weekly

There are 655 posts filed in weekly (this is page 49 of 66).

Weekly#173

  • Apple Inc. is in talks to acquire Tidal, a streaming-music service run by rap mogul Jay Z, according to people familiar with the matter.Apple is exploring the idea of bringing on Tidal to bolster its Apple Music service because of Tidal’s strong ties to popular artists such as Kanye West and Madonna. (WSJ)
  • Jury Says Oracle Should Pay $3 Billion in Damages to Hewlett Packard Enterprise (WSJ)
  • According to a new report from Re/Code, the streaming music service is claiming that Apple has rejected a new version of its app because of “business model rules” and stated that Spotify must use Apple’s billing system.Spotify general counsel Horacio Gutierrez explained the company’s stance in a recent letter to Apple:“This latest episode raises serious concerns under both U.S. and EU competition law,” Gutierrez wrote. “It continues a troubling pattern of behavior by Apple to exclude and diminish the competitiveness of Spotify on iOS and as a rival to Apple Music, particularly when seen against the backdrop of Apple’s previous anticompetitive conduct aimed at Spotify … we cannot stand by as Apple uses the App Store approval process as a weapon to harm competitors.” (AppAdvice)
  • 10 Facebook Messenger Secrets You Need to Know (gizmodo)
  • Top 10 Tech Jobs for 2016 (Slideshare)
  • Meta-Council on Emerging Technologies (World Economic Forum)1. Nanosensors and the Internet of Nanothings
    2. Next Generation Batteries
    3. The Blockchain
    4. 2D Materials
    5. Autonomous Vehicles
    6. Organs-on-chips
    7. Perovskite Solar Cells
    8. Open AI Ecosystem
    9. Optogenetics
    10. Systems Metabolic Engineering
  • Amazon’s Alexa virtual assistant can now order millions of items (CNET)
    Just tell your Echo: “Alexa, order Old Spice deodorant” or (hopefully not yelling across the house) “Alexa, order Charmin toilet paper.”Alexa previously was limited to reordering items someone had already purchased or recommending company-selected printers or laptops through a service called Amazon’s Choice. All the items now available for purchase must be eligible for Prime, Amazon’s membership service that includes unlimited two-day shipping. New items are being added daily to the list.

    Items ineligible for purchase through Alexa include apparel, shoes, jewelry, watches, Amazon Fresh, Amazon Prime Pantry, Amazon Prime Now and add-on items.

  • Bank of America Trends in Consumer Mobility Report [PDF]
  • Burger-flipping robot invasion is headed to the Bay Area. A few years ago, startup Momentum Machines unveiled a robot that could churn out 400 burgers an hour, and now, Tech Insider reports, the company is creating a restaurant concept around it. (recode)
  • The urban sidewalk kiosks from Sidewalk Labs will sport a battery of sensors to monitor cities, traffic and suspicious packages.

    The free Wi-Fi kiosks that Alphabet’s urban innovation division Sidewalk Labs is selling — similar to those already on the streets of New York — will come with eyes, ears and a host of environmental, air and digital sensors to give the tech giant an unprecedented snapshot of urban life, according to documents obtained by Recode.

    The documents, which formed part of Sidewalk Labs’ pitch to cities participating in the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Smart City Challenge, show that Alphabet — Google’s parent company — wants to monitor pedestrian, bike and car traffic, track passing wireless devices, listen to street noise and use the kiosks’ built-in video cameras to identify abandoned packages. Each kiosk will also generate an estimated $30,000 a year for the company from digital advertising. (recode)

  • Can Flipboard survive without a new new thing?
    Eight months ago, it looked like Flipboard was on its way out.

    The six-year-old company had lost key executives. Twitter had taken a hard look at Flipboard as an acquisition target — and passed. A report in the Wall Street Journal spelled out Flipboard’s struggle to hit revenue goals. And on top of it all, the app’s initial appeal — offering a more visual way to consume news — had been replicated and in many ways surpassed by other, bigger players, like Snapchat and Facebook and even Apple. (recode)

Weekly#172

  • Uber Customers Will Get Upfront Pricing in New App Version
    App will eliminate lightning-bolt icon previously used to indicate surge pricing (WSJ)
  • YouTube Will Soon Let You Stream Live Video From Your Phone
    The Google unit, Twitter and Facebook all want to be your mobile app of choice for live video (WSJ)
  • Tencent Seals Deal to Buy ‘Clash of Clans’ Developer Supercell for $8.6 Billion
    Tencent is little known in the West, but the company’s market capitalization was about $207 billion based on Tuesday’s closing price, more than that of Oracle Corp. and Intel Corp.
    Online games accounted for more than half of Tencent’s $15 billion in revenue last year. “We are very bullish on the [mobile games] market,” Tencent President Martin Lau said on a conference call. (WSJ)
  • Self-driving cars may one day face decision of who to save, kill (Wtop)
  • WhatsApp hits 100 million calls per day (TechCrunch)
  • Twitter quietly launches tags to location feeds with Foursquare
  • How Brands Can Put IoT Insights To Work For Them (Forbes)







Weekly#171

  • Salesforce.com Inc. lost out on its own bid for LinkedIn Corp. to Microsoft Corp., which acquired the professional social network site for $26.2 billion on Monday, according to a person familiar with the matter.Salesforce.com’s offer price isn’t known, but Brent Thill, an analyst at UBS Group, said purchasing LinkedIn would have been a stretch for the company, which makes web-based software for salespeople. The price Microsoft paid is nearly half of Salesforce.com’s $55.9 billion market capitalization. (WSJ)
  • Watch Apple’s Two-Hour 2016 WWDC Keynote in 7 Minutes (MacRumors)
  • Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. released an annual revenue forecast for the first time, projecting a 48% increase for the fiscal year ending in March as the Chinese e-commerce company seeks to alleviate investors’ concerns about its growth prospects. (WSJ)
  • LinkedIn also could supercharge Microsoft’s Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software, used to identify and track sales leads. Microsoft is in fourth place in market share among the large CRM players, including Salesforce.com Inc., SAP SE and Oracle Corp.
    Salesforce is the market leader, but it holds a minority of the complex and sometimes ill-defined market.LinkedIn already has its own CRM-type product, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, but more important, it has the data and reach that any CRM company would covet.(WSJ)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Weekly#170

  • Sony Confirms It Is Planning High-End PlayStation 4
    No release date or pricing disclosed but new version will come with a faster processor and graphics enhancement (WSJ)
  • Messaging-app operator Line Corp. is planning a dual listing in Tokyo and New York in July that could raise more than $900 million and value the five-year-old company at more than $5 billion. (WSJ)
  • In a rare pre-WWDC sit-down interview with The Verge, Phil Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing, said that Apple would soon alter its revenue-sharing model for apps. While the well-known 70 / 30 split will remain, developers who are able to maintain a subscription with a customer longer than a year will see Apple’s cut drop down to 15 percent. The option to sell subscriptions will also be available to all developers instead of just a few kinds of apps. “Now we’re going to open up to all categories,” Schiller says, “and that includes games, which is a huge category.” (TheVerge)
  • Tesla’s Betting You’ll Pay
    $9,000 for a Software Upgrade
    On Thursday, Tesla Motors re-introduced the Model S60–a cheaper version of its all-electric sedan that was discontinued last April. The new S60 starts at $66,000 and has a range of about 208 miles. For $8,500 more, customers can choose an upgraded version, called the S75, which can travel about 40 more miles per charge, according to the company’s website.

    So the upgraded model has a bigger battery, right? Nope. The two versions of the car are identical and sport the same 75 kWh battery. The only difference is that the software on the lower-end version limits the capacity of the S60’s battery, crippling its range. In fact, owners can instantly transform a lowly S60 into an S75 at any time for a fee of $9,000 ($500 more than if they’d initially bought it that way). They don’t even have to bring the car to a service center. Tesla flips the software switch remotely. (Bloomberg)

  • Machine Learning Trends and the Future of Artificial Intelligence 2016 (Algorithmia)
  • Marc Andreessen’s Favorite Books

Weekly#169

 

Mary Meeker Internet Trends 2016

  • Ericsson Mobility Report June 2016 [PDF]
  • Code Conference 2016
  • Code Conference Videos
  • The biggest challenges for Chinese companies making the next generation of wearables, self-driving cars and drones is having experts in cross disciplines, GGV Capital Managing Partner Jenny Lee said Friday. (WSJ)
  • Notes for the summer: what happened, what’s happening now and what’s next (Ben Evans)
  • Transportation technology will be the next Internet protocol (TechCrunch)
  • Elon Musk Code Conference

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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