White House announces $300M in tech funding for digital health, smart cities, AI, and getting us to Mars

Image: White House Frontiers Conference

By Alison DeNisco | October 13, 2016, 1:03 PM PST

On Thursday, President Barack Obama hosted the White House Frontiers Conference, where he discussed America's initiatives to leverage tech for health, smart cities, and space travel.



On Thursday, the White House announced more than $300 million in funding, through partnerships, for tech innovations that will help Americans live in smart cities, improve healthcare, and even make it to Mars—while also addressing what increased automation could mean for job security.

At the first White House Frontiers Conference, co-hosted by the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University, President Obama opened up a conversation on current innovations underway in America, and ones to come.

"We may be in a slightly different period now, simply because of the pervasive applicability of AI and other technologies," said President Obama in a video shown at the start of the conference. "High-skill folks do very well in these systems, and can leverage their talents and interface with machines to extend their reach, sales, products, and services. Low-wage, low-skill individuals become more and more redundant, and their jobs may not be replaced, but wages will be suppressed."

Here are the five frontiers of innovation the White House examined at

Toshiba announces entry-level OCZ TL100 family of SSDs

By Shawn Knight on September 28, 2016, 7:30 AM

Toshiba a couple of weeks ago rolled out a new family of OCZ-branded solid state drives – the XV500 series – targeting mainstream desktop and notebook owners interested in replacing their tired (and slow) spinning hard drive.

Now, Toshiba is addressing the entry-level market with its new OCZ TL100 family. Offered in capacities of 120GB and 240GB, both drives dish up sequential read and write speeds of up to 550MB/sec and 530MB/sec, respectively. Random read speeds on the two drives are identical at up to 85,000 IOPS, as are random write speeds at up to 80,000 IOPS.



In addition to its higher capacity, the 240GB should be a bit more durable as it’s rated for 60 TBW (total bytes written) with an average of 54GB per day. The smaller 120GB SSD can only do half that at 30TB or 27GB/day.

Both 7mm drives utilize Toshiba’s TLC (triple level cell) NAND flash and come backed by a three-year advanced warranty program. They also both consume a maximum of 1.6 watts and come with OCZ’s SSD management software. It’s unclear, however, which controller is running the show.

As for pricing, the 120GB TL100 will set you back just $44.99 while the larger drive commands $67.99. Toshiba hasn’t yet said when the drives will go on sale although I suspect they’ll drop in time for the holidays.