Davemichels

LG’s latest monitor is a big beast aimed at pro customers used to juggling multiple displays. It’s 42.5-inches wide, and has enough ports to show four screens at once from different sources. Oh, and it’s available for pre-order for $697 (that price and these details via Anandtech), making it a decent deal to boot. Interested? Let’s dive in.

As mentioned above, this is a 4K IPS panel (catalog name: 43UD79-B), measuring 42.5-inches across the diagonal, with a UHD resolution of 3840 × 2160. It’s got a non-glare coating, a contrast ratio of up to 1000:1, and decent viewing angles of 178° on both the horizontal and vertical. Peak brightness is 350 cd/m2, and LG says it supports up to 1.07 billion colors. The stand it comes with is basic, and...

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A handful of apps are no longer supported on the Apple Watch, according to a report by Apple Insider. Major apps like Google Maps, Amazon, and eBay appear to have quietly abandoned the Apple Watch App Store, without giving a heads-up or providing any explanation to users.

AI reports that Google pulled support for its Maps app on watchOS a few weeks ago, while recent updates to the Amazon and eBay apps no longer reference support for the Apple Watch. Other affected apps include Target (the main one, not its coupon app Cartwheel) and TripAdvisor. A TripAdvisor thread dating back to February questioned the changes, but users said they emailed technical support and received no response.

The lack of a response or explanation from these...

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 Cisco has been rather acquisitive in recent years, buying 19 companies since 2015; today it announced it was acquiring cloud-based SD-WAN vendor Viptela for $610 million in cash. Viptela was founded in 2012 and had raised more than $108 million, including its most recent $75 million round just last May. The $610 million price tag appears to be a nice return for investors. Read More

 Equinix, an international data center company based in Redwood City, California, announced today that it has completed the purchase of 29 data centers from Verizon for $3.6 billion. The acquisition greatly expands Equinix’s footprint, including giving it access to Latin America through a data center in Bogota, Colombia, along with a new presence in Houston, Texas and Culpeper, Virginia. Read More

After many beta versions of its Video SDKs for Android, iOS, and JavaScript, Twilio has now made the SDKs generally available. Further, Twilio launched a new REST API for Programmable Video and Room-based access control for video. Twilio has taken a purposefully controlled approach to its video portfolio, but as video drives towards an expected in-app experience, the company feels the tech is ready to meet consumer demand.

It’s not always better opportunities that lure tech workers away.

Shares of Facebook are at an all-time high on Monday, up 1.05% at $151.83 as of 10 a.m. ET.

The social media giant is set to release its first quarter earnings on Wednesday, May 3. According to Bloomberg, analysts expect Facebook to earn an adjusted $1.12 per share on revenue of $7.83 billion.

Facebook has beaten earnings estimates almost every quarter that it has been publicly traded.

Shares of Facebook have been on a huge run so far this year, up 32%. 

According to Bloomberg, of the 48 analysts who cover the stock, 43 have a "Buy" rating, four have a "Hold" rating, and one has a "Sell" rating. The average analyst price target is $163.30.

Click here for a real-time Facebook chart. 

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NOW WATCH: The Marine Corps is testing a machine gun-wielding robot controlled with just a tablet and a joystick

Earlier this week, Verizon and AT&T introduced new services for some of their respective customers:

• Verizon advertised a "Fios Gigabit Connection" plan that promises "gigabit internet connection service" for more than 8 million homes scattered across Virginia, Washington, D.C., and the Northeast, with prices starting at $69.99 a month. This is an upgrade over the "Fios Instant Internet" service the company launched in January.
• AT&T advertised a "5G Evolution" service that gives Samsung Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8+ owners in select areas of Austin, Texas faster mobile internet speeds. AT&T says it will give users up to "twice the speed of [its] 4G LTE network," and that it will launch the service in "over 20 major metro areas" by the end of 2017.

To be clear: Both of these are nice upgrades. Faster internet is a great thing, and the customers that are fortunate enough to gain access to these services here will likely enjoy them.

The problem is they're both misleading:

• Verizon notes that what it calls "gigabit internet" averages between 750 Mbps and 940 Mbps for download speeds, and between 750 Mbps and 880 Mbps for upload speeds. That is extremely quick, and 940 Mbps is about as fast as gigabit connections get in practice, but it still leaves room below the threshold that commonly designates "gigabit internet."
• The $70-a-month starting price for the plan only applies to new customers. As Ars Technica reported, existing Fios customers will have to pay $20 or $30 more each month, if not higher, depending on what level of service they have today. Those with the Instant Internet plan will pay $80 a month.
• That $70-a-month intro price is also part of a limited-time promotion — though Verizon says those who sign up while the promo lasts won't have their bills raised after the fact — and it doesn't factor in the usual router fees and additional taxes that come along with the bill.

I am a current Fios customer, and I live in an area that is eligible for the Gigabit Connection plan. Here's what I see when I go to buy that plan on Verizon’s web site:

• AT&T does not explain everything that makes up its "5G Evolution" service, but it does mention technologies like carrier aggregation, 4x4 MIMO, and 256 QAM. This is very obtuse, but the gist is that those are all advanced forms of current 4G LTE technology. T-Mobile has used them in its network since last September.
• The technology we call "5G" is still in development. The 3GPP, the central standards body for the wireless industry, has said the first iteration of the standard won't be ready until the end of the year, and that the complete standard won’t be ready for deployment until 2019.

To be fair, the term "5G Evolution" is not the same as "5G." And AT&T is working on new wireless tech. But the mind trick is obvious.

It's also very familiar. The news this week comes at a time when the four major carriers offer "unlimited" data plans that aren’t fully unlimited. All four say you may see moments of reduced speeds in areas of congestion if you go past a certain amount of data each month. That's not as bad as a hard cap, but all of the plans involve some sort of restriction on mobile-hotspot data and/or the ability to stream videos on high definition.

Again, that's okay! Running a network is wildly expensive. But the point is that's data, and those caveats are forms of limits, and they are part of plans that are advertised and sold as "unlimited."

There's a certain type of language we've come to expect from carriers and internet service providers over the years. Actual words are tossed into a blender; they come out meaning half of what they really do; and the rest of the definitions are tucked away in fine print at the bottom of the page.

This doesn’t just apply to consumer-facing stuff, either. In the wake of Congress striking down the Obama-era FCC's internet-privacy rules, the major telecom players made it clear that they do not sell your "personal information" to third parties.

But how true that is depends on how you define "personal information." Your name, address, and social security number are off the table, but some ISPs leave the door open to anonymize browsing data, location, and general demographic info, then sell it all in bulk. And the CTIA, a major telecom trade group, successfully argued in January that customers don’t need to give explicit permission before having their web-browsing and app-usage data collected, because it isn’t "sensitive" info. You have to go out of your way to find all this.

I'm not trying to lay judgment here. There is a general predisposition among the general public to distrust ISPs to an extent that maybe goes a bit far every now and then. And the likes of Google, Facebook, or Amazon aren’t exactly angels about this stuff.

But when you're in a business that is defined by a distinct lack of user choice, a structure that major ISPs have lobbied to help keep in place, the least you can provide is truth in advertising. The various pledges to keep a "free and open internet" in the wake of the seemingly-doomed net-neutrality laws would be a great place to start.

When I was telling a colleague about this post, he responded with a laugh, and said, "Well, I doubt they plan to stop being deceptive." That attitude is unfortunate, but wholly understandable.

SEE ALSO: Trump just killed Obama's internet-privacy rules — here's what that means for you

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NOW WATCH: AT&T CEO: Trump is a 'positive development' for our industry

As CenturyLink passes regulatory hurdles to acquire one of Colorado’s largest technology companies, the telecom said Friday that two of Level 3 Communications executives will join its senior leadership team.

Laurinda Pang, Level 3’s regional president for North America and Asia Pacific, will become CenturyLink’s executive vice president responsible for sales and enterprise service delivery in CenturyLink’s markets in the Asian Pacific, Europe, Middle East, Africa and Latin America. As previously announced, Sunit Patel, Level 3’s chief financial officer, will take on the same role at CenturyLink.

Jeff Storey will step down as Level 3’s CEO after the merger and join CenturyLink’s board of directors. CenturyLink CEO Glen Post will be CEO of the combined company. But further details of what will happen to the rest of Broomfield-based Level 3 were not provided.

Level 3 was ranked as the state’s fifth-largest company on the Fortune 500 list, based on revenues last year. Level 3 was No. 333 on the list. CenturyLink was No. 159.

Shareholders from both companies approved the deal in March, but there are other approvals needed from state, local and federal governments. The merger is expected to be completed by the end of September.

The combined company will be headquartered in Monroe, La., where CenturyLink is based. But both have a substantial number of employees in Colorado. CenturyLink employs 4,600 of its 40,000 workers here, while Level 3 employs about 4,000 of its 12,600 people in Colorado.

Siri lagged behind competitors, though researchers said Apple's product does boast more humorous answers than other digital assistants. 

Microsoft this week announced the launch of Microsoft IoT Central, a software as a service (SaaS) designed to reduce the complexity of deploying internet of things (IoT) solutions. It is a fully managed SaaS offering for customers and partners to deploy IoT products without requiring cloud solution expertise.

In announcing the service, Microsoft acknowledged the benefits of IoT but also its challenges -- its complexity and a shortage of skills for starters -- which makes it difficult for everyone to take advantage of IoT.

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Alphabet's market cap swelled to more than $630 billion on Friday following the Google parent company's better-than-expected Q1 results a day earlier. 

In addition to growth in advertising revenues, the "other revenue" category saw significant growth in Q1, up 49%, as the company seeks to diversify how it makes money beyond digital ads. Most of those revenues come from Google's cloud services and hardware, like the Pixel phone and Google Home speaker.

As Alphabet's stock rose above $900 on Friday, analysts boosted their price targets and heaped praise on Google's growing collection of money-making products and its ability to maintain solid profit margins even as it spends heavily to beat the competition.

Here's what analysts are saying about Alphabet, in reaction to the earnings report:

SEE ALSO: Google's CEO isn't worried about making money on the company's most futuristic products

Barclays: BULLISH

Rating: Buy

Price target: $1,065

Comment: "Stepping back from the results, Google is in a really good spot right now given its shareholder friendly buybacks, strong pace of innovation, and a lower multiple than its large cap peers. With I/O around the corner and solid momentum into 2Q, we'd add to positions."

 

Macquarie: BULLISH

Rating: Buy

Price target: $995

Comment: "There is certainly potential long-term upside from Cloud and many emerging areas such as hardware, AI, and Waymo, but we are reiterating our Outperform rating and raising our target to $995 based mostly on continued core growth."

Baird: BULLISH

Rating: Buy

Price target: $1,100

Comment: "Capital discipline remains a key strength... As Google conti ues to invest in key growth areas including mobile, cloud and ML/AI, management reiterated its focus on maintaining high levels of profitability through a measured approach to capital allocation."

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

 Microsoft just reported earnings for the last quarter. The company reported non-GAAP revenue of $23.6 billion and non-GAAP earnings per share of $0.73. Wall Street’s cadre of crack analysts expected the company’s earnings per share to come in at around $0.70, with revenue hitting about $23.6 billion. In the year-ago quarter, Microsoft reported earnings per share of $0.62. Wall… Read More

Sprint has been inching its way toward beating Denver’s other mobile service providers and, in a report released Thursday, the smallest of the nation’s big four carriers outscored the competition, though just barely.

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RootMetrics, the research firm that has team members nationwide who make calls and test mobile speeds indoors and out, said Sprint tied with AT&T and Verizon for best overall performance in the Denver region. Sprint scored a 96.4, a half-point more than next-place Verizon and above AT&T’s 95.7. Fourth-place T-Mobile wasn’t too far behind, at 94.9.

Those scores are based on 26,407 tests that RootMetrics conducted in the Denver area in March.

Sprint has improved since its typically last-place finish from just a few years ago. And looking closer at most recent results, something is definitely happening at Sprint, said Annette Hamilton, RootMetrics’ director. Sprint’s median download speed in Denver doubled to 19.6 mbps from a year ago. That was also well above the competition, with the other three posting median speeds of 11.7 to 13.5 mbps.

“A year ago, Sprint was also the fastest and they’ve doubled that. It’s the same in Colorado Springs, where (Sprint) has doubled to 25.6 mbps. They’ve done something to improve their speeds dramatically,” Hamilton said. “…That suggests to me that Sprint is investing in this.”

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Mobile data speeds in Denver, first half 2017

In March 2017, RootMetrics sent out testers to make calls and test data speeds on the four major mobile carriers in Denver. Sprint was the fastest — by a lot. Below are the results of speed tests, in megabits per second.

Test period	AT&T	Sprint	T-Mobile	Verizon
March 2017	13.5	19.6	12.5	11.7
Aug.  2016	12.5	14.9	11.7	12.7
Feb. 2016	8.31	9.81	4.45	6.82

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Sprint has been investing in its network nationwide as part a program it calls Network Vision, which included ripping out the old network and replacing it with new network equipment. Sprint officials declined to elaborate on the changes but said more details are coming soon.

“We have been making numerous enhancements around Colorado, especially in Denver, which has become one of the best performing markets on the Sprint nationwide network,” said Greg Post, regional president for the Mountain Southwest at Sprint.

Sprint also won the RootMetrics top honor outright in Colorado Springs, scoring more than a point ahead of second-place Verizon. Sprint also had the fastest data speed in Colorado Springs, at 25.6 mbps.

For regional comparison, other cities have much faster data speeds. In Atlanta, Verizon topped the list with 41.6 mbps. T-Mobile ruled Lansing, Mich. at 50.4 mbps.

Related Articles

• September 24, 2016 This is why mobile service is so bad in Denver
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• January 18, 2017 Denver International Airport has nation’s fastest public Wi-Fi speeds — and it’s free
• August 4, 2016 Second report ranks Denver’s mobile data speeds as nearly the slowest in the U.S.

Sprint customers are also getting better data speeds because of the wireless spectrum the company owns above Denver and nationwide. Sprint doesn’t compete with the others in the more crowded 4G spectrum known as Advanced Wireless Services. Rather, it owns a less-crowded chunk of the wireless spectrum.

But while Sprint saw much improvement, the others maintained their scores from a year ago, which indicates they put some investment in their networks too, Hamilton added.

“Verizon is far and away the best performer across the nation,” Hamilton said. “Presumably, they’re continuing to invest, too. They just do a great job overall nationwide. Whereas for Sprint, they’re less good if you’re driving on a road in Montana.”

RootMetrics did ding Sprint for network reliability, or the ability to get online and stay online to do what you want to do on a smartphone, like view a complete webpage. Sprint, which ranked the lowest, was able to do that 95 percent of the time. By comparison, Verizon was at 99 percent.

All four showed data speed improvements. The slowest — T-Mobile at 12.5 mbps — was faster than what any carrier achieved a year ago, when Denver was named the slowest in the nation.

With the carriers scoring within a few digits of one another, the companies all did well considering this is Denver, Hamilton said.

“Denver may always have more challenges than a major city that is flat, Atlanta comes to mind. Atlanta has the Stone Mountain, but it’s like one little rock. Denver is always going to have challenges specific to the Rocky Mountains,” she said. “But I’m telling you that whatever it is the carriers are doing in Denver, it’s making a noticeable difference. There is no reason that any (customers) of the carriers can’t do normal tasks in Denver now, whereas before it was a little hit and miss.”

 

Amazon announced its first-quarter financial results on Thursday, and it blew by what Wall Street was looking for.

The stock was up about 4% in after-hours trading following the report.

Here were the key numbers:

• Revenue of $35.71 billion, versus Wall Street estimates of $35.3 billion. A nice beat. This was $29.1 billion a year ago.
• EPS of $1.48, versus estimates of $1.13 per share, non-GAAP. This compares with non-GAAP EPS of $1.07 per share a year ago. A big beat as well.

Analysts were also closely watching the performance of Amazon's cloud computing unit, Amazon Web Services.

AWS reported $3.66 billion in revenue and 43% growth, which beat the analyst consensus of $3.65 billion in revenue and 42% growth. Last quarter, AWS didn't grow quite as fast as people had expected.

Even though it beat predictions, AWS growth still slowed down. In the previous three quarters, AWS experienced 47%, 55%, and 58% growth.

Other key stats:

• Overall, first-quarter sales were up 23%.
• Retail subscription services, which is mostly Amazon Prime but includes a few other things, like music, hit $1.94 billion, up 49% year-over-year.

Next quarter, Amazon expects sales of between $35.25 billion and $37.75 billion, or to grow by between 16% and 24% compared with Q2 2016.

This factors in $720 million of headwinds from foreign-exchange rates, the company says. That's right in line with what the Street is looking for, with analysts expecting $36.84 billion.

Here's the full Amazon press release.

SEE ALSO: Amazon is about to surpass Costco on one crucial measure

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NOW WATCH: 6 things the Samsung Galaxy S8 can do that the iPhone can’t

The BlackBerry KeyOne smartphone will be available for purchase in the US and Canada starting next month, according to a press release from TCL, the device’s manufacturer. The KeyOne is the first TCL-manufactured BlackBerry phone to feature a physical keyboard, which was the signature feature of BlackBerry smartphones years ago.

It will be available for purchase in Canada first, with preorders starting on May 18th. Canadian customers will be able to get the phone from Bell, Bell MTS, Rogers, SaskTel, and TELUS Business for $199 with a two-year contract. It will be available unlocked in the US starting on May 31st for $549. The unlocked model will work with both GSM and CDMA networks, and TCL says that Sprint will be selling the device...

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Cybercriminals revealed new levels of ambition in 2016, with more than 100 new malware families released into the wild. 

After months of blunt force foreshadowing, the Federal Communications Commission announced today that it’s ready to pick a fight with the public over the future of the open internet. It’s great news if you’re a lawyer for Verizon or Comcast, and terrible news for the rest of us.

In its first wave of propaganda, the FCC says that its proposal to roll back internet regulation will “Restore Internet Freedom for all Americans” — a mendacious slogan on the level of the “Patriot Act,” or the “World’s Greatest Healthcare Plan.” Like the first fight for net neutrality, this one is going to be about words and what they mean. For instance: “internet freedom.”

What does the FCC mean now when it talks about “internet freedom?” Here’s what Chairman...

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The incident involved a vulnerability in a popular third-party library used by HipChat.com. No other Atlassian systems or products were impacted, the company said. 

A robot is already as good as a human worker (for certain tasks) about two-thirds of the time. 

Though Boston Dynamics has been building impressive — albeit often terrifying — legged robots for decades, the company hasn’t had much traction finding commercial applications for its agile machinery.

Its robots were largely funded by military contracts before Google bought Boston Dynamics in 2013.

But at the TED 2017 conference today, Boston Dynamics founder and CEO Marc Raibert admitted his company has been testing how it can put its robots to work in more marketable ways.

Raibert showed a video of Spot, one of Boston Dynamics’ four-legged dog-like robots, delivering a package strapped to its back to someone’s front door.

“We’ve been taking our robot to our employees’ homes to see whether we could get in the various access ways,” said Raibert onstage at TED. “We’re doing very well — about 70 percent of the way.”

Raibert also showed videos of Atlas, its bipedal access robot, working on a factory floor moving boxes to a conveyor belt, which he said is now working at two-thirds of the average speed of a human worker.

The latest robot Boston Dynamics showed off, Handle, was described by Raibert as “nightmare inducing” when he unveiled the machine at a conference last month. Handle is a legged robot that can jump over hurdles and land on its wheeled feet, lift a single leg while moving, stroll in the snow and go down stairs, as well as carry up to 100 pounds.

At TED, Raibert also said that, using 3-D printing, his team has been able to build robot parts that mimic the anatomy of an animal, helping them reduce the weight of their humanoid robot by over 200 pounds.

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Samsung Italia, the Korean company’s Italy-based team, thinks emoji can help people with aphasia communicate. The neurological disorder affects the language part of people’s brains so they often have difficulty speaking, reading, and writing. It doesn’t affect cognition.

That’s why Samsung made an app called Wemogee, which allows people with aphasia to communicate with others through emoji. Users can select from a list of emoji phrases, and those on the receiving end of a message will see a response in text. Like this:

Image: Samsung Italia

The app contains more than 140 phrases that cover day-to-day activities. Users can ask, “what would you like to eat,” for example, or convey their mood. The emoji in the app...

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UK artificial intelligence (AI) startup Babylon has raised $60 million (£47 million) for its smartphone app which aims to put a doctor in your pocket.

The latest funding round, which comes just over a year after the startup's last fundraise, means that the three-year-old London startup now has a valuation in excess of $200 million (£156 million), according to The Financial Times.

Babylon's app has been downloaded over a million times and it allows people in UK, Ireland, and Rwanda to ask a chatbot a series of questions about their condition without having to visit a GP.

The medical chatbot provides feedback on the patient's symptoms and recommends a paid-for video call with a human doctor when the occasion calls. In the UK, one-off calls with a doctor start at £25, while calls with a specialist cost more. Alternatively, Babylon users can pay £5 a month for a subscription to the service. In Rwanda, where Babylon has 450,000 users, people pay 50p for a consultation.

"The new funding will be used to accelerate the development of our technology and expanding geographically," Ali Parsa, founder and CEO of Babylon, told Business Insider. "We are looking at 11 to 12 countries," he added, saying that South East Asia and Africa are regions of focus for Babylon. The company is also in talks with a Middle Eastern government, Parsa said.

Babylon currently employs around 170 people but Parsa said that this number is expected to grow "significantly" by the end of 2017. "There are 60 vacancies [at Babylon] right now," he said.

Babylon's aim is to build the world's most advanced AI platform in healthcare, support medical diagnosis, and predict personalised health outcomes globally.

"Cutting edge artificial intelligence together with ever increasing advances in medicine means that the promise of global good health is nearer than most people realise," said Parsa in a statement.

"Babylon scientists predict that we will shortly be able to diagnose and foresee personal health issues better than doctors, but this is about machines and medics co-operating not competing. Doctors do a lot more than diagnosis: artificial intelligence will be a tool that will allow doctors and health care professionals to become more accessible and affordable for everyone on earth. It will allow them to focus on the things that humans will be best at for a long time to come."

In the UK, Babylon employs around 100 doctors and pays them roughly the same as they'd get paid if they were working for the NHS. Many of them are busy mums and dads who don't want to work full time at a surgery or in a hospital, he said. 

Last January, Babylon raised $25 million (£19.5 million) from a range of investors, including DeepMind cofounders Demis Hassabis and Mustafa Suleyman. That round valued the company at over $100 million (£78 million), according to The Financial Times.

The latest funding round reportedly includes Egyptian billionaire business family, the Sawiris, as well as several other new investors.

The company teamed up with the NHS in January on a trial project that saw its AI doctor used to power the NHS 111 app, which is available to over a million north London residents. The partnership means that Londoners will be able to type their symptoms into an app instead of calling a human to describe their health problems over a phone. The app will then provide advice to the person on what to do next.

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NOW WATCH: People on Twitter are roasting United Airlines after a passenger was forcibly dragged off a plane

 Back in February, the Facebook-led Telecom Infrastructure Project led a call to put $170 million into startups focusing on solutions to improve infrastructure: the switching technologies, engineering, cabling and other components that go into building networking for internet and other communications services. Today comes one more advance on that front: Facebook and the TIP are working… Read More

 Microsoft announced some significant integrations between LinkedIn, the professional social network it bought last year for over $26 billion and Microsoft Dynamics 365, the company’s CRM and ERP suite. It was clear that when Microsoft paid that much money for LinkedIn, it had plans to use that data in other Microsoft products. Those ideas began to emerge last summer with some Office… Read More

Amazon has quietly formed a team to explore how it can best use driverless technology, the Wall Street Journal first reported Monday.

The 12-person team, formed over a year ago, isn't building self-driving vehicles but is exploring how the tech can be used to improve package delivery, according to the report.

An Amazon spokesperson did not immediately return Business Insider's request for comment.

This isn't the first time we've heard Amazon could make a play in the autonomous driving sector.

In January, Amazon was approved for a patent for a "roadway management system" that helps self-driving vehicles find the best lanes for their driving needs, factoring in things like speed and traffic flow. The Seattle-based tech giant currently owns a fleet of 4,000 semi-trucks.

In general, Amazon has been investing heavily in expanding its transportation network. The company is spending $1.49 billion on its own air cargo hub in northern Kentucky. 

Amazon began leasing planes in 2016 to decrease its reliance on UPS and FedEx. It currently has 16 Boeing 767 planes in use and plans to increase that number to 40 in the next few years. The company has also agreed to lease 20 cargo planes from Atlas Air Worldwide.

The world's largest online retailer has also dipped its toe in the $350 billion freight shipping industry. Amazon China is registered as a freight forwarding provider, allowing it to arrange shipments between the US and merchants in China.

Amazon plans to use a drone delivery service, called Prime Air, by 2018, though that will largely depend on the regulatory environment.

Analysts believe Amazon ultimately plans to build its own shipping network so it can completely bypass partners like UPS and FedEx.

Deutsche Bank released a report in June last year predicting that Amazon will have a shipping operation that consists of self-driving trucks and drones.

Baird Equity Research's Colin Sebastian also believes Amazon's ultimate goal is to offer transportation and logistics services to third parties.

"While we understand the skepticism surrounding the potential of third-party logistics, precedent suggests Amazon has larger ambitions beyond the ATSG and Atlas Air announcements," Sebastian wrote in a 2016 note. "Moreover, we estimate a $400 billion+ market opportunity for Amazon in delivery, freight forwarding, and contract logistics, of which even a small slice could prove material for Amazon."

You can read the full WSJ report here.

SEE ALSO: Amazon is building its own air cargo hub for $1.49 billion

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NOW WATCH: Amazon is launching a drive-up grocery service — here's how it works

Whether your browser supports WebRTC on the desktop has become somewhat of a moot point. Just download Chrome and you’re done. Odds are though, you are using Chrome or have it already downloaded.

Chrome has obliterated all its competition with +50% worldwide market share. The others fade like vintage film stock. I’ve been waiting so long for Microsoft to get their WebRTC act together I”m starting to believe in Santa Claus again. On Mac, Safari users are smart enough to have already downloaded Chrome. Game, set, match.

But on a mobile device, things aren’t so clean. While you can wrap WebRTC into into your app for iOS, it’s not native. For the other ~ 82% of the world who are using Android, you can build a native web app with WebRTC. Unfortunately iOS has whopping 43% market share in the US and you can’t ignore that. Thus the lack of native WebRTC on iOS has been a show stopper for trying to deploy a browser base communications applications on any mobile platform. The math doesn’t work.

Last April, Apple quietly flipped the switch and said that WebRTC was “in development” for Webkit (the engine for Safari on both desktop and mobile). Apple is always super secretive about everything (just ask them what kind of soup they’re serving in the cafeteria today). But they hired some WebRTC resources, attended a few industry gatherings. If there’s smoke, there’s fire. Something was going on.

This is significant as it would mean you can deploy a mobile-centric web-based app with a WebRTC component and be nearly assured it would work on any mobile phone.

Let me make a few predictions

Apple has been fiddling with WebRTC for 18 months and nearly anything can be built in that time frame. So 4Q 2017 sounds about right to me. I’ll be surprised if it’s much longer.

With native iOS support it will be much easier to support casual 1-off communications on your mobile. Need to join a conference call? Send me a link and I can join without any hassle of downloading an app I might use only once. Developers won’t need to worry about what mobile OS we’re on.

Another example is in the consumer field of customer support. Say you bought some widget and can’t figure out how to set up. You’re already in a bad mood when you decide to call the support center. The odds of you downloading and setting up some app to help the support desk “see what you see” and maintaining a decent mood is zero. I’m in a bad mood just thinking about this.

However, if you simply need to click a link. Launch my browser. Well, OK you can take a look. I expect casual customer support apps that need video to have an uptick.

With multiparty being defacto. Facetime is looking a bit elderly. Thus it makes sense for FaceTime to support this. Bonus points if they do something fancy with it.

iMessage has been gingerly embracing an API so it seems natural for us to assume FaceTime would be next. I don’t see it for the moment, what would Apple gain? We witnessed Google shutting down the Hangouts API, so video is perhaps not the first place to start.

Apple has a long history of going against the crowd. But this time I think their WebRTC implementation might just be follow “whatever Google is doing.” While there may be some work for the adapter.js to ‘adapt’, I’m betting it will be minor. This is good news, it means a web WebRTC enabled page should work on iOS out of the box.

So assume Apple has WebRTC, it’s no longer a dream, you should think about the new possibilities that open up once you no longer have to worry about whether the end user has the app installed or correct browser.

The post When Apple supports WebRTC, then what? appeared first on Chris Kranky.

Jessica Davies / Digiday:
The Guardian confirms it has stopped publishing its articles to Apple News and Facebook Instant Articles  —  Publishers aren't happy with the deal platforms are cutting them.  Now, the Guardian has dropped both Facebook's fast-loading Instant Article format and removed its content from Apple News.

Back in February, Microsoft updated Windows 10’s mail and calendar apps with a few useful features. Focused Inbox shows you only the important emails and puts everything else into an “other” tab. And the calendar app gained the ability to display travel reservations and package delivery details. But at the time, neither of these options worked for Google / Gmail accounts — only for Outlook.com and Office 365 accounts. Thankfully, that won’t be the case much longer.

Today Microsoft announced that it going to be rolling out Gmail support to Windows Insiders over the next few weeks before a wider release to all consumers. Users chosen for early access will receive a prompt to update their account settings to get started.

For all of this...

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Microsoft is expected to unveil its Windows 10 Cloud operating system next month at a special software and hardware event in New York City. The software giant is likely launching its own hardware with a special version of Windows 10, which could debut as Windows 10 S or Windows 10 Cloud. While we’ll have to wait for May 2nd to see exactly what Microsoft is planning, some hardware specs point to plans for low-end devices to compete with Google’s Chromebooks.

Microsoft’s event is focused on education, an area Chromebooks are thriving in, and Windows Central has obtained an internal Microsoft document detailing the minimum hardware specifications for “Windows 10 Cloud performance.” One of the targets is for devices running the Windows 10...

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 Microsoft is launching IoT Central today, a new Internet of Things (IoT) service that gives enterprises a fully managed solution for setting up their IoT deployments without needing the in-house expertise necessary for deploying a cloud-based IoT solution from scratch. It’s basically IoT-as-a-Service. Read More