Daily Tech Headlines – May 4, 2018
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| Daily Tech Headlines – May 4, 2018 | |
| Number | 495 |
| Broadcast Date | MAY 4, 2018 |
| Episode Length | 4:27 |
| Hosts | Tom Merritt |
Goodbye Shure phono needles, hello Facebook Internet satellites? Plus a processing technology that could be a million times faster than gigahertz.
Headlines
- Alibaba reported revenue rose 61% year over year beating analyst's expectations and reported a revenue rise of 58% for the year. Alibaba CFO Maggie Wu predicts a revenue rise of 60% this year. Alibaba active users rose 37 million for the month and the year. Ecommerce drove the bulk of the revenue while cloud computing led in growth at 100%.
- Twitter told 330 million users to change their password after a glitch exposed some passwords in plain text on its internal network. Twitter said it had no indication the passwords were misused but encourages the change as a matter of caution.
- TechCrunch reader Genady Okrain noticed that Instagram has added the ability for some users to add a credit or debit card. Instagram confirmed to TechCrunch that it is testing native payments for booking appointments like at restaurants or salons. Resy is one of the first partners.
- Wear OS has added new features for Google Assistant on watches. Scrolling up after a question will provide suggested follow-up questions. Answers can now be spoken through the watches speaker or a connected Bluetooth speaker. And Assistant Actions for interaction with other apps is now available on Wear OS.
- According to sources talking to Reuters, India's Flipkart has approved in principle a deal to sell about 75% of the company to Wal-Mart, with a finalized deal a few days away. The sources also indicate Alphabet may invest alongside Wal-Mart.
- The Strong Museum's World Video Game Hall of Fame in Rochester, New York announced that Spacewar! from 1961 has been inducted alongside John Madden Football, Tomb Raider and Final Fantasy VII. This is the fourth group of inductees, bringing the total to 20.
- Jumia, Nigeria's leading ecommerce company announced free shipping will expand to Abuja, Port Harcourt, Ibadan and Abeokuta. In addition the minimum price to qualify for free shipping has been reduced from 15,000 naira to 10,000 naira. Orders placed by 12PM will deliver in 1 business day within Lagos, and 2-5 business days in the other cities.
- Scientists from the University of Marburg in Germany and the University of Michigan in the US have demonstrated how infrared laser pulses can shift electrons between two different states, the classic 1 and 0, in a thin sheet of semiconductor. This could raise speeds to a million times the normal gigahertz. The process will improve quantum computing. The study, “Lightwave valleytronics in a monolayer of tungsten diselenide,” was funded by the European Research Council and the German Research Foundation.
- Shure announced that as of May 1st it has shut down its phono division, andis no longer making record player needle cartridges. Mark Brunner, VP Global Corporate & Government Relations at Shure told The Next Web that revenues remained stable despite rising LP sales, and challenges to maintaining production equipment and a specialized supply chain led to the decision. Denmark's Ortofon is the leading maker of phonograph cartridges.
- Germany's heise.de reported that Intel's CPUs are affected by eight vulnerabilities the site called "Spectre-class." Intel said it is finalizing mitigations for all 8, one of which was discovered by Google's Project Zero which will reveal it May 7. The site says AMD processors may also be vulnerable.
- IEEE Spectrum reports on an FCC filing from a company called PointView for a satellite called Athena that could deliver Internet service 10 times as fast as SpaceX's Starlink. SpaceX began launching satellites in February while PointView plans to begin launches in early 2019. IEEE Spectrum notes PointView's FCC application was written by the same law firm Facebook uses to file its FCC applications and has the same corporate agent in Delaware as several Facebook subsidiaries.
Links
| Preceded by: "Daily Tech Headlines – May 3, 2018" |
Daily Tech Headlines – May 4, 2018 |
Followed by: "Daily Tech Headlines – May 7, 2018" |