Here we are talking tech, that is Andrew Thomas from
Nexa and James Piecowye.
This was a bit of a problematic week, the tech failed us and the recording was corrupted for 2/3 of the show so that left us with the first 1/3 to share with you.
This week we spoke about the #sony SmartBand2 and I really liked it!
Here are the notes!
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599 on Souq.com
Review of the Sony SmartBand 2
This is a easily the nicest feeling band there is on the market, I am a huge Jawbone UP fan but these bands are awesome to look at and the feel is amazing.
-obviously a Sony phone is great for this wearable BUY works well on the iPhone and my Samsung, M% review next week!
Check SmartBand 2 data from the past week, month, year and beyond on the Lifelog app. View on the timeline alongside other Lifelog entries, including events, photos and music. See how different activities, like a holiday or listening to your favourite tune, can alter your pulse and stress levels and learn how to balance your life.
And the band is a nice way to get beyond the phone for notifications!
Messages and calls, without a sound
The SmartBand 2’s gentle vibrating alert and optional coloured LEDs let you know when a call or message is coming in on your phone. The LED lights change depending on the notification type, so you get to decide if you should reach for your phone.
What you need to know!
Compatibility
Connectivity
Battery
Waterproof****
Sensors
Heart rate monitor
Accelerometer
Design
Coloured LEDs
Removable core
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A SLACK competitor!
There is the obvious – Ryver is completely FREE.
Free is nice, but it means more than saving money…
IT MEANS YOU USE Ryver very DIFFERENTLY than Slack. You never have to hesitate about building a new team with additional new users.
You invite all the people you need.
Every Member can create Teams and invite users with no concern ever about the costs.
Even Guests can be given the right to invite other guests that need to be on the team.
You push information and decision-making out to the edge of your entire organization.
Every stakeholder can have a say and know what is going on.
What about features?
Chat is good but is terrible for threaded, thoughtful, topical discussions.
That’s where Posts come in. In addition to chat, Ryver uses Facebook™-like Posts to allow your team to discuss specific subjects that spawn threaded, topical discussions.
Ryver has worked very hard to integrate chat with posts. Whenever you realize that parts of random chats have become an important topical discussion, you can “promote” them to a more formal Post. It’s really cool and is patent pending.
Topical Posts, Centralized Notifications, a Post Stream of everything new from every Team, and Files in context of every Team, all combine to do a lot of things better than Slack. And yes, we have native Mac, Windows, iOS and Android clients that stay in sync.
This isn’t our first rodeo. Ryver was founded by Pat Sullivan, co-creator of the Contact Management software category and ACT!, the best-selling product that dominated that category for over 20 years. After selling ACT!, Pat created SalesLogix, the leading mid-market CRM solution, which he also sold.
In 2012, Pat recruited a team of great developers to solve the major problem with email. Email had become too slow for modern Team Communication. Buried inside the Inbox is a Team’s most important communication. Ryver is the best way to allow widely dispersed, decentralized Team Communication. Companies HAVE to become decentralized in the sharing of information in order to compete in a more complex and fast moving business environment.
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COOL iPhone app!
In a playfully written blog post, Simon Gladman talks about his newest app, which is called the Plum-O-Meter. As its name implies, the app leverages the 3D Touch technology in his iPhone 6S to act as a scale of sorts that tells the user which of the objects placed on the smartphone’s screen is heavier.
Gladman’s video example shows three plums lined up and placed two at a time onto the screen of his iPhone 6S. The Plum-O-Meter app displays the normalized force of each object on the screen as a percentage and uses a yellow highlight to indicate which object is heaviest.
The app is open source and can be sideloaded onto an iPhone 6S or 6S Plus without any jailbreaking.
Technically, the iPhone’s multi-touch display can simultaneously sense up to five objects at a time, iDownloadBlog points out.
“I did originally build this app for grapes, but they’re too light to activate the 3D Touch,” Gladman writes in his blog post.
Whatever you may decide to weigh on an iPhone 6S or 6S Plus screen, it may be a good idea to properly clean the screen beforehand or remember to clean those objects afterward.
New app from the guys over at instagram :) They are quietly rolling out these new apps
Instagram has launched a new app called Boomerang that lets you share your life with extremely short looping animations. The app shoots 5 still photos in just 1 second, and then turns those frames into a moving picture that plays forward, and then backward, looping forever.
The app could be seen as a new competitor to Apple’s Live Photos feature in iOS, which helps create short moving picture snippets of your life’s moments. Here’s a short video introduction to Boomerang:
Enterprise wearables are the next big thing!
According to the International Data Corporation’s (IDC) recent Worldwide Quarterly Wearable Device Tracker, it is estimated that 72.1 million wearable devices will be shipped in 2015, up 173.3 percent from 2014. Additionally, a study by Salesforce Research found that not only do wearable users experience an improvement in their business performance, but 79 percent agree that wearables are, or will be, strategic to their company’s future business success and 86 percent plan to increase their wearable investment.
These growth projections signify that it’s no longer a question of “if” but “when” the disruptive potential of wearable technologies will become more mainstream. When it happens, the biggest beneficiaries of the technology will be businesses in a variety of verticals.
Wearables Are About To Strap Themselves To Our Work
Wearables for work provide an opportunity to significantly improve productivity, efficiency and even safety, creating tremendous opportunities for those taking advantage...and notable risk for those not preparing a strategic response.
The worlds first modular smart watch
Anything with cloud in it is cool? Right?
Want your next smartphone to stand out from the crowd? Nextbit's Robin will do just that. The boxy, mint-colored handset (it also comes in a blackish "midnight") was originallyfunded on Kickstarter, and now it's available for regular pre-orders via BackerKit. The device certainly looks different, but what makes it truly special is its approach to software. Nextbit is doubling down on the cloud -- the Robin has 32GB of internal storage, but that's coupled with an extra 100GB online. If you're starting to near capacity, the phone will automatically shift little-used apps and data into the cloud, ensuring you're never left furiously deleting old photos. That's the theory, anyway -- we're curious to see how it holds up in practice. Kickstarter backers were able to get the phone for as little as $299, but now you're looking at $399 for a regular pre-order. That's not extortionate for an Android flagship, but this is a new startup launching their first phone -- you've got to be brave to buy one, especially when there are similarly priced alternatives like the Nexus 5X.
Flowers and the Asian market - is it worth a billion?
There’s a heck of a lot of money to be made in flower delivery in Southeast Asia, according to an ex-Googler from the U.S. who left the search giant in June to launch his own startup in Singapore. He is by no means bucking the trend: We’ve written before about top people at Google looking to new opportunities in Asia.
The 27-year-old Steven Feiner, who worked as a San Francisco- and Singapore-based “problem solver” in corporate strategy and data analytics at Google for three years, said he’s dipping his toes into a $2.5 billion regional opportunity. Feiner just launched his flower-delivery startup, A Better Florist, at the end of September, and it’s currently in the midst of closing a $500,000 angel round.
In the barely four weeks since launch, business has been good, and the company has been cashflow- and unit economics-positive from day one. Feiner and his three cofounders said they’re distinguishing themselves from the competition by delivering flowers sourced from nearby Malaysia (the Cameron Highlands, specifically) that are just 2-4 days old when they reach customers — that’s compared to 10-16 days old for most flowers in the market today.
AMAZON CLOUD IS HUGE
What's less obvious is just how big Amazon Web Services has become, in terms of overall value of the business. Logging $2.09 billion in its latest quarter, AWS is on a $8 billion run-rate, booming 78% year over year. So, if AWS were a standalone company, what would it be worth?
Roughly $70 billion.
$70 Billion Might Be The Conservative Estimate
That number comes from The Wall Street Journal's financial editor, Dennis Berman:
But, it's worth noting, it could be much, much higher.
Today AWS is worth close to half the value of IBM's ($141 billion) or Oracle's ($161 billion) entire businesses, will shortly displace SAP ($92 billion), and already exceeds that of HP ($53 billion).
It's only going to get worse for these titans, because AWS promises a different, better way to think about enterprise software. But for customers and developers, things are just going to keep getting better.
Jeff Bezos 3rd richest man!
The resulting stock market movement on Thursday saw Bezos’s net worth increase by around $5 billion, taking his fortune to a colossal $55 billion, Bloomberg reported.
Amazon announced it made a net profit of $79 million in the quarter ending September 30, a notable figure considering the same period a year earlier saw a $437 million loss. Revenue for the latest quarter reached $25.4 billion, marking a 23 percent increase on a year earlier.
The 21-year-old business encompasses not only its gargantuan online store but also other products and services such as its AWS cloud-computing division. In fact, it was the cloud business that was key in helping Amazon to push into the black in Q3.
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Google is used by us all!
abet, Google's new parent company, reported strong third-quarter earnings Thursday, beating estimates with a total revenue of $18.7 billion. The company's six products—Google, YouTube, Android, Google Maps, Google Play and Google Chrome—now each have more than 1 billion users globally.
"We're excited about the opportunities ahead of Google and across Alphabet," said Ruth Porat, Alphabet and Google CFO, in a statement. "Our Q3 results show the strength of Google's business, particularly in mobile search."
Indeed, advertising revenue for the third quarter totaled $16.8 billion, a 13 percent increase over last year. Ad revenue from the second quarter to the third quarter rose 5 percent.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai briefly addressed one of the hot-button issues in the marketing world—the rise of ad blockers. "It is clear that there are areas where the ad experience is getting in the way," he said.
Youtube Red
After many months of speculation, YouTube has finally unveiled its premium subscription service: $9.99 a month for ad-free viewing and listening, offline caching and a raft of other features too.
YouTube Red includes YouTube Music Key (now just YouTube Music), which continues to offer unlimited Google Play Music streaming. The site, which already offers TV shows and movies, will make exclusive shows and moviesfrom the likes of star vlogger PewDiePie and CollegeHumor available in the paid service. Think of it like a Netflix for the YouTube generation, a young viewers who are already glued to the site—and might pay to see even more.
The new service delivers ad-free streaming, offline viewing, exclusive shows, improved music features and Google's version of Spotify all for $9.99 a month. But after 10 years of free, ad-supported access, the real question is whether YouTube will be able to be able to persuade people to cough up money.
The existing YouTube isn't going anywhere, and will continue to operate much as it always has, and there's a risk that the majority of users will too.
Google Mobile search has surpassed desktop search
During the earnings call, new Google CEO Sundar Pichai, who reports to Alphabet CEO Larry Page, said Google now has six services that each has more than a billion users. Joining Google search, Android, Google Maps, Chrome, and YouTube, Google Play now tops 10 figures as well, Pichai said.
For its part, Android has grown from 1 billion users to more than 1.4 billion.
And highlighting Google’s dominance on mobile devices, Pichai said there are now more Google mobile searches than desktop searches worldwide.
Pichai also said that Google Photos, which the company launched during its I/O developers event this spring, now has more than 100 million users who have uploaded more than 50 billion photos.
Google has also sold more than 20 million Chromecast devices, he said.
Porat noted that Google’s board of directors had authorized a stock buy-back worth up to $5 billion.
Back to the future is still with us
The film studio’s home-entertainment arm and the artificial-intelligence software company teamed up to bring an AI-powered Doc Brown virtual character to theDoc Brown Facebook page, and for the next 10 days, Facebook users can click the message button to initiate real-time chat conversations with the virtual Doc.
Racetrack through Instagram
COOL!
New research in neural networks may let computers identify our daily actions more accurately than the apps on the market that track things like GPS location and heart rate. A new computer model has achieved about 83 percent accuracy in identifying the activities it sees in real-life images—and with just a bit of training it could do this for any user it encounters.
Led by Georgia Tech graduate students Daniel Castro and Steven Hickson, researchers have created an artificial neural network designed to identify scenes in so-called “egocentric” photographs taken from the user’s point of view. These usually come from wearable cameras like Narrative Clip, MeCam, Google Glass, and GoPro, but regular cell-phone photos often work as well. The team gave the network its skill by training it with a set of about 40,000 images taken by a single individual over a six-month period. This dedicated volunteer manually associated each image with an activity, and naturally settled on using 19 basic activity labels. These labels include driving, watching TV, family time, and hygiene.
A separate learning algorithm combines the neural network’s guesses with metadata about the day and time at which the image was captured. This allows the network to learn common associations between activities and even make predictions about the user’s upcoming schedule.
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Chrome Canary has some good features!
If you think that your browser's little padlock icon isn't enough to verify a website's security (but don't want to install a full-fledged app), you now have a better solution. Google hasreleased a new Chrome Canary build that includes a security panel in amidst the usual developer options. Open it and you'll not only learn about the encryption for the host page, but the encryption for all the other connected sites, too. This is ostensibly meant to help developers safeguard their sites, but it'll also let you double-check for hidden security flawson any site where you suspect that something's amiss. It'll take a while longer before this pops up in more refined versions of Chrome, so give Canary a shot if you want to verify a page before you trust it with your data.
TalkTalk Hack
TalkTalk's customer database was attacked in a move that could leave the data of four million people compromised -- meaning it is now in the hands of the attackers. The hackers have since issued a ransom demand asking the TalkTalk chief executive for money, presumably in return for the data.
"If you're a cyber-criminal the days of stealing data and then selling it for cash in the dark web -- they're not so profitable as they used to be," Dido Harding, TalkTalk chief executive, told the BBC.
The customer data that may have been accessed includes:
WAS MY DATA ENCRYPTED?
The short answer is probably not. On its website, TalkTalk has said "not all of the data was encrypted." And Harding was unable to provide any further details.
"I would love to be able to give you that complete and unequivocal assurance," said Harding. "But it would be wrong of me to give you that today, when the amount of data that these criminals have had access to is very large."
WHAT RISKS DO I FACE AS A TALKTALK CUSTOMER?
If your data has indeed been breached, you could be at risk of identity theft, phishing attacks, scam phone calls, and any accounts that use the same password could also be easily accessed.
WHAT CAN I DO IF I THINK MY DATA WAS HACKED?
PROTECT YOURSELF FINANCIALLY
In the immediate term, TalkTalk customers should protect themselves financially. Contact your bank or credit card company, and warn them that your data may have been breached so that they can lookout for any suspicious activity from your account.
TalkTalk has also contacted the major banks and is offering a year's free credit monitoring for all its customers.
Keep an eye on activity yourself over the next few months and alert the bank, or Action Fraud -- the UK's fraud reporting centre -- if you see anything suspicious.
Look out for signs of identity theft. Sites like Experian, Equifax and Noddlecan tell you if someone has applied for a credit card in your name.
PROTECT YOURSELF ONLINE
Change passwords to your online accounts. Now -- and into the future -- it is wise to change your passwords regularly and try not to use the same one more than once.
It can be hard to remember numerous different passwords, but there are tools available online that can help. Password managers like1Password, Last Pass and Dashlane can be easy ways to keep a handle on different passwords -- but we can't vouch for their complete safety.
Another month, another billion for Uber… The ride-hailing business is reportedly raising yet again — planning to raise close to $1 billion in new investment according to the NYT citing “people close to the matter”, with investors looking at a valuation of between $60 billion and $70 billion for the six-year-old startup.
If the NYT’s report is on the money, it comes mere months after the WSJ reported Uber had raised almost $1 billion in new financing, with a valuation then, in July, of more than $50 billion.
We’ve reached out to Uber for comment and will update this story with any response. Update: An Uber spokesman declined to comment.
Why does a ride-hailing business that likes to claim it’s not a transportation company need such a massive money mountain behind it? It’s pretty clear Uber subsidizes the cost of rides as part of its market expansion acceleration strategy — as a way to undercut traditional taxi opposition and put pressure on local ride-hailing competition.
It’s also engaged in driverless car tech research — envisaging an evolution of its platform, down the road, where Ubers are driven by robots rather than self-employed human ‘partners’. The meatsacks will just be sitting in the back.
The accelerating stack of investment rounds and valuations is a measure of the scale of Uber’s ambitions to become a global on-demand logistics platform business — a vision that’s clearly convinced investors. (Albeit, it gets easier to be convinced when you’re taking a punt on an $8 billion investment stack.)
