Google Intelligent Products Essentials is a new integrated solution designed to help enterprise clients quickly get hardware products online with a distributed Internet of Things. Intelligent Products Essentials aggregates critical components to launch distributed IoT and edge computing solutions. Essentially turn-key, Essentials does require a third-party system integrator to implement the system. As with other new offerings unveiled this week at the Google Cloud Next virtual event, Essentials is underpinned by analytics tools and designed to help organizations mine value from data for new and existing products. Read more

Light Field Lab is developing a “naked-eye” holographic technology called SolidLight, which essentially creates high-resolution 3D objects in the real world using light (think the “Star Trek” holodeck or Princess Leia uttering “Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi” — but better than the actual hologram tech we’ve seen in recent years). “We’re creating a world where content escapes the screen and merges with reality,” claims the Light Field website. SolidLight builds freestanding 3D objects using what the company describes as a “broad-spectrum, complex-amplitude, dense converging wavefront.” Read more

Microsoft and Nvidia have trained what they describe as the most powerful AI-driven language model to date, the Megatron-Turing Natural Language Generation model (MT-NLG), which has “set the new standard for large-scale language models in both model scale and quality,” the firms say. As the successor to the companies’ Turing NLG 17B and Megatron-LM, the new MT-NLG has 530 billion parameters, or “3x the number of parameters compared to the existing largest model of this type” and demonstrates unmatched accuracy in a broad set of natural language tasks. Read more

Apple is expanding its Los Angeles footprint, building new regional headquarters in the northern part of Culver City. Construction is in progress on two adjacent buildings comprising more than 550,000 square feet on a lot flanked by National, Venice and Washington boulevards. Apple says the complex will house teams working on Apple TV+, Apple Music, engineering and artificial intelligence at a site near the new Ivy Station development and Metro Expo Line stop. Apple already has more than 1,500 employees working in a leased 128,000-square-foot Culver City office.  Read more

Nielsen is relaunching its streaming measurement solutions as a single suite of ad-supported and subscription-based services that now captures 100 percent of activity across content, ads and platforms, the New York-based ratings and analytics firm says. Embattled of late after decades as measurement’s gold standard, Nielsen says its new emphasis on one-stop streaming measurement comes as U.S. consumers “now spend over a quarter of their total TV time” streaming. The new suite aims to give content creators, platforms, studios and advertisers a detailed look at who is streaming, what they’re watching, when and for how long. Read more