Apple May Launch Subscription News Service
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| Apple May Launch Subscription News Service | |
| Number | 750 |
| Broadcast Date | FEBRUARY 13, 2019 |
| Episode Length | 4:17 |
| Hosts | Tom Merritt |
Apple may announce a new news subscription March 25, ActivisionBlizzard announces layoffs but promises developer hiring and the smartwatch market continues to grow.
Headlines
- BuzzFeed reports its sources say Apple will hold an event on its campus March 25 to introduce a subscription news service. Supposedly for $9.99 a month Apple will offer unlimited access to paywalled sites like the New York Times and Wall Street Journal. It also might include magazines. The Wall Street Journal itself reports Apple wants to keep 50% of the revenue and divide the rest among participating news publications based on how often users read their articles. Apple would not share subscriber data with the publications.
- Amazon is now letting anyone publish skills from its Blueprints program into the Alexa skills store. WordPress users can use the Amazon AI plugin to automatically publish blog posts as audio.
- ActivisionBlizzard announced earnings beat estimates by a cent last quarter but forecast full-year profit and revenue below analyst's estimates. Part of the miss is due to sale of publishing rights for Destiny to Bungie. The company also announced 800 job cuts, about 8% of its workforce, mostly in non-game development areas. It said it will increase the number of developers working on games by 20% this year while focusing on live services, eSports and successful franchises like Candy Crush, Call of Duty, Overwatch, Warcraft, Diablo, and Hearthstone.
- Bloomberg reports that Logitech and other device makers have objected to constant requests for data from Amazon and Google smart assistants. In other words, send data when a smart light is turned on or off whether a Google or Amazon smart device was used to do it or not. Amazon and Google want the data to improve response time to voice commands. Logitech has responded by purposefully providing generic information. Amazon says it does not sell the user data for advertising.
- Mozilla will begin helping Ubisoft develop its coding assistant called Clever-Commit that learns from your code base's bug and regression data to flag potential bugs as code is committed. Ubisoft uses the tool internally and Mozilla says it will start using it on Firefox code development. Clever-Commit is not open source.
- Someone wiped out almost two decades worth of data and backups at email provider VFEmail in a matter of hours. The attacker had passwords and used multiple means to access multiple servers including mail hosts, VM hosts and a SQL server cluster and reformatted most drives. VFEmail is sending email again but subfolders and filters for most users were no longer in place. VFEmail was founded in 2001.
- The NPD Group reports dollar sales of smartwatches were up 51% in 2018 and unit sales rose 61 percent. The top three brands, Apple, Samsung and Fitbit made up 88% of unit sales. Fossil and Garmin however continued to expand as well. Sixteen percent of U.S. adults now own a smartwatch, up from 12 percent in 2017.
- Sony's Wena Wrist smart watch band is now available outside of Japan, available for pre-order in the UK. The band is designed to be worn with any watch face. A tiny display in the buckle shows alerts and does basic activity tracking as well as NFC for payments.
- Johnson & Johnson is buying Auris Health which makes the Monarch, a robotic scope used in respiratory and lung cancer procedures. Auris was founded by surgical robotics scientist Frederic Moll who also co-founded Intuitive Surgical, a leader in robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery. Moll will join Johnson & Johnson after the acquisition. Last year, Johnson & Johnson acquired Orthotaxy, a developer of software-enabled robotic technology for surgery. Johnson & Johnson also formed a robotics-focused company called Verb Surgical with Alphabet's Verily in 2015.
- DJI will roll out its Geospatial Environment Online (GEO) 2.0 system in 19 European countries starting later this month. The system creates safety zones aorund airports and flight paths to prevent drones from interfering with air traffic. 13 European markets that already had the GEO system get the 2.0 update.
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| Preceded by: "Amazon Buys eero" |
Apple May Launch Subscription News Service |
Followed by: "Amazon Scraps NYC HQ Plans" |