The professor and the marketer have totally different views and they bring a unique perspective to the tech news and issues of the day!
Andrew Thomas Photo by James Piecowye
The show notes and links.
AOL’s instant messenger 20 YEARS OLD!
Long before we had umpteen different online profiles, there was AIM.
In the heady days of 1997, when AOL Instant Messenger came into the world, there was nothing else like it. Conceived within the hallowed halls of AOL, AIM introduced a large swath of early internet consumers to an idea that would be seized on by any number of multi-billion-dollar companies: You, but online.
Twenty years later, there's still something about AIM. It came out just as average consumers were starting to get online en masse. And instead of presenting users with another random message board where one might converse with strangers, AIM was about connecting with IRL friends through your curated "buddy list" — an idea so singular, AOL even patented it.
Love of apple watch on the decline?
Forget about using your Apple Watch to navigate using Google Maps.
Some big-name apps appear to have dumped their Apple Watch apps. That includes Amazon, eBay, Google Maps and Target, as first spotted by Apple Insider. The Apple rumor site didn't say when the apps were removed from the Apple Watch but said some, like Google Maps, could have been gone for weeks.
Google confirmed it had removed support from Google Maps but suggested that move might be temporary.
"We removed Apple Watch support from our latest iOS release but expect to support it again in the future," Google said in a statement.
Apple didn't immediately respond to a request for comment, nor did any of the other app developers. It's unclear why the companies decided to remove support for their apps on the Apple Watch, or whether Apple had a role in their decision.
Apple likely will talk about its watch software at its annual developer confab next month. It also reports earnings on Tuesday, but it has never detailed Apple Watch sales in its quarterly financials.
This is a great site!
Check123 is a website that aims to help teachers and students find educational videos. The "123" aspect of the name Check123 refers to the length of the videos on the site. All of the videos are either one, two, or three minutes long. You can refine your search results according to length of video, subject, and topic. Check123 lets you search by keyword or you can browse the subject categories.
Check123 claims to have "experts" review and rank the videos that appear in each category. It's not clear who those experts are or how they determine the scores they give to the videos.
What computer to buy? Been to Carefour lately?
New Microsoft laptop?
omorrow Microsoft is holding its #MicrosoftEDU event where we expect to find out how it will take on Google's Chrome OS, but some of the news may have already leaked. Notorious Microsoft watcher @h0x0d tweeted out a few images of a slim 13.5-inch laptop that apparently runs Windows 10 S -- a cloud-optimized version of Windows that only accesses apps from the Store -- has a PixelSense display, comes in four colors and features an Alcantara-covered keyboard. We've seen that material on a Surface Pro 4 keyboard before, and the other specs line up for a laptop that could take on computers from Chromebooks to MacBooks.
Interestingly, the 360-degree view only reveals a few ports, which could be USB, DisplayPort and a headphone jack, plus a Surface Dock connector on the other side. The pictures certainly appear legit and this tweeter has come up with the goods before, but the mix of parts, materials and "Windows Cloud" OS that follows up on the failed Windows RT is a little confusing. We're expecting to find out more tomorrow morning starting at about 9:30AM ET.
LG has a new 4K monitor that can really have multiple displays working! 700$
the company's newest display looks like it'll cover all the bases in terms of sheer flexibility and screen real estate. The LG 43UD79-B, as it's cleverly called, is a 42.5-inch UHD panel with a 3840 × 2160 resolution, plus a nice range of gaming and productivity-focused features.
On it's face, the 43UD79-B is an IPS panel with 1000:1 contrast ratio, wide 178-degree viewing angle and support for over 1.07 billion colors. Although its 60 Hz refresh rate won't quite stack up against the latest gaming monitors, according to a press release from LG the 43UD79-B does boast a Game Mode, Black Stabilizer and Dynamic Action Sync mode. For gamers with Radeon GPUs, compatibility with AMD's FreeSync dynamic refresh rate technology will also prevent screen tearing and visual stutters.
Can twitter compete with YouTube??? Does it want to?
Twitter's livestreamed content has been mostly sports and politics over the last few years, with fans able to watch and tweet about the latest boxing match or presidential debate right on Twitter itself. The company is set to double down on the strategy with twelve new content deals for news, sports, and live entertainment. The deals were announced today at an event with CEO Jack Dorsey and a host of other Twitter executives who took the stage with NBA commissioner Adam Silver, various sports stars like NFL's A.J. Green and even Tony Award-winner Audra McDonald.
Twitter is adding five new sports-centric streams, including a weekly WNBA stream, an added 3-hour weekly MLB analysis show, and a 24/7 fully programmed sports "channel" with "highlights, classic games and daily live studio programming" called STADIUM. We'll get a show titled #Verified that will have athletes responding to fan questions and engaging in sports conversations as well as more than 70 hours of golf from the PGA Tour, which will feature streaming 360 video of the competition.
News will be covered on five new shows, including Bloomberg's new 24/7 news network that will debut this fall. The Verge gets its own weekly bit, hosted by Nilay Patel, called Circuit Breaker: The Verge's Gadget Show,which will focus on, well, gadgets. BuzzFeed offers MonringFeed, which sounds like a Today show for "an audience that wakes up hungry for the latest in 'fire Tweets." Cheddar brings an hour-long stream called Opening Bell to focus on the New York Stock Exchange. This last starts today and complements Cheddar's existent Closing Bell show, which airs every day at 3PM Eastern.
If entertainment is more your thing, Twitter has three new deals to bring music, fashion and pop culture to your feed. Live Nation concerts start streaming on Saturday May 13th with the Zac Brown Band's kickoff of its Welcome Home tour. IMG Fashion gets a regular show, too, with "exclusive runway shows and behind-the-scenes Fashion Week content," while #WhatsHappening will stream live during primetime each day to cover pop culture, music, television and — of course — celebrity Tweets.
Amazon Echo look
What do you think of 360 cameras? I like the idea
Wearables be gone!
For years, we’ve been told that strapping a fitness tracker to your wrist is a great way to track your physical activity and fitness level. But researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory have come up with a non-invasive, non-wearable way to do the same thing—and more accurately—using invisible wireless signals.
Fitness trackers aren’t what they used to be. The fad gadget you strap to your wrist has seen a…Read more on fieldguide.gizmodo.com
The team developed a new device called the WiGait, which looks like an antenna-less Wi-fi router mounted on a wall. It blasts a low-power wireless signal, which emits about one-hundredth the amount of electromagnetic radiation as a smartphone does, and analyzes how that signal bounces off a person’s body as they walk by to determine their speed.
A wearable fitness tracker can only crudely estimate the speed someone is walking by counting their steps, and fancier wearables with built-in GPS don’t work indoors, where satellite signals are blocked. Using wireless signals, the MIT researchers claim that WiGait can measure a person’s speed and stride length accurately at least 85 percent of the time. It can also keep tabs on multiple people all at the same time. Details of the team’s new device can be found in an accompanying paper.
Crazy Money at Alphabet!
Google's properties' share of revenue grew much more than its partner sites during the first quarter of 2017.
Parent company Alphabet reported Thursday that Google's own sales from services now contribute more than 80% of the ad revenue generating $17.4 billion in the quarter -- up from $14.3 billion in the year-ago quarter. Revenue from advertising also climbed to $21.4 billion, up from $18 billion.
The increase in Google's revenue from its sites "reflects healthy growth in mobile search," Alphabet CFO Ruth Porat said on an analyst and investor call.
In aggregate, the cost per click in the quarter fell 21%, compared with the first quarter of 2016. CPCs on Google properties fell 21%, and network members by 17%.
Crealytics CEO Andreas Reiffen isn't surprised to see a continued decline in CPCs, but "what’s interesting is that even as click value decreases, Google continues to show growth in its overall advertising revenue."
Always forget there are a lot of great laptops out there.
Samsung Pay is here! Not only USA!
Smart move by apple to extend warranty of 1st gen watches
Why, battery issues!
Some posts on Reddit and on Apple's discussion board talk about how their first-gen Watches' batteries ballooned and displaced the screens like what happened in the image above. It doesn't seem to be a huge issue, and we haven't seen anyone claim that their device exploded or caught fire like Samsung's Galaxy Notes did. Still, it's definitely good to know Apple can help if anything happens to your smartwatch, especially if you bought it when it was first released in 2015.
Google Classroom may get a nice push at other learning options now that it is open!
Last month Google began allowing anyone who has a Gmail address to join Google Classroom classrooms. This week that option was extended to allow anyone who has a Gmail address to create his or her own Google Classroom online classroom.
Teachers who are already using Google Classroom within a G Suite for Education account already know how to create a new classroom. For people who have been waiting to try it, here's what you need to do:
1. Sign-in with your personal Gmail account at classroom.google.com.
2. Click "+" in the upper, right corner of the screen and choose "create a class."
3. Complete the required basic information about your class (title, section, topic).
4. Invite people to join your classroom. To do this select "students" while viewing your classroom. In the "students" section you will find a classroom invitation code that you can distribute. Alternatively, you can invite people to join by sending emails directly from your Google Classroom account.
It is cool to see a sound editor that will work with a chromebook! And I like that this draws on drive! Oh and free!
Beautiful Audio Editor is a free audio editor that you can use in the Chrome and Firefox web browsers. Beautiful Audio Editor lets you record spoken audio directly and or import audio that you have previously recorded in MP3 and WAV formats. You can edit and blend multiple tracks in the Beautiful Audio Editor. When your audio editing project is complete you can download it as an MP3 file, download it as a WAV file, or you can save it in Google Drive.
For the last few years I've recommended using Twisted Wave to record and edit audio on Chromebooks. Beautiful Audio Editor offers more options and is what I'll be using on Chromebooks from here on.
Applications for Education
Beautiful Audio Editor could be a great tool for your students to use to create podcasts on their Chromebooks. The use of multiple track editing will let your students fade-in music or other canned introductions. Likewise, they'll be able to splice in audio samples in the middle of spoken tracks and or under spoken tracks as background music.
A Speech tool to go from text to talk and this could enable new product engagement! Text to speech deep learning service!
Andy Jasse video is great, submit text get MP3 out
47 voices fully managed service, affordable
Emirates Digital Wallet!
Emirates Digital Wallet Launched
Dubai, 30 April 2017: Emirates Digital Wallet, a unique platform established by 16 of the UAE’s leading banks, has been formally launched at the Seamless Middle East conference on 1 and 2 May in Dubai.
Emirates Digital Wallet paves the way for cashless spending, transfer and storage of money for everyone living and working in the UAE. It brings together best practice from a wide variety of payment systems around the world, and provides a unique solution tuned in to the needs and characteristics of the UAE’s local environment.
The new system, to be rolled out as an app from the last quarter of this year, provides a free to use, highly convenient, safe and efficient way of making payments without the use of physical cash. It responds to the UAE’s smart government initiative by providing a simple to use and interconnected payments platform using smartphones and other handheld digital devices.
Emirates Digital Wallet has been developed over the past two years under the umbrella of the UAE Banks Federation, which created a special committee for its member banks to contribute ideas and suggestions to and formulate the ideal solution for the United Arab Emirates. The UAE Central Bank has also played a crucial role in providing advice and guidance on how the platform should be constructed and operate to meet the highest regulatory standards.
Maki Vekinis, General Manager of the Emirates Digital Wallet, says: “This is an exciting and ground breaking project for the UAE. While there are many payments solutions using new technology out there, none have the buy-in of leading national banks, none have been constructed from the ground up in co-ordination with government, and none allow instant transfer of cash to vendors.
“What we are creating is a new cash for the 21stcentury, cash that does not need a visit to an ATM, or cash that does not fill your pocket or wallet. This is a new movement both to reduce and ultimately eliminate cash from the system, and to allow even those without bank accounts to enjoy the convenience, security and peace of mind of having cash without the physical frustration and risks it often entails.”
Emirates Digital Wallet LLC has been incorporated as a company and has a 9 member Board of Directors representing its shareholder banks. Its Chairman is Mohammed Al Jayyash, Chief Service Officer of Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank. It is working with EDC (Electronic Documents Centre – EDC, a joint venture between Emirates Post Group and ABBA Electronics) who has partnered with Master Card to deliver the service. Mastercard is a global leader in creating and opereating payments systems around the world.
Maki Vekinis adds: “We have selected Seamless Middle East as a milestone for the roll out of the Emirates Digital Wallet because of its focus on Payments , Ecommerce and Retail in the region. This conference provides a very fertile environment for us to introduce the system to many of our key stakeholders and partners of the future.”
The trading brand for Emirates Digital Wallet will be announced in the near future.
For more information, please contact Steve Martin tel 054 4497297
Was a cool idea old/new Doritos and Gardians!
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