Davemichels

Let me be clear up front, since I'm about to say a lot of not-so-positive things about YouTube TV, Google's new streaming TV service that launched in a handful of cities this week.

It's an impressive product from a technical perspective, and easily the best of the growing number of products in the category from DirecTV, Sling TV, and Sony. The app is well-designed and easy to use. The streams are stable, something the competition has struggled with. And the unlimited DVR function is like having your own personal Netflix.

Cool stuff.

But there are far too many caveats and concessions with YouTube TV to make it a viable option for cord cutters today, and many of its restrictions are the ones that have plagued all the other streaming TV services. It's a niche product, and it's not going to grow into its own ambitions without some major improvements.

Here's the rundown.

Regional availability

Right now, YouTube TV is only available in a handful of cities: New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Chicago. It'll expand from here, but don't hold your breath if you're expecting it to launch outside the US. Since YouTube TV is dedicated to offering local channels, that means it'll have to negotiate streaming rights city by city in many cases. There's also a chance it won't be able to get all of them on board.

Channel selection and pricing

There are a little more than 40 channels available. While it's great to have all four major networks and (soon) AMC, YouTube TV is still missing a lot of channels like Discovery, CNN, TBS, TNT, and HBO. It'll likely take a lot more negotiating to get that content, and even then, it'll be tough for YouTube to keep the price at $35 per month if it does.

Meanwhile, DirecTV and Sling TV offer packages with over 100 channels. And while $35 isn't a bad price for 40 or so channels, competitors offer a lot more for your money. DirecTV now gives you over 60 channels for $35 per month, for example.

Device support

The great promise of streaming TV services is that they're ideally supposed to let you watch TV wherever you are, no matter what device you have.

That's not the case with YouTube TV, which only works on iPhone and Android for now. Want to watch on your television? You'll need to beam the video from your phone to a Chromecast. We're still waiting for apps that let you stream on smart TVs, Roku, Apple TV, video game consoles, and so on.

Sports restrictions

Even with ESPN on YouTube TV, watching live sports can still be a pain, thanks to blackout restrictions and other agreements sports leagues have with service providers. For example, you can't watch NFL games on your phone with YouTube TV because Verizon has exclusive mobile streaming rights for now. (Although you can use a Chromecast or stream on your computer.)

Local sports is a problem too. I couldn't watch Mets games on YouTube TV this week because they air on SNY, a local sports network in New York City. It's not on YouTube TV.

Google appears to be conflating two very different trends with YouTube TV

1.) Millennials and young people don't like watching traditional, linear TV. They want what they want on demand.

2.) They want to watch content on their phones.

While both are true, it doesn't make sense to mash the two trends together and provide linear content only on mobile devices with limited ways to watch on a big-screen TV. The cord-cutting trend is growing precisely because a new generation is growing up on the internet and sucking down content on demand without being slave to a programming schedule. Live TV only makes sense with limited programming like sports, and none of the streaming services do sports well.

The future of TV is still a long way away

Just about every major tech company and TV service has promised a radical transformation in the way we watch TV, but none of them have delivered. YouTube TV is proof that you can get the underlying tech right, but there are far too many hurdles getting the content people want on the devices they want. The best option if you you want to watch paid TV is, unfortunately, to still sign up for cable.

SEE ALSO: Here's Samsung's newest phone, the Galaxy S8

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 Many hot new enterprise technologies are centered around free, “open-source” technology. But how can corporate customers, and investors, evaluate all these new open-source offerings? These questions are especially tough to answer because most open-source companies are still private. That’s why we created a detailed index to track popular open-source software projects. Read More

Buzzwords crop up in the business world all the time, whether it's "synergies" or "unicorn," there's always a new term of the moment for companies and investors.

Lately, the corporate world and Wall Street have begun to shift their focus towards emerging technologies such as robotics and artificial intelligence.

The growing use of robotics and AI in industries from manufacturing to finance have intrigued business types (or if you're cynical, made them all jump on the bandwagon).

Wall Street investors have taken notice of the recent focus on these technologies. A note from Michael Hartnett, chief investment strategist at Bank of America Merril Lynch, showed that investments in funds that focus on robotics has grown exponentially in the past two years and continues to gain steam.

Clearly, investors have an appetite for companies that are on the cutting edge, and businesses are doing their best to make note of their own investments and capabilities in these areas.

For instance, many companies have begun to crow about their abilities to integrate artificial intelligence into their businesses. Michael Donough, Bloomberg Intelligence's Global Director of Economic Research & Chief Economist, tweeted a chart on Thursday showing the number of times that companies have mentioned artificial intelligence in their quarterly earnings calls.

Prior to 2014, based on the chart, almost no companies were talking about AI when discussing their business with analysts. Since then, the number of mentions has gone parabolic.

In a note on March 8, Morgan Stanley analyst Ben Uglow wrote that the trend is happening among large manufacturing companies as well.

"Digital Manufacturing has reached the tipping point, and is now going mainstream," Uglow wrote. "Industrial companies have begun to engage in a digital 'race', quickly building out their software competences.

While there certainly have been a number of technological developments in these two areas, the sudden uptick in mentions of robotics and artificial intelligence may be worth a dose of healthy skepticism. Many companies may be blowing hot air to seem like they have kept up with the latest trend and attract the investors interested in these technologies.

Or, as Ugnow said, "...it can be difficult to distinguish fact from rhetoric in terms of what relative strengths different companies have."

SEE ALSO: Ray Dalio explains why we may be repeating the mistakes of the 1930s

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A customer suggestion is the catalyst for Google to stand out from cloud business rivals Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.

The collaboration market is still growing strong, surpassing $9 billion in 2016.

It was a June day when I began my career as a national journalist. I stepped into the Detroit Bureau of The Wall Street Journal and started on what would be a long, varied, rewarding career. I was 23 years old, and the year was 1970. That’s not a typo.

So it seems fitting to me that I’ll be retiring this coming June, almost exactly 47 years later. I’ll be hanging it up shortly after the 2017 edition of the Code Conference, a wonderful event I co-founded in 2003 and which I could never have imagined back then in Detroit.

I didn’t make this decision lightly or hastily or under pressure. It emerged from months of thought and months of talks with my wise wife, my family, and close friends. It wasn’t prompted by my employer or by some dire...

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Federal Communications Commission chairman Ajit Pai on Tuesday met with multiple telecom industry groups and revealed his initial plans to undo the agency’s Obama-era net-neutrality laws, according to multiple reports.

Politico’s Margaret McGill and Alex Byers, The Wall Street Journal’s John McKinnon, and Reuters’ David Shepardson all cite multiple sources with knowledge of the meeting. The reports say that Pai could make his plans public as soon as late April, though they may come later. The FCC’s next open meeting is scheduled for April 20.

According to the reports, Pai said that he wants to maintain the basic principles of the net-neutrality laws — which legally prevent internet providers from blocking, throttling, or prioritizing certain content within their networks for financial gain — but aims to shift enforcement of those policies to the Federal Trade Commission.

Pai reportedly asked groups representing major internet providers to commit to abide by those net-neutrality principles in writing, which he feels will allow the FTC to punish those companies that do not stand by those pledges for “deceptive or unfair practices.”

Pai and Republican commissioner Michael O’Rielly currently hold a 2-1 majority at the agency. The FCC normally consists of five commissioners, but President Donald Trump has yet to nominate people for the two open seats.

The FCC did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The context

The net-neutrality laws passed during the Obama administration, formally known as the 2015 Open Internet Order, were approved in a 3-2 vote along party lines in February 2015, after months of heated debate and public outcries.

The laws classify internet service providers such as Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T as common carriers — i.e., entities that provide a utility service, in this case the internet — under Title II of the Communications Act. In the process, they give the FCC greater authority over what ISPs can and cannot do with the traffic over their networks.

Supporters of the net-neutrality laws say they prevent ISPs from engaging in potentially anticompetitive practices, such as charging certain websites for faster speeds within their networks, that would effectively allow them to play favorites, and possibly give their own services a technical advantage. Internet companies like Google and Netflix, as well as some smaller ISPs, have supported the 2015 order.

Pai voted against the net-neutrality order as a commissioner at the time, saying that the laws were “trying to solve a problem that didn’t exist.” He says that the greater regulatory overhead involved with the Title II classification has prevented ISPs from continually investing in their networks, though that particular point still seems somewhat unclear.

Pai has said previously that he wants to maintain a “free and open internet,” but he has long disputed the necessity of the Title II rebranding. Moving authority over ISPs’ practices to FTC would pave the way to reversing that.

That said, it’s unclear if simply asking ISPs to promise they won’t manipulate traffic would allow the FTC to enforce them with Title II still in place. By law, the FTC is forbidden from regulating common carriers, which all ISPs are considered under the 2015 order.

Complicating matters is an appeals-court decision from last year that ruled that the FTC could not regulate the non-common carrier practices of ISPs. Since ISPs like Verizon and AT&T also offer telephone service, another public utility, they may not be subject to FTC enforcement even if the current net-neutrality laws are undone. Republicans in Congress have said they would introduce legislation to undo the appeals court's decision, however.

Nevertheless, if Pai chooses not to enforce ISPs' practices while they are subject to Title II, it remains to be seen how much regulatory scrutiny they'd legally have to face under his reported plans.

This debate isn’t particularly new, as internet providers and many conservatives have called for regulation of ISPs to move to the FTC in recent years. Net-neutrality advocates, meanwhile, argued for years prior to the 2015 order that Title II classification is the only way to legally uphold net-neutrality laws.

Past attempts at similar net-neutrality laws were shot down in court in part because ISPs were considered “information service providers” at the time under Title I of the Communications Act. Internet providers have challenged the current Title II order in court, but have not succeeded in overturning it.

Any attempted changes to the laws are likely to result in more vocal debate. The FCC said it received nearly 4 million public comments on net-neutrality before the 2015 order’s passing.

Either way, the move would be the latest in Pai's and the GOP’s ongoing dismantling of Obama-era internet regulations. Earlier this week, Trump formally reversed a set of online-privacy laws that would’ve required ISPs to obtain your permission before sharing your web-browsing data with advertisers.

SEE ALSO: Trump’s new FCC boss could have a lasting effect on the internet — here’s what to watch out for

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Facebook’s AI assistant, known simply as M, will now pop into your Messenger chat windows to suggest actions it can take on your behalf, the company announced today. The feature is rolling out to iOS and Android users in the US, with a broader expansion around the globe in the coming months. Facebook first began testing this feature in December, and it appears ready to be unleashed on the public.

The current system works by analyzing your conversation and looking for key words to trigger M’s suggestive capabilities. Those include sending stickers, payment requests through Messenger, ride-hailing with Uber and Lyft, starting a poll for group chat participants, and sharing your location with...

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The social network is hoping a free version will hook small businesses or companies in emerging markets.

Xfinity Mobile will use Verizon’s networks and Comcast customers’ Wi-Fi hotspots.

The cable guy wants to be your phone guy.

Comcast*, the country’s biggest pay TV provider, is going to start selling wireless phone service as well.

The company has been talking openly about its ambitions for years, but now it is spelling out what it is going to do: It will market its own Xfinity Mobile service, using a combination of Wi-Fi hotspots and a wireless network built on the back of Verizon’s network, to its 24 million broadband customers.

Comcast executives say they’re interested in generating a new line of revenue with the service. But they say their primary interest is making the services they already sell more sticky.

The idea is that if you’re a Comcast wireless subscriber, you’ll be more likely to keep getting broadband, or pay TV, from Comcast as well.

Some details:

• Comcast’s core pitch is a flexible plan that offers unlimited voice calls and text, and lets you buy data as you need it, for $12 per gigabyte. It’s also offering an unlimited data plan for $65 a month; that can drop to $45 for customers who buy lots of pay TV.
• The service uses a combination of a wireless service operated by Verizon, augmented by an array of 16 million Wi-Fi hotspots Comcast customers already use. The idea is that as you step into a house, or store, with a Comcast Wi-Fi connection, your phone will automatically switch over to the local network.
• Comcast will only sell the service to people who are already buying broadband from the company.
• Comcast’s service will support iPhones and high-end Samsung phones, as well as more modest handsets from LG.

I’ll let the wireless experts weigh in on the pros and cons of Comcast’s plan, but at first glance it seems like it makes sense for its customers. The service is competitively priced — my Verizon unlimited plan, for instance, costs me $80 a month — and Comcast is going out of its way to make the service less Comcasty than its other lines.

For instance, there’s an option to get customer service, from a real human being, via text messages.

The strategy has logic for Comcast as well. Comcast now sells more broadband subscriptions than pay TV subscriptions, so adding on wireless data subscriptions is a natural way to extend its core business. It’s also a way to bolster revenue as pay TV numbers stagnate, either because customers are cutting the cord or never signing up for it in the first place.

* Comcast owns NBCUniversal, which is an investor in Vox Media, which owns this site.

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A week ago, AT&T did something with network technology that's never been done before and companies like Cisco and Juniper Network should be terrified.

AT&T ran a test using data from its customers that proved it can build a super-fast, reliable network with inexpensive no-name computer switches, some open source software and software from a startup.

In industry speak: that no-name hardware devices AT&T used are  known as "white box" switches.

But that's not all. AT&T's successful test, conducted last Tuesday, sent data from one white box switch in Washington built with one kind of computer chip to another one located in San Francisco from a different vendor using a different computer chip. 

That proves that companies really don't need to buy all their networking gear from one vendor in order to have everything work well together.

AT&T used this network gear with its own homegrown network management software, called ECOMP, that makes sure that all the data gets to where it's supposed to go.

And AT&T has given ECOMP away to the Linux Foundation, meaning anyone can take that software, use it and contribute to it. That includes other telecom network providers, some of whom are trying it out now, and would also likely be interested in the low-cost hardware AT&T just tested.

Software eats the network

AT&T has basically proved Facebook's vision of how data networks should be built. Even when it comes to an enormous, powerful network like AT&T.

To clarify: Facebook has been pushing forward a new way to build networks, an approach generally referred to as software-defined networking (SDN).

Instead of baking all features into expensive, high end networking gear (aka Cisco's model), an SDN network uses cheaper hardware. All the powerful features are built into software, which can be purchased from another company.   

SDN promises to make networks more affordable and easier to manage.

Facebook didn't invent SDN but it has been proving the concept works in its own large-scale data centers.

More importantly, it's been inventing all kinds of brand new networking technology based on the SDN vision. It gives its software and hardware designs away  for free, too. 

Several years ago Facebook launched an organization called the Open Compute Project to develop the vision of giving away hardware designs, known as open source hardware. OCP encompasses more than just networking but networking has been such a big focus hat Facebook launched an similar project for service provider networks, called the Telecom Infra Project.

OCP has taken off beyond Facebook's wildest dreams. AT&T joined last summer, looking for help with its own internal project to revamp itself in the SDN image.

While AT&T created its own hardware for this project (it didn't use standard OCP products), a bunch of OCP players were the ones that helped AT&T. They include:

• SnapRoute, a startup created by the former Apple networking team in direct response to the heartburn they experienced when building Apple's networks running everything from the App Store to Siri. SnapRoute makes software called a network operating system, that can be loaded onto lots of different hardware. 
• Barefoot Networks, a network hardware startup by famed network pioneer and Stanford professor Nick McKeown. Barefoot Networks is building a new breed of chip for network equipment that can be changed and programmed. While that may not sound revolutionary, it is. Most networks today are built on fixed-function chips.
• Broadcom, the chip maker that makes industry standard chips. AT&T used some of its cutting edge network chips. Broadcom has been a big player helping Facebook build OCP network switches.
• Delta and Edgecore, two of the manufacturers that also make network switches based on Facebook/OCP designs.

Why Cisco and Juniper should be scared

While AT&T didn't say it was ditching Cisco, it did say that this method of building networks was its future.

“With this trial, we went from using traditional switches the size of multiple refrigerators to a chip that can literally fit in the palm of your hand. We think white box will be a big part of the future of the wide area network," Andre Fuetsch, CTO and president of AT&T Labs said in the press release. It's actually been saying such things for years.

And at least some people on Wall Street have noticed that the big networking vendors were not part of AT&T's test.

Nomura analyst Jeffrey Kvaal put out a research note on Wednesday on the "implications" of AT&T's test called "AT&T’s Gain . . . Vendors’ Pain."

"Conspicuously absent from the trial were Cisco, Juniper, and Arista," he wrote and  noted that AT&T is a big customer for Cisco and Juniper, as well as Arista but to a lesser extent."AT&T’s network automation is already hurting vendors."

While Cisco does offer a SDN product called Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI), it is only available as a software option for its biggest, most powerful high end switch, the Nexus 9000. Cisco says ACI has been selling well, however  as we previously reported, while customers like the Nexus 9000 switch itself, ACI has a reputation in the industry for being difficult to install and use.

Plus, Cisco's legendary top engineers team that built that product very publicly quit Cisco last summer.

Seeing the writing on the wall, Juniper and Arista have already begun to sell versions of their network software that could run on white box switches. 

Cisco is rumored to be working on a similar thing, internally called Lindt, according to a report by Kevin McLaughlin  in The Information, although Cisco wouldn't publicly confirm that.

But selling the software without the high-end hardware could be a major decline in revenue for Cisco and, possibly, cannibalize its largest, most important product lines.

Put it this way: imagine being able to buy Apple's iOS software, put it on a $99 phone and have it all work great.

That's the quandary Cisco faces. And AT&T just made this problem very real, and very public.

SEE ALSO: How a 4-year-old startup got Cisco and HPE to invest while turning away $100 million

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Insurify, makers of a conversational chatbot solution for the car insurance market, recently announced a funding raise of $4.6M led by MassMutual Ventures and Nationwide Ventures. The Insurify bot can be accessed from Facebook Messenger and helps users shop for car insurance by answering a few questions.

In a previous post I’d written about the growing trend of natural language powered virtual agent and chatbot solutions to focus on specific verticals. From a technical standpoint, designing a successful customer experience is more manageable when the NL-powered conversational user interface is only expected to understand one well-known domain.

The Insurify business model fits well into this trend of the verticalization of NL-powered customer service solutions. The objective of Insurify’s conversational bot is to provide people shopping for car insurance a quick and painless way to get insurance advice and compare quotes from their smartphones.

The insurance industry is obviously aware of the continuing shift in how consumer’s shop for and purchase big ticket items such as car insurance. The fact that MassMutual Ventures and Nationwide Ventures funded the startup’s latest round shows that the industry as a whole doesn’t want to be left behind. In fact, according to the press release, 15 of the top 20 carriers participate in some way in Insurify’s platform.

The continued success of domain-focused NL-powered conversational agents sheds light on another important development. Intelligent assistants, as we like to call them here at Opus Research, are beginning to expand far beyond their original question-answering self-service roles. Many people still think of enterprise intelligent assistants as simple NL-powered question answering systems. People were thought to use such assistants to quick info about a company’s store hours or return policies, or perhaps get an update on account balances.

Of course enterprise intelligent assistants can do all of those things. But we’re charting new territory every day. Consumers shifted from picking up their landlines to get support, to shopping and seeking support from their desktops, to now doing everything from their smartphones. Some consumers are even starting to make purchases from in-home voice assistants such as Amazon Alexa.

And recent numbers from Strategy Analytics forecast that some 970 million devices with voice-activated functionality will be in use around the world in 2020.

Domain-specific solutions such as Insurify’s show that NL-powered platforms are working hard to keep up with this shift. Today, their efforts are fragmented, and encounters with virtual agents or MetaBots feel haphazard. Ideally, within the next decade, the quality and frequency of successful encounters with intelligent assistants will prompt individuals to initiate the majority of their purchases through conversations with smart virtual agents.

Mitel announced the appointment of Todd Abbott, a seasoned executive and industry leader with over 30 years of technology and business communications experience, to oversee the global sales operations at Mitel.

Every summer, tens of thousands of migrant workers swarm a remote area of Northern California — the marijuana-growing capital of the US — to find work as "trimmers" after the weed has been harvested.

Their job is to prune the fluffy, green buds with small pairs of scissors to clear them of leaves before they wind up on dispensary shelves or in dealers' pockets.

The work is arduous and pays between $100 and $300 a day for 10 to 15 hours of labor on the black market, which generated 87% of pot sales in North America in 2016.

A startup based in the Boston area hopes to revolutionize the increasingly legal marijuana industry by assigning robots to the task.

Bloom Automation is developing a robot that uses cameras and computer vision to discern leaves from the smokeable stuff, and cut away the unwanted material. A prototype unit can trim a typical eight-inch to 18-inch marijuana branch in as little as four minutes.

The startup is planning a late 2017 commercial launch. If Bloom Automation is able to bring up the machine's level of accuracy and lower its cost (which is currently upwards of $20,000), its robot could someday replace human trimmers at marijuana cultivation sites.

"We're not aiming to take anyone's job — just improve efficiency and alleviate a significant pain point," says Jon Gowa, founder and CEO of Bloom Automation.

The machine relies on a human operator to ensure the branches load properly. Gowa says it doesn't require a mechanical engineering degree to handle.

Marijuana buds are trimmed because well-manicured weed looks better and tends to fetch higher prices at dispensaries. The leaves also have a lower concentration of THC, the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana. A medical marijuana patient who buys an eighth of an ounce of untrimmed bud gets less value for their money than they would buying trimmed pot.

While trimming kush might sound like a cushy gig, it's actually one of the hardest jobs in the marijuana black market. A blogger who made $5,000 (after food and alcohol expenses) over five weeks in Northern California's trim trade wrote, "After a few weeks your hands are calloused, your lower back crippled, your wrists ache, and all the days merge into a green haze."

In California's marijuana-growing regions, some trimmers — called "trimmigrants" — come from outside the US. Many are effectively homeless. They camp in parks and alleyways. Female trimmigrants working in the male-dominated growing community can face danger. Stories of sexual assault, rape, and exploitation run rampant in the region, though few survivors press charges, according to a 2016 investigation by Reveal reporter Shoshana Walter.

Bloom Automation puts the trimming task in the hands of robots.

The robot prototype stands about three feet tall. Marijuana branches, which hold the buds on smaller stalks, slide down a conveyor belt. High-resolution cameras capture images of the branch from several angles, and a proprietary algorithm figures out which material is undesired leaves. An arm that hangs above the conveyor belt trims away the leaves.

The robot can trim about one pound of marijuana a day, which is on par with a human trimmer's average. Gowa says the company is working to increase its accuracy to about 80% of a human's ability.

Bloom Automation, which is currently enrolled in a marijuana startup accelerator called CanopyBoulder, hopes to start testing the robot at cultivation sites in Colorado this summer. It's targeting a retail launch at the end of 2017 and expects to attract mid-size cultivators.

The robot's cost will likely be prohibitive for the vast majority of small-time marijuana growers. A cultivator with about 5,000 square feet of production space would require one to two robots, according to Gowa, which could run up a bill over $40,000.

Gowa is hopeful that cultivators who contract trimmers at the start of the harvest will find new roles for those humans, like operating the robot.

"While autonomous, they're not fully autonomous. They need an operator," Gowa says. "With the deployment of robots, you also get employment."

SEE ALSO: The way people buy legal marijuana will change in 2019 — here's what to expect

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NOW WATCH: We went inside the grow facility that makes Colorado's number one marijuana strain

 Talla, a Cambridge, Mass. startup, wants to help companies ease into artificial intelligence, and they have come up with a new service assistant bot that gives companies whatever degree of intelligence-fueled power they are looking for. The tool, called ServiceAssistant, works as an IT or HR help desk inside of Slack or Microsoft Teams and gives customers a few options on how to use it. First… Read More

On Wednesday, the hybrid electric-aircraft startup Zunum Aero announced that it had received an investment from Boeing and JetBlue.

"I consider us very fortunate to have backers like JetBlue and Boeing," Zunum Aero founder and CEO Ashish Kumar told Business Insider. "We have been engaged with both companies for about a year, and both are as passionate as we are in this opportunity to reinvent regional air travel."

JetBlue's investment in the three-year-old startup was made through its Silicon Valley-based venture-capital fund led by Bonny Simi, the Olympian turned pilot turned airline executive. The amount was undisclosed.

"At JetBlue Technology Ventures, our goal is to be part of a disruptive force rather than the one being disrupted, and we seek new technologies that look to change the game," Simi said in a statement. "As a company that is also deeply committed to innovation in sustainable travel, we believe that Zunum and its quiet, environmentally friendly aircraft will light up a vast network of underutilized airports and reinvent regional travel."

In a statement, Boeing's vice president of strategy, Steve Nordlund, echoed Simi's sentiments, adding that Zunum's hybrid electric technology was leading the way in the up-and-coming segment.

Zunum's proposed regional aircraft would hold 10 to 50 passengers with a range of up to 1,000 miles. According to Kumar — whose résumé includes leadership stints at Dell, Google, and McKinsey and a Ph.D. from Cornell in mechanical and aerospace engineering — the jet will be powered by a battery first series hybrid propulsion system. This calls for the aircraft to run primarily on battery power with an aviation diesel or turbine range-extending power generator on call if necessary.

Since the aircraft isn't expected to fly until the next decade and will have a service life of roughly 20 years, Zunum is designing its aircraft to be "future-proof" — meaning the aircraft will be designed in a way that will allow it to adopt new technology. For instance, the aircraft will initially feature hybrid propulsion designed to deliver 80% lower emissions than comparable traditional aircraft. But with advancements in battery technology, the range-extending internal combustion engine can be replaced with an extra battery pack, thereby lowering emissions to zero, Kumar said.

In addition, Zunum's propulsor technology is expected to reduce the aircraft's noise emissions by 75% — important for operations into airports with stern noise restrictions.

Zunum's CEO believes his company's nature-friendly electric jet also makes economic sense for airlines and their passengers.

In recent years, many carriers have moved away from operating small 50-seat regional jets in favor larger aircraft that offer lower unit costs. Zunum says that by cutting out the need for large volumes of jet fuel, its aircraft can cut an airline's operating costs by 40% to 80% a flight. Even though airlines will have to swap out battery packs once or twice a year, Kumar believes his electric jets can deliver better unit costs than the latest jumbo jets from Airbus and Boeing.

In addition, the Zunum jets are designed for operation out of small general aviation or regional airports. This cuts down on passenger commute times, time spent in long security lines, and the need to connect through a larger hub. In fact, Kumar says that by taking advantage of general aviation airports, the planes could deliver door-to-door speeds that are two to four times as fast as those of highways, high-speed rail, or conventional aircraft.

According to Simi, JetBlue Technology Ventures, which launched early last year, targets investments that it believes can help JetBlue function better as an airline or provide its passengers with a better experience.

With Zunum, it may have found an investment that can do both.

Oddly enough, however, JetBlue operates a fleet made up entirely of Airbus and Embraer aircraft. If Zunum Aero works out, it may finally be time for JetBlue to acquire aircraft with Boeing's fingerprints on it.

SEE ALSO: United is trying to make flying less of a chore after weathering changes that customers hated

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NOW WATCH: Congress just voted to allow your internet provider to sell your online history and data — here's how to protect your privacy

The stat trackers at StatCounter have come out with their internet usage numbers for the month of March, and they have, for the first time, reported Android as the world's most popular operating system. Nudging ahead of the once-untouchable Windows by a tiny fraction, Android is now the world's most-used platform for getting online according to these latest figures. This represents a natural progression from the difference in devices shipped every year — more than a billion for Android versus 200-something million PCs per year for Windows — but StatCounter is among the first to claim that Android is now in the lead in usage numbers as well.

Image: StatCounter

The trend of mobile internet use taking over from the...

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Internet providers will not have to ask permission before sharing sensitive data with advertisers.

President Donald Trump on Monday officially hit the delete button on federal privacy protections imposed last year on the likes of AT&T, Charter, Comcast* and Verizon.

Trump quietly signed into law a bill that blocks the implementation of rules that would have required those internet providers to ask permission before selling sensitive customer data, like web-browsing histories, to advertisers and other third parties, the White House confirmed.

The move amounts to a major blow to privacy groups like the ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which had backed the Federal Communications Commission and its efforts under former Chairman Tom Wheeler and his boss, former President Barack Obama. And it’s a major win for the telecom industry, which saw the rules as unfair and burdensome.

Many telecom companies also objected because tech companies like Facebook and Google would not have been affected by the rules.

“Consumers deserve and expect one consistent set of online privacy protections and this action helps clear the way for a more uniform approach across the entire internet ecosystem,” said Jonathan Spalter, the CEO of USTelecom, a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group for the industry, in a statement.

Some telecom companies, however, insisted they would protect consumers’ personal information anyway — and chalked doubts up to their opponents.

Bob Quinn, a senior executive vice president at AT&T, struck a defiant tone in a blog post Friday, slamming privacy groups for ignoring “facts.”

“If the government believes that location data is sensitive and requires more explicit consumer disclosures and permissions,” he continued, “then those protections should apply to all players that have access to location data, whether an ISP or edge player or search engine.”

* Comcast, via its NBCU unit, is a minority investor in Vox Media, which owns this site.

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Lyft announced Wednesday that it will team up with Ford on self-driving cars, the latest addition to a growing list of partners.

The news shows how rapidly the self-driving-car space is shaping up. With so many players in the space, companies are exploring new tactics to get their product to market first.

We decided to take a step back and see where each company stands in the race to make robot cars a reality.

Navigant Research assessed all the self-driving-car players and released a leadership grid in April showing who is most poised to bring Level 2, Level 3, and Level 4 self-driving cars to market in the next decade.

Companies on the Leadership Grid were assessed on 10 criteria: vision; go-to-market strategy; partners; production strategy; technology; product capability; sales, marketing & distribution; product quality and reliability; product portfolio; staying power. The companies were then given an overall score out of 100 based on their performance in each category.

The leadership is bound to change next year as companies work to bolster their position in the space, but scroll down to see the top contenders this year:

SEE ALSO: I got a ride in the $100,000 electric car trying to take on Tesla — here’s what it was like

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18. Baidu

Baidu, a Chinese internet company, has been publicly testing its self-driving-car technology since 2015. 

The company allowed members of the public to take rides in its fleet of electric, autonomous cars for the first time in Nov. 2016, but the trial only lasted a week. The company has an autonomous testing permit in California and an office in Sunnyvale.

Baidu in September launched a $1.5 billion fund dedicated to autonomous-car development. The Beijing-based company plans to produce a limited number of autonomous vehicles for a shared shuttle service in 2018 and to mass produce self-driving cars in 2021.

Navigant Research gave Baidu an overall score of 47.1 out of a possible 100, noting that the company ended its partnership with BMW in November of last year.

17. nuTonomy

NuTonomy, a Boston-based startup spun out of MIT in 2013, has been quietly making big moves in the self-driving-car space. 

In August 2016, nuTonomy became the first company to launch a fleet of self-driving taxis under a pilot program in Singapore. The startup has since partnered with Lyft to launch a pilot in Boston before the end of this year.

NuTonomy has raised $20 million in venture funding through 2016. Investors include the government of Singapore and Fontinalis Partners, a venture fund founded Bill Ford, the executive chairman of Ford.

Navigant Research gave nuTonomy an overall score of 51.6 out of a possible 100.

16. Uber

Despite drawing a lot of attention when it launched its self-driving-car pilot in Pittsburgh last September, Uber is relatively low on Navigant's list.

Uber set up shop in Pittsburgh after poaching several robotics experts from Carnegie Mellon in May 2015. After launching its Pittsburgh trial in September, Uber now also runs one in Arizona.

In December, Uber got into a public dispute with the California DMV after launching a self-driving-car pilot in San Francisco without first obtaining an autonomous vehicles testing permit. Uber left California for Arizona after the DMV revoked registration of its 16 self-driving Volvo XC90s.

In January, Uber formed a partnership with Daimler. "This could be a hedge by Uber in the event that its in-house technology development does not work out — or if it proves to be too
expensive to operate its own fleet of vehicles," Navigant wrote in its report.

Waymo is suing Uber, claiming the ride-hailing service stole the intellectual property for its lidar system.

Navigant Research gave Uber an overall score of 54.5 out of a possible 100.

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

Twilio, the $2.4 billion Silicon Valley company behind one of 2016's hottest IPOs, specializes in helping apps and websites send text messages and make phone calls. 

If you've ever gotten a text from Uber that your car is on the way, or made an anonymous call to a would-be paramour via eHarmony, you've used Twilio. The company likes to bill itself as building the future of communications.

So it seems a little weird that, today, Twilio launches Programmable Fax, a new service that lets programmers enable their apps to send and receive faxes. Like, from a fax machine. In 2017. Weird, right?

"Fax is probably not what you think of, when you think about the future of communications," says Twilio VP of Product Patrick Malatack. 

But Malatack explains that, no matter how old-fashioned it may seem, a lot of companies in a lot of industries still rely on the trusty old fax machine. In real estate and law, important paperwork often still needs to be sent via fax for legal reasons; large restaurant or catering orders are sent via fax. 

So by building a service that makes it much easier for hot new apps to send faxes, it's actually bridging those two worlds.

For instance, the New York-based pizza delivery app Slice is using this Twilio Programmable Fax in its app — users place their order in the app, and it gets sent via fax to the pizzeria, the same way they've been taking orders for years. It brings the old and the new together. 

And while there were services out there that let you receive faxes via e-mail, it's not exactly the same thing: This lets programmers build faxing into their own apps, the way they want to. It's not totally crazy, thanks to Twilio's new service, that you could see Amazon Alexa skills that fax off a dictated note. 

In case you were wondering: No, this isn't an April Fool's Joke, though Malatack does note the "ironic" timing. 

 

SEE ALSO: This former Amazon manager is behind the breakout IPO of 2016 — and he says Amazon made it all possible

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There's a hospital in the heart of Silicon Valley that warns its patients not to go home and search about their diagnosis on the internet without first downloading a privacy app.

That's because there's a fear that internet providers could sell that data to insurance companies and influence the patient's insurance rates, says David Gorodyansky, CEO and founder of AnchorFree.

Many might be tempted to think these fears can be brushed off as urban legend. The big internet advertising companies like Google, Facebook, and Yahoo say they don't sell personally identifiable data to companies, although they do track a mind-blowing amount of data on you to serve ads. ISPs have also been able to do such a thing, but, up until yesterday, it would've been harder for them to get their hands on your data without you first giving them the go-ahead.

On Tuesday, however, House Republicans voted to give ISPs the green light to sell your data without your consent, gutting FCC privacy rules scheduled to go into effect by the Obama administration. President Donald Trump has already indicated he plans to sign the legislation into law.

Indeed, ever since Trump won the presidential election, internet-savvy people in the US have been racing to hide themselves and their data from online corporations and government snooping.

"Right after the election, we saw people being concerned and we could say that maybe they were over reacting. I think this FCC issue just proved that people are not over reacting," Gorodyansky says.

While the rise in secret messaging apps like Signal in the wake of the presidential election has been well documented, Gorodyansky says that AnchorFree has seen unprecedented downloads of its flagship app, Hotspot Shield, in the US as well. Hotspot Shield encrypts your online activity to keep it private from snoops and hackers.

"We have seen our US usage double, even before this FCC ruling, since Trump was elected. Whereas before the election, we were very big in repressive countries, in Egypt or Turkey. Every time they had events of censorship or privacy violations, we saw a massive spike of users. We're seeing the same thing in the US," he says.

For instance, before the election, Hotspot Shield was typically installed on about 200,000 new iPhones a month. But since November, that has spiked to over "700,000 installs per month, and that’s not our total global number, just iPhones in the US," he says. That's an increase of over 240%.

That spike in downloads has been enough to keep the app on the Apple App Store's Top 100 list since November, almost unheard of for a privacy app, he says.

When adding in Android, PC and Mac users, the app is being installed "by over 1.5 million new users per month since November in the US alone," Gorodyansky says.

Globally, the app is being installed about 6 million times per months, he says. "The US was always like 20% of that and now it's like 40%," he says, adding, that AnchorFree currently has about 500 million users but, at this pace, expects to hit a billion by the end of 2018.

The increase by US users has been so insane, AnchorFree surveyed them to ask what's going on. Nearly two-thirds (64%) said they were concerned about online privacy because of the Trump administration. About 36% said the recent alleged Russian cybersecurity hacks in the U.S. was a concern.

To be fair, not all of their concerns were due to politics. Half of them were also worried about large-scale email hacks. In December, Yahoo announced that 1 billion email accounts were stolen in a breach.

Still, Gorodyansky says there's no question that the current political environment is causing some of this increased privacy activity.

"It’s very clear to us that under the new [Trump] administration, US users feel like their personal privacy is being threatened and could be turned into a business. We believe in protecting human privacy. We believe it's a basic human right," he says. "The impression is that the current administration is not morally aligned with that."

SEE ALSO: Ford chairman: Employees voluntarily worked with no pay to keep us out of bankruptcy in 2008

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Stephen Colbert got forthright in his takedown of the US Congress' recent vote allowing internet providers to sell consumers' browsing history, gutting Obama-era FCC privacy rules.

"Anybody here use the internet?" Colbert asked his audience to cheers on Wednesday's "Late Show," before adding, "Might want to knock that off."

After telling people that now "might be a good time to clear your browser history," and joking, "I burned my computer this morning," Colbert denounced the congressional decision led by Republicans, which President Donald Trump has signaled he will sign. The host argues it's exactly the type of proposed legislation no one wants.

"This is what's wrong with Washington, DC," he said. "I guarantee you there is not one person, not one voter of any political stripe anywhere in America, who asked for this. No one in America stood up at a town hall and said, 'Sir, I demand you let somebody else make money off my shameful desires. Maybe blackmail me someday.'"

A growing number of Americans are expressing fears about their privacy under Trump, and Colbert warned the move on internet privacy would not be greeted warmly.

"I can't believe they're publicly taking the side of big internet cable companies," Colbert said. "Taking the side of a cable company? The only thing less popular would be if they passed a bill allowing traffic jams to call you during dinner, to give you gonorrhea."

Colbert was more than a little skeptical of the reasoning from Republican Representative Marsha Blackburn, who argued on the House floor that the gutting of the privacy rules will actually lead to "enhanced" consumer privacy.

"I know what's in her search history: 'How to spout bulls---,'" Colbert said.

He also slammed the part of the resolution that would no longer require internet providers to protect "customer information against hackers and thieves," likening it to a hotel that tells its guests, "We don't lock the doors."

And Colbert had a little fun imagining what the guy who's assigned to look through America's search history is going through. It's not optimistic.

Watch Colbert on the congressional vote "we can all hate together" below:

 

 

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Within the next decade, you might never need to talk to a fast-food employee when you order a cheeseburger combo meal.

That's according to Greg Creed, the CEO of Yum Brands (the food company that operates fast food chains like KFC, Taco Bell, and Pizza Hut).

In an interview with CNBC, he said AI, robots, and automation could start replacing workers in the global food services industry by the mid-2020s.

A number of Pizza Hut locations in Japan and Shanghai already have robots, called Pepper and Casper, that can greet, interact with, and take orders from customers. In 2016, Taco Bell introduced TacoBot, an AI-powered ordering service that integrates with the messaging platform Slack. Customers can place orders, ask questions, and pay for their food using the platform. It's only available as a beta version right now at select outside companies, including Giphy and Thought Catalog. 

Several other chains have been experimenting with automating the ordering process as well. McDonald's, Panera Bread, and Wendy's have self-serve kiosks at many locations, where customers place orders on touch-screens. Fast-casual chain Eatsa eliminated interaction between workers and customers entirely when it launched in San Francisco in 2015. People order with iPads, and their meals (prepared by human employees in the back) appear in designated cubbies within minutes.

Automating human labor certainly lowers costs. In 2016, former McDonald's CEO Ed Rensi warned that more fast-food chains will replace human employees with robots if the minimum wage raises above $15.

Creed, on the other hand, is a bit more hopeful about human workers — at least for now.

"We don't make a lot of things until customers order," he told CNBC. "I don't see it changing people's jobs in the short term."

SEE ALSO: Fast food workers are becoming obsolete

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One of the biggest challenges with building connected hardware is getting from proof-of-concept (PoC) prototypes to devices that are ready for large-scale production rollout. Microsoft is aiming to help through labs that allow companies to come in and work with experts on building internet-connected hardware.

Companies come into one of three Microsoft Internet of Things and Artificial Intelligence (IoT/AI) Insider Labs with the hardware they’ve built so far and a plan for an intense two or three weeks of work. Visitors are paired with mentors who are experts in different areas and given access to machinery that can help them quickly work through different hardware designs.

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In a sun-filled room overlooking a smattering of palm trees, power lines, and cement-and-terracotta bungalows, a 73-year-old recovering alcoholic rolls a joint.

Frank, whose name has been changed for this story, doesn't particularly like the feeling he gets from smoking cannabis, but he doesn't hate it either. And he admits it helps him sleep.

High Sobriety, the southern California rehab center where Frank is staying, incorporates cannabis into its treatment regimen for people with drug and alcohol addiction. Frank hasn't touched scotch, his former drink of choice — or any other alcoholic beverage, for that matter — in 30 days.

A month ago, he was living alone and drinking around the clock, despite repeated warnings from his physicians about negative interactions between alcohol and the medications he takes for high blood pressure and other age-related health issues. During a bender over the holidays, Frank knocked over the carriage holding his daughter's 10-month-old baby. Concerned, his family took him to Alcoholics Anonymous. Nothing stuck, and Frank's health continued to decline.

One day last year, his daughter called Joe Schrank, High Sobriety's founder, and asked if he could help.

The idea behind High Sobriety is simple: Help addicts stop abusing the substances that are causing them the most harm, using cannabis as a tool to do so.

"Our retention rates are so much better with being able to give them something," Schrank, a trained social worker who has spent the last 15 years working with addicts, told Business Insider. "The truth is a lot of these people are deep, deep, deep into the weeds with drug and alcohol use, and to think there's a light switch and they can just turn it off ... I mean, you're dealing with a different person when you talk about cessation of drug use."

Schrank's unconventional approach has put him at odds with many people in the recovery community. But his strategy is part of a new and growing movement that aims to treat addiction like any other mental illness — with science. The approaches coming out of this movement share the belief that we should stop treating addiction as a moral issue and start treating it as a medical one.

Reducing harm

Schrank disapproves of AA and other similar programs that portray drinking and using drugs as moral problems. That approach is out of touch with science, he says.

"I never think of drug use as any kind of moral thing," Schrank said. "Actually, I like drug use, although it didn't really work out for me."

Maia Szalavitz, a neuroscience journalist and the author of "Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding Addiction," agrees.

"This stuff that emphasizes this morality, we don't have anything else like that in medicine," said Szalavitz, a former heroin addict and AA member. "And the 12-step thing talking about 'defects of character,' that's not exactly helpful for someone who already has a lot of self-hatred."

Like Schrank, Szalavitz believes that for many addicts, giving up their drug of choice is necessary for recovery, but giving up all drugs may not be.

"This whole idea that total abstinence is the only route to recovery has been incredibly damaging to the addiction field," she said.

Instead, a better approach might be to identify addicts' problem drug — which Szalavitz describes as "that one partner that you long for but if you get them you'll go crazy" — and remove that substance.

This idea is in line with decades of research in a field called harm reduction, which accepts that drug use is a part of daily life. Instead of trying to get people to give drugs up altogether, it aims to improve people's safety by reducing the negative consequences that can be linked with using drugs. This, Szalavitz believes, could save the lives of the many people who have struggled with AA's hardline approach.

"Addiction is compulsive behavior despite negative consequences," she said. "If you're using a substance responsibly and not having negative consequences, why should anyone care?"

Research seems to suggest that partial abstinence may help some people who've struggled with substances like alcohol. Keith Humphreys, the section director for mental-health policy at Stanford's department of psychiatry, published a paper in 2003 that reviewed an approach called "moderation management." He concluded that making the method an option for people with drinking problems "seems on balance a benefit to public health."

'To say there's only one option ... is wrong'

Six years ago, Schrank's friend Gregory Giraldo was found unconscious in a New Jersey hotel room after overdosing on cocaine and Valium. He died shortly after.

Schrank, 48, says that if he could see Giraldo today and offer him cannabis instead of the drugs he died taking, there'd be no question about it.

"I'd say, 'Smoke up there, Gregory, go ahead,'" Schrank said.

Giraldo, a comedian, had been to rehab and tried the abstinence-only route several times. But the 12 steps didn't save him. Schrank thinks his new program might have.

"He was a brilliant dude," Schrank said. "Maybe he wouldn't have been as functional as an abstinent-only person. I don't know. But when I hear people tell others that [abstinence-only] is 100% of the pie — they're wrong."

Schrank has also gone through AA. He got sober that way 20 years ago and hasn't touched a drink or a drug — even cannabis — since. (He doesn't even like the smell of pot.)

While he says AA helped him "immensely in a lot of ways," Schrank takes issue with the idea that addicts are given only two choices: complete abstinence or nothing.

"To say there's only one option and to present people with only one option is wrong," Schrank said. "It's like saying, 'I have a moral objection to insulin, so I'm just not going to take it.' It's malpractice if you ask me."

Schrank and other critics of AA's methodology cite its dismal success rates as one of many reasons new approaches are necessary.

"About one of every 15 people who enter these programs is able to become and stay sober," Lance Dodes, a retired professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, wrote in his well-known 2014 book, "The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry."

A large 2006 review of eight trials involving more than 3,400 people in total also concluded that "no experimental studies unequivocally demonstrated the effectiveness of AA ... for reducing alcohol dependence or problems."

Abstinence-only approaches are untenable for people like Frank, Schrank says.

"The truth is he's 73 years old, he's alone, and the idea that we're gonna make him go to AA and stop drinking, it's fantasy — that's not compassion," he said.

Still, there is some evidence that AA can help some people. A study of more than 400 people found that "some of the association between treatment and long-term alcohol-related outcomes appears to be due to participation in AA."

A 29-year-old recovering alcoholic who has been sober for eight years put it to me this way: "If it wasn't for the rooms [of AA], I'd be lying in a gutter somewhere. That's my reality."

Does cannabis help curb addiction?

There aren't many studies on whether cannabis works for those struggling with addictions.

The research that exists suggests that cannabis may be a helpful tool in reducing the use of opioids by people who use them for long-term pain relief. It also could help reduce the physical and psychological symptoms of withdrawal. And it might help some addicts stop using other substances like nicotine, although a large report published in January by the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine said that "only one randomized trial assessing the role of cannabis in reducing the use of addictive substances" exists.

In addition to these studies being few and far between, each suffered from at least one research error. In some cases, the sample was too small to extrapolate; in other cases, the data was based only on surveys, which can't provide scientific answers. In others, people in the study knew which drug they were taking, which might have contaminated the findings.

Clearly, more research is needed.

"I think ideally you'd study it before you just go and do it," Szalavitz said. "I think it's an intriguing idea that we need more research on."

But many researchers say the idea of using cannabis to treat addiction is absurd.

"Marijuana has exactly no role in the treatment of any mental illness, especially substance-use disorders," Thomas McLellan, who founded the Treatment Research Institute and served briefly as the deputy director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy in the Obama administration, told The Guardian.

These issues put Schrank in a tough spot.

"It's not the easiest place. AA people hate me. Rehab people hate me," he said. "I'm OK with that."

SEE ALSO: The answer to treating drug and alcohol addiction may be far simpler than you think

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Samsung has a portfolio of devices and appliances that would make Apple envious. But unlike Apple's, Samsung's devices don't work well together.

With the Galaxy S8 smartphones and other new products, Samsung hopes that will change. The company is setting in motion a grand plan to build smart homes where its devices operate seamlessly and provide a consistent user experience.

Samsung's S8 smartphones will be able to activate appliances through Connect, an app based on the company's SmartThings platform. With just a flick of the finger, the app will allow users to start a robot vacuum cleaner, dim lights, or even ask a Family Hub refrigerator to analyze contents and send a supermarket shopping list.

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There's a civil war in the bitcoin community over the digital currency's future.

Developers, miners, and other stakeholders are locked in a heated debate over how best to scale the network, with chances steadily rising of irreconcilable differences causing a so-called "hard fork" that would split Bitcoin in two.

Bitcoin is in crisis, and while there's broad consensus that something needs to be done, there's little agreement on what.

What's the problem?

To put it simply: Bitcoin is too popular, and can't handle the weight of transactions going through the network.

To put it less simply: Bitcoin transactions are processed in so-called "blocks" that involve complex cryptography to verify and set the transactions. But as the currency grows and more and more transactions take place, the one megabyte size limit on blocks that is built into the system is becoming an issue, causing delays in processing transactions. A purchase might take hours to confirm, making it unwieldy for real-world use.

"This has also caused companies to change the services they provide," Charles Hayter, CEO of data provider CryptoCompare, said in an email. "Bitpay, for example, increased their invoice minimum by 2400%, while Coinbase has recently announced that users will now be required to pay on-chain fees."

Long-term, this is untenable if bitcoin wants to keep growing. The community recognises this — but it is split over how to respond.

What are the options?

There are two camps in the debate, pushing two different possible solutions: "Bitcoin Unlimited" (which we'll henceforth refer to as BU), and Segregated Witness (SegWit).

They're both proposed software updates to the bitcoin network that would change how it functions. They can't both coexist: Their implementations would "fork" the bitcoin network, effectively splitting it into two competing digital currencies.

For context: Bitcoin transactions are stored in a shared ledger called the blockchain, which is a series of blocks of transactions linked together. The entire transaction history of all bitcoin can be viewed on the blockchain.This "hard fork" would split the chain in two, producing a new chain of transactions splitting from the original one.

But the difference between the two isn't just an arcane technical debate. This is an ideological battle over Bitcoin's future.

Centralised vs. de-centralised

Let's look at Bitcoin Unlimited first. To understand it, you have to understand the concept of bitcoin mining. This is where computers, owned by "miners", do the complex work of crunching through transaction data and verifying transactions and are in return rewarded with newly issued bitcoin.

This is a key underpinning of bitcoin as it incentivises people to give up their computer power in order to make the decentralised bitcoin processing system work. In practice, the overwhelming majority of mining is done by professional miners running huge computing rigs built out of specialised hardware.

BU would allow miners and nodes to vote on increasing the block size as and when required. For this reason, it's favoured by many miners — because it gives them effective control of the Bitcoin network.

It would keep transactions in the main blockchain and effectively give them control to set transaction fees. Miners argue this is important, as the programming of bitcoin limits the lifetime supply of bitcoin to just 21 million. Once they are all in circulation, miners will need some sort of incentive to process transactions — hence control of fees.

What about Segregated Witness?

On the other side of the fence is SegWit. This is the proposal favoured by many bitcoin developers and enthusiasts, and keeps the cryptocurrency more decentralised, rather than handing additional control to miners.

SegWit would double the transactions per second capacity of bitcoin by rejigging the makeup of transactions, stripping out some details such as signatures. It would also add some extra functionality, including possibly moving some transactions off-chain in a way that might not benefit the miners. This solution would keep control over the bitcoin network decentralised.

The decentralisation factor is more important than you might realise. Bitcoin isn't just a financial instrument — its community can be deeply ideological, and since its creation in 2008 it has been framed as a digital currency that works independently of central banks and the established financial system, with no single centralised source of power or control.

One criticism of SegWit is that it appears to be only a temporary solution. It just doubles the network's bandwidth, while BU allows miners to vote to increase the capacity when they need with no upper limit.

Why is everyone going nuts over this now?

This isn't a new, sudden problem. The bitcoin community has been debating and wrangling over this for years, with little real consensus. But it's back in the headlines after the US Securities and Exchange Commission rejected a recent attempt by early Facebook backers the Winklevoss twins to launch a Bitcoin exchange tracker fund (ETF).

This application had dominated the news cycle in bitcoin world — and post-denial, the community is once again revisiting the fundamental challenge of transaction volumes. Earlier this month, nearly 20 exchanges also published contingency plans for a fork — publicly recognising the possibility.

Don't expect to see this solved overnight, either. SegWit is prepared and ready to go but its developers are looking for 95% of the bitcoin community to agree to it before they pull the trigger — a very high bar. So far less than 30% of users have signalled support for SegWit, according to Blockchain.info.

BU is also nominally ready to go but has experienced technical issues. 70% of Bitcoin Unlimited nodes were knocked offline earlier in March as a result of an exploited software bug.

Who's going to win?

Nothing in the world of bitcoin is ever simple, so the outcome to this debate isn't clear right now. It's possible that bitcoin will fork and then both rival currencies will continue to coexist side-by-side, competing for users and legitimacy.

Another digital currency, Ethereum, hard-forked in 2016 over in response to a hack of the DAO (a decentralised organisation — it's complicated), but some miners disagreed with this decision and chose to continue to follow the original Ethereum blockchain — creating two competing currencies.

Something similar may happen with bitcoin. In their contingency plan, the exchanges said they will list BU as an alternative cryptocurrency, so people are publicly preparing for that possibility.

Or, everyone may all come to a happy compromise! But at the moment, a fork is sounding more and more likely.

What does this mean for the value of bitcoin?

Bitcoin has been hitting record highs recently, and if the fork problem is resolved in a timely and satisfactory manner, then it could make the market even more bullish.

But if it's not, and there's "increasing belligerence," then Hayter predicts that "you'll continue to see the price lose momentum," and some of the gains of the last few months could even be wiped out. The bitterness of the debate sparked a 20% collapse in bitcoin earlier this week. (You can see the live price of bitcoin here.)

The dispute also threatens to damage Bitcoin's reputation in the eyes of observers. Throughout its history, the digital currency has been associated with political radicalism and a level of shadiness. It's a Wild West — best exemplified by the collapse of the then-dominant exchange MtGox in 2013, with hundreds of millions of dollars worth of bitcoins vanishing with it.

A schism so huge it literally tears the digital currency in two will do little to repair Bitcoin's reputation in the eyes of sceptics.

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T-Mobile is trying to help its subscribers dodge more spammy calls.

The carrier is going to begin warning subscribers when an incoming phone call appears to be from a scammer. If a scam call is detected, the caller ID will display as “Scam Likely,” giving subscribers a heads up before they answer or the chance to just ignore it outright.

T-Mobile will also let subscribers block all suspected scam calls so those calls never reach their phones in the first place. But subscribers will have to actively opt in to the blocking service, as there’s a chance the carrier could accidentally filter out legitimate numbers.

Scam filtering is something the Federal Communications Commission...

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Google is removing the ability to send and receive SMS messages from its Hangouts service in May, according to an email sent to its G Suite administrators. The email, posted in its entirety on Reddit, says that Google will cut the option from the app on May 22nd, and will prompt users to find a new default messaging service beforehand.

Users of Hangouts’ Android app will see a message from March 27th informing them of the upcoming removal of SMS functions. If they have another chat app installed, Hangouts will ask them to select it as the default; if they don’t, the app will direct them to the Google Play Store to find a new alternative. For Google Voice users, it’s a little more...

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Even as the smartphone has exploded in popularity, the television has remained the most viewed screen in most Americans’ lives.

As this chart from Statista shows, though, its grip is starting to loosen. According to the most recent Total Audience Report from research firm Nielsen, young Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 now spend more time using smartphones than watching TV, with about a five-hour gap between the two.

Older generations still prefer TV by a good margin, but the younger you go, the closer the gap gets. This doesn't necessarily mean traditional TV is dying, but it probably won't be dominant, and this only furthers the notion that when and where people consume media is diversifying. It’s no wonder so many companies are trying to get ahead of the streaming TV game.

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