weekly

There are 640 posts filed in weekly (this is page 48 of 64).

Weekly#168

  • Microsoft to Streamline Smartphone Hardware Business
    Software giant insists that it isn’t exiting the mobile-phone business and will focus efforts in areas where it has ‘differentiation (WSJ)
  • Accenture Technology Vision 2016 [Report]
  • An LED Light Bulb With a Warm, Retro Glow (WSJ)
  • Amazon recently unveiled Echosim.io, a site that emulates the functionality of an Amazon Echo speaker, bringing the Alexa voice assistant technology to desktops.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Weekly#167

 

  • The Internet Value Chain : GSMA Study [PDF]
  • A power company in the Midwest hired a group of white hat hackers known as RedTeam Security to test its defenses [Tech Insider]
  • Google I/O 2016 (in GIFs) [Medium]
  • ARM has acquired an Internet of Things (IoT) business called Apical that holds a lot of intellectual property and has a finger in connected vehicles, robotics, smart cities and security systems.[V3]
  • Earthquakes come without warning, making them one of the most feared natural disaster. Startups like Zizmos are working on early-warning systems using IoT (Internet of Things) sensors…
    Today, Japan has the most advanced early warning system in the world. This system has come at a cost of one billion dollars. It is effective, but unfortunately, unaffordable for all but the richest countries….
    Zizmos is a startup that began as a research project at Stanford University funded by the National Science Foundation. Eight years of research went towards finding new technology to mitigate the effects of earthquakes in the world….
    The Zizmos sensor network can provide up to 90 seconds of warning, depending on the distance between the user and the epicenter. Seismic waves travel at approximately two miles per second; therefore, if you live 30 miles from the epicenter you will receive 15 seconds of warning before the earthquake impacts your location [HuffingtonPost]
  • The plan comes as IMAX and Alphabet Inc.’s Google on Thursday announced plans to collaborate on a camera that will capture 360-degree images made to be experienced on virtual-reality headsets. The camera is expected to be ready for commercial use in roughly 18 months.[WSJ]
  • Understanding The Protocols Behind The Internet Of Things 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Weekly#166

  • Apple Invests $1 Billion in Didi, Uber’s Rival in China (WSJ)
  • The deal came together after the Didi Chuxing executive team visited Tim Cook at Apple headquarters in Cupertino on April 20. The $1 billion investment closed “like lightning” only a few short weeks later. (BI)
  • Uber, not Tesla, will be Apple’s competition in the automobile industry (BI)
  • Google is beautifying its data centers by turning them into giant art projects (TNW)
  • Facebook news selection is in hands of editors not algorithms, documents show (Guardian)
  • Japan-based industrial giant Hitachi announced that it is creating the Hitachi Insight Group, encompassing its IoT solutions and services, to be headquartered in Santa Clara, California…
    Hitachi’s 33 IoT-specific solutions generated $5.4 billion in revenues in 2015, the company reported…
    The group will also oversee Hitachi’s new Lumada IoT software platform, which will serve as the foundation for software applications that Hitachi will build along with its partners. (BI)
  • …before Android’s launch in 2008, its cofounder Rich Miner, now a general partner at Google Ventures, wrote an internal email describing the need for an open-source mobile operating system…
  • “If an open platform is not introduced in the next few years then Microsoft will own the programmable handset platform,” wrote Miner. “Palm is dying, RIM [Blackberry] is a one-trick pony, and while Symbian [a closed operating system] is growing market share it’s becoming a Nokia only solution.” (QZ)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Weekly#165

  • If you have a computer running Windows 7 or 8, mark July 30 on your calendar. That’s the day that upgrading your PC to Windows 10 will no longer be free. Once the operating system passes its one-year anniversary, Microsoft Corp. will start charging $120 to move over to Windows 10. (WSJ)
  • Basically, Microsoft built a “self-capacitive touch screen,”a phone that can sense when your fingers are nearby and display the controls you need, right when you need them. (BI Insider)
  • Microsoft acquires Solair (Microsoft)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Weekly#159

  • Learning machine learning (Ben Evans Blog)
    …Have you built HAL 9000 or have you written a thousand IF statements?…
  • Craig Venter report engineering a bacterium to have the smallest genome—and the fewest genes—of any freely living organism, smaller than the flower’s by a factor of 282,000. Known as Syn 3.0, the new organism has a genome whittled down to the bare essentials needed to survive and reproduce, just 473 genes. (Science)
  • A new report concludes that 48 percent of all mobile games spending comes from a miniscule 0.19 percent of users. (Wired)
  • After nearly four years of crowdfunding, developer kits, an acquisition by Facebook and seemingly endless hype, the finished Oculus Rift headset is shipping to its first customers. (Engadget)
  • Retro gaming fans rejoice: Atari Vault is on Steam with 100 games (Tech Crunch)
  • Google’s $150 Nik Collection of Photo Editing Software is Now 100% Free (PetaPixel)
  • Meet the largest science project in US government history—the James Webb Telescope
    Precision? The Webb can detect heat generated by a bumblebee as far away as the Moon. (ArsTechnica)
  • Report: “YouTube Connect” will be a livestreaming Periscope competitor (ArsTechnica)