At the beginning of 2016, it seemed as if we were all destined to spend our days gawking at live video. Facebook Live, which debuted in April, was everywhere thanks to an enormous boost in reach bestowed by the social network. News organizations, including The New York Times, BuzzFeed and CNN, were churning out live video after inking deals with Facebook that totaled $50 million. And who […]
It’s a new year and to start the year off right, I just put one of my favorite apps back on my iPhone 7 Plus home screen. Evernote just announced the release of Evernote 8.0 for iOS devices with a focus on speed and simplicity. My usage of Evernote began almost 11 years ago on a Samsung Q1 UMPC tablet device and it continues to be one […]
Oracle CEO Mark Hurd said the movement to cloud computing is driven by business realities as much — if not more — than technology. Speaking at his keynote at Oracle CloudWorld in New York, a regional tour designed to land cloud customers, Hurd said the global gross domestic product is growing at about a 2 percent clip. Half of the growth in the world is coming from […]
Blume was working on a letter to a man who was angry about being profiled by the police in his community. She showed me some of Obama’s handwritten comments in the margins. He had underlined sentences and added exclamation points; the words he wrote were sparse, but Blume understood the code. “See?” she said. “You can break down the sections of his thoughts: I’m mad, too. My […]
Computers have long helped us with our analytic tasks at work. But new technology options mean we can now work with them in more collaborative and intuitive ways. At one level, this is nothing new: computers have been making business decisions for a long time. For example, people used to decide how much airline seats should cost or whether a credit card transaction was fraudulent. Computers now […]
A string of code found in the latest beta version of the Google App hints that Google Assistant will become even more useful in the future by allowing users to make payments through voice commands. The integration with Google’s wide range of services and the expanding availability of third-party APIs has contributed to making Google Assistant a successful piece of software, and the future addition of a […]
Exploding lithium-ion batteries have sunk Samsung’s flagship Galaxy Note 7 and damaged the company’s bottom line. Image: CNET Samsung’s internal investigation has found the battery, and not software or hardware, caused the Note 7 smartphone to catch fire and explode, according to a new report from Reuters. The South Korean company will officially reveal its findings on January 23. Shortly after the global recall and pulling the […]
Workers likely to be impacted first by automation include those in manufacturing and retail trade. Image: Getty Images/iStockphoto Today’s technology could be used to automate half of all work activities by 2055 but it could end up taking far longer than that, according to a report from McKinsey Global Institute. It’s likely that one day your skills could be made obsolete by technology aided by advances in […]
Driverless: Intelligent Cars and the Road Ahead • By Hod Lipson and Melba Kurman • MIT Press • 328 pages • ISBN: 978-0262035224 • £19.95 / $29.95 There is an old joke that has Bill Gates, then CEO of Microsoft, boast to the CEO of General Motors that if Microsoft built cars, they would cost $25 and get 1,000 miles per gallon. The GM CEO is supposed […]
Nearly everyone who’s played Super Mario Bros. knows instinctively what the first level looks like. Mario is left-of-center, he moves to the right, the screen pans around the platform, there’s the first question block — gleaming subtly, which is important, but more on that later — and then a goomba trundles toward Mario. This point in the game is crucial. The player either loses a life upon […]
Source: United Nations University Hong Kong and Singapore in 2015 produced the highest volume of e-waste in the region, generating 21.7kg and 19.95kg, respectively, per capita. At 19.13kg per capita, Taiwan rounded up the top three e-waste producers, while China more than doubled its production between 2010 and 2015–at 107 percent–to 6.7 million tonnes. Across East and Southeast Asia, the average e-waste generation per capita was 10kg […]
Yesterday the internet was awash with claims that as a result of a new patent awarded to Apple, the next iPhone will be transparent. I can only guess that these claims were made by people who just skimmed the patent before writing hyperbolic headlines. I actually took the time to read the patent, and I’m here to say with 100 percent confidence that the next iPhone won’t […]
Image: Carnival The cruise industry is following the high-tech wave with the introduction of a new machine-learning wearable device for passengers that Carnival CEO Arnold Donald announced at CES 2017. A lot has been written about the move and it’s shaping up to be one of the most significant Internet of Things projects of 2017. We’ve covered it extensively on ZDNet and TechRepublic and here we’ve broken […]
Dubai Health Authority (DHA) has inaugurated its first “robot” pharmacy at Rashid Hospital in the emirate. The smart pharmacy is deploying a robot for the first time in the UAE to dispense prescribed medication, news agency WAM reported. The robot can dispense prescribed medication at the click of a button based on a barcode, thus minimising any human error, it added. The DHA said it will soon […]
In its first aquisition of calendar 2017, Microsoft announced plans to buy Montreal-based deep-learning startup Maluuba for an undisclosed amount. Maluuba has done work in natural-language understanding and reinforcement learning. Harry Shum, Microsoft executive vice president of the company’s Artificial Intelligence and Research Group, explained a potential scenario where Maluuba’s technology could help this way: “Imagine a future where, instead of frantically searching through your organization’s directory, […]
MANILA, Philippines — Cebu City is celebrating the annual Sinulog Festival, held every third Sunday of January. The city is the center of the Sto. Niño Catholic celebrations around the country. Local and foreign tourists flock Cebu City as it holds a street dancing party as well as a parade where devotees portray the centuries-old image of the Sto. Niño, a symbol of the dawn of Christianity in the […]
The world is taking advantage of the many benefits that the Internet of Things has to offer. However, along with these benefits comes the great threat of DDoS attacks and data breaches. What Is DDoS? DDoS refers to Distributed Denial of Service, and this type of cyber attack is meant to compromise an online service by overwhelming the server through multiple sources. Such attacks are not new, and certain […]
iStockphoto Car makers need to improve the security of today’s connected cars before the arrival of self-driving cars, according to Europe’s cyber security agency. “Over the last few years, there have been many publications on attacks against smart cars, many of which have resulted in reputational damage for car manufacturers. The impact of attacks on a smart car has far-reaching consequences in terms of safety, while the […]
China and Vietnam have promised to settle their differences regarding territorial claims in the South China Sea and to safeguard peace in the region, the two countries said in a joint communique. Then statement came after Vietnamese Communist Party chief Nguyen Phu Trong held talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing on Saturday. The communique, released by China’s Xinhua news agency after the talks, described the […]
Falcon 9 (SpaceX) SpaceX launched its first rocket into low earth orbit on Saturday since one of its rockets and cargo suffered from a fiery rocket explosion on its launchpad in September 2016. SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket launch happened in two stages from California’s Vandenberg Air Force Base, just before 11AM PST. The Falcon9 is carrying 10 communications satellites for the company Iridium to launch into low […]
Leo Lintang, Getty Images/iStockphoto Imagine waking up one morning to discover your email address and current password have been plastered onto a billboard on the side of a major highway. It’s a bit improbable, I know, but play along. For some of you, that would be the end. Anyone could paw through your email history, steal personal identifying information, run password resets for other sites, and generally […]
Minister Without Portfolio Konrad Mizzi. Photo: Chris Sant Fournier During the year just ended the Labour government continued to dig itself deeper into a culture of institutionalised corruption with persons occupying high government positions and those close to them partaking of the fruits of a corrupt system. A perfect example was the scandal revealed last year by leaked secret files where then health and energy minister Konrad Mizzi […]
Barnes & Noble’s latest Nook tablet has been pulled from sale. Barnes & Noble released its latest Nook tablet, the Nook Tablet 7-inch, on Black Friday in its latest attempt to battle the success of Amazon’s popular Fire tablets. With a low price of just $50, the new Nook was supposed to compete with the dirt-cheap Fire 6, but B&N’s slate has been riddled with issues from […]
A border tax in the US could upend the export-based economic model that has brought prosperity to millions of people in Asia, say analysts, as the region wakes up to reforms proposed by Republicans in Congress. Although most attention is still focused on whether president-elect Donald Trump will slap tariffs on China or target companies that move production offshore, proposals for a US tax regime that penalises […]
