Maxar Technologies received an order to build SiriusXM's SXM-10 geostationary satellite, following the SXM-9 satellite order announced earlier this month, it said Tuesday. SXM-10 will be built at Maxar's production site in Palo Alto, it said.

Yellowbrick, an online learning platform for student content creators, landed an undisclosed investment from the Sony Innovation Fund’s Innovation Growth Ventures, which Sony and Daiwa Capital Holdings formed two years ago to infuse cash into “mid to late-stage” tech startups in Japan, the U.S., Europe, Israel and India, said the platform Tuesday. Yellowbrick also said it acquired Animation Mentor, an online animation education platform created in 2005 by animators from Disney, Pixar and Industrial Light & Magic that enlists industry professionals to train student creators. Transaction terms weren’t released. Yellowbrick partners with Fashion Institute of Technology, the Parsons School of Design, New York University and other New York-area colleges to fill the growing demand for “educational opportunities” in content creation, it said.

The in-band power levels in Gogo Business Aviation's proposed next-generation air-to-ground (ATG) system don't change appreciably, and it continues to meet out-of-band emission (OOBE) limits, so there's no reason to expect more risk of harmful interference, Gogo said in docket 21-282 reply comments Tuesday. It's seeking a waiver of effective radiated power limits for ATG operations in the 849-851 MHz and 894-896 MHz bands. Gogo said more-stringent OOBE limits urged by waiver opponents (see 2108090058) would be contrary to FCC precedent, and it would continue to follow the 800 MHz ATG band's traditional OOBE limits. Florida Power & Light, backing Motorola's opposition, said Gogo should be required to provide an analysis affirmatively demonstrating no harmful interference to the adjacent 900 MHz band, which FPL uses for a private land mobile radio system for dispatch communications, nuclear power plant security, smart grid energy efficiency monitoring and electric distribution system controls.

Yellowbrick, an online learning platform for student content creators, landed an undisclosed investment from the Sony Innovation Fund’s Innovation Growth Ventures, which Sony and Daiwa Capital Holdings formed two years ago to infuse cash into “mid to late-stage” tech startups in Japan, the U.S., Europe, Israel and India, said the platform Tuesday. Yellowbrick also said it acquired Animation Mentor, an online animation education platform created in 2005 by animators from Disney, Pixar and Industrial Light & Magic that enlists industry professionals to train student creators. Transaction terms weren’t released. Yellowbrick partners with Fashion Institute of Technology, the Parsons School of Design, New York University and other New York-area colleges to fill the growing demand for “educational opportunities” in content creation, it said.

The self-adjusting speaker invention that Vizio described in the U.S. patent it landed Tuesday (see 2108170010) is embedded in its commercially available P-Series Elevate Dolby Atmos sound bar, emailed a spokesperson. When the Elevate soundbar detects Atmos content through metadata, “it rotates certain speakers upwards to provide the height channels off of the ceiling,” she said. For non-Atmos content, “these speakers rotate to face forward to provide wide separation and better stereo performance,” she said. “This makes the bar dynamic based on content.”

A motion for judgment submitted by plaintiff Fujian Yinfeng Imp & Exp Trading Co. was rejected by the Court of International Trade's Judge M. Miller Baker on Aug. 17 due to a failure to comply with formatting requirements. In a notice from the court, Baker said that the motion was rejected since it failed to include a glossary of case-specific acronyms and abbreviations. The corrected document was instructed to be refiled by Aug. 25 (Fujian Yinfeng Imp & Exp Trading Co., Ltd. v. U.S., CIT #21-00088).

Vizio landed U.S. patent 11,095,976 Tuesday for an audio system that enables the orientation of a “second subset” of speakers to be made “automatically adjustable relative to the orientation of a first subset.” When the system detects incoming audio signals with “up-firing content,” it adjusts “the relative orientations when such content is provided,” said the patent, based on a January 2020 application. The system also is configured “to calculate a desired degree of rotation for the speakers in the second subset based on the geometry of the room in which the sound system is located and the location of the listener in the room,” it said. Some Dolby Atmos channels may be up-firing, “depending on the desires of the specific content creator,” it said. “One scenario in which up-firing content would be used is one in which the listener would expect sounds to emanate from overhead,” such as airplane noise, it said. “This requires rotating the up-firing speakers by an angle of rotation that ensures that the emitted sound will reflect off of the ceiling and travel to the listener's ears.” But in larger rooms or those with high ceilings, “the position of the listener relative to the sound system may vary, causing the optimum angle of rotation to vary as well,” said the patent. “It is desirable to provide a speaker system in which the relative orientations of the speaker drivers comprising the system are automatically adjustable, in particular, to a user selected angle of rotation between the up-firing and forward-firing speakers or based on the position of the listener relative to the sound system and/or the room geometry.” Vizio didn’t comment on commercial deployment plans for the invention.

Some winning Rural Digital Opportunity Fund Phase I auction bidders asked the FCC to waive penalties if they decide to withdraw bids for census blocks that faced questions about whether service is already available. Bidders that won the smallest number of census blocks are among those that responded to the FCC accepting the offer so far.

Representatives from manufacturing interests operating in Mexico said the COVID-19 pandemic has presented an opportunity to argue for locating more production in North America, for both reliability and speed, but there are still obstacles to making the argument for nearshoring as an answer to vulnerable supply chains. The president of the National Council of the Maquiladora and Export Manufacturing Industry and the director of global trade compliance for Illinois-headquartered manufacturer Regal Beloit spoke at the Wilson Center's "Building a Competitive U.S.-Mexico Border" conference, which was held Aug. 10 and 11.

Representatives from manufacturing interests operating in Mexico said the COVID-19 pandemic has presented an opportunity to argue for locating more production in North America, for both reliability and speed, but there are still obstacles to making the argument for nearshoring as an answer to vulnerable supply chains. The president of the National Council of the Maquiladora and Export Manufacturing Industry and the director of global trade compliance for Illinois-headquartered manufacturer Regal Beloit spoke at the Wilson Center's "Building a Competitive U.S.-Mexico Border" conference, which was held Aug. 10 and 11.