The Blockchain Explained

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The Blockchain Explained
Number 2918
Broadcast Date DECEMBER 7, 2016
Episode Length 47:18
Hosts Tom Merritt
Guests Scott Johnson

Fitbit buys and shuts down Pebble, Sony gets into mobile games and Tom Merritt attempts to explain the blockchain to Scott Johnson.

Guest

Top Stories

Facing competition from Microsoft and Facebook, Slack announced deeper integration with Google Cloud, including support for Google’s Team Drives, document previews, permissioning and more. Microsoft announced its next BUILD conference will take place in Seattle May 10-12. Niantic announced that new Pokemon are coming Monday December 12, plus Sprint is turning 10,500 of its locations into Pokestops. AND Apple announced it now has 20 million paid subscribers to Apple Music, up 15% from 3 months ago and about half of Spotify’s number. Now here are some more top stories.
Pebble CEO Eric Migicovsky posted that Fitbit has acquired Pebble. Pebble will shut down, cease manufacturing products and many of its employee will join Fitbit’s wearable software teams. Existing Pebble devices will continue to work, though warranty support has been withdrawn. APIs and SDKs will continue to operate but cloud services will be phased out and handed over to the community. The Pebble 2 has been canceled and Kickstarter backers who have not received a reward will get a full refund.
Sony says it is working on eleven mobile titles with the aim of releasing up to six smartphone games in the next year. Among the titles are Hot Shots Golf, PaRappa the Rapper and Arc The Lad. Sony also announced Project Field, cutting board sized device that allows real world objects with embedded chips to be used with smartphones and tablets. Yokai Watch is the first title announced for the system and no release date or price was announced. Separately Sony announced it has now sold more than 50 Million PlayStation 4 consoles. It last announced sales of 40 million in May.
T-Mobile announced Digits, a service similar to AT&T’s NumberSync or Google Voice which lets you use one phone number across multiple devices. It can also use a number to ring multiple people and let you manage multiple numbers on one device, including temporary numbers. A beta version has launched for postpaid T-Mobile USA account holders and works on Android 5.0 iOS 9 and desktop versions of Chrome and Firefox. It does not work with Apple’s iMessage which T-Mobile advises beta testers to turn off. T-Mobile built it’s own IP Multimedia Subsystem, bypassing SIM meaning it could potentially work on any device. It can even be used on a phone from another carrier if T-Mobile has an account relationship with them.
Nostralrius ran older versions of World of Warcraft but Blizzard required the community cease operations. Blizzard then met with the community and promised to work out an official alternative. Nostralrius seemed positive about it but then heard nothing again from Blizzard after June. So the folks behind Nostralrius have decided to get behind a new unofficial server called Elysium which will run version 1.12 of Warcraft. Nostralrius has decided to release its source code that allowed it to run the older versions. Elysium says it is ready to launch publicly December 19th and will allow accounts from the Nostralrius servers to be revived.
The Shanghai Consumer Council released a report on Friday detailing battery fires in eight iPhone 6 handsets. Apple has investigated and believes the fires were caused by external physical damage. The Council also detailed reports of iPhone 6s battery issues from devices outside the recall range announced by Apple November 20th. Apple posted on its Chinese support page that a “small number of customers outside of the affected range have also reported an unexpected shutdown.”
Google announced it is updating Chrome for Android with the ability to download music, videos and web pages for offline viewing. Users can also share downloads from within Chrome. It also highlights misspelled words in text fields.

Discussion

Pick of the Day

Tom - With all the talk on the streaming music services in the last few shows, the biggest issue for changing services is carrying over your playlists. My pick will help with that. It’s an app that helps migrate your playlists from one service to another and It is called STAMP (https://freeyourmusic.com/). It is a freemium app with lets you try for 10 songs/session and then charges about 9 Euros one time to unlock unlimited. This has been a life saver for me as I jumped between services and finally landed on Google Play music. Hope this is as helpful to others to as it has been from me.
Submitted by Josh M.

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Preceded by:
"Patrick’s Wonderful and Amazing Video Game Holiday Shopping List" 		The Blockchain Explained
 Followed by:
"Windows up in ARM"
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