April 2016

There were 5 posts published in April 2016 (this is page 1 of 1).

Weekly#164

  • More than a third of Snapchat’s daily users create “Stories,” broadcasting photos and videos from their lives that last 24 hours, according to people familiar with the matter. Now users are watching 10 billion videos a day on the application, up from 8 billion in February. Snapchat on Thursday confirmed the number of video views. (Bloomberg)
  • China will launch a core module belonging to its first space station around 2018, …The construction of space station is expected to finish in 2022, Wang said. (Space Daily)
  • Microsoft is buying 10 million strands of long oligonucleotides — laboratory-made molecules of DNA — from San Francisco startup Twist Bioscience, the companies announced today…It seems that Microsoft is exploring the idea of using DNA molecules as a way to store massive amounts of data. Unlike hard drives, Blu-Ray discs, or pretty much any current storage technology, DNA stays intact and readable for as long as 1,000 to 10,000 years. (Business Insider)a
  • Google is building a new hardware division under former Motorola chief Rick Osterloh …
    A Google rep confirmed that Osterloh has joined the company as its newest Senior Vice President, running the new hardware product line and reporting to CEO Sundar Pichai…
    The new division includes:Nexus
    Chromecast
    Consumer hardware (Chromebook laptops and the new Pixel C device, which runs on Android.)
    OnHub ( The wireless home router)
    ATAP
    Glass(Recode)
  • Intel turned down an opportunity to provide the processor for the iPhone, believing that Apple was unlikely to sell enough of them to justify the development costs. (Vox)

    … But, oh, what could have been! Even Otellini betrayed a profound sense of disappointment over a decision he made about a then-unreleased product that became the iPhone. Shortly after winning Apple’s Mac business, he decided against doing what it took to be the chip in Apple’s paradigm-shifting product.

    “We ended up not winning it or passing on it, depending on how you want to view it. And the world would have been a lot different if we’d done it,” Otellini told me in a two-hour conversation during his last month at Intel. “The thing you have to remember is that this was before the iPhone was introduced and no one knew what the iPhone would do… At the end of the day, there was a chip that they were interested in that they wanted to pay a certain price for and not a nickel more and that price was below our forecasted cost. I couldn’t see it. It wasn’t one of these things you can make up on volume. And in hindsight, the forecasted cost was wrong and the volume was 100x what anyone thought.”

    It was the only moment I heard regret slip into Otellini’s voice during the several hours of conversations I had with him. “The lesson I took away from that was, while we like to speak with data around here, so many times in my career I’ve ended up making decisions with my gut, and I should have followed my gut,” he said. “My gut told me to say yes.” (The Atlantic)

  • The first rule of pricing is: you do not talk about pricing (Medium)
  • The Behavioral Psychology of Netflix’s Plan to Charge Higher Prices (The Atlantic)

AWS Summit Series 2016 | Chicago

    • Dr. Matt Wood

 

    • Getting Started with AWS IoT

 

    • Getting Started with Amazon Machine Learning

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Weekly#163

  • Sean Parker, the Napster Inc. co-founder and early investor in Facebook Inc. and Spotify AB, believes social media isn’t intimate enough. Which is why on Thursday, he relaunched his old video service—Airtime—with a new mission, to bring friends closer together online. (WSJ)
  • Revenue from Microsoft’s Intelligent Cloud segment, which includes its Azure on-demand computing services as well as its older server software sales, grew 3% to $6.1 billion. The gain was 8% in constant currency, and the company said that Azure grew 120% in constant currency.But just one quarter earlier, the same segment grew 5%, or 11% in constant currency, and Azure was up 140%(WSJ)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Weekly#162

  • Facebook F8 Summary
  • Project: Raspberry Pi + Alexa Voice Service (Github)
  • The Doomsday Seed Vault [video]
  • Chatbots — the name for robots that simulate human conversation — have been thrust into the spotlight in recent weeks amid a flurry of new experiments in how they might be used to shape the future of shopping. Retail heavyweights Sephora and H&M recently launched bots on messaging app Kik that help shoppers browse and buy their products. Taco Bell showed off its TacoBot, a way to use the messaging app Slack to place a meal order. And on Tuesday, Facebook announced it has created a platform that allows companies to develop bots that run within its Messenger app, which has some 900 million users worldwide. (Washington Post)
  • Facebook’s bots are an ‘existential threat’ to Apple, says Wall Street analyst (Business Insider)
  • Apple could stop the new Facebook Messenger before it’s even begun (Business Insider)
  • Netflix says Geography, Age, and Gender are “Garbage” for Predicting Taste
    “Geography, age, and gender? We put that in the garbage heap,” VP of product Todd Yellin said. Instead, viewers are grouped into “clusters” almost exclusively by common taste, and their Netflix homepages highlight the relatively small slice of content that matches their taste profile. (Fortune)

 

Weekly#161

  • The best part of the 3.50 update is the ability to play all your PS4 games remotely on a Windows or Mac device. (Gizmodo)
  • Google is said to be considering Swift as a ‘first class’ language for Android (TNW)
  • Your next car will need a firewall (TNW)
  • The first company to start making drone deliveries at a commercial, high-volume scale won’t be Amazon or DHL, but a startup sending medical supplies to remote hospitals in Rwanda to save lives. (FastCoExist)
  • Twitch users can now live stream Android games from their PC (TechCrunch)
  • Amazon releases API to add more smart home capabilities to Alexa (BI)
  • Mobile users spend about 30 minutes a day on Facebook. Nobody else is even close
  • Yahoo’s patents could be worth $4 billion (BI)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Weekly#160

  • Tesla’s Model 3 Electric Car Secures 135,000 Reservations on First Day of Ordering, Vehicle is expected to get at least 215 miles of range from a single charge (WSJ)
  • T-Mobile quietly offers a plan that includes unlimited data and texting without the ability to make cellular calls (except for dialing 911). It costs as little as $20 a month, $30 less than the equivalent smartphone plan. (WSJ)
  • Android users will soon be able to reply to texts from their Windows 10 PCs (Business Insider)
  • Microsoft Build 2016 Keynote Summary
  • Linux’s Bash shell is coming to Windows, courtesy of a collaboration between Microsoft and Ubuntu-creator Canonical. Type bash into Windows 10’s Start menu, and you’ll be able to instantly get a full Linux command-line environment. (PCWorld)
  • Drone company Airware raises $30 million and adds Cisco’s John Chambers to its board (Business Insider)
  • Oculus could make up about 10 percent of Facebook’s revenue in four years
    They estimate Facebook will sell 600,000 Rift units this year and more than two million in 2017, generating over $1.6 billion in revenue from hardware and royalty fees from game sales. (Business Insider)