Another week in the world of tech and here are the stories that caught my attention on this week starting 10th October 2016.
- Samsung pull the plug on its flagship Note 7
After all of its woes, and for the first time a manufacturer has done such a step, Samsung have finally stopped making and shipping the Note 7. Too many flames in that smoke. This whole incident will cost the company $5B in real money and likely a more in customer goodwill and brand damage. It is a complete nightmare.
After recalls and units still bursting into flames, the Department of Transport officially ban people from flying with the phone, there is no recovery from this, so Samsung are looking to S8 due out in the 1st quarter of 2017. You can be rest assured the likes of Apple, Google, HTC and LG are looking into the quality of their supply chain.
- Twitter is the house on the block no one wants to buy
The last few weeks had a lot of buzz around the potential buy-out of Twitter by the likes of SalesForce, Google or even Disney. However, all parties have had a deep look at the in’s and out’s and opted to walk away, citing they aren’t the right fit.
This is seriously bad news for Twitter, because if those big players are out of the picture, who else is left that thinks they can monetize this medium that fits between the cracks of social media. Stock price depressed upon this news.
- Yahoo fighting for survival on a number of fronts
Yahoo is trying to close the sale to Verizon, however Verizon are now looking to walk away from the deal due to the huge data security breach of its user base. If that isn’t enough, those people still using @yahoo.com email accounts, discovered this week that Yahoo pulled the feature to auto-forward emails. This effectively is locking people into Yahoo and not making it easy for them to migrate off. As you can appreciate this is infuriating its user base. Yahoo put it back in again at the end of the week, but its excuse was awfully flimsy to why it pulled the feature in the first place.
Marissa Mayer looks to be blundering here at the very time Yahoo needs a strong and determined CEO. She can still save this so the next couple of weeks is going to be crucial.
- Germany votes to ride the combustion engine by 2030
The home of the automobile (BMW, Mercedes, Audi, Porsche) have voted to stop manufacturing and selling traditional gas powered engines by 2030. A bold step but their hopes is to speed up the innovation around alternative fuels. Tesla has already set the bar very high as to what electric cars can do, and Mercedes has declared they will over take Tesla’s innovation in 10 years time.
The reality here is that they looking to have zero-emission engines. Be interesting to see if other countries will follow suit here, but one upside is that we are going into a phase of extremely clean air in our cities.
- Amazon calls bullshit on Oracle’s cloud claims
Oracle has never been shy about its boasts on its own technology. Do you remember the whole ‘Unbreakable Linux’ claim 15 years ago, until it was proven it was indeed breakable? Well Larry Ellison is at it again, claiming that Amazon is 20 years behind Oracle’s cloud and up to 24 times slower. Oh dear.
Well Amazon, who usually do not dignify such claims by getting involved, fired back at Larry. Oracle is desperately trying to be relevant in the cloud space and the reality is that they are the ones that are years too late with too little services too late. Gartner noted that Amazon is 10x bigger than its next 14 competitors combined. There is a reason for this – it works and works very well.
- Morgan Stanley updates its yearly 30 top stocks to look for
Morgan Stanley released the top stocks that they believe will do best when should the economy slow down a little. We have Amazon, Google, Netflix, Facebook in there from the world of big tech. - Netflix will offer offline viewing by year end
Speaking of Netflix, it looks like that they can’t dodge the disconnected offline world we live in and are going to finally allow its content to be downloaded to be viewed later. Applaud Netflix for listening to its paying customers.
This could actually lessen the bandwidth load as people can download quicker in short bursts and then enjoy the content at their leisure in the air for the example.
- The history of the AOL CD
This week, we seen the head of sales leave AOL, reminding us all that AOL still exists (part of Verizon if you recall). You have to wonder just how hard a job that is, when you have a brand that people associate most with is dial-up internet access and their infamous CD ROM.Mental Floss published a fascinating look back at the history of the CD ROM this week.
and finally, this week’s audible distraction was provided by Nate Ruess and his, Grand Romantic album released last summer.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Uber drivers take selfies before they come for you
Actors can remove their age from IMDB
Google Pixel laptop will merge Android with Chrome OS
Plex & Amazon teams up to offer Plex cloud
We finally learn what #slack means
IOT devices create the largest BOT net
Where are all the Fortune 500 companies headquartered?
Blackberry finally gets out of making handsets
… and finally why do airplanes still have ashtrays?
Tesla releases v8.0
Premium Gas may be a waste of money
Resist plugging in that unknown USB
23andMe offers $99 DNA test kit
Google/SalesForce eyes up Twitter
Can SnapChat succeed where Google Glass failed?
Google Home will be $50 cheaper than Amazon’s Echo
alan williamson 