to create a "town development business," working on some of the same problems as are being explored in Columbus, Ohio as part of the Smart City movement.

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  OneWeb satellites are delivered to Baikonur, Kazakhstan, in January. [credit: Arianespace ]

For the better part of a year, SpaceX has gotten the lion's share of attention when it comes to mega-constellations and satellite Internet. Between May and January, the company launched 240 Starlink satellites into low Earth orbit, with more launches coming, and has talked of offering preliminary commercial service later this year.

But it was actually another company, OneWeb, that launched the first six satellites of its mega-constellation back in February, 2019. Initial tests of those satellites went well, the company said last summer. Now OneWeb is preparing for its second launch of 34 satellites on board a Soyuz rocket from Baikonur, Kazakhstan. The launch is scheduled for 4:42pm ET (21:42 UTC) on Thursday, February 6.

On the eve of Thursday's launch, Ars spoke with OneWeb Chief Executive Officer Adrián Steckel about the company's plans and how it will compete with half a dozen other firms looking at providing Internet from space.

Enlarge / Must work-from-homers always rely on a such a patchwork suite of apps? (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty)

When it comes to predicting the future of technology these last 20 years, Ars has had its occasional slam-dunk predictions mixed in with some admittedly uneven guesses. So I'm lucky to begin this article with a no-brainer conclusion: over the next five years, more offices and businesses across the globe will increase their reliance on work-from-home systems.

In other news, water is wet and bears defecate in the woods. In our connected world, computers are a likely common tool at almost any workplace—arguably they're more of a given than even having to be in a particular place. So long as you log in, get your work done, and communicate with colleagues, your computer can be on Mars for all your boss cares.

But how will more companies take the remote-workplace plunge, and what trends will emerge as a result? That's a tougher prediction to make, but I've been asked to poke my head out of my Tech Culture Editor cave to offer some answers based on my knowledge as an Ars staffer for six years—and as a "remote" worker for even longer than that. How long? My first job, in 1996, revolved around working from home as a newspaper columnist (my mom's home, to be accurate, since I was still in high school).