Here are the stories that caught my attention in the week starting 3rd October 2016.
- Samsung’s Note 7 replacement catches fire; plane is evacuated
Samsung’s woes just got worse when its flagship Galaxy Note 7 burst into flames, when it was already turned off, onboard a Southwest flight. The irony here was that this was a replacement phone from the first batch of faulty phones. Network carriers are now offering free replacements to other handsets.
Such a shame to see this, as I love my Note 5 and I was looking for to upgrading to the Note 7. My reason is because the phone is waterproof – though I will need it to be flame proof too!
- Yahoo caught spying on its users emails for the NSA
This is the first major email provider that has been caught with its fingers in their user’s inbox. They not only gave data to the NSA, but actually helped the NSA do their job by building filtering software to track for certain keywords. This is not good for Yahoo as they try to close the deal with Verizon, who are seeking a $1B discount off the sale price because of the stolen 500M users details.
Email is still our primary link to our digital world – we have to trust our email providers safeguard our precious data. This is 2 major strikes against one of the oldest domains.
- Saving babies lives thanks to IoT
Internet of Things is creating buzz all over the industry at the moment as we look to track everything, and one company, Owlet Baby Care has taken it to your baby. They have developed a sock ($250) that monitors the wee ones heart rate and oxygen levels alerting the parents when things significantly change.
This gives me such joy to see technology coming together so beautifully to save lives in a space where there is much research being done on infant premature death.
- Save yourself – how to avoid being scammed online
The vast majority of security hacks are down to the infallibility of the human – we’re so easily seduced and tricked into doing things we really shouldn’t. A very handy info-graphic was released this week to show all the ways scammers try to seduce you and the very simply steps you can do to present.
Covers all forms of online scams in a very easy digestible format. Do yourself a favor and take a look, and then either feel educated, or smug you already knew it all.
- SalesForce announces an improved IoT offering
The big cloud providers are desperate for your IoT data – Amazon, Google, Microsoft and SalesForce have extremely rich offerings to make it real easy to pump your device data to their cloud. This week was DreamForce in San Francisco, the annual SalesForce love fest, where they announced a number of updates to their Thunder IoT cloud. The main one is marrying up the device data with core data stored in SalesForce.
This is a huge step considering how many companies run exclusively inside of SalesForce. Though price is their achilles heel – running inside SalesForce is not a cheap experience when compared to Amazon.
- Dongle technology finally comes to ordinary credit cards
I am sure you have seen the security dongles that many banks issue for online access to your account. They are small devices that continually generate numbers that you read off and type in to gain access. This technology has now come to credit cards, with France trialing the card that updates the 3 digit number on the back every hour.
While this will complicate our lives a little more, not being able to save the card online for fast purchasers as we will be forced to look at the card and type in the ever-changing 3 digits, it is a small price to pay to be immune from hacks and data dumps.
- VMware throws in the towel; joins Amazon’s cloud
VMware, recently part of Dell, was the early pioneer of virtualization technology that allowed the cloud world to even exist. Like the Yahoo’s of its era, VMware has struggled to compete with the mammoth Amazon offering and this week, we learned that they have finally decided to stop fighting it and now offer their software to run within the Amazon cloud.
This is a huge admission that their own cloud offering is failing to take off and instead of losing out on the customer relationship altogether they have wisely decided to give their clients what they want.
- Keep that new Apple Mac feeling going longer with the Mac candle
Nothing better than that new smell that comes with a car or even a house, but what about the smell from a newly booted Apple Mac? Well for those diehard Apple fanboys they can keep that smell going longer, thanks to a new candle that burns the scent of a new Mac.
Naturally, special order at the moment, until such times that Yankee Candle decides they need a whole range of ‘new unboxing scents’.
and finally, this week’s soundtrack was Passenger’s new album.
alan williamson 