Polestar promised Apple CarPlay support for its EVs two years ago, and it's finally delivering. As The Verge explains, the car brand has released an over-the-air update for the Polestar 2 that makes CarPlay available on the Android Automotive-based sedan. If you'd rather use Apple Maps instead of Google Maps or prefer to talk to Siri in lieu of Google Assistant, you now have that choice as long as you connect your iPhone. The most fun part about driving a Polestar is driving it, but there's more to it. Our latest over-the-air update for the Polestar 2 comes with Apple CarPlay, allowing Polestar owners with an iPhone to change music, use apps, and communicate through Siri or the infotainment system pic.twitter.com/mulkjIUR6D

Baidu has already developed autonomous vehicle tech, but now plans to produce electric vehicles in partnership with Geely, the Chinese automaker that owns Volvo and Polestar, according to MSNBC. The idea is that Geely will design and manufacture the EVs, while Baidu, China's search equivalent to Google, will supply the technology. "China has become the world's largest market for EVs, and we are seeing EV consumers demanding next generation vehicles to be more intelligent," said Baidu CEO Robin Li in a statement. China's EV market is getting more crowded every day, thanks in part to government subsidies and rapidly expanding charging infrastructure. On top of incumbents like Tesla and domestic companies Nio, Xpeng Motors and others, other tech companies like Foxconn (with Byton) and Alibaba are jumping in.

Public transportation plays a critical role in people's daily life. It has been proven that public transportation is more environmentally sustainable, efficient, and economical than any other forms of travel. However, due to the increasing expansion of transportation networks and more complex travel situations, people are having difficulties in efficiently finding the most preferred route from one place to another through public transportation systems. To this end, in this paper, we present Polestar, a data-driven engine for intelligent and efficient public transportation routing. Specifically, we first propose a novel Public Transportation Graph (PTG) to model public transportation system in terms of various travel costs, such as time or distance. Then, we introduce a general route search algorithm coupled with an efficient station binding method for efficient route candidate generation. After that, we propose a two-pass route candidate ranking module to capture user preferences under dynamic travel situations. Finally, experiments on two real-world data sets demonstrate the advantages of Polestar in terms of both efficiency and effectiveness. Indeed, in early 2019, Polestar has been deployed on Baidu Maps, one of the world's largest map services. To date, Polestar is servicing over 330 cities, answers over a hundred millions of queries each day, and achieves substantial improvement of user click ratio.

I have worked in the Impact Investment sector for more than ten years. In the past four years, my work in this sector has been focused in the entrepreneurial ecosystem. With my colleagues at ClearlySo, I have been advising impactful early-stage businesses on their business modelling and capital raising. We have raised investments to support their growth strategies. Focusing on the clean-tech and energy, my portfolio of clients includes Tonik Energy, Upside Energy, and LettUs Grow.