Justin Young joins the show to talk about the death of the free tier in streaming music services. Plus Len Peralta is in while his spaghetti cooks, to draw an awesome picture about the show.
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Show Notes
Today’s guests: Justin Robert Young and Len Peralta
Headlines:
Nokia may or may not WANT to sell its HERE mapping division but plenty of folks are interested in buying it. Reuters reports its sources say Daimler, BMW and Audi formed a consortium to submit an indicative bid for the division. The New York Times sources say Uber submitted a bid worth $3 billion. Book value for the HERE mapping division is about €2 billion.
Does web surfing make you hungry? You’re in luck. According to The Verge Google has integrated a “Place and order” option when you search for nearby restaurants. The option lets you choose from various services and complete the order on the services website. The first 6 delivery providers in the US are Seamless, Grubhub, Eat24, Delivery.com, BeyondMenu and MyPizza.com. Google hopes to add more providers in the future.
Reuters has revealed that Alibaba is in talks to buy 20% of Indian smartphone maker Micromax Informatics. The deal would help Alibaba expand into the world’s 3rd largest smartphone market. Alibaba, like many companies would like to get a foothold in the INdian market.
9 to 5 Google reports that starting today, Friday, owners of Samsung Galaxy S6 and S6 edge can order the Gear VR Innovator Edition online for $199 via the Samsung store or BestBuy.com. The headset won’t be in Best Buy retail outlets until May 15th.
Fast Company writes up the new app called Thred from SimCity creator Will Wright. It’s a slideshow app. Or a storytelling app. Or a social network. Depending on who you ask. Wright called it an app for making “multi-image creations for anything from web comics, to logging your tropical vacation, to useful how-tos,” BAsically you take up to 30 images and choose to use any filters, borders or overlays. You can follow people favorite their threds and leave comments. You can also add links and location markers. Thred is available today on iOS in the US.
Nintendo notes that its first smartphone title will come out later this year with four more promised by March 2017. So five apps in two years. Nintendo President and CEO Satoru Iwata says that’s not a small number because they intend to make every app a hit. He said “If we did not aim to achieve a significant result, it would be meaningless for us to do it at all.”
The Wall Street Journal reports that Russia and China have signed an agreement not to conduct cyber-attacks against each other as well as jointly counteract technology that may “destabilize the internal political and socio-economic atmosphere,” ”disturb public order” or “interfere with the internal affairs of the state.” The deal includes information sharing between law enforcement, exchange technologies and ensure security of information infrastructure.
Biztechafrica reports MTN Nigeria had made all Nigerian apps free until May 31 for its customers. The APPtitude campaign requires users to text the word APP to 131. App developers who want their app featured in the MTN portal should visit cp.nexva.com/r/mtn
News From You:
MANAGEMIKE submitted the top subreddit post from Ars Technica. This one gioes out to the chip lovers in the audience. Yesterday, at the AMD Financial Analyst Day CEO Lisa Su said the company will shift from being a bargain chip maker to focusing on high-performance. Among the announcements, Zen will be AMD’s sole CPU microarchitecture, launching at the high end first with a new series of FX chips. Al desktop CPU’s will use the new AM4 socket which introduces DDR4 support. That ends Project Skybridge. ARM-based OPteron A1100 serve chips will finally ship. And a new flagship GPU with high bandwidth memory will launch later this quarter.
Habichuelacondulce pointed out the Wall Street Journal article on CBS earnings, which dropped 195. But CEO Les Moonves always has something interesting to say. This time he mentioned the company will roll out an Internet-delivered version of the Showtime premium TV channel “in the coming months.”
Discussion Section Links:
Pick of the Day:
Rich from Lovely Cleveland:
The pick of Tubes reminded me of an excellent book I think your audience would enjoy. Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software by Scott Rosenberg is a fantastic book that gives a really approachable glance into the world of software development. It covers Mitch Kapor’s attempt to create a dynamic calendar app called Chandler in the mid-2000s. As someone with no background in development or coding, it gave me some great perspective on what needs to go into creating the software I take for granted. Its kind of a layman’s The Mythical Man Month.
Messages:
Alan writes:
Congestion-based data limits brings back the days of “free night time and weekend minutes” on cell phone service. Except the congestion time is probably the diametric opposite of phone service. And if more carriers start billing based on congestion in a big way, I think they will have to do something like time-based rates so that people can have some idea of whether or not their data use is counting against their cap. And like phone service, I expect it will be a temporary solution until more bandwidth is built out. My guess is that carriers were betting on living with the current system of caps during the wait, since it makes them more money, and the industry consensus seems to be that the time-based billing was confusing to customers.
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Monday’s guest: Ron Richards and Veronica Belmont