Daily Tech Headlines – June 16, 2016
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| Daily Tech Headlines – June 16, 2016 | |
| Number | 7 |
| Broadcast Date | JUNE 16, 2016 |
| Episode Length | 9:31 |
| Hosts | Tom Merritt |
Samsung buys the cloud, Stamford Wallace goes to jail, a small town with big fiber.
Headlines
- Samsung announced it has agreed to acquire cloud-computing company Joyent. It will become part of Samsung’s mobile communications unit but continue as a standalone company while key staffers work on Samsung’s cloud projects. Joint’s main products power mobile and Web apps with a container infrastructure platform called Triton and object storage service Manta.
- A federal judge in San Jose sentenced Sanford Wallace to 30 months in prision and fined him $310,000. Wallace sent out more than 27 million spam messages through Facebook's servers between 2008 and 2009. He pleaded guilty to one count of fraud and one count of criminal contempt in August 2015. Wallace has a history with spam, dating back to junk faxes in 1991. In civic lawsuits with MySpace and Facebook, he accumulated more than a total of $1 billion in outstanding default judgments.
- Facebook Messenger launched a redesign today that adds a Home tab so you can see who is online, upcoming birthdays and who your favorite people to chat with are. The navigation bar is now on the bottom with tabs for calls, contacts, groups and your profile. The top bar is now a search bar.
- At E3, Nintendo announced that Pokemon Go, the Niantic co-developed Augmented Reality mobile game, will launch in July for Android and iOS. Several features will not be ready at launch, such as trading monsters and integration with Pokemon Sun and Moon. The Pokemon Go Plus, a $35 wrist worn wearable that lets you play the game without a smartphone, will not be ready for the July launch. BUT at launch it will put Pokemon in the real world through your smartphone's camera, place gym's at notable real world landmarks and have Red, Blue, and Yellow teams vie for control of gyms.
- Recode reports that Meerkat stealth launched a new video messaging app. Houseparty launched in February, and makes you available for video chats with any of your friends from the moment you open the app. You can also jump in and out of your friends' in progress chats. In a March, Meerkat CEO Ben Rubin told Recode, the company had shifted time and resources away from their livestreaming app in August 2015.
- Magic Leap, a company we must remind you has not come out with a product or shown more than a glimpse of a working prototype to the public, is partnering with Lucasfilm and Industrial Light and Magic on a semisecret lab. Magic Leap CEO Rony Abovitz told the Wired Business conference the lab will be based in San Francisco.
- Pinterest announced it has acquired the employees of keyboard app Fleksy but not the app itself. Fleksy founder and chief executive Kosta Eleftheriou will join Pinterest’s product engineering team. Half of Fleksy’s 10-person team will join Pinterest’s mobile and mobile platform engineering departments. The Fleksy app will remain “for the foreseeable future” with minimal updates, and will open-source some of its accessibility components.
- The x.ai appointment-scheduling bot now supports Office 365 and Outlook.com. Corporate accounts are not yet supported. Business Insider reports that Exchange Calendar Server support is coming soon. The bot lets users cc [email protected] or [email protected] on meeting-scheduling threads then the bot handles finding mutual free times. X.ai is currently in a closed beta, and expects to release a paid business version of the bot later this year.
- The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative which is handling the commitment to give 99% of Zuckerberg's Facebook stock to charity over the course of his lifetime has made its first investment. The company is leading a $24 million funding round for Andela, a startup that works to train software developers in Kenya and Nigeria and connect them with jobs. Andela plans to use the funds to expand to other African countries.
- A Pew study finds digital news ad revenue is up 20% to $60 billion, but that a greater percentage aren't going to news organizations, with 65% going to 5 tech companies including Facebook, Google, Yahoo and Twitter. Traditional ad revenue for news declined for newspapers and local tv but rose for cable and broadcast network news. The study also finds podcasts continue to grow in listenership, but that currently 21% of adults listen on a monthly basis.
- IBM announced it’s Watson platform is powering services on a self-driving bus called Olli. Local Motors also 3D-printed parts of the bus to keep costs down. Watson won’t be driving but ‘improving the passenger experience.’ Passengers can talk to Watson about how Olli works, why it makes the driving decisions it does and even get restaurant recommendations. Olli cars will start operations in Washington, DC, and come to Miami-Dade County and Las Vegas later this year.
- UberEats launched Thursday in Central London. It will deliver food from 150 restaurants daily from 11AM to 11 PM and without a delivery charge for the first month. It hopes to expand beyond Central London in the coming weeks. London is UberEats 18th city and second in Europe after Paris.
- Ars Technica’s Jon Brodkin reports on Ammon, Idaho’s municipal open access network. Multiple ISP’s can offer service to customers over the city-owned fiber and residents can sign up and switch ISPs, “almost instantly” by visiting a city-operated website, without changing equipment. IN fact the network’s gateways have 4 ports and each port can be assigned to a separate ISP. A pilot program of 12 homes just finished and construction is beginning for 200 more homes and eventually all 4500. All businesses have been hooked up to fiber already without raising taxes.
- Luma’s home mesh WiFi system has begin shipping to people who preordered last year from Luma or through Amazon. Luna’s devices use Bluetooth to communicate with an app for optimal positioning and hopefully eliminate dead spots. The app can also do content filtering, device management and security. Luma is also available for order now from Best Buy’s website, and coming to the store’s shelves next month. Luma sells for $149 a piece or $399 for a three pack.
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| Preceded by: "Daily Tech Headlines – June 15, 2016" |
Daily Tech Headlines – June 16, 2016 |
Followed by: "Daily Tech Headlines – June 17, 2016" |