Latest news

Google's 2014 acquisition of Nest for $3.2 billion hasn't turned out to be the most profitable of deals, as of yet at least. Now the search giant is trying to blow some additional wind to Nest's sails with some of their Google Home line of devices.

Yesterday at their annual Google I/O developer conference Google announced that they'll move Google Home Hub products under the umbrella of Nest. From now on Google Home Hub is called Google Nest Hub.

However, this doesn't seem to affect the smart speakers, Google Home and Google Home Max. Those still seem to retain their names. Perhaps new and upgraded smart speakers, if and when they'll arrive, will be renamed accordingly.

Nonetheless, not only did they rename some older devices, they also introduced a brand new Nest Hub Max. This new smart display is essentially a bigger and better version of Nest Hub (formerly Google Home Hub).

Instead of a 7-inch display it has a 10-inch one and it now comes with a camera that can be used for video calling with smart focusing and supports gesture controls, like pausing music by raising your hand up.

The camera also enables face recognition and multiple users. This means that walking up to the display it will recognize the user and show only information relevant and privy to that specific person.

Yesterday Google announced some new products and services at their annual developer conference Google I/O. Alongside announcing official the tenth Android version, Android Q, they also first time ever announced a new Pixel device at the event.

As expected, Google unveiled the new Pixel 3a and its bigger sibling Pixel 3a XL. This is the cheaper option to traditional Pixel line of smartphones.

The phones have the same OLED screens (although in 5.6 and 6" sizes), similar body design albeit polycarbonate, same 4GB of RAM and 64GB of internal storage, and same amazing camera as last year's Pixel 3, but instead they are powered by a lesser Snapdragon 670 chipset. With the less powerful processor, however, also comes less expensive price tag.

Pixel 3a starts at $399 and Pixel 3a XL at $479.

Pixel 3a also has a 3.5 mm headphone jack, Active Edge support, and a 3000 or 3700 mAh battery that supports 18W fast charge and Google promises will last all day and night, or up to 30 hours.

Both the models ship with Android 9.0 Pie but will be among the first devices to get the Android Q. You can also already get the Android Q for them in beta form.

It comes in three color options: Just Black, Clearly White, and Purple-ish. You can get it in the U.S. via Verizon, T-Mobile, Sprint, US Cellular, Spectrum Mobile (Charter), C Spire and Google Fi, and is available starting immediately.

Google's developer conference Google I/O started yesterday with keynote from CEO Sundar Pichai and myriad of announcements from his fellow execs.

One of the most anticipated annoucements was of course Android Q, the tenth version of the company's mobile operating system. While the final version of the OS will be released in the fall alongside likely the next-gen Pixel phones, there's already a beta version to try out and see for yourself what the new Android has to offer.

Most of the new features are already built-in to the beta version, although it might not work perfectly.

Android Q is going to focus a lot on privacy and security, which isn't a sexy theme but it is important, and is often under the hood and for no one to really see. There are, however, also nice security features like updates that can be installed without rebooting the device.

You'll get support for foldable devices, including screen continuity between multiple different sized displays on the device, which are said to come out of multiple manufacturers this year, we'll see if Samsung is still one of them.

Rather obviously Android Q also brings along a native 5G support, as many of the first 5G phones will enter the market later this year or early next year.

A long time ago it was thought that Microsoft would battle against Linux for the world domination in a platform war of ages. That epic war never happened, of course, at least not how many of us imagined, and nowadays Linux and Microsoft get along fairly well.

Microsoft has been slowly warming up to Linux over the years, and now they were apparently ready, for the first time, to bring a full Linux kernel to a Windows 10 release.

That is right, the company revealed at their Build 2019 developer conference that new development versions of Windows 10 will feature a full-fledged Linux kernel within.

According to Microsoft, Windows 10 will feature in-house built LTS release of Linux kernel, which is v4.19. Later it will continue updating to newer LTS versions bringing the most up-to-date features for developers.

Linux kernel is part of update to Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) which has previously supported Linux development on Windows but not featured a full Linux kernel.

The company also announced the new Microsoft Terminal, which is a combination of Command Prompt (cmd), PowerShell as well as WSL.

Robots are becoming more common in regular households, and robot vacuums are probably the most common example of that. While they are not even close to intelligent, or humanoid, they are somewhat relatable with all their faults.

They are like clumsy animals that instead of leaving things around, collect and clean them. The manufacturers have realized this too, and allow users to name their pet robots.

While some argue that making robots more relatable might be the biggest problem we do with artificial intelligence, some do want their robots to be more human-like.

One of these people is robotics YouTuber Michael Reeves who has finally filled his promise of delivering a screaming Roomba. So what would a Roomba that feels pain for every wall or furniture collision sound like?

Here's your chance to indulge into that experience. For those who can't play the video and are wondering, it sounds like someone perpetually stubbing their toe.

Hilarious? Yes. More relatable? Probably. Also probably a bad idea in many ways.

Fortunately if you still want to give your own try, you only need a Roomba, a Raspberry Pi, and a speaker of sorts.

Everything is electronic, or smart, these days. Well, everything except voting it seems. For years upon years electronic voting has been suggested as the fix to all election problems, yet here we are with hackable voting machines and cries about rigged elections.

While electronic voting is becoming more popular, there are problems with both security and convenience. Microsoft agrees, and has introduced their own platform for elections, called ElectionGuard, at their Build 2019 conference to solve most of it.

The company promises that ElectionGuard is as secure and transparent as you would hope a voting platform to be. It has been working in partnership with multitude of voting system providers, including Democracy Live, Election Systems & Software, Hart InterCivic, BPro, MicroVote, and VotingWorks, and developed the software with Galois.

Microsoft has said the pilot programs kick off next year, just in time for the 2020 elections.

However, ElectionGuard isn't exactly a complete electronic voting system, more like a software platform to build the system on top of. It collects and handles the data that is fed to it from voting machines.

Microsoft has build it in open source which provides a great deal of transparency as well as opportunity for constructive critique. The company also says that it is compatible with current generation of voting machines, which makes it easy to deploy and use.

Microsoft's Build 2019 developer conference launched yesterday, and company leads took the stage to introduce some of their new projects, and reveal updates to others, to kick it off for the developers.

One of the updates was about the company's new search engine tool, first unveiled last year. Microsoft Search is said to now come to all apps and company's platforms.

While it was introduced last years it hasn't been extended over to all possible places, which is exactly what Microsoft intends to do starting this month. Most apps and services will be featuring Microsoft Search functionality in the near future.

Better yet, Microsoft Search is context aware. While it uses Bing's engine, if logged in to Microsoft Graph on your work computer, you'll be presented with different kinds of results than on your regular home PC.

Microsoft Search is a competitor for Google's Cloud Search. They are both meant for searching on corporate networks and internal searches. Making it available as widely around the desktop experience as possible increases the likelihood that the search will be in the right place at the right time.

Soon it will be found in Office apps, on the desktop, and on Bing, and that's probably one of the bigger advantages compared to Google's offering.

Stranger Things lawsuit turns upside down as plaintiff drops the case just days before the hotly anticipated trial was set to get underway.

Charlie Kessler claimed since 2018 that Matt and Ross Duffer (aka, The Duffer Brothers) had effectively stolen key elements of Stranger Things from his short film Montauk, and had breached an implied contract when he spoke to them about his ideas in 2014.

The Duffer Brothers insisted that Kessler's claims were bogus and that they had never agreed to make any TV show with him, and further that they had been working on the project that would become Stranger Things since 2010.

Kessler pressed ahead with the lawsuit despite lawyers for the Duffers insisting that they had e-mails and Google Documents dated years before Kessler briefly interacted with them at a film festival to prove they had created the series.

Conspiracies surrounding a location called Camp Hero in Montauk, New York, have been abundant for decades, ranging in content from time travel to cold war experiments on test subjects. In fact, the Duffers originally referred to the project that would become Stranger Things as "Montauk", and you can even read the original pilot script dubbed "Montauk" online.

The conquering of ExaScale supercomputing continues with a $600 million machine to be built by AMD and Cray for the U.S. government.

Dubbed "Frontier", when this new supercomputing beast is fully completed it will be capable of exceeding 1.5 ExaFlop/s. An Exaflop is one quintillion floating point operations per second.

The system will be based on Cray's new Shasta architecture and Slingshot interconnect and will feature high-performance AMD EPYC CPU and AMD Radeon Instinct GPU technology.

"Frontier's record-breaking performance will ensure our country's ability to lead the world in science that improves the lives and economic prosperity of all Americans and the entire world," said U.S. Secretary of Energy Rick Perry.

"Frontier will accelerate innovation in AI by giving American researchers world-class data and computing resources to ensure the next great inventions are made in the United States."

Researchers will harness Frontier's powerful architecture to advance science in such applications as systems biology, materials science, energy production, additive manufacturing and health data science.

This year's iPhone is largely still a mystery, but perhaps a new report from a revered Apple analyst gives us some information about iPhone 11.

According to TF Securities' analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, Apple is developing a new antenna design, which would greatly improve navigation features in iPhones. Especially the new antenna is going to be improving indoor navigation, which has been talked about for years, but no real breakthroughs have been made.

Kuo has previously suggested that Apple could introduce a new antenna technology this year, but now that the design of the phone is being finalized and mass production soon starts, he seems more confident that this is indeed the case.

He says that Apple is replaced liquid crystal polymer (LCP) antenna technology used in previous iPhones to modified PI antennas, which is more cost-effective and performs better than the previous solution.

It is only a temporary fix for some issues with high-frequency connections, because Apple intends to go back to LCP for the first 5G iPhone in 2020, Kuo says.

What makes the upcoming iPhones better at indoor navigation is the improvements in ultra-wideband.

Obviously antenna designs haven't always went well for Apple. Most famously Apple introduced a new antenna design in iPhone 4, in which holding the phone "wrong" would drop the cellular connectivity.

People love their iPhones. Not as much as they used to, but people still love their iPhones.

One of the things that they usually don't like, however, is the battery life. Controversies like the #batterygate didn't do much to help Apple's case either.

'Member? Apple admitted that it is throttling older phones so they could keep it lasting longer because of degraded batteries. Not that it is necessarily a bad thing, but they didn't tell the users about it, until it was exposed and they had to.

Well, there's more bad news about Apple's battery practices. According to a British customer advocacy group Which?, as covered by Business Insider, Apple has been fooling customers with the battery life figures.

As they tested iPhones, a total of nine different models, and how long you could actually use them as a phone, the results were not even close to what Apple claims.

Among the models the new iPhone XR was the worst offender. Apple promises 25 hours of talk time but it only managed 16.5 hours. Apple is giving the phone more than 50% more talk time than it can actually manage.

Smartphones are getting better and better, but for a while now the sales volume has gone down. That's probably the reason many manufacturers are making their phones more expensive, to combat the declining quantity.

For some it is not necessary, namely Huawei. The controversial Chinese manufacturer has managed to grow their business among others struggling and the entire market posting -6.6% growth.

Apple has fallen very sharply, according to IDC's newest report. In fact it is leading in negative year-over-year change with -30%. Huawei has now passed the American giant by a huge margin by increasing the volume YoY just over 50%. That is insane in this market.

In 1Q18 Apple shipped 52.2 million iPhones while Huawei "only" managed 39.3 million. A year later the tables have turned, and more, with Apple dropping to 36.4 million and Huawei with 59.1 million shipped smartphones.

Huawei's 19% market share is a scary prospect for Samsung as well, who is leading the pack with 71.9 million units and 23.1% share of the market. Even they dropped 8.1%.

Huawei has managed this without getting into the competitive U.S. market, thanks largely to the governments' hostility towards the Chinese company's suspected spying.

The old magnetic strip of debit and credit cards is nowadays rarely used in most of the Western countries, having been mostly replaced by either contactless payments or chip-and-pin payments. Finnish bank S-Pankki has now introduced a line of debit and credit cards that are designed vertically rather than horizontally.

Reasoning behind the design change is that consumers mostly see their cards positioned vertically - either when stored with their phone flip-covers or when paid with chip-and-pin terminals.

The card itself is still the same, standard-sized bank card we all know, but the all the graphical design elements - including the numbers on the card - are positioned so that they're meant to be read when the card is positioned vertically.

S-Pankki is not the first one to do the switch, as some banks have introduced the portrait cards in past two years, too, such as Sterling Bank in the UK. But S-Pankki is one of the largest banks in Finland, whereas most other banks around the world to introduce portrait cards have been "new banks" rather than traditional, big banks.

Traditional 16 digit card number is split into four lines, each having four numbers. Card still has the old, black magnetic strip so the card can still be used in countries where chip-and-pin payments and contactless payments aren't the norm. More info from S-Pankki website (in Finnish).

The patent dispute between Apple and Qualcomm had all the right ingredients to become a decade long battle like the one between Apple and Samsung, but who knew a failure by a third-party would open this gridlock.

When Intel recognized that it couldn't make 5G chips for Apple, like they promised, Apple had to quickly figure out a new 5G partner. The problem was that they were fighting in the courtroom with the obvious partner, Qualcomm.

Apple had to settle the dispute and, as expected, it wasn't cheap.

According to Qualcomm's latest quarterly financials it is receiving at least $4.5 billion in the settlement. This doesn't include royalties with the new licensing deal.

The deal is a exclusive six-year licensing agreement with a two-year extension option where Qualcomm provides Apple's iPhones with modems. Apple is also developing their own modems in-house, so it remains to be seen how the company manages the development of their own modems and a lengthy deal with Qualcomm.

Revolutionary electric car company, Tesla, is looking for investments to continue operations as planned. The company is looking to raise another $2 billion from investors.

According to CNBC, Tesla is going to try and raise the money via convertible notes and new equity. $1.35 billion would come from convertible notes and $650 million from new equity.

Tesla is looking for investors and one of them is said to be company CEO Elon Musk. Musk has offered to buy around $10 million worth of stock, which is of course a drop in the bucket for both the entirety of the investment round, or Musk's 20% stake in the company worth over $12.5 billion.

Tesla has been burning through their cash deposits in a remarkable pace for couple years. Musk said in the quarterly conference call to shareholders that raising money is not a fix, but instead the company needs to be more efficient.

I don't think raising capital should be a substitute for making the company operate more effectively. I do think there is some merit to raising capital, but this is sort of probably about the right timing.