While wind turbines and solar cells generate power only when there is wind and sun, most rivers always flow and most ocean shores always experience tidal currents. At a recent energy summit organized by the U.S. Energy Department, a company from Maine displayed an innovative submersible generator that effectively harvests power from shallow rivers and tidal currents. VOA’s George Putic has more.
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A recent fatality involving one of Uber’s self-driving cars may have created uncertainty and doubt regarding the future of autonomous vehicles, but it’s not stopping automakers who say autonomous and self-driving vehicles are here to stay. At the New York International Auto Show this week, autonomous vehicles and electric cars were increasingly front and center as VOA’s Tina Trinh reports.
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A new coalition of tech giants and conservationists is looking to drastically reduce the amount of wild, and often endangered, animals that are trafficked via online services. As Veronica Balderas Iglesias reports, they hope to cut 80 percent of the illegal trade by the end of the decade.
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Under Armour Inc. said Thursday that data from 150 million MyFitnessPal diet and fitness app accounts were compromised in February, in one of the biggest hacks in history, sending shares of the athletic apparel maker down 3 percent in after-hours trade.

The stolen data include account user names, email addresses and scrambled passwords for the popular MyFitnessPal mobile app and website, Under Armour said in a statement. Social Security numbers, driver license numbers and payment card data were not compromised, it said.

It is the largest data breach this year and one of the top five to date, based on the number of records compromised, according to SecurityScorecard, a cybersecurity rating and remediation company.

Larger hacks include 3 billion Yahoo accounts compromised in a 2013 incident and credentials for more than 412 million users of adult websites run by California-based FriendFinder Networks Inc. in 2016, according to breach notification website LeakedSource.com.

Under Armour said it was working with data security firms and law enforcement, but it did not provide details of how the hackers got into its network or pulled out the data without getting caught.

While the breach did not include financial data, large troves of stolen email addresses can be valuable to cybercriminals.

Email addresses retrieved in a 2014 attack that compromised data on 83 million JPMorgan Chase customers were later used in schemes to boost stock prices, according to U.S. federal indictments in the case in 2015.

Under Armor said in an alert on its website that it would require MyFitnessPal users to change their passwords, and it urged users to do so immediately.

“We continue to monitor for suspicious activity and to coordinate with law enforcement authorities,” the company said, adding that it was bolstering systems that detect and prevent unauthorized access to user information.

Under Armour said it started notifying users of the breach Thursday, four days after it learned of the incident.

Under Armour bought MyFitnessPal in 2015 for $475 million.

It is part of the company’s connected fitness division, whose revenue last year accounted for 1.8 percent of Under Armour’s $5 billion in total sales. 
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A Facebook Inc. executive said in an internal memo in 2016 that the social media company needed to pursue adding users above all else, BuzzFeed

News reported Thursday, prompting disavowals from the executive and Facebook Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg.

The memo from Andrew Bosworth, a Facebook vice president, had not been previously reported as Facebook faces inquiries over how it handles personal information and the tactics the social media company has used to grow to 2.1 billion users.

Zuckerberg stood by Bosworth, who goes by the nickname “Boz,” while distancing himself from the memo’s contents.

Bosworth confirmed the memo’s authenticity but in a statement he disavowed its message, saying its goal had been to encourage debate.

Facebook users, advertisers and investors have been in an uproar for months over a series of scandals, most recently privacy practices that allowed political consultancy Cambridge Analytica to obtain personal information on 50 million Facebook members. Zuckerberg is expected to testify at a hearing with U.S. lawmakers as soon as April.

​’Provocative’ statements

“Boz is a talented leader who says many provocative things. This was one that most people at Facebook including myself disagreed with strongly. We’ve never believed the ends justify the means,” Zuckerberg said in a statement.

Bosworth wrote in the June 2016 memo that some “questionable” practices were all right if the result was connecting people.

“That’s why all the work we do in growth is justified. All the questionable contact importing practices. All the subtle language that helps people stay searchable by friends,” he wrote in the memo, which BuzzFeed published on its website.

He also urged fellow employees not to let potential negatives slow them down.

“Maybe it costs a life by exposing someone to bullies. Maybe someone dies in a terrorist attack coordinated on our tools. And still we connect people,” he wrote.

Bosworth said Thursday that he did not agree with the post today “and I didn’t agree with it even when I wrote it.

“Having a debate around hard topics like these is a critical part of our process and to do that effectively we have to be able to consider even bad ideas, if only to eliminate them,” Bosworth’s statement said.
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A Nigerian entrepreneur is turning plastic waste into rain coats, school bags, car covers and shoes. He says he is doing his part to fight pollution and encourage recycling while making a practical fashion statement. But not everyone is buying into it. VOA’s Mariama Diallo reports.
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While working for a big consulting firm in Lagos, Nigeria, Afua Osei repeatedly encountered women who wanted to advance professionally but didn’t know how. They needed guidance and mentoring.

So, Osei and her colleague Yasmin Belo-Osagie started She Leads Africa, a digital media company offering advice, information, training and networking opportunities to help “young African women achieve their professional dreams,” according to the website.

Launched in 2014, it now has an online community of over 300,000 in at least 35 countries in Africa and throughout the diaspora.

“I didn’t plan to be an entrepreneur,” Osei said this month at South by Southwest (SXSW), an annual festival of music, film and tech innovation. 

Anyone can be an innovator, Osei said in an interview, after co-hosting a meetup on starting and investing in African businesses. “You don’t have to look a certain way. It’s not just for one type of person. Anybody can play a role, and there is so much work to be done.”

​Opportunities in Africa

The Ghana-born entrepreneur — who grew up in metropolitan Washington, D.C., and once worked for first lady Michelle Obama — has lived in Nigeria for roughly five years. From there, she sees “so many opportunities and potentials in Africa to innovate and help improve people’s lives.”

The continent has some fast-growing economies — including Nigeria, Ghana and Ethiopia — and the world’s fastest-growing population. With more than 1.2 billion people, it’s projected to top 2.2 billion by 2050. At least 26 African countries are likely to double their current populations by then, the United Nations reports. 

Africa also holds challenges for entrepreneurs, from finding funding to untangling bureaucratic red tape, Osei acknowledged. “Dealing with polices and governments can be hard. Also, distributions: How can I get a product that I made in Lagos out here to Austin?”

But, Osei insisted, “Every single challenge and opportunity also presents a space for an innovator and entrepreneur to solve that problem.”

Accelerator gives edge

She Leads Africa deals with problem-solving. In its first year, the company started the SLA Accelerator, a three-month development program to assist female-led startups in Nigeria. It gives entrepreneurs business training and opportunities to meet potential investors.

Entrepreneur Cherae Robinson won a spot in the accelerator program’s first year — and $10,000 in seed money to start a specialty travel company. Now called Tastemakers Africa, it has a mobile app to help users “find and buy hip experiences on the continent.”  

The mentorship “provided a wealth of knowledge I did not have,” said Robinson, a 33-year-old New York native living in Johannesburg, South Africa. “I was a few months into developing the model. She Leads Africa helped us not only refine the model, but it continues to be a source I can tap into. They continue to support the entrepreneurs in their network.”

She Leads Africa recently began working with a New York-based Ghanaian-German designer and fashion blogger who goes by the single name Kukua. She started africaboutik, an online store of modern African designs.

“At Africa-themed events in NYC [New York City], I see a lot of so-called ‘Made in Africa’ items that are 100 percent made in Beijing,” Kukua wrote in an Instagram post. With SLA’s help, she’s identifying new textiles and designers in Africa to change the fashion narrative.

​Navigating rules, regulations

At several SXSW Africa-focused events, Osei was asked how entrepreneurs could navigate complicated government regulations and licensing requirements. She suggested finding key government personnel who understand technology and want to help new businesses.  

“It is important for technology leaders to take the lead and be innovative in the way we communicate to government, because they [government staff] are learning as much as we are,” Osei told VOA.

Osei and Belo-Osagie are learning through She Leads Africa, and their efforts have drawn recognition. Forbes magazine named them among “the 20 Youngest Power Women in Africa” in 2014. 

They don’t plan to slow down, Osei said, noting their goal is at least 1 million subscribers for their website. As the site says, it’s for “the ladies who want to build million-dollar companies, lead corporate organizations and crush it as leaders.”
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Visiting Subway’s website on a personal computer might not seem to have anything to do with checking the NFL’s app on a phone. But these discrete activities are the foundation for a new service to help marketers follow you around.

Adobe, a company better known for Photoshop and PDF files, says the new initiative announced Wednesday will help companies offer more personalized experiences and make ads less annoying by filtering out products and services you have already bought or will never buy.

But it comes amid heightened privacy sensitivities after reports that Facebook allowed a political consulting firm to harvest data on millions of Facebook users to influence elections.

And Adobe’s initiative underscores the role data plays in helping companies make money. Many of the initial uses are for better ad targeting.

Adobe says no personal data is being exchanged among the 60 or so companies that have joined its Device Co-op initiative already. These include such well-known brands as Allstate, Lenovo, Intel, Barnes & Noble, Subaru, Subway, Sprint, the NFL and the Food Network. Adobe says the program links about 300 million consumers across nearly 2 billion devices in the U.S. and Canada.

Under the initiative, Adobe can tell you’re the same person on a home PC, a work laptop, a phone and a tablet by analyzing past sign-ins with member companies. With that knowledge, Sprint would know Bob is already a customer when he visits from a new device. Bob wouldn’t get a promotion to switch from another carrier, but might get instead a phone upgrade offer. Or if Mary has declared herself a Giants fan on the NFL’s app, she might see ads with Giants banners when visiting NFL.com from a laptop for the first time.

All this might feel creepy, but such cross-device tracking is already commonly done by matching attributes such as devices that from the same internet location, or IP address. Consumers typically have little control over it.

Adobe says it will give consumers a chance to opt out of such tracking. And it’s breaking industry practices in a few ways. Adobe says it will honor opt-out requests for all participating companies and for all devices at once. It’s more typical for such setups to require people do so one by one. All companies in the initiative are listed on Adobe’s website, a break from some companies’ practice of referring only to unspecified partners.

“We’re doing everything we can not letting brands hide themselves,” Adobe executive Amit Ahuja said.

But in taking an opt-out approach, which is common in the industry, Adobe assumes that users consent. And it places the burden on consumers to learn about this initiative and to figure out how they can opt out of it.
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Three Facebook Messenger app users have filed a lawsuit claiming the social network violated their privacy by collecting logs of their phone calls and text messages.

The suit, filed Tuesday in federal court in northern California, comes as Facebook faces scrutiny over privacy concerns.

Facebook acknowledged on Sunday that it began uploading call and text logs from phones running Google’s Android system in 2015. Facebook added that only users who gave appropriate permission were affected, that it didn’t collect the contents of messages or calls, and that users can opt out of the data collection and have the stored logs deleted by changing their app settings.

The suit seeks class-action status.

A message seeking comment from Facebook on Wednesday was not immediately returned.
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It could soon be cheaper to operate a factory of robots in the United States than employing manual labor in Africa. That is the stark conclusion of a report from the Overseas Development Institute, which warns automation could have a devastating effect on developing economies unless governments invest urgently in digitalization and skills training. Henry Ridgwell has more.
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It could soon be cheaper to operate a factory of robots in the United States than employing manual labor in Africa. That’s the stark conclusion of a report from a London-based research institute, which warns that automation could have a devastating effect on developing economies unless governments invest urgently in digitalization and skills training.

The rhythmic sounds of the factory floor. At this textile plant in Rwanda, hundreds of workers sit side-by-side at sewing machines, churning out clothes that will be sold in stores across the world.

Outsourcing production by using cheap labor in the developing world has been a hallmark of the global economy for decades. But technology could be about to turn that on its head.

Research from the Overseas Development Institute focused on the example of furniture manufacturing in Africa. Karishma Banga co-authored the report.

“In the next 15 to 20 years, robots in the U.S. are actually going to become much cheaper than Kenyan labor. Particularly in the furniture manufacturing industry. So this means that around 2033, American companies will find it much more profitable to reshore production back. Which means essentially get all the jobs and production back from the developing countries to the U.S. And that obviously can have very significantly negative effects for jobs in Africa.”

As robots are getting cheaper, she says, people are getting more expensive.

“So the cost of a robot or the cost of a 3D printer, they’re declining at similar levels, around 6 percent annually. So that’s a significant decline. Whereas wages in developing countries are rising.”

There’s no doubting the challenges posed by automation to manual labor in developing countries – but some are fighting back.

The Funkidz furniture factory in Kenya breaks with the traditional mold of production. Automated saws cut perfect templates using computer-aided designs, overseen by skilled programmers and operators.

The investment is paying off, with rapid growth and expansion into Uganda and Rwanda. But Kenyan CEO Ciiru Waweru Waithaka says she can’t find the right employees.

“We have machines that sit idle because we don’t have skilled people. There are many people who need jobs, yes, we agree, but if they have no skills… I would love to employ you, but you need a skill, otherwise you cannot operate our machines. So we are urging all institutions, government, please let us take this skills gap as a crisis.”

That call is echoed by the ODI report authors – who urge African governments to use the current window of opportunity to build industrial capabilities and digital skills – before the jobs crunch hits.
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There is a saying that one person’s trash is another person’s treasure. That is the idea behind a new concept by an Israeli company that is taking trash from landfills and converting it into a plastic-like composite. The material is being used to make household items and furniture, as we hear from VOA’s Deborah Block.
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