ShinyShiny tech roundup: Tesla market value hits $1 trillion


Tesla surpassed a market value of $1 trillion on Monday, making it the fifth such firm to reach the milestone. Shares in the electric carmaker climbed 12.6% after it struck a deal to sell 100,000 vehicles to the car rental firm Hertz. Tesla has been the world’s most valuable carmaker for some time, but brands like Ford and GM make more cars. Previously only Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and Google-owner Alphabet have reached a $1tn valuation. For years, Tesla struggled to ramp up production of its cars, leading some investors to speculate it would fail. But last year the company, led by billionaire Elon Musk, upped its game and became profitable for the first time, prompting its shares to take off. BBC 

Britain’s most classified material is to be hosted in the cloud by Amazon after GCHQ struck a deal with the American tech giant, it has been reported. MI5 and MI6, will also use the system provided by Amazon’s cloud computing arm AWS to store secret data as part of the deal, according to the Financial Times. All the agencies’ data will be held in Britain and Amazon will not have access to information stored in the system, according to reports. However, concerns are likely to be raised about the privacy and sovereignty implications of such material being hosted by a non-British company. Telegraph 

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said recent claims against the social media giant are an attempt to “paint a false picture of our company”. Whistleblower Frances Haugen has told MPs that groups on the social media site can be “dangerous” because they use algorithms that “take people who have mainstream interests and push them to extreme interests”. She said groups can become “echo chambers” that reinforce people’s opinions and gave the example that users with left-wing opinions can be pushed to the radical left, while those looking for healthy recipes can be pushed towards anorexia content. Sky News


A Northumbria University academic is preparing to showcase an innovative virtual reality device at this year’s COP26 Climate Change summit which could help to revolutionise the construction industry. As an expert in sustainable construction in Northumbria’s Department of Architecture and Built Environment, Dr Zaid Alwan realised that visualising the impact of carbon in homes and buildings from day-to-day activities and energy use was the next step forward for the construction industry. He has developed the Digital Energy Estimation Tool (DEET) which utilises VR immersive reality to help architects, construction professional developers, planners, and even members of the public assess where energy is being used within buildings and make changes to make them more environmentally friendly. It can also be applied to larger-scale developments, including at a city planning and infrastructure level. Tech Digest

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin and other partners, including Boeing and Colorado-based company Sierra Space, have unveiled plans to build a commercial space station to be operated as a “mixed use business park” by the second half of this decade. The commercially developed, owned, and operated space station called Orbital Reef will be built in low Earth orbit, offering commerce, research, and tourism services, Blue Origin announced in a statement on Monday. With a volume nearly as big as that of the International Space Station, Blue Origin said Orbital Reef can accommodate up to 10 people, providing separate areas for living and conducting scientific research. Independent


Sony’s pretty adept at crafting compact yet capable mirrorless cameras. It’s not too bad at making smartphones either. So effectively, it would be a shrewd idea to meld the two into one device, right? That’s seemingly what the company’s new Xperia Pro-I is. The Sony Xperia Pro-I isn’t a direct successor of the original Xperia Pro, which debuted earlier this year. Instead of packing an HDMI out port that few seemingly embraced, the Xperia Pro-I brings in a 1-inch primary camera sensor that dominates the phone’s rear plate. It sits behind a 24mm lens which can shoot at f/2.0 and f/4.0. It’s by no means the first 1-inch camera phone we’ve seen out in the wild, but it might be more accessible to most than the Sharp Aquos R6, or Leica’s Leitz Phone 1. Android Authority 

Chris Price