Facebook's ARPU (average revenue per user, annualized) in the last quarter was just under $10, declining slightly in the USA and Canada, and a much lower 80 cents in the rest of the world. This is quite a bit less than Google's which hovers well over $40.

At Singularity University, our students have been forming interesting ventures after the class for the past 6 years. This fall, we'll also be starting an SU Startup Accelerator for nascent startups working on exponential technology to solve the world's biggest problems. We will be accelerating both for-profit ventures (for the world's greatest problems can also be the greatest opportunities) and $50K grants for non-profit efforts.

A reader recently asked about the synergies between robocars and ultracapacitors/supercapacitors. It turns out they are not what you would expect, and it teaches some of the surprising lessons of robocars.

This weekend I went to Pomona, CA for the 2015 DARPA Robotics Challenge which had robots (mostly humanoid) compete at a variety of disaster response and assistance tasks. This contest, a successor of sorts to the original DARPA Grand Challenge which changed the world by giving us robocars, got a fair bit of press, but a lot of it was around this video showing various robots falling down when doing the course:

What you don't hear in this video are the cries of sympathy from the crowd of thousands watching -- akin to when a figure skater might fall down -- or the cheers as each robot would complete a simple task to get a point. These cheers and sympathies were not just for the human team members, but in an anthropomorphic way for the robots themselves. Most of the public reaction to this video included declarations that one need not be too afraid of our future robot overlords just yet. It's probably better to watch the DARPA official video which has a little audience reaction.

Don't be fooled as well by the lesser-known fact that there was a lot of remote human tele-operation involved in the running of the course.

Check out my Gallery of Photos from the DARPA Robotics Challenge Finals.

What you also don't see in this video is just how very far the robots have come since the first round of trials in December 2013. During those trials the amount of remote human operation was very high, and there weren't a lot of great fall videos because the robots had tethers that would catch them if they fell. (These robots are heavy and many took serious damage when falling, so almost all testing is done with a crane, hoist or tether able to catch the robot during the many falls which do occur.)

We aren't yet anywhere close to having robots that could do tasks like these autonomously, so for now the research is in making robots that can do tasks with more and more autonomy with higher level decisions made by remote humans. The tasks in the contest were:

• Starting in a car, drive it down a simple course with a few turns and park it by a door.
• Get out of the car -- one of the harder tasks as it turns out, and one that demanded a more humanoid form
• Go to a door and open it
• Walk through the door into a room
• In the room, go up to a valve with circular handle and turn it 360 degrees
• Pick up a power drill, and use it to cut a large enough hole in a sheet of drywall
• Perform a surprise task -- in this case throwing a lever on day one, and on day 2 unplugging a power cord and plugging it into another socket
• Either walk over a field of cinder blocks, or roll through a field of light debris
• Climb a set of stairs

The robots have an hour to do this, so they are often extremely slow, and yet to the surprise of most, the audience -- a crowd of thousands and thousands more online -- watched with fascination and cheering. Even when robots would take a step once a minute, or pause at a task for several minutes, or would get into a problem and spend 10 minutes getting fixed by humans as a penalty.