Daily Tech Headlines – September 6, 2016
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| Daily Tech Headlines – September 6, 2016 | |
| Number | 64 |
| Broadcast Date | SEPTEMBER 6, 2016 |
| Episode Length | 4:57 |
| Hosts | Rich Stroffolino |
Intel buys Movidius, Flipagram needs a buyer, and the European Space Agency finds its lost lander.
Headlines
- On Monday, Intel announced plans to acquire chipmaker Movidius. The company specializes in chips for drones and virtual reality applications, and currently provides chips to Lenovo, DJI, and Google. Intel hopes to integrate Movidius' chips into its RealSense depth-sensing camera platform. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
- Recode reports that according to its sources, video app maker Flipagram is looking for a buyer. The company pivoted last year from a photo and video stitching slideshow utility into more of a social network, and hopes a high profile acquisition would spur growth. According to CEO Farhad Mohit, as of March, the company had 36 million monthly active users.
- Apple began rolling out personalized music playlists in Apple Music for iOS and MacOS beta testers this week. The feature was originally announced at WWDC in June, but has been rebranded from "Discover Weekly" to "My New Music Mix”. The playlist is updated every Friday with new music, and offers 25 tracks based on your music listening habits. Apple is also rolling out another playlist feature called "My Favorite Mix", which combines favorites tracks with recommended new music, the playlist adds new music every Wednesday. Both playlists can be subscribed to for automatic download for offline listening.
- AMD announced that systems using its 7th generation A-series desktop processors began shipping this week. The APUs, code named Bristol Ridge, feature support for DDR4 memory, with up to 4 Excavator computing cores, and AMD Radeon GCN 3.0 cores that run at 1.1 gigahertz. AMD expects performance gains of 17% and 27% for CPU and GPU performance, respectively. The new APUs are optimized for efficiency, running at either 65 or 35 watts, the previous generation ran at 95 watts.
- Headphone manufacturer Bragi announced the successor to its Kickstarted Dash bluetooth headphones, called "The Headphone". The pair of wireless earbuds promises 6 hours of battery life, improved reliability on the bluetooth connection, and a lower price than the Dash, retailing at $149 with preorders available for $119. To achieve the price, The Headphone loses the Dash's fitness tracking and onboard music storage features. A shipment date has not been announced.
- French peer-to-peer payment platform Lydia is launching a payment card, with payments processed through MasterCard. Lydia uses the plastic card infrastructure to more quickly process payments, previously the service used SEPA transfers which could take days for deposits to be received. Users can request a card for 10 euros, with a 3.99 euro fee. Using the Lydia app, users can toggle features on the card, including payment limits, ATM withdrawals, NCF payments, or even deactivate the card itself.
- Softbank officially closed on its acquisition of semiconductor designer ARM Holdings for 24 billion pounds. ARM will be delisted from the London Stock Exchange today. Softbank reiterated that they plan to run ARM as an independent business.
- The European Space Agency announced it has found its lost Philae lander, which touched down on a comet in 2014. The lander had not been heard from since July 2015, after it had drained its batteries and gone into hibernation mode. The Rosetta spacecraft orbiting the comet spotted the lander is the shadow of a large bolder, oriented on its side, with its antenna facing the comet, which the ESA explains why its signals were weak and erratic. Sadly, no rescue mission is planned.
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| Preceded by: "Daily Tech Headlines – September 5, 2016" |
Daily Tech Headlines – September 6, 2016 |
Followed by: "Daily Tech Headlines – September 7, 2016" |