Daily Tech Headlines – July 7, 2016
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| Daily Tech Headlines – July 7, 2016 | |
| Number | 21 |
| Broadcast Date | JULY 7, 2016 |
| Episode Length | 7:00 |
| Hosts | Tom Merritt |
Snapchat lets you store snaps, Avast buys AVG and Microsoft loses a COO, gains 5 jobs.
Headlines
- Snapchat has a new feature called Memories that will let you save personal moments to Snapchat's servers, rather than your camera roll. If you choose to save a picture or video to memories you can find it later by swiping up from below the camera screen. You can search in memories by keyword. Saved memories can be re-shared in My Stories and will show up with a Frame and timestamp to indicate it's an older pic or video. You can also create a new story to send to friends in a message. You can also move snaps and stories to My Eyes Only protected by a PIN. Memories will roll out over the next month or so.
- Android Police reports its sources say Google is building two Android Wear devices for release after the next wave of Nexus phones are announced. One watch codenamed Angelfish would have LTE and GPS and both would monitor heart rate and has Google Assist integration. The smaller one is codenamed Swordfish.
- Avast Software announced its intention to acquire AVG Technologies for $1.3 billion. Avast cited the need to scale their business into the Internet of Things market as a primary factor for the acquisition. The combined userbase of Avast and AVG will grow to 400 million endpoints, of which 160 million are mobile. An Avast spokeswoman confirmed the company will still keep the AVG brand.
- Starting July 11 Facebook will allow a small percentage of users in India to download video for offline viewing. Videos can only be viewed within the Facebook app and publishers can choose not to allow downloads.
- Google announced new updates to Now on Tap for users of Android Marshmallow. Long press the home button on any screen in any app and tap Translate this screen. It's available for phones with languages set to English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Portuguese and Russian. Discover mode gives you a stream of visual content related to what's on your screen. And you can now scan barcodes and QR codes to get info cards related to that object.
- Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced Thursday morning that 11-year Microsoft veteran and COO Kevin Turner will leave the company. Turner will become CEO at Citadel Securities. Turner's job will be broken into five pieces. Worldwide Commercial Business led by Judson Althoff. Global Sales, Marketing and Operations led by Jen-Philippe Courtois, Worldwide Marketing and Consumer Business under Chris Capossela, IT and Operations goes to Kurt DelBene and finance teams under Amy Hood. Turner had been a candidate to replace Steve Ballmer as CEO.
- Apple is making the beta of macOS Sierra and iOS 10 available to the public Thursday at beta.apple.com. The new OS includes Siri, picture in picture mode for iTunes and Safari and universal clipboard shared with iOS. Those with the developer version of watchOS 3 can unlock a computer with the Watch now. The non-beta releases of macOS Sierra and iOS 10 are due later this year.
- In a press release, Samsung unveiled the first Universal Flash Storage cards or UFS cards, the successor to microSD. The new standard has five times faster read speeds at up to 530MB per second, and significantly faster write speeds at 170MB per second. Universal Flash Storage has seen some limited usage as an embedded storage solution in smartphones, but to date no device has shipped with an external card reader.
- Samsung announced it expects to earn 8.1 trillion Korean Won ($7 billion) in Q2 with revenue of 50 trillion KRW, around $43 billion. This would mark the most profitable quarter for Samsung since Q1 2014, and represent a 17% increase year over year. The new guidance is buoyed by the success of the company's Galaxy S7 smartphones.
- HTC has released the 5-inch Desire 530 phone in the US. It's available from T-Mobile and Verizon in Blue Lagoon, Sprinkle White and Stratus White which are apparently names for colors. A $179 unlocked version will be available directly from HTC later this month.
- If you were able to resist spending $600 on the Nvidia GTX 1080 you can now try to resist spending $249 on the GTX 1060. Nvidia claims the 1060's 16-nanometer Pascal architecture is as fast as the GTX 980, with 1280 CUDA cores, 6GB of GDDR5 RAM and a boost clock speed of 1.7GHz. The 1060 will be available from partners like ASUS, EVGA and Gigabyte starting July 19. A founders edition will also be available for $299. The 1060 is still more expensive than AMD's $200 RX 480.
- Facebook launched OpenCellular today with the aim of bringing more affordable wireless access through an open source hardware and software platform. The platform tries to use already available infrastructure as much as possible to keep costs low. It has two main subsystems, one for general purpose and base-band computing and one for radio. They are designed to handle extremes of wind temperature and other harsh conditions. Telecom operators, entrepreneurs, researchers and OEMs can make free use of the designs and software which will also be donated to the Telecom Infra Project.
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| Preceded by: "Daily Tech Headlines – July 6, 2016" |
Daily Tech Headlines – July 7, 2016 |
Followed by: "Daily Tech Headlines – July 8, 2016" |