Davemichels

About a year ago, I wrote a column suggesting what the major tech companies should try and accomplish in 2016. For Google, I said: “It would be pretty great if Chromebooks could, out of the box, run all Android apps — provided that, unlike on the recent Pixel C tablet, the Android apps were able to adapt better to a bigger screen.”

I’m happy to report that the first Chromebook designed from the ground up to run Android apps out of the box has arrived, albeit a little past the end of 2016. It goes on sale this week for $450. It’s called the Samsung Chromebook Plus, and it runs on an ARM processor, the same type of processor that powers the vast majority of smartphones and tablets. It was designed in close cooperation with Google.

Alas, in...

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The Amazon Echo and Google Home could be used to make and receive phone calls later this year, according to a new report from The Wall Street Journal’s Ryan Knutson and Laura Stevens.

Citing “people familiar with the matter,” the report says that both Amazon and Google are looking to activate the feature, but that their attempts have been slowed by privacy and regulatory concerns.

Amazon has reportedly been working on Echo-specific voice calls since 2015, but has been held up by “employee turnover” as well. Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Google declined to comment on the matter, only saying that it “continue[s] developing new experiences for Google Home.”

How exactly this feature would work on either device is unclear. The report suggests that the smart speakers would “most likely” use voice over internet protocol (VoIP) tech, which lets you make calls over the internet. This is what apps like Skype do today. Amazon launched its own Skype competitor called Chime on Tuesday.

The report says Amazon is considering other options, though, like giving the Echo its own phone number and using call forwarding, or syncing an Echo owner’s phone number with the speaker itself.

In any case, Amazon would be entering the market with less experience in phone tech than Google, which has operated its Google Voice service since 2009. Google Voice currently gives users a phone number that can be used for forwarding calls and making VoIP calls; it was recently updated by Google in late January. Google also runs a wireless service called Project Fi, which provides mobile data by piggybacking off Sprint and T-Mobile’s network.

Integrating voice-call support would make sense for speakers that, particularly in the Echo’s case, are growing increasingly popular and intelligent. But it would likely further the ongoing privacy concerns that exist with such devices, especially since both speakers have the ability to record conversations. One of the WSJ's sources says that Amazon wouldn't record the content of conversations, but that it would collect the length of those conversations and what numbers are dialed.

All of that, plus the myriad of regulatory hurdles associated with creating new telephone features, means Google and Amazon are likely far from getting speaker-specific voice calls up and running in the near-term. But if they do make it work, voice calling could turn the Echo and Home into modern-day landline phones.

You can read the full Wall Street Journal report here >>

SEE ALSO: Why Amazon's Echo is totally dominating — and what Google, Microsoft, and Apple have to do to catch up

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NOW WATCH: These popular devices keep a recording of everything you ask them — here's how to find it and delete it

Chloe Bridgewater, who lives in Hereford, England, has a little more drive than your average 7-year-old.

Fascinated by her Kindle Fire tablet and robots — and totally taken by the idea of working somewhere with bean-bag chairs, go-karts, and slides — Chloe decided to apply for a job at Google.

Here's Chloe's letter, shared with Business Insider by her father, Andy Bridgewater:

Super cute, right? Imagine her surprise and delight when she got a letter back from the CEO of Google, Sundar Pichai, who encouraged her to follow her dreams.

"I look forward to receiving your job application when you are finished with school! :)" he wrote.

Take a look at the letter, shared in a viral LinkedIn post by Andy earlier this week:

Business Insider has confirmed the veracity of the letter.

In that LinkedIn post, Andy said the letter was a much-needed confidence booster for Chloe, who was "knocked down" by a car years ago.

Chloe's fascination with Google began recently, Andy told Business Insider, when she asked her father where his ideal place to work would be. Andy currently works in sales for a refrigeration-system parts manufacturer.

"And I said, 'Oh, Google would be a nice place to work,'" he said, because of its world-famous perks and the cutting-edge work it does. When Chloe decided she wanted to work there, too, her father encouraged her to apply and "get the ball rolling," he said.

All the attention garnered from Pichai's response has redoubled Chloe's drive to work for Google. Andy says his daughter now wants to find a way into the Silicon Valley-based company through going on TV and talking to the media.

He's largely resisted, though, saying he wants her to focus on her studies and develop her skills.

But Andy also wants to brush up on his own technological skills to catch up with Chloe.

"Sadly, I think I've got to up my game," he said.

SEE ALSO: Bill Gates once stayed up until 4 a.m. to write a game that Apple thought was 'embarrassing'

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NOW WATCH: The meteoric rise of Google CEO Sundar Pichai

Republicans may try to reverse a landmark privacy rule that requires internet providers to get permission before sharing your web browsing data and other sensitive information with outside companies.

Politico reports that Senate Republicans are planning to introduce legislation that would reverse the rules, which began going into effect at the beginning of the year.

It would be easy enough for them to do, too. The Congressional Review Act allows a new Congress to reverse rules recently passed by federal agencies — in this case, the rule comes from the FCC. The New York Times has a good explainer on the intricacies of how the law works, but the gist is that Republicans only need a simple majority vote in both chambers, and a signature...

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Most of Apple's product introductions are famously accompanied by a video starring Jony Ive, its head of design, in a all-white room lovingly explaining how Apple conceives and designs its products.

McDonald's, the fast food chain, has lovingly parodied the iconic videos in a new ad for a milkshake flavor — no, it's not aluminum. 

Watch below:

SEE ALSO: The actor who played Borat just nailed this Apple product launch parody

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Bill Gates has never shied away from using the internet to achieve his philanthropic goals. He’s participated in the Ice Bucket Challenge and multiple Reddit AMAs, and even published incredible book reviews online. This week, the Microsoft co-founder and multibillionaire philanthropist is joining WeChat to reach an even bigger audience. While Gates has participated in Chinese microblogging service Weibo since 2010, WeChat is one of the most popular apps in the world with more than 800 million users.

Gates’ introduction video to the service didn’t involve him dressing up as Austin Powers, but it did include a 12-word welcome in Mandarin. “Hello,” begins Gates in Chinese, before announcing “welcome to my official WeChat account.” Gates...

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Encrypted communication app Signal is bringing video calling to both its Android and iOS users in a new update today. But with the refreshed app also comes support for CallKit on iOS, which introduces an apparent privacy issue into an app otherwise considered secure.

CallKit, a new iOS 10 feature, makes Signal act more like the regular phone app. It allows Signal calls to be answered from the lock screen and lists those calls in a user’s “Recent Calls” list. But while it might be more convenient, Signal notes that if users decide to opt in to CallKit, some of their data might sync to iCloud, including who they called and how long they talked. That probably won’t sit well with privacy-minded people, so for now, CallKit is optional and if...

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Amazon's first bookstore in the Bay Area will be in Walnut Creek, a suburban town 20 miles east of San Francisco.

According to the East Bay Times' Jennifer Modenessi, Amazon's bookstore will be located in Broadway Plaza, one of the high-end shopping centers in the region.

In an email to Business Insider, Amazon's spokesperson confirmed the report, saying, "We are excited to be bringing Amazon Books to Broadway Plaza in Walnut Creek and we are currently hiring store managers and associates."

This will be Amazon's ninth brick-and-mortar bookstore. It already has three open in Seattle, San Diego, and Portland, with five more to come in New York, Chicago, New Jersey, and two suburban towns of Boston.

It's unclear what made Amazon choose Walnut Creek, as opposed to a more metropolitan area like downtown San Francisco. But Walnut Creek is a destination shopping town, and also follows a common theme that can be found in other Amazon bookstores: it's close to independent bookstores.

As noted in the East Bay Times report, Walnut Creek has lost all of its major bookstores in recent years and is left with a single antiquarian shop called Swan's Fine Books. Amazon's new bookstore will be located 0.3 miles, or a 7-minute walk, away from Swan's Fine Books.

Most of Amazon's bookstores are launching in community neighborhoods, instead of commercial shopping districts, going after the markets typically owned by independent bookstores. The Seattle store is just 1.5 miles away from an indie store called Third Place Books, while the Chicago store is in the historic Lakeview neighborhood, sitting within a mile of two independent bookstores.

Given how well indie bookstores have done lately, it makes sense for Amazon to go after this market with its own brick-and-mortar bookstores.

But there's still the question of why Amazon is doubling down on this market all of a sudden. Amazon CFO Brian Olsavsky did give one clue, however.

"We think bookstores ... are a great way for customers to engage with our devices, to see them, touch and play with them, and become fans, so we see a lot of value in that," Olsavsky said during a recent earnings call.

Bookstores don't just sell books, they also sell Kindles, Echoes, and any other gadget Amazon wants to put out.

SEE ALSO: Amazon's $10 bras are a shot at Walmart and Target — not Victoria's Secret

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NOW WATCH: 7 hidden iPhone tricks that only power users know about

Dams can be amazing sources of renewable, carbon-free energy. Just build a sturdy wall, let a reservoir naturally fill up with water, and allow gravity to drive electric generators and power nearby towns and cities.

The US gets about 6% of its energy this way.

But as this week's Oroville, California dam crisis illustrates, hydroelectric energy technology comes with a major yet infrequent risk: Catastrophic collapse and flooding.

According to a March 2011 data analysis by reporter Phil McKenna at New Scientist, dams may be among the riskier power sources in the world. The magazine compiled data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the International Energy Agency, and other sources.

The analysis calculated the immediate and later deaths that occurred for every 10 terrawatt-hours (TWh) of power generated globally — as a point of contrast, the world makes about 20,000 TWh of electrical power a year.

The data give a range of deaths for each type of power, but the ranking consistently places hydroelectric power as more deadly than nuclear energy and natural gas:

• Nuclear — 0.2 to 1.2 deaths per 10 TWh (least deadly)
• Natural gas — 0.3-1.6 deaths per 10 TWh
• Hydroelectric — 1.0-1.6 deaths per 10 TWh
• Coal — 2.8 to 32.7 deaths per 10 TWh (most deadly)

Even accounting for nuclear disasters like Chernobyl, which caused an estimated 9,000 cancer deaths, nuclear power is one of the safest ways to generate electricity (contrary to popular belief).

Coal appears to be the most deadly because of the deaths it causes via air pollution.

Harvard University risk analyst James Hammitt tells Business Insider that those deaths are "highly predictable," in part because medical studies have strongly linked airborne pollution to mortality.

"We have tens of thousands of deaths a year caused by air pollution, and that's not unusual," Hammitt says. "But it is unusual to have deaths from hydroelectric power on any given year," due to the rarity of dam collapses without any warning.

But there's a catch.

When you include the deaths caused by the tragic 1975 collapse of China's enormous Banqiao Dam, hydroelectric can be considered one of the riskiest power sources.

From 1951 to 1952, China built the giant hydroelectric dam on the Ruhe River with help from the Soviet Union. But in early August 1975, a unusually wet typhoon moved into the area and broke records for rainfall, filling up the Banqiao Reservoir and pushing the limits that engineers designed for the dam.

On August 8, 1975, the dam collapsed and sent a wall of water nearly 20 feet (6 meters) high and 7.5 miles wide (12 kilometers) downriver, according to a summary of a chapter in the book "The River Dragon Has Come!" by investigative journalist Dai Qing.

The torrent wrecked other dams along the river and killed an estimated 85,000 people. When accounting for later deaths caused by flood-related disease and famine, however, the toll may actually be closer to 220,000 to 230,000 people.

This devastating outlier pushes the statistical risk of dams dozens of times higher, to 54.7 deaths per 10 TWh — about 46 times more risk than nuclear power. Business Insider contacted the National Hydropower Association for comment on the risk that hydroelectric dams pose in the US, but we did not immediately receive a response.

The Chinese rebuilt the Banqiao Dam in 1993 and incorporated the lessons learned from the tragedy.

While it remains to be seen whether the Oroville Dam will actually collapse — it was stabilizing at the time this story was published — one crucial difference between the two events is that authorities were able to urge more than 180,000 people in that region of California to evacuate immediately.

"That makes this much less threatening than something like an earthquake, when you can't do anything to evacuate ahead of time and it just happens," Hammitt says.

DON'T MISS: The most toxic countries in the world when it comes to air pollution and electricity use

SEE ALSO: How likely are foreign terrorists to kill Americans? The odds may surprise you

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NOW WATCH: Countries around the world are pouring billions of dollars into France's revolutionary nuclear fusion reactor

Human beings are in danger of being eclipsed by artificial intelligence and need to evolve the ability to communicate directly with machines or risk irrelevance, Elon Musk said in a typically heartwarming speech from everyone’s favorite billionaire technologist.

“Over time I think we will probably see a closer merger of biological intelligence and digital intelligence," Musk told an audience at the World Government Summit in Dubai, where he also launched Tesla in the United Arab Emirates, according to CNBC. "It's mostly about the bandwidth, the speed of the connection between your brain and the digital version of yourself, particularly output."

To be sure, the idea of...

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First, the "sushi burrito" took over San Francisco.

Now, a flaky pastry stuffed with smoked salmon, seaweed, ginger, and wasabi — a "sushi croissant" — is capturing the hearts of those brave enough to try it.

The sushi-stuffed pastry comes from the creative minds of Mr. Holmes Bakehouse, a bakery in San Francisco's Tenderloin district that's famous for its hybrid desserts and drool-worthy Instagram feed. The bakery calls the pastry a "California croissant," in honor of its sister, the California roll.

We visited the kitchen of Mr. Holmes Bakehouse to see how it comes together. 

SEE ALSO: I tried the sushi burrito, the 'mutant food' San Franciscans are obsessed with — take a look

Brittany Dunn, a pastry chef at Mr. Holmes Bakehouse, says it took her a week to try the bakery's "California croissant" after she was hired. "That sounds awful," she remembers thinking.

It turned out to be love at first bite. The California croissant has since become Dunn's favorite item on the menu at Bakehouse, which is known for its popular "cruffin" (a croissant-muffin hybrid).

Before we gave the California croissant a taste, Dunn led us into the kitchen to see how the pastry is made. The chef piped a stripe of wasabi along the pastry's edge.

"It looks like a lot," Dunn said. But the heat of the wasabi burns off in the oven.

 

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

Digium has announced the release of a new phone, the Digium D80 high definition (HD) touchscreen IP phone, which boasts all the features and quality of a typical IP phone at an affordable price point.

One of the Twitter accounts that's throwing the most shade to President Trump and the rest of the White House is not one you might expect. Merriam-Webster was subtweeting Trump during his presidential campaign, and ever since he was elected, they have really stepped up their game. Here's a look at some of the things the dictionary company has done in the past few months.

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The company moved more than 3 petabytes of data in just 70 days.

Comcast has been told to stop marketing its Xfinity broadband service as the “fastest internet in America,” according to a recommendation issued today by the National Advertising Review Board (NARB). The decision came after Verizon last year raised questions about Comcast’s marketing, which specifically sought to undermine Verizon’s FiOS offering and cast Xfinity in a superior light.

The National Advertising Division (NAD), NARB’s investigative arm, found that while Comcast’s speeds at its most expensive tier were indeed faster than Verizon’s, this was not true of every Xfinity speed tier. Yet because Comcast did not make this clear in its marketing material, consumers could reasonably be led to believe that...

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The 21st century workplace is a marvel to behold. We’ve got snacks, bike rooms, recycling, Slack channels, shared Google Docs, unflattering overheard lights, and Wi-Fi. Technology makes it easy to collaborate with coworkers without having to actually speak to them, so imagine my shock when I heard about the Luxafor, a light that’s designed to plug into your PC, or connect over Bluetooth, and then stick up from your desk to communicate to your colleagues whether you’re available to be bothered. The company attempted a Kickstarter last year, too, but failed to raise enough funds. Luxafor imagines a situations where you’re deep into an Excel spreadsheet and your coworker decides she wants to come chat about her weekend. She walks over to...

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With a commanding 73% market share, Logitech is the leader in webcams. They’ve been very successful at diversifying their product range, introducing the ConferenceCam, GROUP and PTZ Pro models aimed at business users. These business oriented offerings have vaulted the company to new heights in the VC/UC space. Yet the meeting/huddle room focus left desktop users … Continue reading "Logitech Launches A New Flagship: The Brio 4K Pro Webcam"

Logitech has taken its more than 20 years of hardware experience and created its best ever webcam. The new Logitech Brio 4K Pro Webcam launches today for $199, but the high price is matched by a high number of features. Logitech has paired 4K recording with HDR, and the company’s latest RightLight features to improve low-light situations. If you’re used to holding video calls in dimly lit rooms, then the addition of HDR should improve image quality and avoid some of the typical lighting issues associated with webcam feeds.

While the Brio looks like a regular webcam with a glass and metal design, Logitech has also added infrared-based facial recognition. That means you can use the Windows Hello feature in Windows 10 to log into a PC with...

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This year's Super Bowl featured 51 minutes 20 seconds of ads — the second highest amount of ad time in the big game's history, according to data from Kantar Media

Ads — which included a commercial break in the Super Bowl's first ever period of overtime — accounted 23% of the of the game's 3 hours 47 minute broadcast.

The record is held by Super Bowl XLVII in 2013, when 51 minutes 40 seconds of ads were shown.

However, Super Bowl LI did set a commercial record: If you set aside the unpaid promotional spots for broadcaster Fox and the NFL, the big game this year featured the most commercials from paying advertisers, at 41 minutes 30 seconds.

This year's top-spender was Anheuser-Busch InBev, which aired 3 minutes 30 seconds of ads.

The brewer promoted four brands in that time, with a immigration-themed spot for Budweiser (a divisive ad that caused some viewers to call for a boycott of the brand), an ad for Bud Light featuring its vintage mascot Spuds MacKenzie, a humorous commercial for Busch, and an ad for Michelob Ultra, set in a gym.

T-Mobile also purchased four ads — featuring celebrities such as Justin Bieber, Snoop Dogg, Martha Stewart, and Kristen Schaal — racking up 3 minutes of Super Bowl ad time.

Broadcaster Fox reportedly charged advertisers upwards of $5 million for a 30-second spot in the Super Bowl this year.

The Super Bowl attracted 12 new advertisers this year — including 84 Lumber, Netflix, and Airbnb. But more than 40% of advertisers (18) who paid for slots in the big game last year did not return for this year's game.

SEE ALSO: The 5 best ads of Super Bowl 51

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NOW WATCH: Watch Budweiser’s Super Bowl ad — it makes a strong statement on immigration

The company promised users more features around safety, so here they are.

A week ago, Twitter executives said that making the service safer for users was the company’s “primary focus,” with CEO Jack Dorsey tweeting that the company was taking a “completely new approach” to stopping abuse.

Now Twitter is putting its money where its mouth is and rolling out some actual changes to try and curb bad behavior.

On Tuesday, Twitter unveiled three new updates:

• It says it’s going to do a better job of keeping banned users from rejoining the service via new accounts. The company already does this to an extent, and won’t share exactly how the process works because it doesn’t want people to “game the system.” But a spokesperson said it will use a combination of human reviewers and machine learning technology to keep suspended users from resurfacing.
• Twitter is adding a “safe search” feature that removes tweets with inappropriate words, phrases or images from search results. Users can toggle this off and on.

• Twitter will start hiding inappropriate responses to tweets so they don’t appear in user conversations. Tweets containing words, phrases or images deemed inappropriate by the company will be hidden from conversation threads, and users will need to click a new “show less relevant replies” button in order to see them. Twitter will use machine learning technology (a.k.a. algorithms) to automatically hide certain responses. You can’t opt out of this feature, according to a company spokesperson.

There’s a general theme to all of these changes: Keep mean or abusive content out of sight. It’s the same approach Twitter used in August when it rolled out a feature so users could filter their notifications.

Twitter is more than a decade old, and its abuse problem has always been a black mark on the service. Because users can tweet anonymously and only need an email address to create an account, Twitter can get nasty, especially for women and minority users.

It’s been bad enough in the past that Disney’s interest in a possible acquisition of Twitter fizzled because of the company’s reputation around abuse, according to Bloomberg.

When Dorsey asked Twitter users in late December what product changes they were most interested in, better safety and reporting features were near the top of the list.

So it’s no surprise Twitter is making this a high priority, though many will likely wonder why it took this long. The company says Tuesday’s updates are just the beginning. “In the days and weeks ahead, we will continue to roll out product changes,” the company wrote in a blog post.

Tuesday’s new features will roll out over the next few days.

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A global cyberthreat report released Tuesday found that 2016 was a mixed bag: malware was down slightly, but ransomware attacks soared, up 167 times the number recorded in 2015.

In addition to that huge increase in ransomware, 2016 saw a new line of cybercrime from a large-scale DDoS attack through internet of things devices. The principal case occurred in October when the Mirai botnet attacked unprotected IoT devices, such as internet-ready cameras, resulting in a DDoS attack on Dyn servers.

The 2016 report, by cybersecurity company SonicWall, looked at data from daily network feeds sent from more than 1 million sensors in nearly 200 countries.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Vizio got in trouble with the FTC this week and had to pay $2.2 million to settle charges around having monitored the viewing habits on more than 11 million TVs without consent over the course of two years.

The main problem was that Vizio TVs had tracking features turned on by default, instead of an opt-in setting like many other manufacturers use (and, as you’ll see, sometimes hide or trick you into accepting). Newer Vizio TVs that run the company’s SmartCast system have the tracking turned off by default.

It was a bad practice that people had been complaining about for years — a possible class action lawsuit was even filed in 2016 — but the situation is now a relatively good one for Vizio TV owners: the company is specifically...

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Microsoft getting their act with WebRTC Edge support is far from a fashionable delay, saying more about the future of Edge than the future of WebRTC.

Last week, Microsoft officially announced their intent to support WebRTC 1.0 (whatever that is exactly). I skimmed over that piece of news, but direct questions from a couple of my friends about my opinion, along with short chats with them on various messaging services made up my mind to actually write something about this.

Let’s begin from the end – nothing changed under the sun. Microsoft Edge supporting WebRTC is a non-starter for most.

Now for the details.

The Microsoft’s WebRTC Edge announcement

The title of the announcement? Introducing WebRTC 1.0 and interoperable real-time communications in Microsoft Edge. 1.0 surpasses interoperability in the title, while interoperability (with Chrome) surpasses anything else in that announcement.

• This release is still in beta, the Windows Insider Preview, making its way to a stable release in the upcoming Windows 10 Creator Update – taking place sometime in “Spring 2017” – somewhere in Q2
• It seems that this release won’t support the WebRTC data channel, as Microsoft is more interested in getting its Skype asset to work first – making Peer Connections and interoperability a lot more important
• On the video side, the version supports both H.264 and VP8, making the old codec wars moot (until Apple decides to join the fray)

Microsoft is doing their damnest not to mention Chrome in the announcement – and they have succeeded. Barely. The annoucement mentions “video communications are now interoperable between Microsoft Edge and other major WebRTC browsers and RTC services”. I wonder who are these major WebRTC browsers. I wonder even more what “RTC services” means here. Maybe the ability to do a Facebook Messenger video call from an Edge browser to the Facebook Messenger iOS app?

They failed in not mentioning Chrome by mentioning specific bandwith estimation algorithm that Google is using: “Support for Google Receiver Estimated Maximum Bitrate, goog-remb”. I have to wonder how much legal fought over this one getting into an official blog post on Microsoft’s website.

The end result? Edge will soon have video interoperability support with Chrome and Firefox when it comes to WebRTC.

This is great, but it changes nothing.

Edge and Market Share

Somehow, a friend of mine actually thought Edge is a real thing. Until we started searching for recent market share indication. The most recent stats I publicly found are from November 2016, and they place Microsoft Edge at 5.21% – “Trailing Microsoft Edge was only Apple’s Safari browser, with 3.61%, and Opera with 1.36%.”

NetMarketShare places Edge even lower at only 4.52%:

Great.

While Windows 10 has grown in adoption, Edge hasn’t.

Things are now getting desparate. In my own Windows 10 laptop, Microsoft is now pushing “ads” about how Edge is faster than Chrome and how great it is – enticing me (unsuccessfuly) to try it out.

This is happening to everyone NOT using Edge apparently, with some suggesting how to stop this Microsoft pushing you to the Edge.

The Enterprise Urban Legend

Microsoft reigns supreme in enterprises. There’s no doubting that. But here’s the thing – the browser of choice there is Internet Explorer. Not Edge.

Many of these enterprises use Windows 7 today – NOT Windows 10. So the IT guy in the enterprise sees the following choices in front of him when he needs to decide on a major upgrade:

1. Switch to Windows 10
   • While doing that, continue using Internet Explorer 11
   • Or go for HTML5, and standardize around Chrome, Firefox, Edge – or all of them
   • There’s a hybrid option of IE11/Edge which isn’t that fun, and as far as I am aware, isn’t popular
2. Stay with Windows 7, but shift away from Internet Explorer 11
   • Microsoft’s Edge browser isn’t available there anyway, so that option is not possible
   • So you have to go for HTML5, and standardize around Chrome and Firefox

A smart IT person, will decide on a project that makes the switch in stages. Taking him to one of these two routes:

1. Switch to Windows 10; later switching to HTML5
2. Switch to Chrome/Firefox; later switching to Windows 10

The common denominator? Use Chrome/Firefox and NOT Edge. Which is why most end up forgoing Edge. That and the notorious reputation of IE that is tarnishing Edge.

From a friend who works in front of such large enterprises, I am told that most are asking either for Chrome/Firefox support or Windows 10 with… Chrome/Firefox support. There’s no requests coming in for the Edge browser.

In the enterprise, it is either IE11 or Chrome/Firefox these days.

What the Future Holds?

From day 1 of WebRTC, it seemed obvious that out of the oligopoly of 4 web browsers, two are going to be adopting WebRTC (Chrome and Firefox) and two will need to be dragged towards adoption (IE and Safari).

Microsoft decided to kill IE and focus on Edge. It also decided to throw the towel on ORTC and adopt WebRTC. The reasons are rather obvious – when you lack market share, you need to follow the trends. It tried taking the higher ground with the better ORTC design, only to fail and get back in line and now introducing WebRTC.

Apple… who knows? They hire people. They commit stuff into WebKit. They have people in the standards bodies. Will this mature enough in 2017 for an official release? Maybe. Probably. I just don’t know.

As always, before you make the decision on what to support – do an investigation of your target users and what they are using. You might be that outlier whose users are that 5% using Edge…

The post Microsoft and the WebRTC Edge Case appeared first on BlogGeek.me.

The former New York Times technology reporter says, “The world is aging, and nobody gets it.”

Former New York Times technology reporter John Markoff used to think robots taking jobs was cause for alarm. Then, he found out that the working-age population in China, Japan, Korea and the U.S. was declining.

“We need the robots for two reasons: On the one side, there are not enough workers,” Markoff said on the latest episode of Recode Decode, hosted by Kara Swisher. “The demographic trends are more important than the technological trends, and they happen more quickly.”

“On the other side, there’s this thing called the dependency ratio, the ratio between caregivers and people who need care,” he added. “For the first time last year, there were more people in the world who are over 65 than under five. First time ever in history. By the middle of the century, the number of people over 80 will double. By the end of the century, it’ll be up sevenfold, globally.”

As a result, Markoff noted that he doesn’t ask roboticists when he’ll be able to ride in a self-driving car — instead, he asks when we’ll get a robot “that can safely give an aging human a shower.”

Although he retired from the Times in late 2016, Markoff plans to continue to contribute and is working on a biography of “The Whole Earth Catalog” publisher Stewart Brand. Reflecting on his nearly three decades covering tech, he said the job allowed him to track major tech trends at a distance from the companies making them happen.

“The visionaries are always wrong,” Markoff said. “That’s the best thing about being a reporter: You don’t have to be a visionary, you just have to take notes about what they’re claiming and remember when they’re wrong.”

You can listen to Recode Decode in the audio player above, or subscribe on iTunes, Google Play Music, TuneIn, Stitcher and SoundCloud.

If you like this show, you should also sample our other podcasts:

• Recode Media with Peter Kafka features no-nonsense conversations with the smartest and most interesting people in the media world, with new episodes every Thursday. Use these links to subscribe on iTunes, Google Play Music, TuneIn, Stitcher and SoundCloud.
• Too Embarrassed to Ask, hosted by Kara Swisher and The Verge's Lauren Goode, answers the tech questions sent in by our readers and listeners. You can hear new episodes every Friday on iTunes, Google Play Music, TuneIn, Stitcher and SoundCloud.
• And Recode Replay has all the audio from our live events, including the Code Conference, Code Media and the Code Commerce Series. Subscribe today on iTunes, Google Play Music, TuneInand Stitcher.

If you like what we’re doing, please write a review on iTunes — and if you don’t, just tweet-strafe Kara.

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Google, Microsoft and Amazon Web Services recently released new earnings reports. What do they say about the state of cloud?

In 2016, Cleveland Basketball great LeBron James made over $77 million between his pay ($23 million) and endorsements, Forbes reports. New York Giants quarterback Eli Manning made $45 million, and LA Dodgers pitcher Clayton Kershaw made $32 million.

There's no question being an elite pro athlete pays very, very well.

But consider this: The career span for an athlete is short and the rank-and-file pros don't get paid nearly so much as the top players. In the NFL, the average career length is 3.5 years with the lifetime earning potential of $3,010,000, according to tech job site Paysa. In the MLB, the average career length is 5.6 years with the lifetime earning potential of $2,912,000. Things are better in the NBA, where the average career lasts 4.8 years with the lifetime earning potential of $12,027,456.

None of that is chicken scratch. But if you factor in the number of people who try to become pro sports players and don't ever get a decent contract at all, the percentages would be far lower.

Now, compare that to becoming an engineer, Paysa suggests. If you try to become an engineer, odds are good that you will succeed. The average acceptance rate at engineering schools is 63 out of 100, Paysa says. Plus, 6 out of 10 engineering students graduate, and 97 out of 100 find jobs, Paysa says.

And once you're out in the workforce, the average career span is 40 years with an average annual salary at $125,418. The lifetime earnings potential adds up to $5,016,723, better than both the typical pro NFL player and typical pro MLB athlete.

Plus, those that land in "elite" ranks will do far better. A career at Facebook could give you overall lifetime earnings of $13,533,236, Paysa calculates. A career tech employee at Google could make as much as $10,674,690.

And that's enough to stand tall, even against a pro NBA player. 

SEE ALSO: Why Marissa Mayer's team is looking into getting fired by Verizon

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Lighting my home is something I only ever think about fleetingly — usually while replacing a blown-out halogen bulb — but this past week I discovered LED light bulbs and, well, I’m sorry I’m so late to this cool party.

Unfortunately, LED lights have been swept up into the whole "smart home" mess, with app-controlled dimming and hue adjustments and whatnot, making them both costlier and more complex than they need to be. So, in my mind, they’ve always been filed away alongside things like ZigBee, SmartThings, and AllJoyn — stuff that I’m aware exists and probably / maybe serves someone’s purposes, but I don’t need to be too concerned with yet.

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In January Amazon said that it plans to hire 100,000 more workers in the next 18 months, which received a fair amount of attention in the news. But it turns out that’s right in line with Amazon’s current hiring habits.

According to the company’s fourth quarter earnings report released yesterday, Amazon’s full-time and part-time employees, excluding contractors and temp workers, jumped from 230,800 thousand at the end of 2015 to 341,400 at the end of 2016.

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The nimble aircraft could be equipped with a screen or a projector for videoconferencing.

Google is hoping to patent a small videoconferencing “telepresence” drone for collaborating with colleagues from remote locations, according to an application that was made public today.

The drone is designed to fly indoors and move from room to room. A typical telepresence robot, which often amounts to an iPad mounted to a roving stand, can’t go up stairs and is difficult to navigate in the unpredictable floor plans that are typical of large tech companies, the application says.

Google suggests a telepresence system on a quadcopter drone could be much more agile for moving around the room, take up less space, consume less energy and provide an experience that’s more engaging overall than a ground-based robot.

The patent application describes an aircraft that has an H-shaped frame, a structure Google says may prove more capable of carrying a rotating screen and still be constructed from lightweight materials. The drone may also carry a projection system for beaming images from the remote pilot onto walls or surfaces in the room, as well as an audio system for voice communication between participants.

Although Google primarily describes the drone as a way for colleagues to collaborate when not working from the same place, the company also writes about how it could be used by “a medical professional consulting with a patient and/or another medical professional at a different location” or “an instructor providing instruction to students at remote locations.”

The application shows how a smartphone can be docked to the drone and used for the onboard processing and control of the aircraft, as well as the drone’s audio and video functions.

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Google announced today that it’ll be further integrating web apps into Android. Now, web apps will appear in the app drawer alongside full applications, and offer the same notification controls, where previously Google had set them to only appear as home screen icons.

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