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Show Notes
Today’s guests: Justin Robert Young
Headlines:
Apple announced today that orders for its Apple Watch will only be taken online during the initial launch period. TechCrunch asked how long that would last, but Apple had nothing to add. Meanwhile the Verge has a Google “source close to the development team” that says Android Wear watches are close to being able to work with iPhones through a companion app.
Microsoft and Dropbox expanded their integration today. According to TechCrunch, Dropbox users can now click the Open button when previewing a file on the web and select an option to edit using Office Online. Users can also save new files to dropbox from within Office Online. The feature is available to Dropbox for Business customers who have an Office 365 license, and Dropbox basic and pro users. Dropbox says over 35 billion Office documents are stored on its service presently. Microsoft has over 1.2 billion Office users.
Reuters passes along data from a Pew Research Report that Facebook is still the most popular social network among teens, despite a dip in total teen users over the last few years. 71% of teens 13-17 use the service. Instagram is at 52% and Snapchat in third at 41%. Facebook is not so popular with 27-year-old Max Schrems and the 25,000 users that joined a lawsuit accusing Facebook of violating privacy cooperating with the US NSA. FAcebook’s lawyers began the first day of hearings by challenging Schrems standing to bring the case.
TechCrunch reports Xiaomi sold 2.12 million smartphones during their 12 hour “Fan Festival” Sale yesterday. Celebrating Xiaomi’s 5th birthday the 12 hour fan festival was held across 7 Asian countries, including India, Indonesia, and Malaysia, and brought in RMB 2.08 billion (US$335 million) of revenue. In addition to the phones, 38,000 Mi TVs and more than 770,000 smart appliances were also sold. This event broke the record of its previous best flash sales event.
CNET reports Adobe has lots of updates coming to its Creative Cloud video tools. Project Candy uses Augmented Reality to capture palettes from your iPhone’s cameraor stored photos, for use in Premiere and After Affects. Character Animator has face-tracking algorithms that map a characters face to your own to create more realistic facial movements and sync with speech, using data from a new app called Face Tracker. Think Andy Serkis, without ping pong balls.
Samsung warns that the Galaxy S6 Edge will be in short supply according to Engadget. In a Reuters report Samsung mobile head J.K. Shin revealed production yields of the phone’s curved glass screen are low and will not be able to keep up with anticipated demand. Samsung is “working hard to resolve the difficulty in supply,” but yields could be low “for a while.” The issue will not affect the Galaxy S6 with its conventional display.
News From You:
Starfuryzeta submitted the TechCrunch article that LinkedIn will purchase online learning company Lynda.com. The acquisition is expected to close sometime in Q2. LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner hopes the acquisition can help job seekers with education and skill acquisition.
KAPT_Kipper alerts us to Amazon taking a legal stand against review mills. The e-commerce titan’s lawsuit targets one Jay Gentile (if that is his Reeeal name) who sold reviews via sites buyreviewsnow.com, bayreviews.net, buyazonreviews.com and buyamazonreviews.com. The Seattle Times notes that Mark Collins apparently owns buyamazonreviews.com, not Gentile, but Collins is not named in the suit. This is the first lawsuit Amazon has ever filed regarding the pay for play review practice despite it being an established industry for anyone looking to pad their star count for coin.
TheLazyOne wants to call our attention to a BBC report from yesterday that Google has purged almost 200 extensions rom its catalogue of browser add-ons after a security reviews. Google enlisted several security experts to research how extensions from multiple browsers behaved when visiting Google sites. The findings are due to be published in full in May at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy.
Discussion Section Links:
| http://www.theverge.com/2015/4/8/8371131/youtube-paid-subscription-offline-video |
| http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-04-08/google-plots-new-youtube-subscription-service-as-soon-as-this-year |
Pick of the day:
Your about GPS tracking constituting an unreasonable search under the Fourth Amendment remind me I wanted to recommend Supreme Podcast, produced by supremecourtreview.com.
It frames the case and offer the context to better understand it, and cuts to the relevant exchanges from the argument audio. Of course if I find a case particularly interesting, I’ll then download and listen to the full audio from supremecourt.gov. Supreme Podcast also provides analysis of the majority and dissenting opinions when they’re issued.
Supreme Podcast
http://supremecourtreview.com/default/podcast/view/
and listed on many podcast aggregators
Supreme Court Arguments Audio
http://www.supremecourt.gov/oral_arguments/argument_audio.aspx
Thanks for a great show,
Technosquid
Messages
Rich from Lovely Cleveland:
With all the new Macbook reviews out critiquing the performance of Core M CPU, I thought I’d point your audience to an article just posted on Andandtech about how OEM design decisions actually have as much of an impact on performance of Core M laptops as the actual CPU model. The TL;DR version: even if a CPU has a higher Turbo frequency, if the design of the machine doesn’t dissipate heat adequately, it’ll be forced to throttle its performance. This is relevant to the Macbook in that the higher spec’d CPUs might not actually perform better in many scenarios (haven’t seen any reviews though yet to verify).
http://www.anandtech.com/show/9117/analyzing-intel-core-m-performance
Trung writes:
“A New Hope won’t be Disney Movies Anywhere. It will be ultraviolet. The other five movies will be Disney Movies Anywhere.
If you search Star Wars on vudu.com, you’ll see that there’s no Disney Movies Anywhere banner on the bottom of A New Hope. If you go on disneymoviesanywhere.com, the image for A New Hope says “This movie is currently unavailable on Disney Movies Anywhere.”
Patreon backer Rob from Geelong, Australia adds:
Disney Movies Anywhere is only available to US residents. So, if you’re outside the US and buy the digital copies from any service your purchase will be locked to that service. Hooray for DRM.
Anyway, I already own all 6 movies on Blu-Ray. And DVD. And VHS. So I’m not in a hurry to buy them again.
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Wednesday’s guests: Darren Kitchen & Len Peralta!