Daily Tech Headlines – June 4, 2018

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Daily Tech Headlines – June 4, 2018
Number 516
Broadcast Date JUNE 4, 2018
Episode Length 4:15
Hosts Tom Merritt

Microsoft buys GitHub, Facebook in hot water over 10-year-old API, ASUS announce gaming phone.

Headlines

Microsoft confirmed it has agreed to acquire GitHub for $7.5 billion in stock. Microsoft expects the acquisition to close by the end of the year. Microsoft corporate vice president Nat Friedman, formerly CEO of Xamarin will become CEO and GitHub founder Chris Wanstrath will become a Microsoft technical fellow. Microsoft says GitHub will operate independently. GitHub allows open source projects to use the service for free and charges for others. Microsoft uses GitHub and is thought by some to be its biggest contributor. Some developers are already switching to GitLab and Atlassian's BitBucket. Gitlab says it is seeing 10 times the normal daily amount of repositories.
The New York Times reported Sunday that Facebook's device-integrated APIs, launched ten years ago, gave partners like Apple, Amazon, BlackBerry, Microsoft and Samsung access to data on users and friends. The APIs let device makers offer Facebook features like messaging, address books and the like button in the OS, before apps were common. Facebook said in April it was winding down the API. Facebook said the device makers were beholden to strict agreements that adhered to Facebook's privacy policy and the 2011 US FTC agreement.
At Computex in Taiwan, ASUS announced the ROG gaming phone. It uses the Snapdragon 845 boosted from 2.8 to 2.96 GHz, a 6-inch 2160 x 1080 AMOLED screen running at 90Hz with a 1ms response rate and support for HDR. 802.11ad WiGig lets you use ASUS's WiGig dock to mirror the display to a TV. It will come with 3 USB-C ports, 8 GB of RAM but no word on storage. Ultrasonic sensors work as triggers for landscape gaming so your fingers aren't covering the screen. There's also a 4,000mAh battery and a copper heat radiator that ASUS says dissipates heat 16 times as well as a standard smartphone. Accessories include an external cooling fan, a TwinViewDock for a second mobile screen and the Mobile Desktop Dock for plugging into a PC. It launches for an unknown price in Q3.
ASUS also announced two new 15.1-inch gaming laptops. The $1,999 Scar II for First-person shooters has white WASD keys and the $1,699 Hero II for MOBAs has white QWER keys, both available today.
NVIDIA announced its Isaac platform at Computex, powered by the Jetson Xavier system-on-a-chip for intelligent robots. It uses the same processor as the Xavier Drive self-driving SOC. The system includes an octa-core Arm CPU; a Volta Tensor Core GPU; two NVDLA deep learning chips, and vision, video and image processors. Xavier is capable of 30 trillion operations per second. Developers can get the Jetson Xavier SoC for $1,299 starting in August.
Windows Central says a source tells it that an upcoming Xbox One build adds a Digital Assistants section to the Kinect and Devices menu which lets the user enable Cortana, Google Assistant and Amazon's Alexa. Users would supposedly need to install the Xbox skills app for the respective platform.
Friday, Apple approved an updated version of the Telegram app. The day before, Telegram CEO Pavel Durov said Apple had not updated the app since April after Russia ordered the app blocked in that country.
Fitbit announced it has shipped "more than" 1 million $199 Versa smartwatches in the six weeks since it went on sale April 16th. For comparison Canalys estimates Apple shipped 3.8 million smartwatches in the Q1.

Apple's WorldWide Developers' Conference kicks off Monday in San Jose. Updates from there will be included in an upcoming episode of Daily Tech Headlines.

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"Daily Tech Headlines – June 1, 2018" 		Daily Tech Headlines – June 4, 2018
 Followed by:
"Daily Tech Headlines – June 5, 2018"
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