Providence Technology Group

Austin-based electric carmaker Tesla will be opening up an engineering headquarters in California, a little more than a year after the company first announced plans to move its headquarters to central Texas. Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced the new engineering and artificial intelligence headquarters at an event  Wednesday at the new office space, along with California Gov. Gavin Newsom. The roughly five-minute event was livestreamed on Twitter, and Newsom’s office later confirmed the announcement. Tesla also livestreamed further comments from Musk as the chief executive took the stage at a party for the new engineering headquarters. Keep reading This Article at msn.com.

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Big tech continues to see big layoffs. Seventy-thousand tech workers have lost their jobs already this year. Most live in the Bay area, but it’s estimated 20,000 are now unemployed in Sacramento. The state of California is seizing the opportunity to try to lure those laid-off workers to state government. “We really want to use this opportunity to just let people take a look at working for the state. It’s a good option,” said Amy Tong, secretary of the Government Operations Agency.  It’s leading the campaign to fill nearly 500 open high-tech jobs. Keep reading this article at kcra.com.

This week’s announcement of Solidigm, a global leader in NAND flash memory solutions, locating its headquarters in the city of Rancho Cordova could instantly change the economic future of the region, according to some business leaders. Five months after announcing Rancho Cordova as the location of its global research and development campus, Solidigm confirmed its headquarters will follow. The moves will translate into nearly 2,000 higher-wage jobs in the region over the next five years. “Our reputation is different today,” said Broome. “Forbes just called Sacramento the number one place to live, but are we now the number one place for semiconductors? That’s a different conversation.” Keep reading This Article at msn.com.

The Department of Motor Vehicles has never been an agency that screams innovation. The agency is better know for bureaucracy and endless lines than technological transformation. But this may be changing after a collaboration between California’s DMV and open-source blockchain Tezos and Oxhead Alpha, a crypto-focused software development firm. Together, the three partners are building a DMV-run blockchain that will not only digitize car titles for California drivers, but also seek to streamline title transfers between owners. Keep Reading This Article at yahoo.com.

An effort to regulate cryptocurrency in California will show up again this year after Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) vetoed a similar bill in September amid concerns that measure could conflict with other state efforts. The collapse of FTX and other turmoil in the cryptocurrency market last year have created a new sense of urgency about building safeguards around crypto. “The misguided, unethical, and likely illegal business practices of FTX have done severe damage to the credibility of an entire industry,” said Charles Belle, executive director of the Blockchain Advocacy Coalition, a California-focused group that’s pushed for pro-blockchain policy. “The industry needs regulatory clarity now more than ever.” But separate, ongoing regulatory work by the Newsom administration could complicate any leg...[Read More]

The California Employment Development Department found itself on the receiving end of a letter from Congress demanding documents and explaining why the state saw, what the letter called, “the worst unemployment fraud in the nation during the pandemic.” The letter was sent Friday by the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, which flipped to Republican control after the party took the chamber during the midterm elections and installed Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-California, as speaker after a days-long battle on the House floor. Keep Reading This Article at MSN.com.

There is a push to use CRISPR to make agricultural technologies that pull carbon dioxide (CO2) out of the air and store it better in the soil. With the help of CRISPR technology, scientists are making gene edited plant varieties that are better at storing carbon and don’t have the traits of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) that are made with transgenes. Many research projects have sprung up to enhance biological carbon sequestration and thereby help restore balance to the carbon cycle and prevent further buildup of CO2 in the atmosphere. For example, carbon sequestration research is being conducted at the Innovative Genomics Institute (IGI), an organization founded by Nobel laureate Jennifer A. Doudna, PhD. In June 2022, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative gave $11 million to the IGI to he...[Read More]

A new law that went into effect this week requires most California employers to disclose salaries on job listings. The law affects every company with more than 15 employees looking to fill a job that could be performed from the state of California. It covers hourly and temporary work, all the way up to openings for highly paid technology executives. That means it’s now possible to know the salaries top tech companies pay their workers. For example: A program manager in Apple’s augmented reality group will receive base pay between $121,000 and $230,000 per year, according to an Apple posting Wednesday. A midcareer software engineer at Google Health can expect to make between $126,000 and $190,000 per year. A director of software engineering at Meta leading teams building network...[Read More]

Losing luggage during a trip can easily ruin vacation plans. With recent Southwest cancellations and thousands of unclaimed pieces of luggage at airport terminals, luggage tracking technologies may become a no brainer when traveling. Based on the most recent Air Travel Consumer report, in November, 2,157,470 bags were mishandled in the U.S. in 2022. That is a 37% increase from 2021 in either stolen, damaged or lost bags. Thankfully, new technologies like luggage tracking devices are making it easier to identify where you bags are going at all times. Keep Reading This Article at Aviationpros.com.

It was 3:30 p.m. on Tuesday, Sept. 6, and Californians were using more electricity than ever before. Soon the sun would begin to set, taking solar energy production with it. If things got bad, the operator might have to order rolling blackouts, which would plunge hundreds of thousands of people into darkness and turn off everything from air conditioners to lifesaving medical equipment. Conditions were not promising. Out on the deck of the state grid operator’s headquarters in Folsom (Sacramento County), the mercury reached 116 degrees — close to an all-time record for Northern California. CEO Elliot Mainzer had never felt anything like it. “The heat was just infernal,” he recalled. Keep Reading This Article at MSN.com.

Another year is very nearly in the books — and when it comes to the work that UC researchers have accomplished in 2022, that book is quite the page-turner. Just this year, UC researchers released the first complete, gapless sequence of the human genome; developed applications for Nobel Prize-winning CRISPR technology to fight climate change; and kicked off an ingenious pilot project to cover California’s canals with solar panels. They’ve also learned how we focus, shed light into the importance of social relationships, and even identified the source of hair loss. To top it all off, the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) just announced that Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s National Ignition Facility achieved fusion ignition — a major sc...[Read More]

When transit systems experience delays, the reason usually isn’t very interesting: congested streets, medical emergencies, mechanical problems. But the cause of a recent holdup on San Francisco’s MUNI system at least had the virtue of being novel. On Sept. 30 at around 11 p.m., an N Line streetcar ground to a halt at the intersection of Carl Street and Cole Street because an autonomous vehicle from Cruise, a subsidiary of General Motors, had halted on the streetcar tracks and wouldn’t budge. According to the city’s transportation department, the 140 passengers riding the N line that evening were stuck in place for seven minutes before a Cruise employee arrived and moved the driverless conveyance. (Cruise did not respond to questions about what happened that night.) Keep reading this articl...[Read More]