2. Club Weekly News NOV 01 2022
Part 1 Check Out the latest Tech News!
Samsung Kicks Advanced-Chipmaking Race Into High Gear With Road Map
Samsung Electronics Co. unveiled targets for making its most advanced chips, detailing for the first time how its production road map would compare with that of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. in their closely watched technology race. On Oct 3 2022, Samsung’s contract chipmaking unit said it would start manufacturing chips on the 2-nanometer production process in 2025 and the 1.4-nanometer production process in 2027. That advances from its current 3-nanometer chip production that began in June and which the company called an industry first. That timeline is similar to TSMC, which had said it would start mass production of 3-nanometer chips later this year and subsequently introduce other variations. By 2025, it will also move into the 2-nanometer process. It hasn’t detailed its plans beyond that time (Wall Street Journal, 2022).
The Next Big Battle Between Google and Apple Is for the Soul of Your Car
Now that cars, especially electric ones, are becoming something like smartphones on wheels, some of the dynamics that played out in the early days of the mobile industry are playing out in the auto industry. Competition between the two kingpins of the smartphone industry has in the past couple of years gained new momentum, with Google racking up auto-maker partnerships for the automobile-based version of its Android operating system, and Apple teasing plans to expand its software capabilities in the car. For the car companies involved, which face the nearly impossible challenge of producing software on par with what tech companies offer, working with Silicon Valley can address consumer desires while also staving off competition from companies like Tesla. And yet there is an inherent tension in these partnerships over who controls the user experience and the valuable data produced. Taken together, these forces mean that every car maker is having to navigate a delicate balance between doing things in-house and signing partnerships that cede control, and potentially some sources of revenue. These choices are leading to a vast and confusing new ecosystem in which “mobile” device refers to the car, and not just the phone. Until now, consumers didn’t need to care about what software was running in their car, but increasingly, they may (Wall Street Journal, 2022).
Part 2 Stories of famous technology company founders:
Sergey Brin, known as a co-founder of Google LLC, is also a business magnate and computer scientist. He received both his bachelor and master’s degree of Computer Science, and also won honors in computer science and mathematics when he was 19, which enhanced his technical skills. But how did he decide to enter this field of study? One of the reasons could be that his father, a mathematics professor, encouraged him to learn mathematics, which I believe further developed Sergey’s way of thinking and his awareness of the importance of data. During his graduate life at Stanford University, where he focused on developing data mining systems, he met his future business partner, Larry Page. Larry was extending "the concept of inferring the importance of a research paper from its citations in other papers" at that time. It was this extensive exploring throughout the process that led them to their final product, the web search engine.
Travis Kalanick is the co-founder and former CEO of Uber. Travis’s parents were retail advertising practitioner and civil engineer respectively. When Travis was young, he was always eager to win. He sold knives door-to-door for direct sales company Cutco. When he was 18, he started a test preparation company, "New Way Academy", with his classmate’s father. Raised in such a business environment and with such characters as passionate and competitive, Travis also equipped himself by studying Computer Engineering and Business Economics in the University of California, Los Angeles. I believe these are all the components for him to found a technology company.
Huateng(Pony) Ma, founder, chairman and chief executive officer of Tencent Holdings Ltd. Having graduated with a bachelor’s degree of Computer Science, he became a programming engineer, working on the development of pager software. His early experience taught him that the point of developing software is to use it, not to entertain the writer. And I think this insight into products also prepared him to develop the later popular software, WeChat and QQ. Just as he said, “Keep finding and correcting one or two small problems every day, and the product will be polished out in less than a year.”
From the three stories above, we can find something in common among them:
They are passionate and interested in what they do.
They have technical skills and relevant educational background, which are their “hardware”.
They put themselves into an environment where they could gain relevant insights from either professionals or learning by doing.
Here we translate these three into what we can do:
Any difficulties we encounter along our way to a data person should be seen as interesting challenges.
We try our best to master what we learn in class and put it into practice.
We reach out to people in different industries, which can also be met by subscribing APAN Club’s newsletter, and seeking for opportunities to work in real life.
Want more stories? Watch this video to check out the story of Professor Day Yi!