May 31, 2016
The digital media world was abuzz last week when
news surfaced that billionaire Peter Thiel had provided financial
backing for a defamation lawsuit against Gawker Media. The suit stemmed
from Gawker's publication of a sex tape involving ex-WWE superstar Terry
Bollea, better known as "Hulk Hogan." A Florida jury awarded Bollea
$140 million in March.
[More...]
May 31, 2016
With lucrative broadcast deals and cup
competitions now crowding calendars, drone racing has become one of the
primary factors driving the surge in demand for consumer drones.
Mountain Dew and DR1 Racing earlier this month announced a special DR1
Invitational presented by Mountain Dew. The one-hour broadcast will air
on Discovery Communication's Discovery and Science channels in August.
[More...]
May 30, 2016
I joined a bunch of analysts in discussing
Hewlett Packard Enterprise's next move at a secret conclave last week.
The company had just announced the sale of its IT services, which
basically undid much of Mark Hurd's work as CEO. It already had sold off
PCs and printers, more than undoing Carly Fiorina's earlier efforts.
Granted, HPE spun it like it was an acquisition.
[More...]
May 27, 2016
Taking a page or 10 out of Amazon Echo's book,
Home is a blend of a smart speaker and a personal assistant, which you
control using your voice. It can handle the types of queries Google Now
and its successor, Google Assistant, can take on -- from simple
questions like what's on your schedule for the day to more complex ones
about the history of your favorite sports team.
[More...]
May 26, 2016
Dish Network continues to change the way we view
recorded TV. It made location-shifting as easy as time-shifting via its
Sling technology, and its Hopper let users transfer recordings to a
mobile device. Now it has introduced another option for taking recorded
content anywhere: the HopperGO, a compact DVR hard disk drive that lets
users transfer content from a set-top box to the portable unit.
[More...]
May 25, 2016
Twitter on Tuesday announced a number of changes
to tweets, including what will be included in a message's 140-character
count. The changes will be rolled out in the coming months. When
replying to a tweet, tagged @names at the beginning of the reply no
longer will be included in the character count. Photos, GIFs, videos,
polls and quote tweets won't be counted against the character limit.
[More...]
May 25, 2016
The 30,000 virtual reality headsets OnePlus
announced it would give away as part the unveiling of its OnePlus 3
smartphone were snapped up Monday, the day they became available.
OnePlus has set up a VR space called "The Loop" in which it will unveil
the OnePlus 3. The Loop can be accessed only by users of the OnePlus
Loop VR headsets, made by AntVR.
[More...]
May 24, 2016
By the end of the year, Android devs will be able
to use a trust API from Google's Project Abacus in their apps, Google
ATAP Director Dan Kaufman suggested at last week's I/O conference. The
API, which will run in the background continually, is aimed at doing
away with passwords. It will use a smartphone's sensors to create a
cumulative trust score that will authenticate users.
[More...]
May 24, 2016
Toyota and DEKA Research and Development last
week announced an agreement that will revive development of the iBot, a
wheelchair that can climb stairs. The companies revealed their pact to
develop mobility solutions for the disabled community at the annual
convention of the Paralyzed Veterans of America. One of the first
initiatives under the agreement will be to resurrect the iBot.
[More...]
May 24, 2016
Tearing through open spaces and timing each turn
to burst out of them, a seeming continuum of drones weaves through a set
of obstacles lap after lap, until the stutter of a pilot's joystick
breaks the cadence of this competitive concert and destroys the
illusion. It's the drama -- anticipating and reacting to those human
moments -- that has propelled drone racing to the spotlight.
[More...]
May 23, 2016
Microsoft last week announced plans to crack down
on terrorist content, perhaps in response to the Obama administration's
intense effort to get Silicon Valley's help in preventing organizations
like ISIS from using social media as a recruiting and fundraising tool.
Microsoft has amended its terms of use to prohibit the posting of
terrorist content on its various platforms.
[More...]
May 23, 2016
Google last week announced the Tensor Processing
Unit, a custom application-specific integrated circuit, at Google I/O.
TPU was built for machine learning applications and has been running in
Google's data centers for more than a year. Google's AlphaGo software,
which thrashed an 18-time international Go champion in a match earlier
this year, ran on servers using TPUs.
[More...]
May 23, 2016
I've been thinking a lot this week about what it
takes to select a strong CEO and being annoyed by robocalls from the
different campaigns. On one such call, when asked what I'd do if given
the choice between Clinton and Trump, my response was "move to Canada."
That apparently wasn't what they were looking for. Boards often have to
select from a very small pool of CEO candidates, and they don't get the
"move to Canada" option.
[More...]
May 21, 2016
The Hyperloop -- the high-speed transportation
concept Elon Musk has promoted heavily -- is edging closer to becoming a
reality. Russia plans to develop a Hyperloop network for freight
transportation, the country's transport minister announced Friday. MIT
last week unveiled its Hyperloop Pod, a prototype of its award-winning
design concept intended for human travelers.
[More...]
May 20, 2016
Eset on Wednesday announced that it has fashioned
a free tool that victims of all variants of the TeslaCrypt ransomware
can use to unlock affected files. After the criminal gang behind
TeslaCrypt recently abandoned support of the malicious software, an Eset
analyst contacted the group anonymously, using the channel offered to
ransomware victims, and asked for the universal master decryption key.
[More...]
May 20, 2016
The United States Patent and Trademark Office
earlier this week granted Google a patent for "Adhesive Vehicle Front
End For Mitigation of Secondary Pedestrian Impact." The patent
application, filed a year and a half ago, credits Google employees Alex
Khaykin and Daniel Lynn Larner as the inventors of the new technology.
This latest patent grant is for "a system for protecting a colliding
object from a secondary impact."
[More...]
May 20, 2016
Flatev is a pod-based system for instant
tortillas in the mold of a Keurig coffee maker. Insert a pod of fresh
dough -- you have several choices, all organic -- then adjust settings
for type of dough and desired crispiness, and 90 seconds later you'll
have a fresh, warm tortilla. There's a heated drawer to keep your
tortillas warm while you make as many as you need.
[More...]
May 20, 2016
Wireless mice and keyboards are the perfect
accessories for a world in which devices increasingly are shuffling off
their connection coils, but those accessories -- especially untethered
rodents -- also can create new threats for those who use them. One such
threat is Mousejack. The attack exploits a vulnerability found in 80
percent of wireless mice.
[More...]
May 20, 2016
The Linux Foundation on Thursday announced that
Brian Behlendorf, a primary developer of the Apache Web server, has
joined the Hyperledger Project as executive director. The project is a
collaborative effort to advance blockchain technology by identifying and
addressing important features for an open standard for distributed
ledgers that will apply across industries.
[More...]
May 19, 2016
Google CEO Sundar Pichai kicked off the company's
annual I/O developers conference on Wednesday with a keynote address
that included previews of a batch of new products. Among those showcased
were Google Assistant, a tool that can understand and respond to
complex questions in real time; and Home, Google's highly anticipated
response to Amazon's Echo speaker.
[More...]
May 19, 2016
BitTorrent on Tuesday announced at the Internet
& Television Expo an application called "BitTorrent Live" that
applies its distributed file-sharing technology to video streaming.
BitTorrent is able to speed up file downloads by storing pieces of a
file on computers throughout the Net and reassembling them when a
request is made for the file. BitTorrent Live does the same for
streaming live video.
[More...]
May 18, 2016
Otto on Monday introduced a self-driving kit
designed to help those behind the wheel of big rigs drive more safely
and efficiently. The company is developing a suite of sensors, software
and other truck-related enhancements that could be retrofitted into
existing vehicles. The technology has been tested in Otto's research
fleet, and the company completed an autonomous demo on public highways.
[More...]
May 18, 2016
Motorola on Tuesday unveiled three new
smartphones: the fourth-generation Moto G, the Moto G Plus and the Moto G
Play. The Moto G and Moto G Plus can be customized using Moto Maker,
while the Moto G Play can not. All three run Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow.
The Moto G and Moto G Plus became available Tuesday in Brazil and India.
They will be rolled out elsewhere over time.
[More...]
OpManager: Monitors network & servers from a single console. Try it for free!
Access millions of IT and business decision makers. Our full-service
global marketing program delivers sales-ready leads. Learn more.
www.google.com
Comments