The second week of the year comes with a number of interesting stories that caught my attention.
- The car industry is trying to redefine itself in this modern day age, with Cadillac throwing its hat into the ring with a new $1500 a month service that lets you pick and choose your cars as often as you wish
- Those crazy Ozzy boys down under, Atlassian, have gone added to their services by buying the popular project management service, Tello service for $425M. They promise not to fiddle with it too much.
- The fate of Yahoo has not yet been decided as Verizon still continue their will-they-or-won’t-they game, but Mayer has resigned from the board as Yahoo is renamed Atlaba
- The fight for your seats in the air, JetBlue has upped the ante by offering free broadband in the air. Come on United, do the same thing will ya?
- Pandora is still struggling to compete with the plethora of streaming services, as it sheds 7% of its workforce to cut costs
- Banana’s are on the brink of extinction if you can believe that? Our beloved yellow fruit has developed a disease that is proving hard to beat
- Seems like everyone is getting into the electric car business. James Dyson has thrown his hat into the ring. And why not? It isn’t a huge leap from expensive vacuum cleaners to automobile!
- We all know 3D printers are cool, but how about a bio 3D printer? One that prints body parts on demand. Star Trek future is coming faster than anyone ever predicted.
… and this weeks soundtrack was from the early 90’s, as New Kids On The Block was rediscovered as it was popped up in a YouTube evening.
This is a new twist in the cyber extortion world. We all know about how malware can target a machine and start deleting files if they do not pay a given amount of money to the hackers. Well there is a way to sidestep this payment – that is to infect 2 other people and if they succumb you will get an unlock key and you are off the hook.
Verizon who previously said they wouldn’t get involved in the deactivation of Samsung’s infamous flame bursting phone have reversed their decision and in an upcoming software update they will disable people from charging the phone. This will effectively render them useless.
Cisco’s ‘Intercloud’ which had a $1B budget behind it will be closing its doors in March 2017. While it has not 
Slack, the very popular corporate chat system, has finally added video calling to its suite. This brings it inline with pretty much every other chat system. You can do one-2-one video calling, or group calling.
The oldest property on the Internet block is just not having a good time of it. They have released details of an earlier attack, circa 2013, where over 1 billion accounts were compromised. This is in addition to the 2014 hack where 500 million accounts were abused.
We are all starting to get use to the faceless helpers such as Amazon’s Echo, or Apple’s Siri. Well GateBox have upped the ante here and offered up a hologram to respond to your every move. While this may first appear creepy, it does make a lot of sense, to have something more contextual to react to instead of just a voice. The avatar can feedback using actions which will speed up the interactions.
The man that invented one of the most famous anti-choking moves in the world, has sadly passed away at the age of 96. Henry invented the technique in 1974 when he discovered an alarming number of people died while eating out. He died of natural causes, as opposed to choking himself – the irony would have been too much.
A company in the UK has developed a USB stick that can detect the amount of HIV in the blood within 20 minutes, with 88% accuracy. This is a huge improvement on the ‘try-at-home’ mouth swab self testing kits that are currently available. No hint of availability or cost.
Last weekend, cyber thieves managed to successfully siphon off £2.5M from 9000 online accounts. There is no official how so far, but experts have stepped forward noting their mobile apps had some possible problems, coupled with a potential insider who was apparently selling access in the dark web.
This one is turning out to be the tech equivalent of will they or won’t they Mulder and Scully love affair. After discovering a huge data breach (500M accounts) was lost and some inside Yahoo knew this before the deal was signed, Verizon are being very coy and stroking their chins deciding on whether to continue with the $4.8B deal.
This week, head of security at Facebook gave a talk on security noting that the biggest problem facing security today, is that users are still using the same password across all their online properties. To help them fight this, they have bought password lists from hackers in the dark web to run them against their database to flag such people and have them update accordingly.
One of America’s most loved sports is in chaos as ratings plunge. NFL Commissioner has come out and said the game needs to change because people are just not willing to wait anymore. Continual timeouts, stoppages, ads (70 per game!!) are all adding up to a frustration that are turning people off the game. The Netflix ‘ad-free uninterrupted experience‘ culture is being blamed.
Ever since Concorde got grounded 13 years ago, we’ve had no way to get around the planet at any faster than 575 mph commercially speaking. However a new company, Boom Super Sonic has emerged stating they could begin flying us back and forth as early as 2020, for as little as $2500.
To know love, we first must suffer pain and BA is going to help us with that after reading about supersonic jets. They plan to add an extra seat to every row, increasing the number of seats in a standard 777 to 332 from 280.
As I’ve noted before, Snapchat is getting into the wearables market with a pair of sunglasses that can record 10 seconds of video for only $140 a pair (compared to the $1500 of the Google Glass experiment). This week they tested the market with a stealth pop-up kiosk selling the first run of units.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
alan williamson 