valet
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You can now book a COVID-19 vaccine through Uber
You'll also be able to reserve a rental car and have a valet drop it off.
Baidu completes its computer for self-driving cars
Baidu is ready to use its computer for self-driving cars as part of a robotic valet parking service.
Daimler and Bosch inch closer to fully automated, self-driving valet service
Daimler has plans for self-driving trucks, autonomous taxis and cars that drive themselves on the autobahn. Now, it's moving forward with its vision to bring fully automated, driverless parking to the Mercedes-Benz Museum parking garage in Stuttgart, Germany. The system, a joint effort with Bosch, will allow visitors to park their autonomous vehicles with a few taps of an app.
Jaguar Land Rover tests autonomous parking on public roads
Plenty of cars will help you park, but the biggest challenge is frequently finding a spot in the first place -- it's no fun to circle the parking lot for 10 minutes. Fully autonomous cars can ultimately take care of this, but Jaguar Land Rover is demonstrating a feature that would help in the meantime. It recently expanded its public semi-autonomous testing in the UK to include a "self-driving valet" where vehicles both find open spaces and park themselves. The company pitches it as eliminating some of the drudgery of driving, letting you take the wheel when you'd genuinely enjoy it.
Volvo buys premium app-based valet service Luxe
Volvo has just acquired the app-based valet service Luxe, which let users coordinate a driver to park, wash and refuel their car. But the Swedish automaker didn't pick it up just to convenience its customers -- it wants Luxe's technology and engineers, too.
At the Mercedes museum, your rental car parks itself
The concept of a self-parking car certainly isn't new, but Daimler is about to take the next logical step on that front. It's partnering with Bosch to launch an Automated Valet Parking service at the Mercedes-Benz Museum in Stuttgart. When it launches at the start of 2018, anyone (not just museum guests) can rent cars that will not only drive themselves out, but park themselves upon return. You just need a smartphone app to both make the reservation and the virtual handover when you're done.
ICYMI: Hand over your car to the robot overlords
try{document.getElementById("aol-cms-player-1").style.display="none";}catch(e){}Today on In Case You Missed It: A new parking structure will autonomously park cars without a single human's assistance. Meanwhile Colorado School of Mines is testing small-scale water treatment plants that could be used in neighborhoods rather than one city location. And Canadians sent the US a darling little 'keep your head up' video that has us saying aww! The machine mating video on YouTube can be found here. As always, please share any interesting tech or science videos you find by using the #ICYMI hashtag on Twitter for @mskerryd.
Hail a scooter-riding 'Vallie' to park your car in London
Driving in London can be slow and stressful enough, but finding a parking spot? Eesh. For many locals, that's the stuff of nightmares. Vallie wants to solve the problem with a valet parking app that lets you request custom drop-off and pick-up points inside the city. The service is available right now, but there are some caveats to be aware of; one, it's only available in a small patch of central London, between Farringdon and Aldgate; two, parking costs £8 per hour or £25 per day; three, Vallie only operates Monday to Friday, 7am to 8pm, so late-night dinners and weekend expeditions are out of the question.
The 2015 Corvette has a video recording of everything the valet did in your car
The human body undergoes some weird physical changes when it hands the keys to a shiny new car to someone else; the pulse quickens, the throat dries out and the palms get unnaturally clammy. If that shiny new car happens to be a Corvette, though, the human body may be able to worry a little less - Chevy kitted the 2015 model out with a Valet Mode to help you lock down your ride when you're not the one driving it. Once you key in your code and fire up Valet Mode (introduced in 2014), the system springs into action: the glovebox and the storage bin in the center console automatically lock themselves and the infotainment system gets disabled completely. There's something new this year though: using the Performance Data Recorder tech, a built-in camera films where the car goes (complete with vehicle data like speed and engine RPM) while a microphone records what's going on inside the cabin. Sure, using the feature may speak to an intense distrust of your fellow man (if you've seen Ferris Bueller's Day Off), but really now -- what have those randoms done to earn your trust in the first place?
eBay Valet sells your stuff for you, for a (steep) price
eBay has offered Sell for Me, a service does most of the heavy lifting for you, for sometime. But, it hasn't been widely used. The company seems to think its lack of success might be a combination of poor branding and inconvenience (Sell for Me is only accessible from the desktop site). So today it got a new name and a mobile app, eBay Valet, that lets iPhone users sell their stuff without lifting a finger. (Ok, not literally, since you'll have to lift a finger to operate the app... but you get the idea.) Basically you snap a few photos of whatever it is you want to sell. A representative will give you an estimate of its worth, and if you're still interested, the company will send you a box with a pre-paid shipping label. The eBay will take some pro-quality snaps of your goods, create a listing, send you a notification when it goes live and ship it to the winner when everything is over. Or return the item to you if it fails to sell. For its trouble eBay will take a 30 percent cut of the sale price, however. It's not ideal if you're actually looking to make money, but it sounds like a godsend for the lazy among us just looking to ditch some clutter.
Cisco's Valet routers take a cue from Flip's design department
Admittedly, we were a bit hesitant when Cisco contacted us with jubilation over a router, but now we can kind of see why. The company has pulled in design experts from its recently-acquired Flip for what it's banking on is a much simpler and friendlier user experience, from the packaging to the set up and maintenance menus, with a new lineup of routers it's calling Valet. The hardware itself is not too shabby -- it'd probably be quite inconspicuous in a Tomorrowland exhibit -- but the internals are nothing mind-blowing. Both the Valet and Valet Plus offer 2.4GHz Wireless N, while the latter model boasts a longer range and a quartet of Gigabit ports (the standard only uses 10/100). Eschewing the usual CD installation key is what Cisco's calling the USB Easy Setup Key. Similar idea to the other routers, just plug in and install the software. After two clicks of the menu, it auto-located our Valet and connected to a newly-minted, protected wireless service (in this case "BusyFish") with the password saved in our keychain. Adjusting guest access and parental controls are easy enough, and nice part of the USB key is that you can write the settings onto it, letting you simply plug it into another computer and auto-load the settings. Manual controls are still available and should be fine for most readers. Nothing mind-blowing, but for the audience Cisco's targeting, it's definitely a step in the right direction. According to Cisco, availability is "immediately" and prices are $100 for Valet and $150 for Valet Plus. Press release and oodles (yes, oodles) more pictures after the break. %Gallery-89348%
Valet - a flexible application launcher with Parallels integration
Valet is a new kind of application launcher that brings some interesting innovations to the table. First, upon activation it offers a heads-up display containing application icons, organized into categories of your choosing. This is a rich visual departure from competition like LaunchBar and Quicksilver. Second, Valet is heavy on voice control, though you apparently still need to activate it with a hotkey. Perhaps most interesting is Valet's ability to also open Windows applications inside of a Parallels virtual machine. That's right: you can create a category containing Windows apps like Internet Explorer, Access or even shortcuts to Control Panel items. Calling these things from Valet will start Parallels, open your virtual machine and fire up the Windows app of your choosing. Does anyone else see the line between OSes getting thinner with new apps like this? Valet doesn't stop there though; other tricks up its sleeve include Growl support and automatic detection of new apps. If you want to see Valet in action, its developers have put together a nice demo (QuickTime link) of the voice activation and heads-up display features. Valet is a Universal Binary. Licenses are $25, and volume licensing options are available upon request.
