Daily Tech Headlines – January 17, 2018
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| Daily Tech Headlines – January 17, 2018 | |
| Number | 418 |
| Broadcast Date | JANUARY 17, 2018 |
| Episode Length | 4:01 |
| Hosts | Sarah Lane |
China leads app usage growth, OnePlus shuts down credit card payments, Microsoft expands Surface Book 2 country availability.
Headlines
- After multiple reports of unauthorized transactions, smartphone maker OnePlus says it's temporarily shutting down credit card payments on its site, although PayPal is still available. OnePlus says it's doing a complete audit of its system.
- YouTube will start manually reviewing all videos in its Google Preferred premium advertising program so advertisers have more faith that their messages won’t show up in disturbing or inappropriate videos. New creators applying to the YouTube Partner Program will need to have amassed 4,000 hours of video watch-time within the past 12 months and have 1,000 subscribers to be eligible to earn advertising revenue from their channels.
- Podcast network This Week in Tech aka TWiT, is suing Twitter. TWiT alleges Twitter breached a written contract, oral agreement, intentional interference with prospective economic advantage and trademark infringement. In May of last year, Twitter announced original, premium video content would come to its platform, and TWiT’s attorneys demanded that Twitter stop expanding the use of the Twitter trademark. TWiT is seeking a relief including a preliminary and permanent injunction that orders Twitter to stop using the mark in connection with the distribution of audio and video content, and “any and all profits derived from the unlawful acts.”
- Google announced AutoML Vision, a new service in alpha that helps developers build custom image recognition models, even without machine learning expertise. For now the service only supports computer vision models, but Google plans to expand the AutoML brand to other areas, such as think speech, translation, video, and natural language recognition.
- App Annie's retrospective report for 2017 shows 60% growth in the number of app downloads globally, with consumer spend more than doubling, and time spent in apps up 30%. The average smartphone user has 80 apps, using 40 of them in any given month, though that varies a bit by country. In Q4 2017, Chinese app users spent over 200 billion hours in apps across iOS, Google Play and third-party Android apps, with $1 out of every $4 generated from app stores, in-app ads and mobile commerce is generated by the Chinese market.
- Apple's expanding a new Siri feature to play podcasts when users ask "give me the news" in Australia and the UK after testing the feature on iOS 11.2.5 beta in the US. By default, the feature appears to play content from NPR in the U.S. and BBC in the U.K, but users can switch their source - for example in the US to Fox News, CNN, or the Washington Post.
- Nissan's luxury auto brand Infiniti plans to switch all its models to electric by 2021, CEO Hiroto Saikawa announced Tuesday from the Detroit Auto Show. Infiniti previously said it planned to migrate to the Variable-Compression Turbo or VC-T engine, which now appears to be a short-term technology that will eventually be phased out.
- Microsoft is expanding its 15-inch Surface Book 2 availability to 17 new countries, including Australia, Canada, Denmark, Ireland, New Zealand, Poland, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom, among otherx. The 15-inch Surface Book 2 includes Nvidia’s GTX 1060 graphics card, and Xbox Wireless support. Preorders start today, with both the 13- and 15-inch models also available soon in other market including China, India, Korea, Spain, Taiwan, and the United Arab Emirates.
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| Preceded by: "Daily Tech Headlines – January 16, 2018" |
Daily Tech Headlines – January 17, 2018 |
Followed by: "Daily Tech Headlines – January 18, 2018" |