First week of the last month, we see BMW locking bad people up, Apple Watch sales fall dead, Amazon legalizes shoplifting, Bluetooth gets faster, Canada gets a data center, Java 9 may slip, clues to how Samsung built a fire starter and a true legion is no longer in this world.
- BMW remotely locked a thief in the car until the fuzz came
Finally a great story about why connected cars matters to everyone. Seattle Police were helped by BMW when it was reported that someone had taken the opportunity of the owners carelessness with their key vob to drive off with the car.
Unlucky for him though, it was a high-end BMW that could remotely be controlled and the car was locked from the outside, trapping the light finger bugger inside until PSA (Police Side Assistance) came!
- Sales of Apple watches plunge; down 71% from last year
While we have the likes of FitBit buying up Pebble for $40M last week, we see that Apple is not having a great time of it with its range of wearables. Sales are down a whopping 71% compared to the same quarter last year.
You would think maybe the market for wearables is showing signs of weakness, but you would be wrong, everyone else’s shipping is up. Guess Apple just can’t compete with the competition/value.
- Amazon Go, launches the mother of all big brother shops
Picture a futuristic shop, where you walk in, browse around looking at merchandise and then if you want it, you simply take it and as soon as you walk out the door, you are billed for.
No waiting in line, no handling of cash, no annoying bagger asking if you want your bags carried (well that bit may still be there). This is Amazon Go, a new grocery shop opening in Seattle next year. Register on your phone, then boom as soon as you walk out you are billed. It is like legal shoplifting!
- It’s a go, Bluetooth 5 finally launches and it’s even more powerful
Bluetooth, the favourite short range network that connects your headphones and car to your phone (and also a great way to spam out obscene messages to anyone that tries to search for open networks).Bluetooth 5 has 4 times the range and more bandwidth, meaning you can walk further away from your phone and stream more data!
New phones will start supporting this very soon. I just want it to work from my jean pocket to my headphone, not a huge ask.
- Amazon Web Services opens its first Canadian region
The world’s largest cloud provider has opened its first region north of the border, namely in Canada – you know the unofficial 51st state. The Canadian region supports all the big services of AWS and will be a boom for any company operating up there, as well as being able to keep the data out of the hands of the American government.
AWS has a huge footprint, with pretty much every major region in the world covered with a data center – Canada is a little late to the party considering how close it is.
- Java 9 looks to slip release date of the July 2017
One of Java’s biggest releases to date, may be at risk of slipping a few months from its target release date of July 2017. Java 9 has many big features coming in, with one of the biggest ones Jigsaw. Jigsaw is the modular run time to make it easier to ship Java into smaller and more manageable pieces.
This one shouldn’t concern the masses at all. Java is such a key component of our eco-system it is vital they get it right, not get it on time.
- Clues are emerging on why the Samsung kept catching fire
A manufacturing company has made a claim that the Note 7’s internal layout and design maybe fundamentally flawed as it has attempted to cram too much into a small space and not left the usual 10% gap between battery. Thus when compressed, for example, by heat expansion or someone’s fat arse sitting on the phone, two points touch that shouldn’t be touched, and boom!
It is yet to be seen whether Samsung will ever officially release a reason as to why its flagship phone burst into flames. But until then, this is the most credible scientific one to date.
- A true space hero dies, John Glenn departs this world for the last time
John Glenn, a pioneer of the space race, has sadly died this week at the ripe old age of 95 years. Glenn was the first American to fully orbit the earth, and also, the oldest many to travel to space at 77 years.
But his notable records aside, Glenn was part of that era that took humans off this planet and gave us the inspiration and stepping stone to explore further. This generation of people, hold a very dear place in my heart.
… and this week’s soundtrack is dedicated to the excellent HBO’s Westworld that officially ended its first season run this week. Every so often a TV show comes along that is so well written, produced and acted that each episode is simply a piece of art to be enjoyed. If you haven’t watched it yet, then please treat yourself. Now for the bad news- season 2 won’t be here until 2018.
Last weekend, there was an attack on the network that controls San Francisco’s MUNI transit system, resulting in everyone getting free rides at the weekend, since the gates were free to walk through.
Sometimes it is good old fashioned human error that can take networks offline. This time it was a ship’s anchor dragging along the floor bed of the sea, that snagged 3 fibre optic cables, ripping them apart, resulting in the islands links to the UK cut.
This was the week that Netflix finally relented to continued pressure and released an update to its mobile apps to allow for users to download content for viewing offline.
FitBit has added to its portfolio by acquiring the struggling smartwatch manufacturer, Pebble. Pebble came to prominence many years ago as a big winner of KickStarter that help raise millions and get it started. I was one of such early investor.
No denying it, Amazon is doing terribly well in the cloud space, on track to book $13B in revenue this financial year. They are adding more servers daily, than it took to run the whole AWS cloud in 2003.
No small change, but the Central Bank of Russia, has been compromised with $31M being removed through fraudulent client accounts. This one could easily not be anything that sophisticated but merely relied on social hacking – the ability to convince another human you someone you are not.
Got to love the land of the free; you are free to buy a gun that can result in untold mayhem, but don’t you dare buy small magnetic balls that you might swallow, resulting in them being attracted to large magnets, you know, like an MRI machine!
Barely a week goes by when we don’t learn of a hack of some sort, but this one takes the prize for the largest number of users affected in 2016 at 412M users. This haul included passwords, in both clear and (weak) hashed format. The issue here is of course that the vast majority of people repeat their email/passwords combinations, opening them up for not only blackmail, but identify theft.
When we hear of Denial of Server attacks, we picture 1000’s of independent machines infected with a piece of malware that saturate a servers infrastructure. Well that may not be the case anymore if researchers from TDC Security are to believed.
With all the news this week about fake news stories on Google and Facebook you would think you can take solace that something as mechanical as a car won’t betray you. Think again – those pesky German VW software engineers have been caught with their compilers down again – this time with the Audi brand.
Yes, Amazon are getting into the automotive business, by offering 3 Fiat models on their Italian website. If you recall they announced a few months ago, 
With Amazon getting into the car selling business, Tesla is now in the solar business after shareholders overwhelming approved the acquisition. All gone crazy! At first blush, a car company buying a solar panel maker makes absolutely no sense. However, to understand this you need to buy-in to Elon Musk’s vertical transport energy company (car + battery + solar).
What is a Russian recruiter to do now?!? Russia has added LinkedIn to the list of foreign sites that are no longer accessible to the average Russian user. LinkedIn has succumb to that law that dictates that any company storing personal Russian citizen data need to have those servers hosted within Russia. LinkedIn does not.
File this under, #finally. Skype is a great service, but requires both parties to have a Skype account to really benefit. Not any longer. Microsoft have finally relented and can offer Skype call sessions via a web browser, single unique link experience.
Dang naggit the US DoT has gone ruined one of the best bits of fun you can have in an electric car – that is sneaking up on runners in your neighborhood, dogs also fall into that category. They now want all cars that can run silent to emit a sound while they are under 19 mph.
There seems to be no logic to the stock market at times. It was 
Just as it is sweeping up the literal ashes of its fire starter Note 7, another safety scandal has beset the South Korean company – its washing machines may have a tendency to have bits come flying off. Machines from 2011 and 2016 are being recalled as the number of people to report injury from laundry mounts.
Can you believe the Hubble telescope is 26 years old? So it comes as no surprise that NASA has been spending time (and $8.7B) on creating an update to it, called the James Webb telescope. This 18 carat gold plated beauty is extremely powerful and makes the current Hubble look like a 1st generation Kodak compared to today’s high end smartphone cameras.
It has taken a while to get this one over the line, but Oracle’s big push into the accountancy SaaS world will be complete this Monday, when it completes the $9.3B purchase of NetSuite.
In another quarterly earnings report, GoPro had a rough week with its investors, as it announced that it is not as bullish on the number of units it expects to sell. GoPro point towards production problems that are not allowing them to make the volume they want to.
Is the genius in the physical pairing of the classic Billy Bass talking fish with a Raspberry PI and Amazon’s Alexa? Or is the genius simply coming up with the idea in the first place?
There are certain problems you would have thought that should have been solved by now. The light bulb we never have to change or bicycle tires that never go flat. Oh wait a minute, scratch that last one, this week we can put a check box against that.
It was a long standing rumor for many years that Apple was getting into the electric car business, competing head on with Tesla. Bloomberg announced this week that the project that headed up this initiative has been dismantled with many lay-offs coming.
While we are on the subject of electric cars, Elon Musk teased the internet for a week about a big announcement and this Wednesday he held a press conference and demonstrated a Model X driving by itself from home to the office. The video is extremely impressive and worth the watch, complete with Rolling Stones theme.
While Samsung are figuring out how to rebuild its reputation Apple’s latest flagship handset, the iPhone 7, has had a couple of reports of it bursting into the flames. They haven’t officially commented on this, only to say they are investigating this thoroughly.
The king of gamers for the masses have set the standard again with its latest Switch device. Just as the Wii appealed to everyone, Nintendo are hoping to capture that same family appeal with the Switch. Think of the Wii and the 3DS and then put that in a portable, multi-player handset and you have something that could catch on.
The previous week, we had DNS provider, hover.com, go offline due to a massive DoS attack on its servers. This week it was the turn of Dyn who were the target of the same attack that knocked out many of the big players, including Twitter, Amazon and Spotify.
This week Microsoft’s stock was at its highest after a very good earnings call this week detailing that all its subscription services are way above expectations, with the enterprise suite Dynamics getting most of that attention.
The real big news of the week, was that a real piece of movie history, the Ark of the Covenant, went on display at Walt Disney World Hollywood in Orlando. You can view this legendary prop while you are queuing for the Great Hollywood Movie Ride, though you will be forgiven for just queuing and not making it to the ride.
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.
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.
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.
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.
alan williamson 