By Michael Finneran Three mobile operators are now offering as many new enterprise mobile solutions; here's what you need to know to make intelligent buying decisions.
Microsoft has spent a large part of this year focusing on its bot efforts within Skype. While a number of new messaging bots like Expedia and UPS are starting to appear in Skype, Microsoft has bigger plans for next year. “Soon our partners will be able to create talking bots with the general availability of the Skype calling API,” says a Skype spokesperson. “That means users will be able to interact with bots that can actually speak to you.”
The talking bots will allow companies to create services that call and interact with users, and it’s possible that Skype could even provide its real-time translation service to these bots in the future. Microsoft is also planning to allow bots to interact with video, audio, and even GIFs in chat...
Microsoft unveiled its plans to take on Amazon’s Echo last week, but the company didn’t detail any specific hardware products. Harman Kardon is the first third-party device maker to bring Cortana to a speaker, and it’s teasing its audio hardware that will debut next year. In a 30-second video, the speaker looks very much like an Amazon Echo, but it appears to include a display at the top that lights up with Cortana’s user interface.
Microsoft has been detailing its plans for Cortana on devices with screens over the past week, and it appears the company is going to make the screen a requirement for bringing Cortana to Internet of Things devices. The software giant used fridges, toasters, and thermostats as example devices for Cortana, but...
At the end of 2016, the Arctic will have endured its hottest year on record — in a period that goes back to 1900.
That's according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)'s annual Arctic report card, which rounds up the key events of the last year in the polar north. The report also found that the Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet. The ongoing warming and melting in that region is more significant than anywhere else in the world.
Why? The Arctic ice acts like a massive temperature regulator for the whole planet. Its white ice reflects heat back into space. Remove enough of it, and more heat infiltrates that darker ocean or land surface. That makes it harder for the Arctic to recover what it's lost, and speeds warming across the whole planet.
And the report highlights another key finding: Melting in the far north both absorbs and releases carbon from the atmosphere. The Arctic absorbs carbon when tundra gets warm enough to sprout plant life, which pulls carbon dioxide from the air. But it also releases carbon dioxide when permafrost melts. And — here's the critical bit — that release turns out to be significantly greater than the absorption.
This should also be expected to impact the climate.
And 2016 has already been outlandish in terms of climate change. After a period between 2013 and 2015 when warming slowed and sea ice was relatively stable, the ever-less-icy north began smashing records again.
In addition to notching the highest annual sea surface temperature on record, 2016 saw the warmest January, February, October, and November ever. Sea ice extents neared all time lows, tying 2007 for the second lowest extent in the satellite record dating back to 1979. Spring snow cover in the North American Arctic was the lowest in the satellite record dating back to 1967. Additionally, Greenland's ice began melting earlier in the spring than in all other years on record but one.
These outages are nothing new for the young service. Directly after the launch, multiple Business Insider staffers (and frustrated customers on Twitter) saw channels stall and drop repeatedly. The bugs made watching DirecTV Now a pretty frustrating experience.
But since then, we have had much better luck getting it to generally work as advertised — unless the service is down. The fact that these outages continue, however, does not bode well for the future of DirecTV Now.
How DirecTV Now's competitors are doing
If you've never used a live-TV streaming product, the fact that DirecTV Now is having repeated technical snafus might surprise you.
From a tech delivery perspective, Netflix is fine, Amazon is fine, Hulu is fine — so you might be forgiven for thinking DirecTV would be fine as well. But live TV products streamed over the internet have often been plagued with technical failures.
DirecTV Now's primary rival right now is Dish's Sling TV, which also promises your favorite cable or satellite channels delivered over the internet, wherever you are.
This summer, after months of testing Sling TV, we wrote that while we had a largely positive experience with it, the product suffered from repeated technical failures, at the exact moments we really didn't want it to. Channels would get intolerably fuzzy or cease to work, particularly at high-traffic moments like the NBA playoffs or the "Game of Thrones" premiere.
The steadiest of these streaming TV services, at least in our experience, has been PlayStation Vue. Sony's streaming service consistently felt natural enough over the course of a three-month flirtation, but past reports suggest it's dealing with fewer subscribers, and even then, plenty others have expressedfrustrations. Vue usually works, and when it does it's the most complete cable substitute of the bunch — but there's always a little bit of risk.
For some cord-cutters, any of these three services can be a bargain from a programming perspective. You can get the channels you want for less money. (We even constructed the ideal cord-cutter bundle at around $63 per month using DirecTV Now).
But they don't always nail the technical side, and that's tough to accept, especially if you are used to cable. You want your streaming TV service to work every time you turn on your TV — like cable, or even Netflix — period.
Cisco has confirmed that it is killing its $1 billion cloud project known as "Intercloud," as The Reg's Simon Sharwood reported on Wednesday.
A spokesperson confirmed to Venture Beat that the public Intercloud will be shuttered in March 2017 and Cisco will move enterprises apps and data elsewhere including to another, unnamed public cloud provider.
Cisco launched The Intercloud in 2014, promising to spend $1 billion on it. It was launched in response to the growing threat of Amazon, which is increasingly sucking up the apps, data and IT budgets of many big enterprise customers.
Meanwhile, the cloud providers like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google aren't using a lot of Cisco gear. They are increasingly using a new style to build networks that relies more on software and less on high-end, expensive hardware. Some of them, like Amazon, Microsoft and Google are even building their own network hardware altogether. (Meanwhile Facebook has been madly inventing whole new kinds of network hardware suitable for big cloud providers and giving the designs away to everyone for free.)
So score another body bag win for the unstoppable Amazon Web Services. Its runaway success has claimed a number of victims since last year. For instance, in 2015, HP shuttered its public cloud and helped its customers move to Amazon and then signed a bigger partnership deal to help them use Microsoft Azure.
The naked and the dead
Rackspace threw in the towel and instead became an Amazon (and Microsoft) cloud partner, offering customer support on those clouds. (In industry jargon, it sells a "managed service.")
VMware was attempting to do a similar thing as Cisco. It has its own cloud software and was trying to get a bunch of smaller hosting providers to become a big network of public cloud providers. But its customers wanted to use Amazon's top shelf cloud. VMware either had to make its products work better with Amazon or risk losing customers altogether.
Some also lay EMC's demise at Amazon's feet as well. Amazon offers a less-expensive way for companies to store lots of data, so they don't need to buy as much storage hardware anymore. Dell acquired EMC in a $67 billion deal earlier this year.
Cisco emailed Business Insider the following statement in response to the report:
"Cisco has internally communicated that we are discontinuing one of our internal cloud platforms and will be transitioning affected workloads onto other platforms. We do not expect any material customer issues as a result of this transition. For the last several months we have been evolving our cloud strategy and our service provider partners are aware of this.
Cisco continually re-evaluates its technology strategy as customers’ needs evolve. The cloud market has shifted considerably in the last two years, and many of our customers are asking Cisco to help them develop cloud strategies that will help drive their digital transformations. With the global availability of cloud offerings, the trend toward rapid application development with microservices, and the ability to orchestrate workloads across private and public clouds, Cisco has evolved its cloud strategy from federating clouds to helping customers build and manage hybrid IT environments. Our cloud strategy centers on building and delivering secure hybrid cloud infrastructure, platforms, and services — with our partners — that offer customers the freedom to choose the best environments and consumption models for their traditional and new cloud-native applications."
Christmas card writing sucks (or so I'm told — I’ve going to be honest and admit that I’ve never actually written a Christmas card in my life). But, you know what would make things better? Robots. Robots make everything better! And the only way to improve on a card-writing robot, of course, would be to make it out of the most fun toy in the world: Lego! Which is exactly what creative teenagers Sanjay and Arvind Seshan have done.
The Holiday Plott3r is a Lego MindStorms-powered creation that cleverly uses Lego's modular robotic platform to print Christmas cards in snowflake, holiday tree, and Santa designs. The Seshans’ festive creation seems to be working similar to a dot-matrix printer, using two markers to create the...
Microsoft’s Cortana virtual assistant is getting a lot smarter. On Tuesday, the company announced a set of developer tools aimed at bringing it into the internet of things, and adding support for developers to build new functionality for it.
The makers of IoT devices like speakers and cars will be able to use a Microsoft software development kit to integrate Cortana into their products. In addition, developers will be able to build custom integrations that add capabilities to Microsoft’s virtual assistant.
Microsoft is also launching a new service designed to help users simplify the process of scheduling meetings. Cortana will help find openings on a user’s calendar and work with meeting participants to find a time that works for them.
We don't often review phone cases, but those we do review tend to be a little different than your average plastic shell.
For the past week, I've spent time with furry iPhone cases from a startup called Wild and Woolly. The reason we decided to check them out can be seen from the pictures. They're big, fluffy, furry cases.
I spoke with Wild and Woolly's founder, Nina Cheng, to learn more about how these cases were made. Yes, they're made of real fur, but even fur protesters can appreciate the care and commitment to animal wellbeing that Wild and Woolly takes to makes them.
However, it's a commitment that makes these furry cases more expensive than your regular case.
Check out these crazy furry iPhone cases and what it's like to use them:
In the Star Trek universe, doctors use devices called "medical tricorders" to collect patient information and diagnose diseases. Now real-life versions of those tricorders — in this case, lightweight devices that can diagnose 13 different conditions — are entering into consumer testing. Unlike the Star Trek tricorders, these devices can be used by patients themselves.
The Qualcomm Tricorder X Prize, a $10 million, four-year long competition challenging teams to build their own tricorders, is now in its final round. The two remaining teams are about to start testing at the University of California, San Diego.
The teams' devices can diagnose a variety of common ailments, including anemia, atrial fibrillation, diabetes, sleep apnea, and urinary tract infections.
One of the teams is led by two brothers: Dr. Basil Harris, an emergency room physician, and George Harris, a network engineer. "I thought, 'This thing can't be that hard, it's what I do in the ER, making diagnoses,'" says Basil. "I found a small group of people who would listen to me, mainly my family, and we got together and started banging the thing out."
The brothers, who are also the founders of Basil Leaf Technologies, invented a hardware kit that comes with an iPad app to guide users through the diagnostic process.
It's the kind of medical exam you might get in an ER visit. Users have the ability to listen to lung sounds, heart rhythm and pulse, for example. The Harris brothers also came up with new sensors that can gather data on blood glucose, hemoglobin, and white count level — without drawing any blood.
"It's sensors that go on your finger like an oxygen sensor in the hospital," says Basil.
The other finalist team in the competition is helmed by Dr. Chung-Kang Peng, a Harvard Medical School professor.
Peng, who is interested in providing healthcare to people who don't often have access to it, had already been thinking about building a tricorder-like device before the competition was announced.
"In the long run, I'm optimistic that this kind of system will be used so patients can self-diagnose. Maybe in the future you just need to transmit info to a doctor remotely, who will give out a prescription. Most importantly, this could happen in rural areas that don't have any health infrastructure," he says.
For Peng, the biggest challenge has been making a device that meets X Prize's weight limitations (5 pounds) that can also be used by anyone, regardless of medical experience.
At this point, however, the hard part for the teams is over. Now it's up to X Prize to conduct the consumer testing. Each device will be evaluated on its ability to diagnose a condition the patient has along with taking five vital signs. The winner will be announced in the spring— and then there will be likely be years of testing before FDA approval.
After that, this long-awaited piece of Star Trek technology might actually go on sale.
Google wants to put Android in the next wave of smart devices that’ll be vying to fill up your home. It’s launching a version of Android today called Android Things that can run on products like connected speakers, security cameras, and routers. The OS is supposed to make it easier for companies to start shipping hardware, since they’ll be able to work with the Android dev tools they already know.
Android Things is a new name, but the operating system itself isn’t strictly new. It’s basically an update and a rebranding to Brillo, an Android-based OS for smart devices and Internet of Things products announced a little more than a year and a half ago. Brillo has — publicly, at least — gone close to nowhere. It was more or less a no-show at...
I’ve got a bit of a problem. I keep on shouting at three different voices in my home, and it’s driving me crazy. Alexa, Siri, and Cortana all promise to be the best personal digital assistants, but none of them talk to each other and they’re all pretty bad at their jobs. I find myself forced to shout at all three of them if I want to interact with my gadgets without my hands, and I’ve made things even worse by buying smart home electronics that only work with one of my three assistants.
I use Alexa to control my lights and my heating, Siri to set reminders that follow me in my pocket, and Cortana to control my TV. I’ve tried to use Alexa as my sole digital assistant, but it doesn’t even let me set reminders with my voice, and controlling...
Microsoft is planning to allow fridges, toasters, thermostats, and other Internet of Things (IoT) devices to access Cortana. The software giant is bringing Cortana to IoT devices with its Windows 10 Creators Update, due in March next year. ZDNet spotted a presentation about the plans at Microsoft’s WinHEC conference in China recently, and the company is outlining its software requirements to hardware makers in preparation of devices coming to the market.
“This will enable you to build devices with displays, so you get that immersive Cortana experience,” explains Microsoft program manager Carla Forester. “Any kind of smart device with a screen can now take advantage of Cortana.” Microsoft wants device makers to use a screen to get the...
Gates spoke with Recode on Monday, shortly after announcing his $1 billion clean energy fund
Bill Gates is an optimist. That said, he believes getting a desired outcome means taking on significant risk, making a big investment and having a long-term view.
That is the approach Gates took at Microsoft by choosing to license, rather than sell, his computer operating system to IBM.
And it’s the same approach Gates is using in his latest project: The $1 billion Breakthrough Energy Ventures fund announced on Monday. The effort, which also has funds from Alibaba’s Jack Ma and venture capitalists Vinod Khosla and John Doerr, aims to fund only energy companies that show the potential to make a meaningful difference in climate change.
“If you can make electrons cheaper than someone, that is one of the biggest markets in the world,” Gates told Recode on Monday.
“Research has pretty big payoffs, whether it is jobs or leadership,” Gate said in the interview. “Even if you just put a security lens on it, energy is pretty important.”
Here’s an edited transcript of Gates’ conversation with Recode’s Ina Fried:
How concerning is it to you that as you are doing this, we have a president-elect who says he isn’t convinced climate change is real?
Gates: It will be interesting to see what we get out of this administration. I’m hopeful that some of the innovation things, including in energy, but in basic science (also), that we can even strengthen the bipartisan support.
Research has pretty big payoffs, whether it is jobs or leadership. Even if you just put a security lens on it, energy is pretty important. I hope people appreciate that, in terms of scientific understanding, we are in a pretty strong position. When you have an opportunity like that it is a good time to invest in it.
You have to look at the energy market broadly, and we have to make the case to the Congress about investing in innovation, and the executive branch has to see it as a good deal.
But, just to be clear, that’s the government piece. Breakthrough Energy Ventures, no matter what happens to the energy R&D budget, we are going to go out and find the ideas that are out there. It’s just more favorable if governments as a whole are putting more into the basic research level.
When you spoke to President-elect Trump, did you encourage him to take energy issues seriously, or what was your advice to him?
It wasn’t a super-long call, and I am sure I will get a chance to talk to him more in the future. The theme of the call was about innovation and innovation in helping things like being able to stop epidemics or finishing polio eradication or innovation in educational-related software. I did speak specifically about energy.
It wasn’t a long enough call to get a clear sense. Obviously there will be a lot of key appointees like secretary of energy, and the Congress will be still a major factor when you look at this stuff at a budgetary level.
One of the benefits about this investment fund is this isn’t about one country or one administration. But how important is the tone that government sets when it makes clean energy a priority or not a priority?
Take like India — if you say there is some huge premium for clean energy, that’s a huge dilemma for them because getting energy out so that people have air conditioning and lights and the basic stuff we take for granted, it actually not only improves lives, but saves lives. The goal has got to be, even though there may be some bootstrap period, has got to be to have this clean, reliable energy that is actually lower cost. Subsidization has helped accelerate wind and solar.
One of the things you have talked about is that the limiting factor might not actually be the billion-dollars-plus that you have set aside to invest but rather the number of companies that can meet the criteria you have set out, which is that it has to make a meaningful difference in climate change. What areas are promising as far as investments for the next year or two of the fund?
I used solar fuels as an example, both because I am excited by it and because it hasn’t received nearly the same visibility. And because, if it works economically and it is a long ways from showing that it can do that, it actually solves the storage problem, which is such a huge problem.
We hope to find a lot of things like solar fuels. Vinod (Khosla) thinks geothermal might be able to play a bigger role than just in the unusual places where the high heat is near the surface of the earth. That’s absolutely worth looking into.
Nuclear fusion, there’s actually quite a few companies out there. At this stage I don’t know if any of them given 20 years can really do something economic. I’m not saying for sure there is something out there.
I’ve been in nuclear fission with TerraPower. We’ve got a couple reactor projects, one of which we will be partnered with companies in China. The other one, which is earlier stage, got a big Department of Energy grant, which is a three-way partnership between the U.S. government and the Southern Company, the big utility company down in the southeast, and TerraPower. That’s actually a very unusual design called a molten chloride fast reactor. It’s in the general class of salt reactors the U.S. has played around with. That’s where the economics and safety could be dramatically better than even the latest so-called third-generation reactors.
And I hope I get surprised by some things that come in.
Are there any things you think we have learned from the last generation of clean tech investments that doesn’t work well?
Certainly having a five-to-10-year time frame is constraining. Not bringing the strategic investors in at a very early stage, sometimes you go off in a direction that doesn’t fit the tight constraints. Really having the next tier of capital ready, which is why we are working with a variety of institutions so that when the stuff needs to scale up.
There have been a lot of successes. Vinod sold one called Climate Corp., which is about smart agriculture. He sold that to Monsanto. He had a positive return on his clean tech work, not as much as he had in some of his other tech funds, but still it was very impressive. So we have the benefit of all of the work he and others like John Doerr did.
It sounded from the other investors talking that, just from a pure economic standpoint, never mind the benefit to civilization, they see this as a good investment strategy. How important is that piece?
John Arnold (another BEV investor), he’s an energy expert. His point is a very good one.
If you can make electrons cheaper than someone, that is one of the biggest markets in the world. It means there aren’t a lot of niche markets where in software you can start out being the best for a few customers and then broaden that piece.
If your electrons cost extra, there aren’t a lot of niche plays in that. You end up with a lot of all-or-nothing things. They are going to be absolutely gigantic or not get there. It is daunting, but with a few breakthroughs, we can make money for the investors. They are being asked to be a bit more patient than normal because of the length of the fund (Its plan is to see returns over a 20-year time frame.) They are all people that care about the issue of a clean energy system.
Gates tells Recode the time is right to pour big bucks into clean energy.
Bill Gates says he isn’t worried about investing millions in clean energy just as the White House is about to be inhabited by a man who says he isn’t convinced climate change is real.
“No matter what happens to the energy R&D budget, we are going to go out and find the ideas that are out there,” Gates told Recode in an interview today, following the formal announcement of Breakthrough Energy Ventures, a $1 billion clean energy fund led by Gates, along with investors including Vinod Khosla, Jack Ma and John Doerr. “It’s just more favorable if governments as a whole are putting more into the basic research level.”
So Gates is trying a different approach, pitching Trump on the other benefits that leadership in clean energy can bring.
“Research has pretty big payoffs, whether it is jobs or leadership. Even if you just put a security lens on it, energy is pretty important,” Gates said. “I hope people appreciate that, in terms of scientific understanding, we are in a pretty strong position. When you have an opportunity like that it is a good time to invest in it.”
Gates included energy policy on a short list of topics during an initial phone call with Trump. That said, Gates thinks it is too soon to tell if the message got through.
“It wasn’t a long enough call to get a clear sense,” Gates said.
The US uses an astounding amount of energy: about 97 quadrillion BTUs, or about 18% of world's total energy consumption. And demand is only going to increase over time.
The vast majority of the energy the country consumes comes from fossil fuels, and isn't renewable or sustainable. But wind farms offer a promising alternative.
GE and Deepwater Wind, a developer of offshore turbines, have partnered to build five massive wind turbines and install them in the Atlantic Ocean. They make up the first offshore wind farm in North America, called the Block Island Wind Farm. The turbines started delivering power to the New England grid on December 12.
The team began installing the turbines 30 miles off the coast of Rhode Island over the summer, and construction was completed in late August. The farm's four-month testing phase, which produced more than one gigawatt-hour of energy, ended on December 2.
The Block Island Wind Farm will generate 30 megawatts of energy, which is the amount required to power every home on Block Island, Eric Crucerey, the farm's project manager, tells Business Insider. It will emit about 40,000 fewer tons of greenhouse gases per year than fossil fuels would to generate the same amount of energy. That's the equivalent of taking 150,000 cars off the road.
The potential for offshore wind energy in the US is massive. If we build in all of the available ocean space, the winds above coastal waters could provide more than 4,000 gigawatts a year. That's more than four times the nation’s current annual electricity production.
Offshore turbines offer many advantages over those on land. Winds tend to blow harder and more consistently in the ocean, which helps offshore turbines generate more power.
Self-driving cars may still seem far away, but automakers are making huge moves in just the next few years to make them a reality.
In 2017, Tesla said it will have a car drive itself from Los Angeles to New York. By 2020, an estimated 10 million self-driving cars, including ones made by Toyota and Nissan, will be on the road.
Here are the 18 biggest breakthroughs coming by 2030:
When Apple bought Beats in 2014, it immediately became one of the biggest headphone sellers in the world. Then, for years afterwards, it basically didn't touch its headphone lineup aside from a few minor updates.
So when Apple launched the iPhone 7 this past September, it was a great opportunity to launch new headphones, because a phone without a headphone jack was the perfect time to get people excited about wireless headphones.
The new models introduced in September were the Apple-branded AirPods, and the Beats X, a pair of earbuds with a cord attaching them.
And with less than two weeks before Christmas, neither of them are in stores, and there is no release date for either product.
In fact, the Beats X might be a while. An Apple reseller emailed a customer recently saying that the Beats X might not ship for "at least 2-3 months." The reseller even said Apple still does "not know when they will begin shipping this item."
The AirPods are also missing, after Apple said they would launch in October. The most recent update from The Wall Street Journal implies they won't be on sale before Christmas, either.
But even if the AirPods or Beats X were to appear at Apple Stores in the next week, it's still a problem for Apple — 13 days of time on sale before Christmas is not optimal, and there are suggestions that stock at stores will be very limited.
Apple did not answer questions about when the Beats X headphones would ship. The company's product page still says "coming this fall."
A person familiar with the development of the AirPod said the trouble appears to stem from Apple’s effort to chart a new path for wireless headphones. In most other wireless headphones, only one earpiece receives a signal from the phone via wireless Bluetooth technology; it then transmits the signal to the other earpiece.
Apple has said AirPod earpieces each receive independent signals from an iPhone, Mac or other Apple device. But Apple must ensure that both earpieces receive audio at the same time to avoid distortion, the person familiar with their development said. That person said Apple also must resolve what happens when a user loses one of the earpieces or the battery dies.
If true, this would be a huge problem for Apple. Yes, wireless protocols are hard, but announcing a product with fundamental flaws — like being unable to properly synchronize the two earpieces wirelessly — is a very bad sign.
But if this were the case, there shouldn't be a problem with the Beats X, which are wireless, but have the two earbuds connected by a wire.
Apple blogger John Gruber suggests that the AirPods delay is a manufacturing problem. He says that people who would know say they're "more difficult to manufacture at scale than expected."
That makes more sense than a issue with how the headphones work. But it should still be deeply concerning to Apple fans and investors. Missing a big launch before Christmas is simply a failure — there's no other way to put it. These two products were announced so they could take advantage of the big 4th quarter spending boom, and Apple was not able to deliver them on time.
As The Wall Street Journal points out, Apple hasn't missed a deadline for an announced product like this since the white iPhone 4 in 2010. And its CEO, Tim Cook, made his name doing supply chain operations — so multiple products being hard to manufacture is the exact kind of stuff you'd think he'd know ahead of time.
The missed release date isn't the only sign that there's been a lack of care with Apple's headphones. Apple was able to get updated versions of its Solo on-ear headphones and its PowerBeats workout earbuds on sale.
But these new versions still charge using micro-USB, not the same cords that Apple's iPhone or laptops use. To summarize: if one were to get Apple's flagship phone (iPhone 7), laptop (MacBook Pro), and headphones (Beats Solo 3) that will be available this Christmas, she would require three different charging cables to keep them all powered up.
But ultimately Apple must regard how it brought its headphones to market this fall as a massive failure. It's a missed opportunity and a visible embarrassment for the company. Sure, headphones aren't as important to Apple's top line as the iPhone, but Apple shouldn't be botching any product launches like this.
Microsoft says it is directly gaining from the subdued reaction to Apple’s newest MacBook Pros.
In a blog post issued Monday, the Windows maker said that November was its “best month ever for consumer Surface sales,” and that “more people are switching from Macs to Surface than ever before.”
The company even cites “the disappointment of the new MacBook Pro — especially among professionals” as a reason for the converts to its high-end hybrid PCs, which include the Surface Pro 4 tablet, Surface Book laptop, and Surface Studio desktop, among others.
The notion of the MacBook Pro having a less-than-enthusiastic reaction among hardcore PC users may not be totally out of line, though. Shortly after the Pro launched, a number of would-be users expressed disappointment in what they saw as a notebook that sacrificed too many high-level features for design purposes.
That said, Microsoft did not disclose specific unit sales for Surface PCs over the period, per usual. There’s probably a reason for that.
The most recent PC sales data from analyst firm Gartner, for instance, said that while Apple’s market share had declined significantly year-over-year, it was still the fifth biggest seller of PCs worldwide. Microsoft, meanwhile, was not listed.
That was before Apple released the latest MacBook Pro models, too. Though the complaints toward the new notebooks have been loud, Apple marketing boss Phil Schiller said in November that early online orders for the new MacBook Pro were more numerous than “any other pro notebook before.”
All of this is to say that Mac sales, in all likelihood, continue to dwarf Surface sales overall. But if Microsoft is to be believed, it may be gaining at least a little bit of momentum among new PC buyers.
Panasonic is joining the race to automate grocery store checkouts. Just one week after Amazon unveiled its cashier-free convenience store, the Japan-based electronics maker today showed off its own solution with a checkout machine that can detect items in your shopping cart, tally the bill, and automatically bag those items.
As detailed by The Wall Street Journal, Panasonic’s system would use a basket that scans items outfitted with electronic tags as they’re being put inside. When a customer checks out, they place their basket on a machine where the bottom of the basket slides out. The items inside are gently dropped into a plastic bag while the customer pays the bill.
The goal is to help save time rather than eliminate the need for...
It seems that Apple has pressed the world into abandoning one of the oldest standard connectors still in use, the 3.5mm mini-jack. Apple, Samsung and others are now offering mobile phones sans mini-jack, much to the delight of the Bluetooth Consortium and those who make adapter dongles. I’m not going to waste any more ink, … Continue reading "A Lament for the 3.5mm Mini Jack"
So this was inevitable: the Samsung Galaxy S8 rumor mill is in full swing, and one of the reports suggests that Samsung will be removing the headphone jack from the next generation of its flagship phone, just as Apple did with the iPhone 7. (The rumors also suggest the company will go with an “all-screen” bezel-less design that hides the home button, which sounds neat and also almost exactly like the rumors about the next iPhone design. Samsung, you know?)
Anyway, the conventional wisdom is that since Apple already took the hit and removed the headphone jack, Samsung is free to do the same without suffering a similar public relations firestorm. Which is good, because the fires of the Note 7 are still burning. Here’s John Gruber:
Workplace by Facebook has been in general release for just two months now, but it’s clear that Facebook has big plans for its enterprise social product. Just this week, at TechCrunch Disrupt in London, the company announced a new platform to integrate enterprise applications with Workplace, putting it in direct competition with Slack, the enterprise social darling of the moment. Read More
A chunk of ice nearly twice the size of Rhode Island state is cracking off of an Antarctic glacier, and the rift between it and the southern continent is growing longer and wider every day.
The 2,300-square-mile ice block is part of the Larsen C Ice Shelf, which is the leading edge of one of the world's largest glacier systems.
It's called an ice shelf because it's floating on the ocean. It's normal for ice shelves to calve big icebergs, since snow accumulation gradually pushes old glacier ice out to sea.
But this 1,000-foot-thick piece of floating ice is colossal, and it's quickly fracturing off of Antarctica's prominent peninsula, likely due to rapid human-caused global warming.
Satellite images suggest the crack began opening up around 2011 and lengthened more than 18 miles by 2015. By March 2016 it had grown nearly 14 miles longer.
Now a team of scientists, who flew over the region in November as part of NASA's Operation IceBridge survey, have confirmed the rift is at least 70 miles long, 300 feet wide, and one-third of a mile deep. (Other estimates peg it at 80 miles long.)
"[R]ifting of this magnitude doesn't happen so often, [so] we don't often get a chance to study it up close," Joe MacGregor, a glaciologist and geophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, told Business Insider in an email.
So how long until the epic ice block chips off?
"Maybe a month, maybe a year," MacGregor said. "The more we study these rifts, the better we'll be able to predict their evolution and influence upon the ice sheets and oceans at large."
When the block does break off, it will be the third-largest in recorded history. MacGregor said it'd "drift out into the Weddell Sea and then the Southern Ocean and be caught up in the broader clockwise [...] ocean circulation and then melt, which will take at least several months, given its size."
Computer modeling by some researchers suggests the calving of Larsen C's big ice block mightdestabilize the entire ice shelf itself, which is about 19,300 square miles (or nearly two times larger than Massachusetts), via a kind of ripple effect.
MacGregor downplayed this possibility, noting that other "computer models predict that the eventual calving of this iceberg won't affect the overall stability of the ice shelf."
However, a rapid ice shelf collapse would not be unprecedented.
In 2002, a large piece of the nearby Larsen B Ice Shelf snapped off, but within a month — and quite unexpectedly — an even larger swath of the 10,000-year-old feature behind it rapidly disintegrated. The rest of Larsen B may splinter off by 2020.
If there's any good news about the rift in Larsen C, it's that the ice shelf "is already floating in the ocean, so it has already displaced an equivalent water mass and minutely raised sea level as a result," MacGregor said. "Melting of the resulting iceberg won't change that contribution."
The bad news is that if Larsen C collapses, all the ice it holds back might add another 4 inches to sea levels, and it's just one of many major ice systems around the world affected by climate change.
Team communication startup Slack has always billed itself as more than just a chat app. The company sees its software as a the hub of workplace productivity, with the spokes of the wheel being third-party integrations to any number of products and services customers rely on day in and day out. Now, Slack is dialing up one of those partnerships — its integrations with Google Drive — to make its app that much more useful for completing tasks without having to jump in and out of different app windows.
Slack is letting itself merge with Google Drive to make it easier to manage files
Starting today, Google Drive will automatically extend permissions on a file to any member of a Slack channel the file is shared to. So instead of having to...
Mark Zuckerberg once posted a photo on his Facebook page celebrating the success of Instagram. His followers quickly noticed something strange about his laptop in the image: there was tape over both the camera and the microphone to protect against hackers. Is Zuck overly paranoid, or is this actually a good tip for everyone to take into consideration?
Microsoft has announced that its annual Build developer conference will be taking place on May 10th–12th, 2017. In a change from previous years, Build 2017 is planned to take place in downtown Seattle, instead of its usual San Fransisco venue from years past.
The Build conference typically serves as an event for Microsoft to show off the future of its software to developers ahead of consumer release. Build 2017 will likely see the unveiling of the next version of Windows following the release of the Windows 10 Creators Update in early 2017.
Microsoft hasn’t announced when you’ll be able to register for Build 2017, but interested individuals can sign up for a mailing list for more information. Whenever tickets do go on sale, however,...
The average lawn mower does nothing but keep your lawn trimmed and bouncy. But researchers at the University of Tokyo think they can take the lawn mower to the next level, by which I mean they created a mower that’ll leave designs on your lawn. It’s called the Grassffiti. A custom app lets users specify what they want drawn, which seems like a good way to threaten people, delight them, or mark your territory.
The researchers imagine their technology will be great for large-scale designs — think the Chicago Cubs’ logo on Wrigley Field or something of that nature. Baseball fields already prune their lawns to perfection by brushing the blades in different directions to create a gradient, striped effect. The new lawn mower relies on that...
Facebook will compete directly with Slack through a full-fledged new collaboration app platform built atop its pay-per-user enterprise communication product Workplace. Exclusively announced on stage today at TechCrunch Disrupt London, the Facebook Workplace platform will support integration with apps for CRM, file sharing, email, calendars and more. By allowing clients’ IT teams to… Read More
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The US uses an astounding amount of energy: about 97 quadrillion BTUs, or about 18% of world's total energy consumption. And demand is only going to increase over time.
In fact, the Beats X might be a while. An Apple reseller emailed a customer recently saying that the Beats X might not ship for "at least 2-3 months." The reseller even said Apple still does "not know when they will begin shipping this item."
Workplace by Facebook has been in general release for just two months now, but it’s clear that Facebook has big plans for its enterprise social product. Just this week, at TechCrunch Disrupt in London, the company announced a new platform to integrate enterprise applications with Workplace, putting it in direct competition with Slack, the enterprise social darling of the moment. Read More
Facebook will compete directly with Slack through a full-fledged new collaboration app platform built atop its pay-per-user enterprise communication product Workplace. Exclusively announced on stage today at TechCrunch Disrupt London, the Facebook Workplace platform will support integration with apps for CRM, file sharing, email, calendars and more. By allowing clients’ IT teams to… Read More