To end the year, streaming giant Netflix released their first ever interactive movie. For Netflix Black Mirror: Bandersnatch was a trial of sorts, which confirmed the concept a success. Others are now following Netflix's lead.
Just yesterday Netflix released their new interactive TV show, You vs. Wild, where the viewer guides survival expert Bear Grylls through survival situations. Now it has been reported, that YouTube is also bringing interactive content to their platform.
YouTube has previously experimented with interactive advertisement but the interactive programming is a completely different beast. They are also planning to use the interactive elements in both unscripted as well as scripted programming.
According to Bloomberg, YouTube is working on several projects under its new interactive programming unit.
At this point there's not much other details but fortunately we might not have to wait long for more information. YouTube is announcing new content in New York in a couple of weeks.
Amazon's Echo is considered the first smart speaker that sparked the interest of Google, Apple, Samsung, and others to pursue this new type of AI enabled home tech.
Alexa has thus become nearly an eponym of voice assistants, and is referred often in both good and bad of what the technology has to potentially offer.
However, the success of Alexa's listening skills is more than super advanced machine learning algorithms and computer AI. In fact, Bloomberg's report tells that Amazon has employees all over the world listening to Alexa conversations to help enhance Alexa.
The employees listen to commands given by Alexa users, and while Amazon would deny that they listen to actual conversations or the content, they do record private conversations with customers to improve their service.
Not only are Alexa commands recorded, but according to Bloomberg's sources they also hear noises that aren't meant for Alexa's eletronic ears at all, including things like singing in the shower, children crying for help.
Some employees have reported hearing noises that they've suspected were part of a sexual assault. Amazon's internal policies however dictate that they shouldn't intervene.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been arrested in London today, shortly after Ecuador removed his asylum status.
Assage has been hiding in Ecuador's embassy in London, UK since 2012 when he applied for a asylum status with Ecuador. Country granted him the asylum status, but UK stated that if he moves out of the embassy area, he will be arrested immediately. Thus, he has stayed within the embassy for the past seven years.
Ecuador removed his asylum status today, stating that Assange has breached international laws and should therefor lose his refuge status. Shortly after, he was arrested on warrant issued by London's Westminster magistrates court, issued in June, 2012, when he failed to surrender to the court.
Assange has refused to leave the embassy, stating that he would be extradited to the United States if he'd leave the embassy. In United States, he is likely to face charges related to WikiLeaks data leaks about U.S., including the leak of diplomatic cables back in 2010.
Apple has strategy with the iPhone has been to have a bigger update biennially and every other year you have an S version update.
This has been called the dichotomy between an evolutionary and a revolutionary update. This year it's once again the time for Apple to revolutionize the iPhone once more.
According to sources, Apple will be introducing a triple camera setup first time ever on an iPhone. Now reports from Japanese website Macotakara suggest that Apple is making the regular iPhone larger, or at least the display on it bigger.
Rumors have it that both iPhone 11 and 11 Max, or whatever they will be called, are going to feature triple cameras in the back and a big OLED panels in the front. The Max version is said to be 6.5 inches just like last year but the regular iPhone's display is going from 5.8 to 6.1 inches.
According to the same "trustworthy source", the iPhones are not going to adopt USB-C charging connector yet, unlike the iPad Pro, but they will charge much faster with the new 18 W charger.
Valve, the developer of online game platform Steam and upcoming game Half-Life 3, has been under investigation by the European Commission for couple years now.
Since early 2017, the regulatory branch of EU has been suspecting that Valve has violated European Union's antitrust laws by providing goods with geo-blocking.
Now the commission has delivered formal letter against the defendants in what's called the Statements of Objections. Alongside Valve are five game developers who are co-defendants in the case.
According to European Commission Valve, Bandai Namco, Capcom, Focus Home, Koch Media, and ZeniMax have been selling games, or more specifically Steam activation keys, that are only valid in some EU member states. According to EU rules games should be valid in all EU member states.
The idea behind the country-specific codes was that they would be cheaper in EU countries with lower GDP, mostly in Eastern Europe, while in richer Western European countries games would cost more. This is against the EU rules on digital markets.
Countries in which codes were sold in included Czech Republic, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, and Romania.
Now Valve and the developers can defend their case to the commission after which they determine whether they still believe the companies have broken the rules.
Recent news about Apple's delays in 5G development for iPhones has sparked questions about whether Apple's semiconductor deals are set in stone.
Apple is not expected to ship a 5G enabled iPhone this year perhaps due to their sole chip partner Intel not being able to produce one.
Intel is hoping they'll get their XMM 8160 5G modem ready for Apple in early 2020 but earlier delays in the product line are reportedly eroding Apple's trust in Intel. This opens up question about other manufacturers.
This includes the likes of Samsung, MediaTek, and even Qualcomm, whom Apple have been battling against in the court recently because of several patent disputes.
Court cases don't seem to stop Qualcomm from effectively proposing to supply 5G modems to Apple. The company's president Cristiano Amon has told Axios that Apple "has their number."
Apple is said to be developing their first in-house modem which is expected to be the 5G modem likely heading to 2021 or 2022 iPhones. However, at that point its too late to enter the 5G competition, and to get there earlier they'll need at least one generation of externally designed modems.
Netflix has supported Apple's AirPlay ever since 2013, but just recently dropped the support for the feature. Feature has allowed users to watch Netflix on devices such as Apple TV.
Now, that Apple has expanded the AirPlay to also 3rd party products, under a licensing deal, Netflix has decided to drop the support for it.
Netflix states that the very reason is they want to certify each Netflix-capable device on their own. With AirPlay in its current form, this is no longer possible, as the protocol doesn't let Netflix know which device it is using. Thus, the experience could be subpar with some devices - and Netflix wont allow that risk.
Netflix has also dropped the option for Apple users to pay for their Netflix subscription via Apple's App Store, forcing users to pay directly to Netflix. This - and Apple TV+ service - have raised tensions between the two tech giants.
Tomorrow, 6th of April, 2019, marks a day when millions of navigation systems all over the world may go haywire, as the so-called Y2K19 bug hits them.
Satellite navigation systems (using GPS) that have been sold as recently as 2014 or so, might go nuts due a bug that makes them believe it is year 1999 again. This could cause serious problems, not only to people using GPS for navigation, but for various infrastructure that relies on GPS satellite data.
The bug is caused by the fact that GPS tracks time by weeks, as weird as it might sound. And the "week zero" has been set to year 1980, the year when the first parts of the GPS system went online. And the system was designed to allow the week numbering to go as up as 1,024 weeks. And we'll reaching that number, again, tomorrow. At that point, the counters will reset to zero again, thinking it must be year 1999 again. As you might have calculated, yes, we have already resetted the counter once, back in 1999. But back then, navigation devices were a rarity rather than a norm.
Most experts don't expect serious problems to occur because of this, but major manufacturers, such as Dutch TomTom and Garmin have all issued emergency patches to their devices - at least in TomTom's case, even to pretty ancient devices, too. Companies have reached out to their product owners and asked them to update their devices. At least in TomTom's case, the update is available to most of its old models - and the update is free. Garmin states that its devices should behave normally, although the dates shown might be off.
Microsoft has announced that the next major Windows 10 feature update will be called Windows 10 May 2019 Update and as the name suggests, will start rolling out in next month.
The new feature update, known as version 1903 and codenamed "19H1" will be available in next week for those users who have signed up to be part of the Release Preview ring of Windows 10. Rest of us will see the update arriving sometime in May, depending on each user's geographical location and various other factors. As always, Microsoft tries to balance the roll out so that not all users will get the update at the same date.
Compared to previous feature updates, the May update will be very small one, at least for regular user. The update focuses mostly on improving existing Windows 10 features, the stability of the operating system and fine-tuning some OS elements.
Most visible changes will be the new "light theme", some improvements to the Start menu and the Action Center. For full list of changes, check this list.
Netflix will increase its prices for U.S. users in May, 2019. The price hike will also affect those users in Latin American countries that are being charged in U.S. dollars.
Some of the new subscribers are already paying the increased price and some of the old users have already seen their prices rise to the new levels. However, the remaining subscription base will change to the new, increased price level in May.
The basic plan is rising from $7.99 to $8.99, the standard package from $10.99 to $12.99 and the premium plan, with UHD/4K streaming, will cost $15.99 instead of $13.99.
Netflix has been pumping money into its original content and is preparing to challenge the upcoming Disney subscription service, as well as Apple's new subscription service. Netflix poured $12 billion in content in 2018 and is expected to spend $15 billion this year on content.
Google has created some of the most popular online services and products of modern era, ranging from its namesake search engine to Gmail, YouTube and others. But company is also notorious for killing off its own products - even those that users seem to love wholeheartedly.
This killing spree that has lasted for more than a decade has made some people very, very wary of falling in love to anything that Google has produced. And it might explain - to a degree - why some of the Google's products of recent years have failed to gather significant number of users.
Looking at the list of killed products in Google portfolio, it might be fair to say that the suspicious take is pretty granted. One of the biggest outrages was caused when Google shut down its Google Reader service back in 2013. Similarly, killing off much-hyped Google Glass AR product was also a disappointment to many people.
But looking at the entire list of killed Google products over the years is mind-boggling, as there are products that most of us have never even heard about - but some, which might have been useful - and even loved - to its users. Many people have hoped that Google would simply sell the products that it doesn't want to continue, but they have never done so, but prefer killing them instead.
April Fool's Day pranks might either annoy or amuse the observer, depending on your attitude towards "real journalists" going crazy for one day. But at least there's a solid benefit out of all this: Researchers at Lancaster University are teaching an AI algorithm to detect fake news from real ones - and they're teaching the AI with April Fool's Day pranks and variety of other hoaxes.
The soon-to-be-released paper from Lancaster University, dubbed as "Fool's Errand: Looking at April Fools Hoaxes as Disinformation through the Lens of Deception and Humour" has found that April Fool's pranks from news organizations and companies (via their press releases) can be used to teach AI on how to determine if the article is "fake" or not.
Some of the characteristics that help AI to find out if the article is a prank or not, include:
April Fool's stories are generally shorter in length
they also use more unique words than real articles
they're easier to read than real articles
they tend to use more first-person pronouns than real articles
According to researchers, fake news articles that weren't April Fool's pranks, but confirmed fabrications, shared quite a lot of similarities to April Fool's articles and, thus, helped AI to learn the differences between fabrications are real articles.
Apple has been working on a wireless power source for its wirelessly charging products for year and a half, but now the fight to get the product to the market is over. However, not in a way we expected.
After revealing the product in 2017 iPhone event (alongside iPhone 8 and iPhone X), Apple has cancelled AirPower yesterday citing high standards not being achieved. Here's the full quote from Apple:
"After much effort, we've concluded AirPower will not achieve our high standards and we have cancelled the project."
Simple as that. Apple has a tradition of not cancelling products, which makes this a significant step backwards. In fact, the company became known for its swift release schedule after the initial product reveal to the press.
That has slowed down in the recent years, perhaps after Steve Jobs, and products like HomePod took quite a while to be released to the public.
According to some rumors AirPower's three coil design ran too hot and they couldn't fix it due to simple laws of physics.
Making the cancellation a little bit more painful than it needed to be they just released a new set of AirPods that promote AirPower in the packaging.
YouTube TV, Google's answer to cable TV, was originally founded in February of 2017, but now just over two years ago it has officially been expanded to cover the entire United States.
The online TV service that provides both local channels as well as pay cable TV first started in April 2017 with five markets in New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia and San Francisco. Now YouTube TV's official Twitter account has announced that it is available in every television market in the United States.
The last market to join the YouTube TV family is Glendive, Montana. Unfortunately YouTube TV didn't want to celebrate the occasion by revealing some subscription stats or any other interesting nuggets of information.
YouTube TV starts at $40/mo with around 70 channels, depending on the location, and additional channels increasing the cost. It includes Cloud DVR with no storage limits and works with up to 6 separate accounts within household.
Sony has revealed this week that it has sold 4.2 million PlayStation VR devices worldwide. That's a good amount of virtual reality glasses, but what is the context here?
The glasses originally came out in October 2016, so 4.2 million units in in two and half years. When you also include the fact that Sony has sold over 90 million PlayStation 4 consoles, all of which are compatible with the VR equipment, it seems like they could've done better.
However, perhaps Sony hasn't failed – and them just announcing the figures seems to confirms that they are fairly comfortable with the sales – but it reinforces the fact that virtual reality is still a niche business.
Under 5 percent of PS4 owners have made the move to virtual reality on what is undeniably one of the easier and cheaper ways to get yourself in the VR game.
Ars Technica has compared PS VR's sales to a Sega Genesis peripheral, Sega CD, which sold around 2.2 million units for a 30 million units selling Genesis.
Perhaps VR is in the same place as optical discs were for gaming consoles in the early 90s, but if the same trajectory is to be followed, there will be some amazing years ahead for future VR devices.
To end the year, streaming giant Netflix released their first ever interactive movie. For Netflix Black Mirror: Bandersnatch was a trial of sorts, which confirmed the concept a success. Others are now following Netflix's lead.
Amazon's Echo is considered the first smart speaker that sparked the interest of Google, Apple, Samsung, and others to pursue this new type of AI enabled home tech.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been arrested in London today, shortly after Ecuador removed his asylum status.
