Amazon May Have 2 HQ-2’s; Samsung Folder and OS Tomorrow? Google May Help Avoiding Food Poisoning; Bill Gates in the Toilet

After months and months of suspense, lots of wooing by cities to get Amazon to open their HQ2 second headquarters in their town, it now appears that Amazon may split the HQ2…so HQ2a and HQ2b?? According to bloomberg.com, the most likely candidates appear to be Crystal City, part of Arlington, VA, and Long Island City, in the New York borough of Queens. Amazon has had no comment. One of the reasons given for the split is that Amazon hasn’t been able to find sufficient tech talent in a single location. Amazon already has more employees in the two areas than anywhere in the country, except for their main HQ in Seattle, and the San Francisco Bay Area.

Yesterday, we reported that Samsung is expected to roll out their folding smartphone tomorrow at their developer conference. Now, 9to5google.com says we will also get some information on how Samsung thinks the user experience will change with the foldable phablet with an outside screen for normal smartphone use. For example, how will it handle running an app on the outside screen, when you open it up? Will it deactivate the outside screen so random touches won’t cause actions you hadn’t planned on? One thing we probably won’t see…an actual working model of the phone. That isn’t expected until next year.

If you think lower letter ratings or Yelp reviews got restaurant owners riled up, wait until they get word of this! Google has built a model that identifies restaurants that could give you food poisoning. Engadget.com reports that they worked with researchers from Harvard, and have tested a machine learned model in Chicago and Las Vegas to identify search queries like ‘stomach cramps’ or ‘diarrhea’, then cross-referenced them with saved location history data on smartphones relating to recently visited restaurants. Health inspectors visited restaurants…not being told if due to traditional consumer complaints or the AI model. Unsafe restaurants detected by the model ran 52.3%, while those found with traditional methods were spotted 22.7% of the time. Good news for people who don’t want to eat bad food…and just wait for the outrage from restaurants over this!

Ok, so Gates isn’t really in the toilet…and he could ACTUALLY afford all solid gold ones, better than a certain president who seems to adore gold…and orange. The former CEO of Microsoft opened the ‘Reinvented Toilet Expo’ in China…touting the biggest sanitation advances in 200 years. According to geekwire.com, Mr Gates has been thinking about crappers for the past 10 years…and the poor sanitation in a number of poor countries he traveled too. The Gates Foundation is leading the way in commercialization and adaption of off-grid toilet tech and sanitation systems for 3rd world countries. Discretion being the better part of valor, I will leave it to you to google a pic of Bill Gates holding up a jar of poop at the podium at the Toilet Expo! The latest tech in off-grid toilets can break down waste to the point that clean water and solids left behind can be used as fertilizer or be disposed of safely without any further treatment.