Bryan Lee, the Microsoft executive most recently in charge of business development for the company’s Zune portable media player, is retiring to “pursue personal interests.” Taking over the business development work for the Zune brand will be J. Allard, the man widely credited with building Microsoft’s Xbox brand and Xbox Live services into a serious player in the video game console market.
Lee came to Microsoft in 2000, following a long stint at Sony Pictures Entertainment handling contract negotiations. Both Lee and Allard had hands in creating both the Xbox and the Zune, and Lee led most of the negotiations with studios, music distributors, and other content providers for licensing Zune content: including the now infamous dollar-per-player royalty being paid to Universal Music.
Microsoft says Lee’s retirement does not indicate any dissatisfaction with his management of the the Zune business, but it’s certain that J. Allard will face significant challenges trying to built the Zune brand. The initial Zune player has been widely criticized for its crippled Wi-Fi sharing capability and for abandoning the PlaysForSure compatibility standard Microsoft held out to music player partners wanting to use the company’s digital rights management technology. But, as with the Xbox, Microsoft says it’s taking a long-term view of the Zune, looking to establish and grow a family of devices and services which, over time, will eventually challenge Apple, the iPod, and iTunes for the digital media market. Although Microsoft certainly has the financial resources to produce Zune products and services for an indefinite period of time without success in the marketplace, shareholders and industry watchers may take a dim view of Microsoft pouring money into a project over the long term without at least some signs of momentum—so Allard may have his work cut out for him.
San Francisco startup Dimensional advertised for people to walk robot dogs through city streets. The New York Times reported that the job could include carrying a roughly 33-pound robot back to the office if it overheated. A lift home is an awkward requirement for a labor-saving machine.
Keeping the hardware running is only one challenge. Anthropic's robotics tests found that language models mostly failed when controlling joints directly, but did better when directing trained controllers. Giving an AI agent a body doesn't teach it to handle ordinary household objects.
Soon, a mattress protector may be more than a bed cover. Australian medtech company Sleeptite and researchers at RMIT University have received a US patent for FlexiSense, a smart bedding technology that tracks body position and posture to help caregivers identify when older residents may be at risk of falling.
The technology is being developed for Sleeptite’s in-bed monitoring system, REMi, and was recently on display at The MedTech Conference in Boston. A peer-reviewed study in Flexible and Printed Electronics says the sensors can also be made at scale without sacrificing performance or durability.
AI companies spend enormous amounts of time convincing us their technology is safe and secure. But what happens when those same companies become targets of increasingly sophisticated AI-powered attacks? Anthropic, the company behind Claude, is now facing that question. According to a Washington Post report, cybersecurity startup Cathedral discovered vulnerabilities that let its researchers access sensitive information in Anthropic's internal systems.
The researchers used AI agents to identify potential entry points in less than 12 hours. Interestingly, they didn't need to crack Claude itself. Instead, they exploited weaknesses in third-party business applications that Anthropic uses for everyday operations. Anthropic's security testing program disclosed the findings, which allows outside researchers to identify and report vulnerabilities.