LTE Advanced, also named or recognized as LTE+, LTE-A or 4G+, is a 4G mobile cellular communication standard developed by 3GPP as a major enhancement of the Long Term Evolution (LTE) standard. Three technologies from the LTE-Advanced tool-kit – carrier aggregation, 4x4 MIMO and 256QAM modulation in the downlink – if used together and with sufficient aggregated bandwidth, can deliver maximum peak downlink speeds approaching, or even exceeding, 1 Gbit/s. This is significantly more than the peak 300 Mbit/s rate offered by the preceding LTE standard. Later developments have resulted in LTE Advanced Pro (or 4.9G) which increases bandwidth even further. The first ever LTE Advanced network was deployed in 2013 by SK Telecom in South Korea. In August 2019, the Global mobile Suppliers Association (GSA) reported that there were 304 commercially launched LTE-Advanced networks in 134 countries. Overall, 335 operators are investing in LTE-Advanced (in the form of tests, trials, deployments or commercial service provision) in 141 countries. == Name == LTE Advanced is also named (indicated as) LTE+, LTE-A, or (on Samsung Galaxy and Xiaomi smartphones) as 4G+. Such networks have also often been described as ‘Gigabit LTE networks’ mirroring a term that is also used in the fixed broadband industry. == History == The mobile communication industry and standards organizations have therefore started work on 4G access technologies, such as LTE Advanced. At a workshop in April 2008 in China, 3GPP agreed the plans for work on Long Term Evolution (LTE). A first set of specifications were approved in June 2008. Besides the peak data rate 1 Gb/s as defined by the ITU-R, it also targets faster switching between power states and improved performance at the cell edge. Detailed proposals are being studied within the working groups. The LTE+ format was first proposed by NTT DoCoMo of Japan and has been adopted as the international standard. It was formally submitted as a candidate 4G to ITU-T in late 2009 as meeting the requirements of the IMT-Advanced standard, and was standardized by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) in March 2011 as 3GPP Release 10. The work by 3GPP to define a 4G candidate radio interface technology started in Release 9 with the study phase for LTE-Advanced. Being described as a 3.9G (beyond 3G but pre-4G), the first release of LTE did not meet the requirements for 4G (also called IMT Advanced as defined by the International Telecommunication Union) such as peak data rates up to 1 Gb/s. The ITU has invited the submission of candidate Radio Interface Technologies (RITs) following their requirements in a circular letter, 3GPP Technical Report (TR) 36.913, "Requirements for Further Advancements for E-UTRA (LTE-Advanced)." These are based on ITU's requirements for 4G and on operators’ own requirements for advanced LTE. Major technical considerations include the following: Continual improvement to the LTE radio technology and architecture Scenarios and performance requirements for working with legacy radio technologies Backward compatibility of LTE-Advanced with LTE. An LTE terminal should be able to work in an LTE-Advanced network and vice versa. Any exceptions will be considered by 3GPP. Consideration of recent World Radiocommunication Conference (WRC-07) decisions regarding frequency bands to ensure that LTE-Advanced accommodates the geographically available spectrum for channels above 20 MHz. Also, specifications must recognize those parts of the world in which wideband channels are not available. Likewise, 'WiMAX 2', 802.16m, has been approved by ITU as the IMT Advanced family. WiMAX 2 is designed to be backward compatible with WiMAX 1 devices. Most vendors now support conversion of 'pre-4G', pre-advanced versions and some support software upgrades of base station equipment from 3G. == Proposals == The target of 3GPP LTE Advanced is to reach and surpass the ITU requirements. LTE Advanced should be compatible with first release LTE equipment, and should share frequency bands with first release LTE. In the feasibility study for LTE Advanced, 3GPP determined that LTE Advanced would meet the ITU-R requirements for 4G. The results of the study are published in 3GPP Technical Report (TR) 36.912. One of the important LTE Advanced benefits is the ability to take advantage of advanced topology networks; optimized heterogeneous networks with a mix of macrocells with low power nodes such as picocells, femtocells and new relay nodes. The next significant performance leap in wireless networks will come from making the most of topology, and brings the network closer to the user by adding many of these low power nodes – LTE Advanced further improves the capacity and coverage, and ensures user fairness. LTE Advanced also introduces multicarrier to be able to use ultra wide bandwidth, up to 100 MHz of spectrum supporting very high data rates. In the research phase many proposals have been studied as candidates for LTE Advanced (LTE-A) technologies. The proposals could roughly be categorized into: Support for relay node base stations Coordinated multipoint (CoMP) transmission and reception UE Dual TX antenna solutions for SU-MIMO and diversity MIMO, commonly referred to as 2x2 MIMO Scalable system bandwidth exceeding 20 MHz, up to 100 MHz Carrier aggregation of contiguous and non-contiguous spectrum allocations Local area optimization of air interface Nomadic / Local Area network and mobility solutions Flexible spectrum usage Cognitive radio Automatic and autonomous network configuration and operation Support of autonomous network and device test, measurement tied to network management and optimization Enhanced precoding and forward error correction Interference management and suppression Asymmetric bandwidth assignment for FDD Hybrid OFDMA and SC-FDMA in uplink UL/DL inter eNB coordinated MIMO SONs, Self Organizing Networks methodologies Within the range of system development, LTE-Advanced and WiMAX 2 can use up to 8x8 MIMO and 128-QAM in downlink direction. Example performance: 100 MHz aggregated bandwidth, LTE-Advanced provides almost 3.3 Gbit peak download rates per sector of the base station under ideal conditions. Advanced network architectures combined with distributed and collaborative smart antenna technologies provide several years road map of commercial enhancements. The 3GPP standards Release 12 added support for 256-QAM. A summary of a study carried out in 3GPP can be found in TR36.912. == Timeframe and introduction of additional features == Original standardization work for LTE-Advanced was done as part of 3GPP Release 10, which was frozen in April 2011. Trials were based on pre-release equipment. Major vendors support software upgrades to later versions and ongoing improvements. In order to improve the quality of service for users in hotspots and on cell edges, heterogeneous networks (HetNets) are formed of a mixture of macro-, pico- and femto base stations serving corresponding-size areas. Frozen in December 2012, 3GPP Release 11 concentrates on better support of HetNet. Coordinated Multi-Point operation (CoMP) is a key feature of Release 11 in order to support such network structures. Whereas users located at a cell edge in homogenous networks suffer from decreasing signal strength compounded by neighbor cell interference, CoMP is designed to enable use of a neighboring cell to also transmit the same signal as the serving cell, enhancing quality of service on the perimeter of a serving cell. In-device Co-existence (IDC) is another topic addressed in Release 11. IDC features are designed to ameliorate disturbances within the user equipment caused between LTE/LTE-A and the various other radio subsystems such as WiFi, Bluetooth, and the GPS receiver. Further enhancements for MIMO such as 4x4 configuration for the uplink were standardized. The higher number of cells in HetNet results in user equipment changing the serving cell more frequently when in motion. The ongoing work on LTE-Advanced in Release 12, amongst other areas, concentrates on addressing issues that come about when users move through HetNet, such as frequent hand-overs between cells. It also included use of 256-QAM. == First technology demonstrations and field trials == This list covers technology demonstrations and field trials up to the year 2014, paving the way for a wider commercial deployment of the VoLTE technology worldwide. From 2014 onwards various further operators trialled and demonstrated the technology for future deployment on their respective networks. These are not covered here. Instead a coverage of commercial deployments can be found in the section below. == LTE Advanced Pro == LTE Advanced Pro (LTE-A Pro, also known as 4.5G, 4.5G Pro, 4.9G, Pre-5G, 5G Project) is a name for 3GPP release 13 and 14. It is an evolution of LTE Advanced (LTE-A) cellular standard supporting data rates in excess of 3 Gbit/s using 32-carrier aggregation. It also introduces th
Observability (software)
In software engineering, more specifically in distributed computing, observability is the ability to collect data about programs' execution, modules' internal states, and the communication among components. To improve observability, software engineers use a wide range of logging and tracing techniques to gather telemetry information, and tools to analyze and use it. Observability is foundational to site reliability engineering, as it is the first step in triaging a service outage. One of the goals of observability is to minimize the amount of prior knowledge needed to debug an issue. == Etymology, terminology and definition == The term is borrowed from control theory, where the "observability" of a system measures how well its state can be determined from its outputs. Similarly, software observability measures how well a system's state can be understood from the obtained telemetry (metrics, logs, traces, profiling). The definition of observability varies by vendor: Observability is the process of making a system’s internal state more transparent. Systems are made observable by the data they produce, which in turn helps you to determine if your infrastructure or application is healthy and functioning normally. a measure of how well you can understand and explain any state your system can get into, no matter how novel or bizarre [...] without needing to ship new code software tools and practices for aggregating, correlating and analyzing a steady stream of performance data from a distributed application along with the hardware and network it runs onobservability starts by shipping all your raw data to central service before you begin analysisthe ability to measure a system’s current state based on the data it generates, such as logs, metrics, and traces Observability is tooling or a technical solution that allows teams to actively debug their system. Observability is based on exploring properties and patterns not defined in advance. proactively collecting, visualizing, and applying intelligence to all of your metrics, events, logs, and traces—so you can understand the behavior of your complex digital system The term is frequently referred to as its numeronym o11y (where 11 stands for the number of letters between the first letter and the last letter of the word). This is similar to other computer science abbreviations such as i18n and l10n and k8s. === Observability vs. monitoring === Observability and monitoring are sometimes used interchangeably. As tooling, commercial offerings and practices evolved in complexity, "monitoring" was re-branded as observability in order to differentiate new tools from the old. The terms are commonly contrasted in that systems are monitored using predefined sets of telemetry, and monitored systems may be observable. Majors et al. suggest that engineering teams that only have monitoring tools end up relying on expert foreknowledge (seniority), whereas teams that have observability tools rely on exploratory analysis (curiosity). == Telemetry types == Observability relies on three main types of telemetry data: metrics, logs and traces. Those are often referred to as "pillars of observability". === Metrics === A metric is a point in time measurement (scalar) that represents some system state. Examples of common metrics include: number of HTTP requests per second; total number of query failures; database size in bytes; time in seconds since last garbage collection. Monitoring tools are typically configured to emit alerts when certain metric values exceed set thresholds. Thresholds are set based on knowledge about normal operating conditions and experience. Metrics are typically tagged to facilitate grouping and searchability. Application developers choose what kind of metrics to instrument their software with, before it is released. As a result, when a previously unknown issue is encountered, it is impossible to add new metrics without shipping new code. Furthermore, their cardinality can quickly make the storage size of telemetry data prohibitively expensive. Since metrics are cardinality-limited, they are often used to represent aggregate values (for example: average page load time, or 5-second average of the request rate). Without external context, it is impossible to correlate between events (such as user requests) and distinct metric values. === Logs === Logs, or log lines, are generally free-form, unstructured text blobs that are intended to be human readable. Modern logging is structured to enable machine parsability. As with metrics, an application developer must instrument the application upfront and ship new code if different logging information is required. Logs typically include a timestamp and severity level. An event (such as a user request) may be fragmented across multiple log lines and interweave with logs from concurrent events. === Traces === ==== Distributed traces ==== A cloud native application is typically made up of distributed services which together fulfill a single request. A distributed trace is an interrelated series of discrete events (also called spans) that track the progression of a single user request. A trace shows the causal and temporal relationships between the services that interoperate to fulfill a request. Instrumenting an application with traces means sending span information to a tracing backend. The tracing backend correlates the received spans to generate presentable traces. To be able to follow a request as it traverses multiple services, spans are labeled with unique identifiers that enable constructing a parent-child relationship between spans. Span information is typically shared in the HTTP headers of outbound requests. === Continuous profiling === Continuous profiling is another telemetry type used to precisely determine how an application consumes resources. === Instrumentation === To be able to observe an application, telemetry about the application's behavior needs to be collected or exported. Instrumentation means generating telemetry alongside the normal operation of the application. Telemetry is then collected by an independent backend for later analysis. In fast-changing systems, instrumentation itself is often the best possible documentation, since it combines intention (what are the dimensions that an engineer named and decided to collect?) with the real-time, up-to-date information of live status in production. Instrumentation can be automatic, or custom. Automatic instrumentation offers blanket coverage and immediate value; custom instrumentation brings higher value but requires more intimate involvement with the instrumented application. Instrumentation can be native - done in-code (modifying the code of the instrumented application) - or out-of-code (e.g. sidecar, eBPF). Verifying new features in production by shipping them together with custom instrumentation is a practice called "observability-driven development". == "Pillars of observability" == Metrics, logs and traces are most commonly listed as the pillars of observability. Majors et al. suggest that the pillars of observability are high cardinality, high-dimensionality, and explorability, arguing that runbooks and dashboards have little value because "modern systems rarely fail in precisely the same way twice." == Self monitoring == Self monitoring is a practice where observability stacks monitor each other, in order to reduce the risk of inconspicuous outages. Self monitoring may be put in place in addition to high availability and redundancy to further avoid correlated failures.
Facebook Platform
The Facebook Platform is the set of services, tools, and products provided by the social networking service Facebook for third-party developers to create their own applications and services that access data in Facebook. The current Facebook Platform was launched in 2010. The platform offers a set of programming interfaces and tools which enable developers to integrate with the open "social graph" of personal relations and other things like songs, places, and Facebook pages. Applications on facebook.com, external websites, and devices are all allowed to access the graph. == History == Facebook launched the Facebook Platform on May 24, 2007, providing a framework for software developers to create applications that interact with core Facebook features. A markup language called Facebook Markup Language was introduced simultaneously; it is used to customize the "look and feel" of applications that developers create. Prior to the Facebook platform, Facebook had built many applications themselves within the Facebook website, including Gifts, allowing users to send virtual gifts to each other, Marketplace, allowing users to post free classified ads, Facebook events, giving users a method of informing their friends about upcoming events, Video, letting users share homemade videos with one another, and social network game, where users can use their connections to friends to help them advance in games they are playing. The Facebook Platform made it possible for outside partners to build similar applications. Many of the popular early social network games would combine capabilities. For instance, one of the early games to reach the top application spot, (Lil) Green Patch, combined virtual Gifts with Event notifications to friends and contributions to charities through Causes. Third-party companies provide application metrics, and several blogs arose in response to the clamor for Facebook applications. On July 4, 2007, Altura Ventures announced the "Altura 1 Facebook Investment Fund," becoming the world's first Facebook-only venture capital firm. On August 29, 2007, Facebook changed the way in which the popularity of applications is measured, to give attention to the more engaging applications, following criticism that ranking applications only by the number of people who had installed the application was giving an advantage to the highly viral, yet useless applications. Tech blog Valleywag has criticized Facebook Applications, labeling them a "cornucopia of uselessness." Others have called for limiting third-party applications so the Facebook user experience is not degraded. Applications that have been created on the Platform include chess, which both allow users to play games with their friends. In such games, a user's moves are saved on the website, allowing the next move to be made at any time rather than immediately after the previous move. By November 3, 2007, seven thousand applications had been developed on the Facebook Platform, with another hundred created every day. By the second annual f8 developers conference on July 23, 2008, the number of applications had grown to 33,000, and the number of registered developers had exceeded 400,000. Within a few months of launching the Facebook Platform, issues arose regarding "application spam", which involves Facebook applications "spamming" users to request it be installed. Facebook integration was announced for the Xbox 360 and Nintendo DSi on June 1, 2009 at E3. On November 18, 2009, Sony announced an integration with Facebook to deliver the first phase of a variety of new features to further connect and enhance the online social experiences of PlayStation 3. On February 2, 2010, Facebook announced the release of HipHop for PHP as an opensource project. Mark Zuckerberg said that his team from Facebook is developing a Facebook search engine. “Facebook is pretty well placed to respond to people’s questions. At some point, we will. We have a team that is working on it", said Mark Zuckerberg. For him, the traditional search engines return too many results that do not necessarily respond to questions. “The search engines really need to evolve a set of answers: 'I have a specific question, answer this question for me.'" On June 10, 2014, Facebook announced Haxl, a Haskell library that simplified the access to remote data, such as databases or web-based services. === Partnerships with device manufacturers === Starting in 2007, Facebook formed data sharing partnerships with at least 60 handset manufacturers, including Apple, Amazon, BlackBerry, Microsoft and Samsung. Those manufacturers were provided with Facebook user data without the users' consent. Most of the partnerships remained in place as of 2018, when the partnerships were first publicly reported. == High-level Platform components == === Graph API === The Graph API is the core of Facebook Platform, enabling developers to read from and write data into Facebook. The Graph API presents a simple, consistent view of the Facebook social graph, uniformly representing objects in the graph (e.g., people, photos, events, and pages) and the connections between them (e.g., friend relationships, shared content, and photo tags). On April 30, 2015, Facebook shut down friends' data API prior to the v2.0 release. === Authentication === Facebook authentication enables developers’ applications to interact with the Graph API on behalf of Facebook users, and it provides a single-sign on mechanism across web, mobile, and desktop apps. ==== Facebook Connect ==== Facebook Connect, also called Log in with Facebook, like OpenID, is a set of authentication APIs from Facebook that developers can use to help their users connect and share with such users' Facebook friends (on and off Facebook) and increase engagement for their website or application. When so used, Facebook members can log on to third-party websites, applications, mobile devices and gaming systems with their Facebook identity and, while logged in, can connect with friends via these media and post information and updates to their Facebook profile. Originally unveiled during Facebook's developer conference, F8, in July 2008, Log in with Facebook became generally available in December 2008. According to an article from The New York Times, "Some say the services are representative of surprising new thinking in Silicon Valley. Instead of trying to hoard information about their users, the Internet companies (including Facebook, Google, MySpace and Twitter) all share at least some of that data so people do not have to enter the same identifying information again and again on different sites." Log in with Facebook cannot be used by users in locations that cannot access Facebook, even if the third-party site is otherwise accessible from that location. According to Facebook, users who logged into The Huffington Post with Facebook spent more time on the site than the average user. === Social plugins === Social plugins – including the Like Button, Recommendations, and Activity Feed – enable developers to provide social experiences to their users with just a few lines of HTML. All social plugins are extensions of Facebook and are designed so that no user data is shared with the sites on which they appear. On the other hand, the social plugins let Facebook track its users’ browsing habits through any sites that feature the plugins. === Open Graph protocol === The Open Graph protocol enables developers to integrate their pages into Facebook's global mapping/tracking tool Social Graph. These pages gain the functionality of other graph objects including profile links and stream updates for connected users. OpenGraph tags in HTML5 might look like this: === iframes === Facebook uses iframes to allow third-party developers to create applications that are hosted separately from Facebook, but operate within a Facebook session and are accessed through a user's profile. Since iframes essentially nest independent websites within a Facebook session, their content is distinct from Facebook formatting. Facebook originally used 'Facebook Markup Language (FBML)' to allow Facebook Application developers to customize the "look and feel" of their applications, to a limited extent. FBML is a specification of how to encode content so that Facebook's servers can read and publish it, which is needed in the Facebook-specific feed so that Facebook's system can properly parse content and publish it as specified. FBML set by any application is cached by Facebook until a subsequent API call replaces it. Facebook also offers a specialized Facebook JavaScript (FBJS) library. Facebook stopped accepting new FBML applications on March 18, 2011, but continued to support existing FBML tabs and applications. Since January 1, 2012 FBML was no longer supported, and FBML no longer functioned as of June 1, 2012. === Microformats === In February 2011, Facebook began to use the hCalendar microformat to mark up events, and the hCard for the events' venues,
Acousto-electronics
Acousto-electronics (also spelled 'Acoustoelectronics') is a branch of physics, acoustics and electronics that studies interactions of ultrasonic and hypersonic waves in solids with electrons and with electro-magnetic fields. Typical phenomena studied in acousto-electronics are acousto-electric effect and also amplification of acoustic waves by flows of electrons in piezoelectric semiconductors, when the drift velocity of the electrons exceeds the velocity of sound. The term 'acousto-electronics' is often understood in a wider sense to include numerous practical applications of the interactions of electro-magnetic fields with acoustic waves in solids. In particular, these are signal processing devices using surface acoustic waves (SAW), different sensors of temperature, pressure, humidity, acceleration, etc.
MIDI Show Control
MIDI Show Control (MSC), is a real-time System Exclusive extension of the international Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) standard. MSC enables all types of entertainment equipment to communicate with each other through the process of show control. The MIDI Show Control protocol is a technical standard ratified by the MIDI Manufacturers Association in 1991, which allows entertainment control devices to talk with each other and with computers to perform show control functions in live and prerecorded entertainment applications. Just like musical MIDI, MSC does not transmit the actual show media - it simply transmits digital information about a multimedia performance. == How MSC works == When any cue is called by a user (typically a stage manager) and/or preprogrammed timeline in a show control software application, the show controller transmits one or more MSC messages from its 'MIDI Out' port. A typical MSC message sequence is: the user has just called a cue the cue is for lighting device 3 the cue is number 45.8 the cue is in cue list 7 MSC messages are serially transmitted in the same way as musical messages and are fully compatible with all conventional MIDI hardware; however, many modern MSC devices now use Ethernet communications for higher bandwidth and the flexibility afforded by networks. Other performance parameters are also transmitted, such as lighting desk submaster settings using MSC SET messages. All cues that a media control device is capable of playing are assigned MSC messages within the Show Controller's cue list and they are transmitted from its MIDI Out port at the appropriate show time, depending on the actions of the user and the show controller's internally timed sequences. All MSC-compatible instruments follow the MSC specification and thus transmit identical MSC messages for identical MSC events, such as the playing of a certain cue on the media controller. Since they follow a published standard, all MSC devices can communicate with and understand each other, as well as with computers that have been programmed to understand MSC messages using the MSC Command Set. All MSC compatible instruments have a built-in MIDI interface and many now follow one of the various MIDI-over-Ethernet protocols. == History == To create the MSC spec, Charlie Richmond headed the USITT MIDI Forum on their Callboard Network in 1990, which included developers and designers from the theatre sound and lighting industry from around the world. It is believed that this was the first international standard to be developed without a single physical meeting of the participants. This Forum created the MSC standard between January and September 1990. This was ratified by the MIDI Manufacturers Association (MMA) in January 1991, and the Japan MIDI Standards Committee (JMSC) later that year, becoming a part of the standard MIDI specification in August 1991. The first show to fully use the MSC specification was the Magic Kingdom Parade at Walt Disney World's Magic Kingdom in September 1991. == MIDI Show Control software ==
Figure AI
Figure AI, Inc. is an American robotics company developing humanoid robots that operate via artificial intelligence. The company was founded in 2022 by Brett Adcock. As of late 2025, the company has a $39 billion valuation. Three generations of humanoid robots (Figure 01–03) have been developed, as well as two iterations of a vision-language-action model (Helix 01–02), which can control up to two robots at once. By 2026, the robots demonstrated the potential ability to perform household work and the company gained publicity when a Figure 03 appeared at a White House event. == History == Figure AI was founded in 2022 by Brett Adcock, also known for founding Archer Aviation and Vettery. That year, the company introduced its prototype, Figure 01, a bipedal robot designed for manual labor, initially targeting the logistics and warehousing sectors. The initial model utilized external cabling for easier maintenance. In May 2023, Figure AI raised $70 million from investors including Adcock, who invested $20 million, and Parkway Venture Capital. In January 2024, Figure AI announced a partnership with BMW to deploy humanoid robots in automotive manufacturing facilities. In February 2024, Figure AI secured $675 million in venture capital funding from a consortium that includes Jeff Bezos, Microsoft, Nvidia, Intel, and the startup-funding divisions of Amazon and OpenAI; the company was then valued at $2.6 billion. Figure AI also announced a partnership with OpenAI, which would build specialized artificial intelligence (AI) models for Figure AI's humanoid robots, enabling its robots to process language; the collaboration ended after a year, with Adcock stating that large language models had become a smaller problem compared to those allowing for "high rate robot control". In August 2024, the company introduced Figure 02, describing it as the next step toward deploying humanoids for industrial use. The machine has 35 degrees of freedom (DOF), while the five-fingered hands have 16 DOF and the ability to carry up to 25 kilograms (55 lb). The model is equipped with cabling integrated into the limbs, a torso-placed battery, six RGB cameras, and an onboard vision-language-action (VLA) model. It has three times the computing power (including inference AI) of the previous model, including two graphics processing units, supported by Nvidia. Microphones, speakers, and custom AI models (developed with OpenAI) enable communication with humans. In early 2025, Figure AI announced BotQ, a manufacturing facility aiming to produce 12,000 humanoids per year with the help of its own humanoid robots, and Helix, a VLA model that can control up to two robots at once. Helix enables a robot to interact with the world without extensive manual training, according to the company allowing it to pick up nearly any small household object. By April, the company issued cease-and-desist letters to at least two secondary brokers promoting its private stock without authorization. In September, a third round of financing exceeded $1 billion, raising the company's total valuation to $39 billion. Investors included Brookfield Asset Management, Intel, Macquarie Capital, Nvidia, Parkway Venture Capital, Qualcomm, Salesforce, and T-Mobile. In October 2025, Figure 03 was introduced. According to the company, its hardware and software redesign aims to create a general-purpose robot able to learn directly from humans. An upgraded camera system delivers twice the frame rate, a quarter the latency, and a 60% wider field of view, in addition to a camera in each hand. Tactile sensors in the fingertips can detect forces as little as 3 grams (0.1 oz). It incorporates soft materials and a protected battery for safety, and removable, washable textiles. It supports wireless inductive charging. In November 2025, the former head of product safety sued the company on the basis of being fired for raising the concern that the company's robots were strong enough to fracture a human skull. By early 2026, Figure 02 had been used in demonstrations showing that it could load a washing machine, sort packages, and fold laundry. That January, Helix 02 was released, expanding the AI model to the entire body to allow for functional autonomy. A Helix 02–powered Figure 02 was shown to be capable of loading and unloading a dishwasher, based on hours of motion-capture data and simulation-based machine learning. In March, U.S. First Lady Melania Trump appeared at the White House with a Figure 03, promoting the presumptive eventual ability of AI to teach children. In May 2026, Figure AI livestreamed a group of their robots processing packages nonstop for almost a week, inspiring a 10-hour competition between their robot and a human, in which the robot performed 98.5% as well as the human.
Acquisition of DirecTV by AT&T
AT&T Inc. announced an agreement with the DirecTV Group on May 18, 2014, to acquire the company for $48.5 billion in a joint cash-stock transaction and assumed debts of $18.6 billion for a total offer of $67.1 billion. Due to stalling growth in the wireless sector, AT&T began diversifying into mass media to expand its consumer offerings. After regulatory agencies approved the purchase on July 24, 2015, AT&T briefly became the largest Pay-TV provider. DirecTV was brought under AT&T's communication segment and DirecTV Now was launched on November 30, 2016, as an alternative to cord-cutting. In the years following the purchase, DirecTV lost millions of subscribers across its satellite and streaming services and by 2019, calls grew for AT&T to divest itself off the business. Initially, AT&T rejected these calls and defended the acquisition, but by February 2021, it reached a deal with TPG Inc. to transfer ownership of DirecTV. Under the terms of the agreement, AT&T would retain a 70% majority stake in DirecTV but would no longer oversee its daily operations. The deal was finalized by August 2, 2021, with AT&T receiving $7.1 billion. By July 3, 2025, AT&T sold its majority stake to TPG, ending any ties of involvement. == Background and Development == === AT&T's history === The company to bear the name "AT&T" was founded on March 3, 1885, as American Telephone and Telegraph Company (or AT&T Corporation) by Theodore Newton Vail as a long-distance subsidiary of the Bell Telephone Company. By December 1899, the Bell Telephone's assets were transferred to AT&T, with the latter gaining control of the Bell System, a regional network of local telecom companies. Theodore Vail became AT&T's President in 1907 and under his leadership, AT&T gained a monopoly over the telephone sector in the United States. This near century dominance earned AT&T the nickname of "Ma Bell." In 1974, the U.S. Department of Justice sued AT&T on accounts of antitrust violations. AT&T challenged the lawsuit, but in 1982, it reached a settlement with the DOJ to break apart its Bell System monopoly into seven regional companies. On January 1, 1984, the Bell System came to an end and led to a reshaped telecom industry. One of these regional companies, Southwestern Bell, emerged as the smallest, but after the passage of the 1996 Telecom Act, deregulated telecom rules allowed SBC to become a major telecom company. AT&T briefly became the largest cable and broadband company by the end of the 20th Century, but later deconsolidated to exit those industries. In 2005, SBC acquired its former parent, AT&T, and took on its branding as AT&T Inc, while retaining its previous business history. The newly reincorporated AT&T acquired BellSouth in 2006 and reconstituted much of its former Bell System. === DirecTV's history === == Acquisition Timeline == == Managing DirecTV == == Divestment and Spinoff ==