Self-driving cars are nearly ready for primetime, and so are the laser sensors that help them see the world. Lidar, which builds a 3-D map of a car's surroundings by firing millions of laser points a second and measuring how long they take to bounce back, has been in development since 2005, when a guy named Dave Hall made one for the Darpa Grand Challenge, an autonomous vehicle contest. In the decade-plus since then, if you wanted a lidar for your self-driving car, Velodyne was your only choice. Yet Velodyne's one-time monopoly has eroded in recent years, as dozens of lidar startups came to life, and robocar makers found their own way. Google's sister company Waymo put years and millions of dollars into developing a proprietary system.

During a test drive near Ford's Michigan headquarters, the team noticed something strange with its self-driving cars. Each car shifted slightly at the same point in the lane "as if they were avoiding a pothole," says Jim McBride, Ford's senior technical leader for autonomous cars. The problem wasn't the cars -- it was the map. The team had just updated its 3D map of the test route, which helps guide self-driving cars. But a minor glitch caused one pixel on the map to have the wrong data value. It told the car a spot in the ground was raised 10 inches, when it was perfectly level.

LG Electronics and Samsung Electronics have been long-time rivals when it comes to manufacturing appliances, smartphones and other devices, and now it looks like the two will once again butt heads in the self-driving car market. Apparently, LG has just been granted permission to test its autonomous cars on public roads, suggesting that it will soon be ready to compete against what Samsung has been developing. This Wednesday, LG exclusively disclosed to English language South Korean news site Korea Herald that it received permission to use its self-driving cars on public roads in its home country early this month. "We received the approval to test self-driving from the government on July 7 after applying for permission in May," an LG official said. LG's venture into the self-driving car market is seen as a move that would help it grow despite the slowing sales of its smartphones.

It was almost a flat year for Intel (NASDAQ:INTC) in 2016, as the stock was up roughly 5% over the year. In comparison, most of the Intel's competitors such as Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), Qualcomm (QCOM) and NVIDIA (NVDA) delivered huge returns to stockholders. However, that does not means Intel is out of the game, as it still holds 80% market share in the worldwide microprocessor market mainly due to its leading position in the PC industry. The company has been generating huge profits by selling high-end desktop processing chips to data centers. It is highly likely that CPUs will continue to see reasonable growth in data centers, as the company requires huge computation power to make use of the big data they have gathered. According to marketsandmarkets.com, the data center market is projected to reach $32.30 billion by 2020 from $18.56 billion in 2015, which represents a compound annual growth rate of 11.7%.