News archive (3 / 2018)

Swedish telecom giant Telia has sold its share of Spotify for appx. $272 million (SEK2.3 billion) to institutional investors.

Both companies originate from Sweden and Telia was one of the oldest partners of Spotify, signing up to an exclusive deal back in 2009 to offer Spotify Premium to its customers across the globe. Telia invested $115 million in Spotify in June 2015.

As Spotify has filed for an IPO, Telia decided to sell its shares.

Source: Telia press release

'We could make a ton of money if we monetized our customer... we've elected not to do that," Tim Cook.

Apple chief executive Tim Cook has weighed in on the response to the Cambridge Analytica story by criticizing Facebook's use of its users' private data. During an interview with MSNBC's Chris Hayes and Recode's Kara Swisher, which will air on MSNBC soon, Cook suggested that Facebook should have regulated itself properly.

Cook was asked what he would do now if he was Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, to which he simply insisted that he would not be in this situation in the first place.

"We've never believed that these detailed profiles of people, that have incredibly deep personal information that is patched together from several sources, should exist," Cook reportedly said, warning such deep information on users can be exploited by advertisers and can even be used "against democracy."

While Cook admits that he usually gravitates toward no regulation because of unintended consequences, he believes that regulation of how firms like Facebook use data is necessary. In Apple's case, the customer is not the product, even though Cook admits the firm could make a lot more money if that was the case.

Pandora takes a leaf out of Spotify's book by introducing personalized soundtracks that are based on your listening tastes.

Personalized soundtracks are currently being tested with a small group of Premium users of the Pandora's services, but will roll out soon to all Premium subscribers. The playlists - similar to Spotify's Daily Mixes - will update every weeik to fit your moods, activities and favorite genres.

Pandora's personalized soundtracks are powered by its Music Genome.

"We apply a state-of-the-art ensemble of 75+ machine learning algorithms spanning bleeding-edge deep learning techniques, raw audio content analysis and collaborative filtering methods for listener preferences," writes Chris Phillips, Chief Product Officer, Pandora.

These new playlists will appear in the "Browse" section under "Featured Playlists" on the mobile app. The more you listen to differentiated music, the more playlists you'll get. Playlists can also be shared with friends who can check them out even if on Free tier service.

Google's Chromecast is the favourite little gadget of many movie freaks. It allows sending video from Netflix, Youtube and hundreds of other video services directly to a TV set, with a click of a button.

But watching downloaded video files via Chromecast has always been somewhat problematic. Many solutions exist, yes: VLC now has an option to cast a video file to a Chromecast and excellent Chrome plugin called Videostream is an excellent solution, too.

But all the options are somewhat complicated for many people. Thus, Google has now added a "Cast a file" option directly to its Chrome browser.

The option is available in latest beta version of Chrome and Google's François Beaufort has already published instructions on how to use it. However, he didn't state which file formats the feature supports, subtitle support information, etc.

Facebook has been under quite a volley of fire recently, thanks to the Cambridge Analytica controversy. Now Mozilla has revealed a new tool to prevent privacy violations.

The world's largest social media company has been tracking its users in myriad of ways, some of which are more nefarious than others. For example, with cookies Facebook has managed to store data on websites its users visit.

Mozilla is branding their web browser as the solution to the privacy breaking madness, and has released a new tool it calls the Facebook Container Extension. As you might imagine it is an extension for the company's Firefox browser.

The extension prevents Facebook from tracking you when you are browsing other sites. This obviously doesn't affect usage within Facebook or even when using Facebook buttons outside the site, such as the like or share buttons, which will be tracked and sold, just like everyone should expect by now.

You can find Facebook Container Extension from Mozilla's web store and if you are new to Firefox and would like to give it a go amidst all the privacy concerns, head to our software section to download it.

With most Android phones, user has two options for screen rotation: "lock the rotation", forcing the screen to remain in portrait mode and "automatic rotation", rotating screen automatically according to device's physical orientation.

Problems arise when you're, for example, watching a video clip on your phone's browser, laying on sofa with phone in slightly tilted position - you move slightly and suddenly the video jumps between landscape and portrait mode.

To avoid such situation, you should be able to lock the screen orientation to whatever mode you prefer.

Luckily there's a solution.

Small, free and ad-free app called Rotation Control does exactly that.

Apple's latest iOS versions have been in some hot water lately. As you probably remember, the current iteration of iPhone's (and iPad's) operating system slows down older devices with degraded batteries.

All would have been good, if Apple just told people and perhaps even offered a way out of this slowdown even if that would mean battery problems. And that is exactly what Apple is going to offer in the upcoming iOS 11.3 update.

Well, turns out there are some other fairly major problems with the current system version. Apparently Siri, the voice assistant for iOS, can read your notifications out loud, and thus blurt out private messages even when the device is locked, and when the notifications aren't revealing any secrets.

Apple has acknowledged this bug to MacRumors, and confirms that an upcoming patch will indeed take care of any privacy issues related to Siri reading locked messages.

Currently this problem affects many third party applications such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and email apps. It seems to have no effect on iMessage, however.

The update is likely to arrive with the major iOS 11.3 update that also includes the aforementioned battery improvements, although there is a possibility of an intermediate smaller patch.

The internet is decades and decades old already, and more specifically even the web, the world wide web as it was once known, has come of age a decade ago, depending on how you define adulthood and start of the WWW.

Most of you probably still can think of a few problems with the undoubtedly revolutionary technology that has brought all information in the world to our fingertips. Perhaps you dislike the unintended feature that people seem to be creating their own echo chambers to feed their confirmation bias. Or think that social media is toxic, as some have pointed out with findings related to Facebook recently.

However, there might be one thing we can agree is not good, though. Automatically playing advertisements with sounds. Now Google has decided to tackle this issue once and for all.

Google, the player in online ad space, has announced that the upcoming update to its Chrome browser will block advertisement that are automatically playing video with sounds. The version number 66 will not be stopping all automatically playing videos but only the ones that might ruin your eardrums.

Obviously Google has noticed that there's no reason to make people hate ads entirely, and thus it might be more persuasive to keep people's ears intact, at least until they consent to the sounds.

This years Game Developers Conference, or GDC, is currently under way, and most of the game developers are gathered in Moscone Center in San Francisco. This means that new games are announced and upcoming technology is presented, often first time ever.

One of the more impressive demos of the GDC so far has been a technique called ray tracing. New development tools are bringing this tech, that sounds like something from Star Trek, to games and other multimedia platforms in the near future.

There's been a few major players that have shown off what they can do with the new tech. Microsoft's DirectX 12 API takes use of an extension that is called DirectX Raytracing, or DXR for short, which obviously brings it to many, many developers.

So what does ray tracing then do, you might ask. Well, it's a technology that allows more realistic light tracking and lighting conditions to be rendered, and even more importantly this can be done with fairly low resources compared to previous models.

In addition to Microsoft, GPU manufacturer Nvidia revealed their own RTX ray tracing technology that is compatible with their Volta generation GPUs and Microsoft's DXR. Furthermore, game engine developers like Epic Games, Remedy Entertainment, and Unity are going to support RTX.

Earlier this week we reported about the first confirmed pedestrian fatality involving a self-driving car. The Uber's experimental car in question killed a woman in a collision in Tempe, Arizona. Now Toyota is following Uber's suit in temporarily halting tests.

Toyota has announced that it is halting self-driving tests on public roads as a result of learning about the casualty. The company is afraid that the accident in Tempe might pose the employees in self-driving cars an unwanted emotional risk, Engadget reports.

The police chief from Tempe has expressed that the Uber car was likely not at fault in the accident but it has obviously caused a major pause in Uber as well as other companies developing self-driving technologies. The car was a Volvo XC90 crossover SUV, but the Swedish car manufacturer has yet to comment.

Both Volvo and Toyota are collaborating with Uber on self-driving cars.

Elon Musk, perhaps the foremost spokesperson for self-driving, recently in a SXSW interview quoted studies in which even Tesla's first generation was 40 percent safer than a human driver. The second generation, currently used by some Tesla cars, is already considered at least twice as safe as the previous generation.

HTC's new upgraded Vive Pro is available to pre-order now ahead of its April launch, while the original bundle has had a price cut.

HTC is focusing on stepping up the technical side of its new VR producers rather than worrying about affordability for now (as Oculus seems to be focused on). The new Vive Pro, shown off at this year's Consumer Electronics Show in Los Vegas, steps up the specs and design but also increases to a staggering $799.

For the additional coin, the OLED displays increase the resolution from 2160x1200 to 2880x1600 while the headset packs new built-in headphones with 3D audio and noise cancellation. A redesigned strap almost makes the headset more comfortable to wear compared to the older Vive.

The original Vive bundle is also getting a price cut to $499, a reduction of $100.

via: Engadget

Ride-hailing service Uber has suspended its North American self-driving vehicles tests after news of the first fatality involving one of the autonomous cars spread on Monday.

Police confirmed on Monday that a woman was struck by a self-driving vehicle being tested by Uber. Elaine Herzberg, 49, was walking her bicycle outside the crosswalk on a four-lane road in Tempe when an Uber vehicle in autonomous mode struck her at around 40 miles per hour. She died from her injuries later in hospital.

"The pedestrian was outside of the crosswalk. As soon as she walked into the lane of traffic she was struck," Tempe Police Sergeant Ronald Elcock told reporters. He said he believed that the woman may have been homeless.

Uber has been testing its vehicles in Arizona, Pittsburgh and Toronto, and will suspend all testing while the investigation is underway.

"Our investigators have that information, and they will be using that in their investigation as well as the Maricopa County Attorney's Office as part of their investigation," said Elcock.

Qualcomm might not be fusing with Broadcom, but it still is one of leading semiconductor manufacturers. Their reach in smartphones is unparalleled, although competition from the likes of Samsung and Huawei with their own chipsets is ever increasing.

Snapdragon is everywhere, even Samsung has to rely on Qualcomm's chips in most of its phones – even half of Galaxy S9 have a Snapdragon chip. And while the CPUs and GPUs get most of the limelight when we talk about SoCs (System on Chip), there's plenty of other features included.

The chipsets feature things like LTE modems, image signal processors, and quick charging solutions. However, not all phones are made equal even if they have the same platform, the manufacturer needs to support the feature sets.

Qualcomm also lists devices with its chips on their website, and you can even filter by technologies. One of the newest technologies is Quick Charge 4.0, the company's latest and greatest version of quickly charging your phone (via USB). Unfortunately there's not lot of support for the feature in question, even though it's been around since last year's Snapdragon 835, Android Police notes.

Google's one of the more known ad campaigns, for Pixel phones, has reminded people of how limited iPhone's storage is. Google Photos offers unlimited storage which Apple doesn't and that's why, the search giant claims, you'll often run out of storage space just when you're about to snap an important picture.

Obviously this is not the only strength of Pixel 2, or even the Google Photos app. In fact, Google Photos is an excellent solution for photo storage, and even has some nifty smart features.

One of the smart features uses machine learning, or more generally artificial intelligence, to recognize subjects and object in the photos. It's called Google Lens, and it's now available on the iPhone.

Google Lens adds a new button (camera icon) to your Photos app on the iPhone with which you can get information about object in your camera finder, or easily save information from a business card. It even recognizes things like dog breeds and car models.

You can find the new feature from Google Photos v3.15, and it should be available on the App Store in the coming week, if you can't find it already.

Microsoft has set up a new gaming cloud division late last year, and according to The Verge, the company's new team is readying for a future of gaming in the cloud.

Microsoft of course is not alone in its strategy. Gaming from the cloud has been a big focus of Sony's after it bought Gaikai in 2012 for $380 million. Gaikai of course is one of the prominent cloud gaming developers and service providers.

With Gaikai's technology, as is probably planned for the Xbox Cloud, or whatever it will be called, allows gameplay by streaming the content from the cloud servers. That allows most of the heavy lifting to be done by remote computers and the client itself can remain agile, if you will.

Thus for example smartphones and tablets are able to provide gameplay that otherwise wouldn't be accessible with performance levels provided with mobile technology. Sony calls this feature PlayStation Now.

Nvidia believes in the same type of future as well. Their service, called GeForce NOW, is currently looking for beta testers for Mac, and is available for PC users as well.

Microsoft's Kareem Choudhry says they are looking to bring entertainment to all 2 billion future gamers, no matter the platform.

Microsoft has achieved something that many probably thought would be ways off in the future. The Redmond-based tech giant has managed to reach human-level translation from Chinese to English with a computer.

Microsoft's official AI blog writes that the team lead by Xuedong Huang has reached an AI system that can translate news articles from Chinese to English as well as human counterparts. They used a test called newstest2017, developed by industry and academic partners, and had external bilingual human evaluators compare the results with human translations.

Anyone that regularly uses the currently de facto translation tools on browsers and social media knows that human parity is definitely not the case in current iteration. The updates can't come soon enough for us mere mortals.

However, this is just one step in a continually challenging landscape of human language that is tackled by AI teams such as Microsoft's. It is a very encouraging example how far we can get but work is all but done, researchers caution.

To learn more about Microsoft's accomplishment and other recent news about AI translation head to the blog post.

The go to device for computer DIY enthusiasts and other nano-sized computer needs has been updated with a new model. The new version of Raspberry Pi is called the Model B+.

While Model B+ is a fairly minor upgrade to the previous version, it does improve upon connectivity features and thermal management. It features a quad-core Broadcom BCM2837B0 chip that now offers 1.4GHz clock speeds instead of the previous 1.2GHz.

Although clock speeds have been improved, the bulk of the upgrade is not to the performance but to thermal design and power management which should provide a better overall thermal performance.

The nanocomputer Model B+ features a WiFi chip that supports 802.11ac and both 2.4 and 5.0GHz networks as well as Bluetooth 4.2 and Bluetooth LE (Low Energy). There's nothing new in terms of USB's though, so you'll still have the same four old, yet popular, 2nd gen ports, unsurprisingly.

What's nice, though, is that the computer-on-a-chip now supports Power over Ethernet, or PoE, which allows both power and network data to be transported in the same Ethernet cable. This is a common practice in many of the security cameras, for example.

Raspberry Pi Model B+ costs around $35 and can be found on Amazon.

E-commerce giant Amazon is preparing a launch in a few new countries this summer, says Di Digital, a Swedish publication. According to them, and their insider sources, Amazon is expanding to at least Sweden but probably a few surrounding countries as well.

Others are corroborating the rumors too. Per Svärdsön, the founder of Adlibris and Apotea, a book and a healthcare online store, has heard the same rumors, according to Business Insider.

Most of it points to this summer or at least this year. Staffan Mölndal from venture capital firm Verdane Capital says Amazon has been on the lookout for e-commerce talent to recruit and eventually launch in Sweden. The launch schedule is expected well before this year's favorite American shopping holiday Black Friday.

There's a lot of demand for a larger scale, better functioning e-commerce in Sweden for sure, but expanding to only one of the Scandinavian, or Nordic countries, seems like a lot of hassle for a very limited customer base.

Elon Musk's latest venture, whimsically named The Boring Company, is building an underground network of transportation underneath Los Angeles. Previously Musk has revealed plans to transport cars underground but has now announced that they will be instead focusing first on pedestrians and mass transport.

While fast car transportation from station to another is still in plans, Musk says that they've decided to prioritize pedestrians and mass transportation because not everyone can afford a car.

It is of course true that not everyone can afford a car, although almost everyone seems to have one in LA compared to ratios in metropolises on the East Coast, but the real reason might be something else. However, Musk's tweets reveal that car transportation will only be a priority after public transport needs are met.

The public transportation is done, according to a Boring Company video (below), by small shuttles that are swallowed by the ground and propelled on tracks to their destinations. Must says the station itself doesn't require more space than a single parking space, although a few should probably be reserved according to the video.

If you didn't know, it's Mario Day today! Yes, that plummer from dozens of Nintendo games is being celebrated today.

You might ask why? And the answer is not because he was born today, or anything like that at all. It all comes from the date itself, Mar 10. MAR10 is celebrated by Nintendo in a variety of ways, including rewards and deals, but they're not the only ones to have noted the mustache-wielding Italian.

In fact Google is one of the companies that has decided, for a reason or another, to include a bit of a easter egg in one of their apps. Both Android and iOS versions of Google Maps have been updated with a Mario Kart function.

When navigating on Google Maps there a new Mario-like question mark below via which you can enable what is called Mario Time. After enabling this your app changes the boring navigation arrow into a Mario Kart, driven by the famous plumber himself.

Google has also revealed that if you don't have nowhere to go on the actual Mario Day, no worries. You'll be able to use the feature for the next week.

This isn't of course the first easter egg from Google, not even on Maps. Couple years back on April Fools' Day they added a function which turned Google Maps into a game of Pac-Man.

The powerhouse of a comedian Norm Macdonald is getting his own talk show on Netflix, reports Variety. The 58-year-old Canadian is known for his stand-up as well as a five year streak on SNL during the 90s.

Now Netflix is grabbing one of the country's prominent comedians to host a talk show. The show by the name of "Norm Macdonald has a Show" is slated for a season of 10 episodes. This isn't actually the first time Macdonald has a show carrying his name, as some of you might remember a sitcom at the turn of the millennia called The Norm Show.

The talk show will be of course hosted by Norm Macdonald and features a sidekick in the form of Adam Eget. The duo has produced three seasons of Norm Macdonald Live video podcast.

The show is produced by Norm Macdonald and David Letterman serves an advisory role. Every episode of the talk show will welcome one celebrity guest.

There are currently now dates attached to the show so we'll just have to wait and see.

Netflix has been expanding over the years like no other streaming service. Not too long ago it was a service only provided to Americans and a few lucky others, now the service is available in over 190 countries – so pretty much the entire planet except for China.

Perhaps even more importantly, though, the company has been expanding on the variety of original content it provides, Netflix Originals as they call them. That has earned the company's first Emmy in 2013, Golden Globe in 2014, and now even an Oscar in 2018.

The company offers a medley of content types that range from anime to feature films and from documentaries to anthologies. Netflix has even expanded to new territories with localized original content that you've got for example from Japan, Germany, Brazil, and Denmark.

However, there are categories Netflix will not be expanding towards.

Netflix has revealed that while there are tons of opportunities for them to expand on, some stones will remain unturned. They want to focus on what they are doing well, and how can anyone argue against that?

However, this means that many of us who've hoped for a revolution in terms of sports streaming, are going to be disappointed, Engadget reports.

Google has released the first glimpse of its upcoming Android P operating system. New version of Android is about to launch sometime in Fall 2018, but Google provides information for developers and manufacturers about the most important changes beforehand to allow them to adjust to new APIs and design.

Android P includes several changes to the visuals of the UI. Icons are more rounded and plain as is the custom nowadays. Additionally, the settings have been revamped quite a lot and also the notification area has gone through some changes.

Despite those changes, the biggest visual change is the support for iPhone X-styled gap in the top of the screen to accommodate better for front camera while allowing "borderless" displays.

Samsung has today unveiled their 2018 TV lineup in New York. The updated line of smart TVs is divided roughly into three categories: Quantum LED powered Q Series, Premium UHD models, and Ultra Large TVs.

The latter TVs are sized 75 inches and above, and according to Samsung the demand for larger TVs has been ever growing. These models offer a proper home theater experience but are also popular for commercial uses.

However, Samsung's most important TV branding effort of recent years has been Quantum LED, or QLED for short, that is used in the company's Q Series smart TVs. Now they come with an improved backlighting technology.

This includes what the company calls Carbon Mesh which limits the backlighting per pixel and minimizes leakage to nearby pixels. Obviously this comes with a full panel backlighting the company calls Direct Full Array backlighting. All this should provide a better picture quality and improved contrast definition.

Netflix will beef up the parent controls available to users of its service to make its platform more child appropriate.

As it stands, parents can use Netflix parental controls to prevent their children from accessing content above a specified maturity rating. The content can be hidden behind a PIN altogether, or parents can available of designated child accounts.

In order to give parents more control over what their children can access on the service, Netflix will allow parents to control access to individual movies and shows behind a security PIN.

Spotify appears to be cracking down on the use of unauthorized applications that allow users with Free accounts to get benefits of its paid Premium tier.

Some users with free accounts opt to download modified Spotify apps that allow them to get around some of the limitations of a Free account, and have some benefits of the paid Premium service. While having almost 160 million users of its service, around 71 million actually pay for Premium accounts whilst the rest of the active users are limited to lower quality, ad-supported service.

Free users who have been using modified apps have been receiving a warning from Spotify that reads as follows:

Dear User:

We detected abnormal activity on the app you are using so we have disabled it. Don't worry - your Spotify account is safe.

To access your Spotify account, simply uninstall any unauthorized or modified version of Spotify and download and install the Spotify app from the official Google Play Store. If you need more help, please see our support article on Reinstalling Spotify.

If we detect repeated use of unauthorized apps in violation of our terms, we suspend all rights, including suspending or terminating your account.