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One of the biggest downsides of vinyl is the inconvenience of using it on the go. With the exception of things like the now-defunct Audio-Technica AT727 portable vinyl player, you've pretty much got to lug an entire turntable around for listening to vinyl records anywhere outside of your living room.

The RokBlok is a creative Kickstarter project solution to portable vinyl. It's a small block that rides along your records, serving as both needle and speaker to play back audio. And while it still needs a flat surface to function, it's infinitely more portable than carrying around a full-size turntable.

The idea is very reminiscent of the VW Soundwagon, a miniature vinyl player from Japan that also rides along the top of your records....

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Headphone design is no stranger to invasions from other categories, whether you’re talking LED lights, belt buckles, or, um, cat-ear speakers. Usually, I snarl at those excesses, but I find myself smiling at the latest example: a fully functional VU meter integrated into the ear cups of the new Meters Music OV-1 cans.

Who’s Meters Music, you ask? I was pondering that same question when I first heard of them this morning, but it turns out there’s some decent sonic pedigree behind this new brand. It’s an offshoot of Ashdown Engineering, a company engaged in making bass amplifiers for major musical acts like Lenny Kravitz, U2, and System of a Down. Unlike, say, Marshall headphones that only share a name with the original Marshall amp maker,...

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Plex, a media server company that helps customers access files on a range of devices, is expanding its cloud service well beyond Amazon. Now, users of Plex Cloud can use Google Drive, Dropbox, or Microsoft’s OneDrive to store media and other files. That way, you pay any one of those companies for storage — and pony up $4.99 per month or $39.99 per year for a Plex Pass account — to access Plex’s app library to manage files and play media. The company’s software works on most major game consoles, smart TVs, and streaming devices.

Plex Cloud launched as a beta program back in September, starting exclusively with Amazon’s cloud service provider, AWS. A number of...

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 DevOps teams will be happy to hear that Amazon is launching its own dashboard for Amazon Web Services. Personal Health Dashboard, as the company calls it, is its latest release from the stage of re:Invent 2016 to support more advanced cloud apps monitoring. The tool puts critical infrastructure data in one place. The dashboard will automatically notify teams of failures and allow them… Read More

Amazon is bringing the Greengrass IoT service to devices and board computers, meant to help boost offline data collection and analysis.

The goal of Greengrass, an AWS software tool, is to make IoT devices and maker boards smarter. Even underpowered devices collecting data won't be "dumb" anymore, Amazon says.

Amazon has kept in mind that smart devices can't always be connected to the cloud for data analysis, and Greengrass brings some AWS software tools to devices to aid in better collection and analysis of data.

Developer boards are strongly tied to cloud services, which add more functionality to smart devices. Data collected from sensors are typically dispatched and collected in the cloud, where it can be analyzed and can define the next steps.

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 AWS fired a shot across Digital Ocean’s bow this morning at the AWS re:Invent conference when it announced new virtual private servers starting at just $5 a month. The VPS service, called Lightsail, allows a customer to easily fire up a server in the cloud for a low price and hide the complexity of the underlying services being used. It’s been designed, according to AWS CEO Andy… Read More

You can finally take Netflix with you onto a plane or the subway. Today the company announced that it’s launching offline playback for “many of your favorite streaming series and movies.” Right now, that selection seems largely limited to shows and movies made by Netflix, so you’ve got Stranger Things, The Crown, Narcos, Orange is the New Black, and others available to view offline on day one. But Netflix says more stuff will allow downloads soon.

Once you’ve updated to the latest version of Netflix on Android or iOS (the update...

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A new project between General Electric and Gerdau, a large steel manufacturer in Brazil, had a simple objective: Improve productivity by reducing equipment failure and related problems. Early indications suggest that goal was achieved with flying colors.

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(Insider Story)

Chris O’Connor, IBM’s General Manager for Internet of Things Offerings, has been involved with connected devices for almost 25 years. As a result, he has a unique view on the emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT), what it means for the future, and what we can learn from previous generations of technology. 

Chris is also an Advisory Board Member of IoT Community, the organization producing IoT Slam , so we sat down with him as he prepared for the event to hear what he plans to talk about.

ReadWrite: So as the General Manager for IoT, what does this mean for IBM?

Chris O’Conn0r: So for us at IBM it’s been a journey of experimenting with the IoT data, all these connected assets, And the early work that we did around Smart Planet. It proved that it was controlled, but the ability to do it in mass wasn’t quite there yet, and now we move to where we are today which is sensors are cheap,  connectivity is easy given Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, low power long range capabilities, and cellular capabilities in abundance. As well as now the cloud is an accepted way to work both in both a public, private, and local fashion.  And analytics are ruling the day in terms of being able to provide value and information, and thinking engines are now emerging as a way to understand the patterns and the variances of how well this data actually comes together.  So you think about all this technology as the perfect storm and now these capabilities are becoming very affordable and can make the internet of things and its wealth of data actually processable by the average enterprise, company or corporation. 

RW: And that process is really important because the first way of IoT was sort of everyone running around the hooking sensors and then putting data streams onto everything they could find and it’s great I got these huge pile of data – okay, now what?  And now you got to figure out how to take all that data and actually turn to insight and actable business information. 

CO:  That’s correct.  We think our clients need to think beyond the connection of the device. Fundamentally we see three types of the business that our clients strive for. The first is around operations and maintenance and product life cycle. This is driven by devices and I know whether it’s healthy, whether it’s well, whether it’s on, whether it’s off, whether it’s broken, whether it’s fixed. And I can more efficiently maintain that device to make something better for my enterprise if I know this.  So many of the clients we work with can pay for the experimentation of an IoT system just by savings they get being able to change that equation. 

The second pattern that we see is people talking to their clients. So many companies actually don’t really connect directly with their clients. They make devices, they put them into distribution channels, distribution channels, and then a retailer sells it. The manufacturer is not working with the client, it’s the retailer that actually talks to the client about the plus and minus of that particular product being sold.  So with a connected device, the customer hooks it up and the manufacturer now has a direct connection for the first time and that’s a huge advantage.

And then there’s a third area,  just fundamentally watching all this information about how your products are being used. So, for example, you can change your warranty, so instead of saying a warranty is 36,000 miles for three years, you can have a warranty that says, if you drive your car into these cities and these geographies your warranty as this long. Or if you drive your car in these cities and these geographies, or if the car is exposed to salt and snow, you’d really re-invent your business and the service that you sell at the same time.

RW: Do warranties even exist in five years? I mean if you’re building predictive models then you can sell products not as assets, but one with use case scenarios. If I’m selling tires and I had this information of where you live and whether there’s salt on the road and whether it’s at altitude, maybe I sell this product as a service and the idea of a warranty goes away. 

CO:  I think that’s right.  And the real benefit here is your predictive models get to account for all kinds of different variabilities and you get to also take the learnings from those predictive models to instantly tell other devices about it at the same time.

And so it’s an individual process of learning, if you think of a car driving down the road with a certain set of conditions and then flips it can instantly tell all other cars about that flip and they can also account all other cars what to watch out, those cars now can watch, learn and take action instantly based off the knowledge of that first car.

RW: And I love that because I think that’s where cognitive computing takes off when you start seeing the data pools overlap on each other and learning from each other and that’s when cognitive computing just kind of explodes. 

CO:  Well, if you think about why we bought The Weather Company, it’s to be able to have that additional processing. And in the environment are other devices and then the context of weather plays into the variability of what should take place, so having learning points we think are the key aspect of IBM’s start with IoT.

RW: Of course, with everything has been going on recently with all this data and all these sensors, over the last couple of weeks all of a sudden security is right back in the public eye.

CO:  If you think about security with IoT, we’ve solved this problem before. We solved this problem several times at the data center, we solved it when we went to client-server, we solved this problem when we started introducing cloud technologies inside the data center. But what you have going on right now is you have an end point. Some do simple things like a sports watch that simply transfers your heart rate, some do incredibly complex things like a car driving down the road or an airplane up the sky, and they require incredibly complex types of interaction. 

RW: But the thing about that is you’re saying we’ve solved this before, but we now have people entering this market who don’t have a data legacy, so the problem with IoT is people connecting devices who don’t have that background and don’t realize the implications.

CO:  That’s right. So if you’re going to be connecting your device you need to do a little business security pattern work even if it is something that seems non-threatening. You have to think that if you are putting together this system and you’re getting ready to sell something that you buy from suppliers, you need to sit down and map it out. Am I going one-way, am I going the two-way with my data, am I storing anything, do I take any personal information, where does that go? You actually need to kind of write the things down each step of the way.  And we will learn as an industry and that’s part of the growth, unfortunately, but it’s part of the growth. 

RW: So based then on people learning, what do you going to be talking about on IoT Slam?

CO:  So IoT Slam, it’s a great time because it’s such a wonderfully diverse set of people from individuals to educational institutions to systems integrators to device manufacturers.  We’re going to talk about some of the trends and directions we think are relevant around the IoT and we’re going to talk about some of the technologies that relate to business use cases around security, around usage of things like blockchain,  around usage of the IoT platform and what is that do for you if you use one. Why do you want to use one versus putting one together, maybe, yourself and so we’ll talk a little about trends and directions and some best practices we see and generally use it as a way to seed the discussion for what we hope is  really good forum and opportunity to get people to talk as individuals and groups around the internet of things.

Hear Chris O’Connor discuss the three major ways he’s seeing enterprises take advantage of IoT at IoT Grand Slam [http://tav.so/QdsuZ]. Enter code “RWW” for 20% off.

The post How IoT is making IBM’s Smart Planet smarter appeared first on ReadWrite.

 

Many travelers bought travel pillows for their flights, only to find that it is extremely frustrating to find a comfortable sleeping position with them. FaceCradle is a newly designed travel pillow from Hairy Turtle Pty that is aimed to fix the problem with traditional travel pillows.

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source: MIT Sloan Review

The president-elect’s new FCC advisers dislike net neutrality and broadband subsidies for low-income Americans.

President-elect Trump formally named two advisers to help oversee his telecom policy agenda at the Federal Communications Commission today: Jeff Eisenach and Mark Jamison.

Both are fierce opponents of the network neutrality rules the agency passed last year and have long advocated against regulations aimed at reining in the already massively consolidated telecom industry, where most Americans have no more than one or two choices for broadband providers as it is.

A record-breaking four million Americans commented in the FCC proceedings in favor of passing net neutrality, which now prevents internet providers, like Comcast and Verizon, from charging websites, like Netflix and Facebook, a fee to access users at faster speeds.

Trump himself has spoken out against the FCC’s network neutrality rules.

Deregulation under a Trump presidency would be a boon to internet providers, but could be a big hit against the content companies relying on those providers.

Companies that vocally advocated for network neutrality rules, particularly those that stream video like Netflix and Vimeo, stand to suffer from having to pay internet providers to reach users, in that they would be charged to not be pushed into a slower tier of service.

Netflix, for example, accounts for over 35 percent of North American internet traffic, according to numbers released by Sandvine, the broadband analysis firm, earlier this year. Netflix was one of the most engaged proponents of net neutrality in Silicon Valley, having poured millions into lobbying efforts to pass the new rules.

Eisenach, who joined Trump as an adviser during his campaign, advocated against network neutrality during the most recent rulemaking process and has received payments from Verizon to underwrite his work.

In the 1980s, Eisenach worked on the Federal Trade Commission and FCC transition teams with President Reagan. Under Reagan, the FCC famously repealed the Fairness Doctrine and other public-interest obligations, which required broadcasters to cover news of public importance and air contrasting views.

Jamison, for his part, previously worked as a lobbyist for Sprint. He has not only opposed network neutrality rules, but also the cable set-top box rules and FCC policies to expand broadband access for low-income Americans. He currently holds a professorship at the University of Florida.

For context, the current chairman of the FCC, Tom Wheeler, also comes from a background in industry lobbying. Before his tenure at the FCC he was the CEO of the Cellular Telecommunications & Internet Association. But his championing net neutrality showed his willingness to advocate for the broader industry rather than just one subset.

*Comcast's NBCU is a minority investor in Recode parent company Vox Media.

Apple has disbanded the hardware division responsible for its AirPort Extreme, AirPort Express, and Time Capsule products, according to a report from Bloomberg. The reassignment of employees signals that the company is making a quiet exit from the home router business — just as competitors like Google increase their focus on providing consumers with speedy, reliable Wi-Fi connectivity that blankets entire homes.

Apple’s router products were last updated in 2013 with support for 802.11ac Wi-Fi. But that was long before companies like Eero, Netgear, Google and others began manufacturing router systems that use a mesh network approach for better whole-home coverage. Apple’s AirPort devices, which remain available for sale, range in price...

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OnePlus released the OnePlus 3T just five months after it launched its predecessor, the OnePlus 3, so it could keep offering the latest and greatest specs.

As a result, the OnePlus 3T is priced at $450 — that's $50 more than the OnePlus' $400 price tag, but still considerably less than other top Android smartphones like Samsung's Galaxy phones or Google's new Pixel.

While the upgrades make the OnePlus 3T a better phone than the 3 overall, it didn't necessarily shine in every single area.

See how the OnePlus 3T stacks up against the OnePlus 3, as well as the other top Android phones.

SEE ALSO: The 20 best smartphones in the world

The OnePlus 3T is physically identical to the OnePlus 3 in every single way, which means it's still one of the best looking phones you can buy.

The new "gunmetal" color replaces the lighter "graphite" option.

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

The internet of things is so complex that some enterprises would rather turn to one vendor to determine the business case for an IoT deployment, design the system, roll it out, and operate it as a service.

At least that’s what IBM believes. The company’s combining several of its products and services into what it calls the IoT Solutions Practice. The move, announced Monday, is designed so customers can find all of IBM’s IoT offerings in one place.

Turning IoT into a service isn’t a new idea. Consultancies like Accenture and carriers like Verizon, among others, say they can reduce the complexity of adopting these systems and making them pay for themselves.

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Apple's gross margins on iPhone sales — a measure of the raw underlying profitability of its business — have declined from 57.7% in 2009 to just 41% today, according to analysts at Bernstein Research (see chart below). They expect it to sink to a "mere" 39% in 2018.

Apple is the single most profitable company on the planet. In January of this year, it famously posted the biggest quarterly profit of any company, ever. So it is unusual to see analysts worrying about where future profits might come from.

To put this in context: Apple is going to stay very, very profitable. No one is saying those profits are going to disappear. But at least four teams of analysts said in recent notes to clients that it was becoming harder to see how Apple would sustain its massive gross margins.

Here's the chart from Bernstein's Toni Sacconaghi et al: 

Key issues include the cost of making next year's iPhone and whether Apple still has the ability to raise prices even further despite price competition. Apple has seen a 30% decline in sales and a loss of market share in China, where consumers recently trended toward lower-priced Android smartphones.  

"Historically, iPhone gross margins have deteriorated steadily, and we believe margin compression underpins the bear thesis on the stock. Encouragingly, iPhone margins have been more stable over the last four years, and the mix shift to services is a positive tailwind,"  Sacconaghi wrote recently. "We believe that GMs [gross margins] will potentially become a larger issue as we approach the iPhone 8’s release, as the devices’ new form factor, OLED screen and increased functionality (wireless charging) will invariably drive up iPhone’s BOM [bill of materials], either necessitating a further price increase in the device, or potentially pressuring gross margins in FY 18. 

Morgan Stanley's Katy Huberty and her team agree. "Gross margin trajectory is the key debate post Apple earnings. While our long-term view of gross margin hasn't changed, 10-K data suggests Apple underestimated demand creating a near- term margin headwind as supply ramps," she said recently. "We also see this as a sign Apple approached iPhone 7 forecasts with conservatism. Given better than expected initial demand, Apple has increased orders to suppliers and is incurring expenses to ramp additional production lines, which is creating a headwind in December."

Again, these analysts are largely positive on Apple's future ability to generate profits. They simply are having difficulty figuring out how, exactly, that will happen. "Can Apple grow revenue and EPS [earnings per share]? Yes, at a low-teens pace for EPS over time as it takes share in slower-growth smartphone market," Huberty told clients.

UBS's Steven Milunovich and Benjamin Wilson believe that if Apple builds a new, larger, 5.8 inch phone with an OLED screen that wraps around the whole device, creating a bezel-free phone, it may incur greater costs that the company may not be able to recoup with increased prices. "Depending on price increases, larger screens could increase ASPs. However, margins might decline if build cost increases outstrip higher prices. Apple could end up selling Plus phones at closer to regular size prices," they wrote. "Apple faces potential margin headwinds in F17/18 as the benefits from deferred revenue and lower warranty accruals wane."

"Warranty accruals" are the costs associated with customers whose phones break or malfunction, and who want the devices repaired or replaced. Bernstein's Sacconaghi and Wells Fargo's Maynard Um and their teams both told clients recently that the cost of accruals was becoming more unpredictable and might weigh on future profits. "We believe accrual levels are still too low relative to claims and expect an increase in FQ1, which we think may limit upside potential to gross margin from warranties. On a rolling 24-month basis, claims per unit have been relatively steady, while accruals per unit have decreased, which suggests, to us, a greater likelihood of increased to accruals," Um says.

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And the video won’t cost you a penny.

There has been no shortage of jokes about Apple’s decision to release a $300 coffee-table book highlighting its products. But, in perhaps the best takedown, late-night talk-show host Stephen Colbert created a parody mimicking the videos Apple typically uses to introduce new products.

“We were able to take an experience that was instantly familiar and charge $300 for it,” the faux Jony Ive states.

Other narrators highlight some key features of the Apple book including its “touch page technology” that lets you swipe to move from one page to the next.

“The Apple book’s pages are sequential,” one voice-over states. “60 is followed by 61, which is followed by 62, followed by 63 and so on.”

The actual book, which went on sale this week, comes in $200 and $300 versions.

Colbert’s video ripping said book to shreds, meanwhile, is free.

Image by Stephen Lawson

General Electric showcased its industrial internet of things solutions and partnerships this week at its annual Minds + Machines conference in San Francisco this week. The industrial powerhouse is transforming itself into an IoT software and services company focused on improving customers' efficiency, productivity and revenue streams.

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Amazon has partnered with Fiat Chrylser to sell cars online for the first time, showing the company's growing ambition to go after the $1.2 trillion auto sales market.

According to Reuters, Fiat Chrysler will sell three models — the 500, the 500L, and the Panda — on Amazon's Italian site at a price that is up to 30% cheaper than other dealerships. The service will only be available in Italy.

The report said buyers will be connected with a dealer once they buy the car on Amazon. Then they will be able to finalize the deal with the dealer and pick up the car within two weeks of making the purchase. It's unclear if Amazon will be holding actual inventory or it's merely serving as a middleman for Fiat.

Amazon wasn't immediately available for comment.

The news comes just three months after Amazon launched a new car browsing site called Amazon Vehicles. The site lets users read and leave reviews while browsing the specs of thousands of different car models, although it doesn't allow actual purchases.

Some investors believe Amazon will eventually start selling cars on its US site. Morgan Stanley wrote in a note published in August that the launch of Amazon Vehicles, its partnership with Hyundai to deliver test drive vehicles, and the Echo integration with car brands all points to a new car selling site in the future.

During its most recent earnings, Amazon downplayed these speculations, saying the new Vehicles site is simply intended to be a research destination. But its head of investor relations Darin Manney did hint at the possibility of going further. He said:

"Certainly we'll try to build a one-stop shop for vehicles as an extension to the automotive store which engages customers to add information about their cars in their garage and which makes it actually easier to shop for parts and accessories for your particular vehicle. And so we think there's a lot of opportunity there to add convenience for customers."

SEE ALSO: This 23-person startup raised $10 million using these 21 slides

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 In a month of unexpected outcomes, we have also seen some tech partnership announcements, ones we thought we might never see. In fact, just this week we witnessed Microsoft joining the Linux foundation and Google joining Microsoft’s .NET foundation. You cannot minimize just how at odds these announcements are with what has been the reality of the tech industry over the last 20 years.… Read More

SAN FRANCISCO — For a company like BP, which has been in the oil and gas business for over a century, adopting new technologies could be a difficult task.

It not only takes years to fully deploy new products, but there are also safety and reliability issues that need to be addressed before making the final call.

Even so, Ahmed Hashmi, BP's global head of upstream technology, says that shouldn't stop a company from continuously seeking new investment opportunities.

"If you don’t know what to do next, do something. That first step, it opens up the next three steps for you, and then it opens up the next few...it's like an exponential effect," Hashmi said on stage at GE's Minds + Machines conference on Tuesday.

BP's latest initiative is in the area of digital transformation. The company wants to turn its aging facilities into a more technologically advanced platforms using cloud and analytics software.

For example, BP announced a new pilot program that would put GE's Plant Operations Advisor (POA) software in one of its largest offshore oil production platforms in the Gulf of Mexico. The new software will enable the offshore production platforms to gather tons of real-time data to prevent the facility unexpectedly shutting down. It's also expected to improve operating efficiency by up to 4%, which could potentially lead to hundreds of millions of dollars in annual savings if rolled out globally.

"It’s about improving and understanding how the equipment operates. Before something happens, you can intervene and fix it," Hashmi told Business Insider.

GE Oil & Gas' Chief Digital Officer Matthias Heilmann likened the POA software to a more professional Fitbit, given how it monitors your performance with real-time data and prevents bad things from happening.

"One of the key objectives is to reduce, if not eliminate, unplanned downtime, which continues to be a major challenge in the oil and gas industry," Heilmann told us.

Digital investments

Hashmi said BP has gone from investing in big data for seismic technology to 2D and 3D modelling over the past three decades, he said. Now, it's all about digital.

"We had to get comfortable embarking on digital investments," Hashmi said on stage.

In fact, BP tells us that the company's R&D spend on digital initiatives increased last year, despite its overall R&D investments shrinking due to lower oil prices. For example, the company now has the largest super computer in the world for commercial research, and has also developed a Well Advisor tool that helps monitor what is happening in the wells being drilled and prepared for production subsurface and subsea.

All this could theoretically help the company prevent any unforeseen disasters, like the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion, from happening again. It will also help the company operate more efficiently and effectively by 2050, as seen in the chart below from BP:

Different mindset

Hashmi also said it was important for him to instill a different mindset at BP to keep up its culture of innovation. He pointed to three things to remember for any organization looking to drive change internally:

1. "You know your business better than anyone else": Focus on where there's value and go after something that's big. Something that changes your business.
2. "You know yourself best": Partner with people with complementary skills.
3. "Put your best people on the job": By best, he doesn't mean just capable people, but those with outstanding behavior who can hold themselves accountable, and allow others to hold themselves accountable.

SEE ALSO: GE signs software deal with electricity giant Exelon

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According to Stephen Hawking, our days are numbered — unless we find a new planet to live on.

During a talk at Oxford Union debating society this week, the renowned theoretical physicist said that humanity probably only has about 1,000 years left before we go extinct. 

In his 74 years, Hawking has spoken several times about our doomed fate, with the risk of things like nuclear war increasing as well as the oncoming threat of global warming. He has also warned that the development of artificial intelligence could end mankind.  

Our only hope of escaping these dangers, says Hawking, is by finding another habitable planet.

"We must also continue to go into space for the future of humanity," he said. "I don’t think we will survive another 1,000 years without escaping beyond our fragile planet."

NASA launched its Kepler spacecraft in 2009, whose mission is to do just that. It was designed to search the nearby region of our galaxy for Earth-sized planets orbiting in the habitable zone of stars similar to our sun. This zone is also called the "Goldilocks zone" because it is the range where pressure and temperature are "just right" for liquid water to exist on a planet's surface. 

This year, the astronomers were excited by the discovery of Proxima B, which is an Earth-size planet orbiting in the star Proxima Centauri's habitable zone. It also lies just 4.2 light-years away from us, which in space terms is pretty close. So far, Proxima B looks like our best chance of escape. 

Hawking's speech ended with him encouraging the students to stay curious and told them to remember to "look up to the stars and not down at your feet."

SEE ALSO: Researchers are calling Trump 'the first anti-science president'

DON'T MISS: Bed bugs are evolving before our eyes

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NOW WATCH: Elon Musk on going to Mars — ‘The probability of death is quite high'

One of the original kings of fake news thinks he might have helped get Trump elected, and he's not happy about it.

38-year-old Paul Horner, who runs a network of viral fake-news site (he calls them satire), has been making a living off the practice for years. And he's big. He says he makes $10,000 per month from Google's AdSense alone, the source of most of his revenue.

But Horner says that with the rise of Trump, fake news has reached a whole new level.

"It's real scary," he told The Washington Post. "I've never seen anything like it."

"My sites were picked up by Trump supporters all the time," Horner continued. "I think Trump is in the White House because of me. His followers don’t fact-check anything — they’ll post everything, believe anything. His campaign manager posted my story about a protester getting paid $3,500 as fact. Like, I made that up. I posted a fake ad on Craigslist."

Facebook and Google have been forced to grapple with their fake-news problem since Trump's election put them in the spotlight.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has dismissed the idea that fake news on Facebook influenced the election.

"Personally, I think the idea that fake news on Facebook — it's a very small amount of the content — influenced the election in any way is a pretty crazy idea," he said at a conference after the election.

But others aren't so sure. A recent study by BuzzFeed showed that in the lead-up to the election, the top fake-news stories on Facebook outperformed legitimate news stories shared by some of the most popular media companies.

Ad dollars

The most concrete steps Google and Facebook have taken so far is a move to ban fake-news sites from their ad networks. The rationale: if you cut off the economic incentive, people will stop making the hoaxes.

Horner admitted that the prospect of Google turning off the AdSense money jet was "pretty scary," though he said there were ways he would try and work around it.

"But if it did really go away ... I don’t know what I would do," he said.

Read Horner's full Q&A with the Washington Post over here.

SEE ALSO: A report that fake news 'outperformed' real news on Facebook suggests the problem is wildly out of control

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NOW WATCH: ‘Coming here tonight wasn’t the easiest thing for me’: Watch Clinton's first speech since conceding the election

WhatsApp is rolling out video calling today to its billion-plus monthly users. That’s basically the entire story — if you’d like to use it, update the app, open a chat, and tap the familiar video camera icon in the top-right corner. The video chat results look like the video chatting you’ve done before on FaceTime, Skype, Facebook Messenger, or Google Duo: two faces, one in a smaller window, with a handful of small features for changing the position of the chat windows or turning the camera around.

That video calls took until November 2016 to arrive on WhatsApp reflects the app’s cautious — some might say glacial — approach to product development. WhatsApp launched in 2009, but group chats didn’t come until two years later, and voice...

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Today, GE announced that its software and services business is on track to do $6 billion in revenue in 2016 — 20% higher than in 2015, and putting GE on track to hit its goal of $15 billion in annual revenue by 2020.

The core of the GE software business is Predix, what it calls an "operating system for the industrial Internet of Things." In other words, Predix is a tool to help GE customers build the software that powers Internet-connected industrial machinery like jet turbines, trains, or factory robots. 

Indeed, Predix is the star attraction at GE's "Mind and Machines" conference this week in San Francsico.

GE Digital CEO Bill Ruh says the idea is to refine the technology to handle a wider variety of tasks, and to bring together as many partners as possible to that end. That will help ensure that the Predix platform appeals to as many markets as it can as industries begin to digitize their businesses. 

"Every CEO is realizing they need to transform themselves," Ruh says.

In addition to the revenue stats, GE announced new industry-specific Predix solutions for energy management, oil and gas, and other specialized markets, as well as new solutions to help end-users, as in factory machine operators, maintenance workers, and the like, use Predix-powered applications.

GE also announced that it's bought startups BitStew and Wise.io to help customers add data from their industrial machines to the Predix cloud, and to add a little extra artificial intelligence know-how to Predix. 

Gartner Research VP Benoit Lheureux praises the BitStew acquisition. He says that letting customers integrate machine data is a major difficulty for any industrial cloud vendor, and that the addition of BitStew tech to Predix makes a "substantive" dent in the problem.

GE also announced that there are 19,000 developers building specialized industrial software on top of the Predix platform, along with new initiatives to attract business software vendors like Box and Pitney Bowes.

"You have to build an ecosystem. You have to have a set of friends to help you on this journey," Ruh says. 

The endgame, Ruh says, is in using Predix, combined with GE's own industry-specific solutions, plus some software from those 19,000 developers, to make more efficient machines. Give humans the tools to manage machines at peak efficiency, building them into the way they already work, and big things will happen. The same way that startups automate things like taxi dispatch to operate at scale, real automation brings value hereto untold.

"It's the equivalent of what Uber did, but for business," Ruh says. 

SEE ALSO: This is how the 'Internet of Things' is changing the business model of the world's biggest technology companies

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You and your friends may all have the newest iPhone, but you're actually in the minority: Over 80% of smartphone users are using an Android phone, according to IDC. 

Many of these Android phones are of the low-cost variety. Not Samsung's big flagship Galaxy phones, or even Google's flashy new Pixel, but models you've never heard of — unlikely to be advertised during Monday night football — that get the job done. These are phones made by Chinese giants like Huawei and ZTE, often re-branded in the US and sold under other names.

These phones are ubiquitous, which is why it's so scary that an unknown number are reportedly sending private user data to China every 72 hours.

Wait, what?

You read that correctly: A newly-discovered piece of software running in an unknown number of Android phones is reportedly sending a variety of private user information directly to Chinese servers every 72 hours. The software, created by a Chinese firm named Shanghai Adups Technology Company, is said to be in hundreds of millions of devices — it's not clear how many of those devices are in the US, or how many users are affected.

The news comes from a report Tuesday morning in the New York Times — a security firm named Kryptowire identified the malicious software, and said it does more than just archive/collect your text messages (though it also does that).

Apparently the software collects "the full contents of text messages, contact lists, call logs, location information and other data," and then sends that data to a Chinese server. US officials told the NYT that it's unclear whether the software was being as a means to collect user data for advertising or as a means of intelligence collection.

A rep from the Chinese software company characterized the move as, "a private company that made a mistake," and said Adups isn't connected to the Chinese government. The software was allegedly written and used with the intent of assisting with customer support for one of Adups' clients, an unnamed Chinese company.

It's unclear how many phones are affected, or even how to tell if your phone has the malicious software running. Apparently US customers using a phone internationally, and customers who use prepaid phones, are most likely to be affected. At least one US phone company, BLU, has announced that around 120,000 of its phones were impacted; the company says it updated those phones to remove the issue.

SEE ALSO: The ‘Netflix of China’ just barged into the US with two high-value smartphones

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NOW WATCH: 5 wild uses for your old Android smartphone

The company wants to use AI to simplify your work conversations.

If you use Slack for work, you’ve likely had this overwhelming experience: You come back from a meeting to a dozen slack rooms waiting for you with unread messages. It’s the new-age email inbox, full of stuff from colleagues you may or may not even know.

Slack thinks it has the combination to solve this issue: Learning how you work, and mixing in a little artificial intelligence to pinpoint exactly where you should spend your time.

“What we’re starting to build is what we’re internally calling our work graph,” Noah Weiss, Slack’s head of search and intelligence, said at the Code Enterprise conference in San Francisco on Tuesday.

“[This] is basically looking at you and seeing [which] people you seem to care the most about or respond the quickest to or interact with the most. What are the channels that you’re most active in? And then also, what are the topics that you seem to care the most about?”

Weiss continued: “That allows us to then build this layer of intelligence to then understand not just what your organization looks like, but then ... how do we personalize the service based on that.”

In other words: How can Slack make you more productive by watching how you work and whom you work with?

Slack is already doing some of this. The service will already make channel recommendations to some users, and Weiss says it’s starting to test message rankings, too, so that people know who to respond to first when they’re in a time pinch.

That idea may be a little creepy, but Weiss believes Slack can eliminate a lot of the wasted time that people spend trying to locate information or prioritize their time.

“Most knowledge work is a game of telephone,” Weiss said. “Part of our job at Slack is how do we short-circuit that game of telephone more effectively.”

The coffee company raised $45 million in new venture capital.

Philz Coffee, the San Francisco-based company founded by Phil Jaber, is now run by his 29-year-old son Jacob.

The San Francisco-based chain, which started out in 2002 as a coffee corner in Phil’s deli on Mission Street in San Francisco, now has 36 locations, with more than two dozen in the Bay Area including one in Facebook headquarters. By this time next year, Jaber expects to have somewhere around 50, with a planned expansion into Boston coming soon.

“I think about Philz as changing the way people drink coffee. If you look at our menu board, it consists of secret recipe blends that my dad has spent decades trying to create,” Jacob Jaber said at the Code Enterprise conference in San Francisco on Tuesday.

The expansion is being fueled by $45 million in new venture capital that Philz raised from TPG earlier this year. The big question is whether Philz can continue to create the welcoming culture and homey in-store environment it stresses as it chases national growth. Starbucks, which is a multibillion-dollar corporation, started as a venture-backed startup.

One of the main ways Philz stays true to its original spirit is to focus on hiring people that are a good match and taking good care of them.

“Close to 50 percent of people we hire come from referrals from team members who are already working for us,” Jaber said. “We’re not going to be able to pay a barista $25 a hour right now, but what we can do is we can create an education platform that is free and democratized, that’s available to every team member so that they’re improving themselves and learning skills so that there’s an opportunity for them to grow.”

Caring for their employees and their well-being is how Philz is able maintain an almost 50 percent retention rate, which Jaber said is almost unheard of in retail settings. And with new forms of employment popularizing, such as with Uber’s and TaskRabbit’s contracted workers, Jaber says Philz is thinking hard about how to be more empathetic with their scheduling and benefit packages.

It’s a stark difference from other trends coming from the Bay Area.

Lawson spoke with Recode’s Ina Fried at Code Enterprise.

If you still haven’t heard of Twilio, you are forgiven. Despite the fact they are a $2.7 billion public company, you can’t buy a Twilio, nor can you take one to work or stay at one on your next vacation.

That said, Twilio’s tools are running behind the scenes when you call your Uber driver or text with your Airbnb host. CEO Jeff Lawson says the easiest way to think of the company is “AWS for telecom.”

“What I care about is that the people who need to know about Twilio know about Twilio,” Lawson told Recode’s Ina Fried Tuesday at the Code Enterprise conference. “Developers are our core market.”

More than one million developers are currently on Twilio’s platform, he added. The company’s hope is that when their companies need to do something like calling or texting a consumer, those developers will volunteer Twilio as a way to do it.

“Do I want to connect with a brand by calling them? Probably not,” Lawson said. “What I probably want to do is message them.”

It’s not just businesses like Uber and Airbnb, either. The company is also helping nonprofits like Crisis Text Line and the American Red Cross deliver their vital services via modern tools. Lawson said these efforts have the beneficial side effect of reassuring for-profit clients — for example, if the company is willing to stake its reliability on a suicide help line, then it can handle other big challenges, too.

“You do that extra work to test the system, because you realize that every message matters,” he said of the Crisis Text Line. “And I think that’s a big deal. We build our tools to meet that critical use case.”

He noted that Twilio’s IPO earlier this year also undergirds that trust, rowing against dubious fears of “bad unicorns” in the private markets. Its share price is up 24 percent from its first day on the NYSE, but has fallen, over the past month and a half, to about half of its value in late September.

By Dave Michels
Early to recognize the power of communications API model, Twilio's founder is busy making sure his company doesn't lose its first-mover advantage.