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iPhone SE 2 could be imminent

brainyalk@gmail.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 19 Apr 2018 08:58:00 -0700

iPhone SE 2 could be imminent

This source has a strong track record

The sequel to the original iPhone SE may be tied to 11 different variants of a mystery device registered with the Eurasian Economic Commission database this week.

The Eurasian agency has a strong track record of outing Apple products one to two months before launch, notes 9to5Mac. That puts us in WWDC 2018 territory.

Yes, Apple is almost certainly working on the iPhone X2, iPhone X2 Plus and cheaper iPhone LCD models right now, but those phones aren't expected until September.

11 different iPhone SE models?

The iPhone SE 2 seems like an obvious choice given the fact that people still want a one-hand-friendly iPhone at a cheaper price, and since the original SE is two years old, it's getting slower by the day.

The biggest mystery is that 11 different models were registered in the filing. It's easy to speculate that Apple may launch two internal storage sizes and various colors.

There's also a chance that Apple could launch a new iPhone X color, like a Product Red iPhone X or that newly 'found' gold iPhone X that never launched.

We haven't seen credible multi-colored iPhone SE 2 leaks in recent months, but that may change in the lead up to Apple's WWDC keynote on June 4.

GOOGLE'S NEW AI HEAD IS SO SMART HE DOESN'T NEED AI

brainyalk@gmail.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 19 Apr 2018 08:53:00 -0700

in artificial intelligence has helped the company’s software write music and beat humans at complex board games. What unlikely feats could be next? The company’s new head of AI says he’d like to see Google move deeper into areas such as healthcare. He also warns that the company will face some tricky ethical questions over appropriate uses for AI as it expands its use of the technology.

The new AI boss at Google is Jeff Dean. The lean 50-year-old computer scientist joined the company in 1999, when it was a startup less than one year old. He earned a reputation as one of the industry’s most talented coders by helping Google become a computational powerhouse with new approaches to databases and large-scale data analysis. Google colleagues once created a joke website of “Jeff Dean facts,” including his purported role in accelerating the speed of light. Another had it that Dean doesn’t really exist—he’s an advanced AI created by Jeff Dean.

Dean helped ignite Silicon Valley’s AI boom when he joined Google’s secretive X lab in 2011 to investigate an approach to machine learning known as deep neural networks. The project produced software that learned to recognize cats on YouTube. Google went on to use deep neural networks to greatly improve the accuracy of its speech recognition service, and has since made the technique the heart of the company’s strategy for just about everything.

The cat-video project morphed into a research group called Google Brain, which Dean has led since 2012. He ascended to head the company’s AI efforts early this month after John Giannandrea left to lead Apple’s AI projects.

Dean’s new job puts him at the helm of perhaps the world’s foremost AI research operation. The group churns out research papers on topics such as creating more realistic synthetic voices and teaching robots to grasp objects.

But Dean and his group are also on the hook to invent the future of Google’s business. CEO Sundar Pichai describes the company’s strategy as “AI first,” saying that everything the company does will build on the technology.

One way Dean hopes to help is by conjuring up new lines of business. Google’s AI research has so far mostly been used to improve or expand existing products, such as search and smartphone software. “New machine learning capabilities or research results might enable us to do new things that Google doesn't now,” says Dean. “Health is one that's pretty far along in this direction.”

Dean wouldn’t discuss details. But two Google research projects offer clues. The company is testing software in India that can detect a complication of diabetes that causes blindness, and has also tested software that looks for signs of breast cancer on microscope slides. The FDA has begun cautiously approving AI software that helps doctors make medical decisions.

Success in healthcare could help diversify the business of a company that, despite broad interests, relies heavily on advertising. In 2017, almost 90 percent of parent company Alphabet’s revenue came from ads.

Dean is also excited about automating artificial intelligence—using machine-learning software to build machine-learning software. “It could be a huge enabler of the benefits of machine learning,” Dean says. “The current state is that machine learning expertise is relatively in short supply.”

Google dubs that meta-AI project AutoML. Dean says Alphabet’s self-driving car division Waymo has been testing the technology to improve its vision systems. AutoML is also at the core of a new cloud service of the same name that helps companies create customized image-recognition systems.

Longer term, Dean thinks automatic AI could enable robots to figure out how to cope with unfamiliar situations, such as opening a type of bottle cap they haven’t seen before. Despite successes on narrow tasks, AI researchers have struggled to make machines capable of many different thing. Dean says AutoML could bring about “really intelligent, adaptable systems that can tackle a new problem in the world when you don't have exposure of how to tackle it.”

More powerful AI systems will also lead Google into new, uncertain moral ground. Some researchers at the company are working on how to ensure that machine-learning systems don’t breach societal expectations of fairness. In 2015, Google’s photo-organizing product tagged some images of black people as gorillas, and the service has been blind to searches for the black apes ever since.

Google also faces other ethical decisions over allowing customers to tap its AI skills. The same week Dean took over Google’s top AI role, the New York Times reported that thousands of Google employees had signed a letter protesting a contract with the Pentagon that applies AI to interpret video from drones.

Dean declines to comment on the project’s details, but suggests it’s more a pointer to future ethical questions than an immediate moral challenge. “The actual project is relatively mundane, sort of assembling a bunch of existing open source components together, but it does I think give us pause as a company about what we want our role to be,” Dean says. “There's a wide range of views in the company about what we should be doing there.”

Google’s AI Adventures

Google's CEO says AI will influence everything the company does, a strategy he dubs “AI First.”
There’s a shortage of people who know how to build AI systems, so Google researchers are trying to automate their own skills.
Google blinds its Photos service to gorillas to prevent it labeling some humans as apes.

THIS RADIO HACKER COULD HIJACK CITYWIDE EMERGENCY SIRENS TO PLAY ANY SOUND

brainyalk@gmail.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 16 Apr 2018 07:01:00 -0700

At exactly noon on the first Tuesday after Balint Seeber moved from Silicon Valley to San Francisco in late 2015, the Australian radio hacker and security researcher was surprised to discover a phenomenon already known to practically every other resident of the city: a brief, piercing wail that rose and then fell, followed by a man's voice: "This is a test. This is a test of the outdoor warning system. This is only a test."

The next week, at exactly the same time, Seeber heard it again. A few weeks after that, Seeber found himself staring up from his bicycle at a utility pole in the city's SoMa neighborhood, examining one of the more than 100 sirens that produced that inescapable emergency test message around the city. At the top, he noticed a vertical antenna; it seemed to be receiving signals via radio, not wires. The thought came to him: Could a hacker like him hijack that command system to trigger all the sirens around the whole city at will, or to use them to broadcast even more alarming sounds?

Spoofable SirensNow, after two-and-a-half years of patiently recording and reverse-engineering those weekly radio communications, Seeber has indeed found that he or anyone with a laptop and a $35 radio could not only trigger those sirens, as unknown hackers did in Dallas last year. They could also make them play any audio they choose: false warnings of incoming tsunamis or missile strikes, dangerous or mass-panic-inducing instructions, 3 am serenades of death metal or Tony Bennett. And he has found the same hackable siren systems not only in San Francisco but in two other cities, as well as hints they may be installed in many more. "If you wanted to send out your own music or your own alert, you could broadcast it across entire cities," Seeber says. "You could do it with something as cheap and easy as a handheld radio you can buy from Amazon."

On Tuesday, security firm Bastille, where Seeber works as director of vulnerability research, went public with his discovery that the emergency siren equipment sold by Boston-based ATI Systems in all three cities Bastille tested lacked the basic encryption necessary to prevent any prankster or saboteur from commandeering the system. In San Francisco, Wichita, Kansas, and another city that Bastille declined to name, Seeber was able to read and fully reproduce the transmissions to those siren systems. By bouncing that signal through a repeater near the center of each city's network, Seeber believes he could have gained control over the citywide collection of sirens, each one capable of pumping out as much as 135 decibels, according to Bastille's estimates, more than the noise of four jackhammers combined.

What Hearings? Advertisers Still Love Facebook

brainyalk@gmail.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 16 Apr 2018 06:58:00 -0700

AFTER 10 HOURS of verbal flogging by an incensed Congress, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg seemed like a leader whose pedestal had cracked. Over and over during his testimony this week, he apologized for lapses in his company’s handling of user data. He emerged from the hearings with months’ worth of homeworkfor him and his team.

But life’s not so bad for Zuckerberg. His exhaustive, highly publicized grilling appears to have had minimal impact on the one thing that ultimately gives Facebook its power: its popularity among advertisers.

“There’s still a very positive outlook from the industry overall and the belief that Facebook will continue to be a trustworthy partner,” says Angela Seits, director of social media and influencer marketing at the advertising agency PMG.

Not only do they see the platform as principled, “a couple of my clients have actually shifted more money towards Facebook,” says Shuman Sahu, director of performance media at ad agency Nina Hale.

With advertisers still eager to use Facebook’s services, the company’s business model stays intact and its dominance as a social network and an advertising behemoth remains assured. The few brands that have abandoned Facebook recently—Pep Boys, Mozilla, Sonos (for a week)—are just making a statement, says Brian Wieser, a senior analyst at Pivotal Research Group. “They’re thinking, here’s a good opportunity to say something about our values.”

Of course, Facebook is appealing to marketers only as long as people keep using the platform, which for the most part they are. A survey of Facebook users by Cowen Equity Research published Thursday found that people spent, on average, 53 minutes per day on the platform in the first quarter of 2018, down from 58 minutes a year earlier. Though the decline is significant, the report’s authors note that no other social platform comes close. Cowen's data put Snapchat in second place with users spending 33 minutes per day on it, followed closely by Facebook-owned Instagram with 32 minutes.

“The vast majority of people on Facebook have very little knowledge,” of the company’s expansive data collection habits, says Steve Buors, cofounder and CEO of Reshift Media, a digital marketing company. “We’re talking about it, people in the industry are talking about it. But if you look at the average person, they are not talking about it nearly enough.” Though the #deleteFacebook movement gained enough momentum to attract celebrities like Steve Wozniak, Cher and Elon Musk, it hasn’t hit mainstream culture, a strong signal that the social network’s brand remains untarnished among the constituencies advertisers care about.

A big reason is most people never dig into—or care about—how Facebook makes money. It does so not only by collecting users’ actions and likes on the platform but by tracking their activity across the web. If a person clicks on a Facebook ad for a certain shop and later buys an item at that brand’s brick-and-mortar store, Facebook will likely find out. Users of its Messenger app will have their texts and phone call histories stowed away in the social network’s massive data centers.

All that data serves an overarching purpose: to connect people the world over, sure—but also to help advertisers place their ads in front of receptive audiences. The fees Facebook charges for the service fuels its unparalleled engine of prosperity. In 2017, Facebook amassed $40.6 billion in revenue, almost all of it from advertising, and analysts predict it will score approximately $55 billion this year.

Still, the backlash against Facebookand its peers over their privacy missteps is causing the tech giants to change how they handle users’ data. The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation, which goes into effect on May 25, has pushed Facebook to modify its rules around advertising in ways that will likely diminish its effectiveness in the short term. Among the changes, Facebook has promised to remove some options for targeting ads to specific groups, such as by age or race, to prohibit discrimination. Investigations by ProPublica found marketers could choose to only show housing ads to white users or exclude older people from seeing job ads.

Another change will hit a product called Custom Audiences, a tool wielded expertly by President Trump’s digital campaign. Marketers had long enjoyed the ability to plug an email list into Facebook’s advertising dashboard and produce a pool of Facebook users similar to the people on the email list, a useful way to target potential customers. Soon the rules will become stricter, requiring marketers to get explicit consent to use those email addresses. Many advertisers will have to shorten their email lists as a result, causing the pool of so-called lookalikes to shrink significantly. But even with these changes, Buors says, “They are so far ahead of other platforms in their tools and their specificity that they are still the best option.”

“It’s the two billion users,” says Sahu. No other platform has the reach and the variety of ad formats that Facebook can offer, he says. Facebook and Google combined will account for more than 65 percent of digital ad revenue in 2018, estimates research firm eMarketer. Sahu likens the current moment to a milder version of YouTube’s image crisis a year ago, when companies boycotted the platform after their products showed up alongside hate speech and extremist content. But the downturn in advertising was soon reversed, and marketers today are once again happy to spend a significant chunk of their budgets on the video site. “Essentially, these platforms are too big to fail.”

That pedestal Zuckerberg occupies? Its cracks are healing as you read.

GOOGLE'S NEW AD BLOCKER CHANGED THE WEB BEFORE IT EVEN SWITCHED ON

brainyalk@gmail.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 19 Feb 2018 08:28:00 -0800

You might see fewer ads on the web from now on. But you probably won't.

On Thursday, Google Chrome, the most popular browser by a wide margin, began rolling out a feature that will block adson sites that engage in particularly annoying behavior, such as automatically playing sound, or displaying ads that can't be dismissed until a certain amount of time has passed. Google is essentially blacklisting sites that violate specific guidelines, and then trying to filter all ads that appear on those sites, not just the particularly annoying ones.

Despite the advance hype, the number of sites Chrome will actually block ads on turns out to be quite small. Of the 100,000 most popular sites in North America and Europe, fewer than one percent violate the guidelines Google uses to decide whether to filter ads on a site, a Google spokesperson tells WIRED.

But even if Chrome never blocks ads on a page you visit, Google's move has already affected the web. The company notified sites in advance that they would be subject to the filtering, and 42 percent made preemptive changes, the spokesperson says, including Forbes, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, and In Touch Weekly.

It may seem strange that Google, which still makes most of its revenue from advertising, blocks ads at all, especially since the company says it will even block those served by its own ad networks. But Google hopes ridding the web of its very worst ads might discourage Chrome users from installing more aggressive ad-blocking software that saps revenue universally.

A survey published by the industry group Interactive Advertising Bureau in 2016 found that about 26 percent of web users had installed ad-blockers on their computers, and about 15 percent had ad-blockers on their smartphones. Respondents gave a variety of reasons for blocking ads, including privacy concerns, page load times, and visual clutter.

Your ultimate fitness guide

brainyalk@gmail.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 27 Jan 2018 03:00:00 -0800

Watch our full beginner's guide video to fitness tech:

DJI Mavic Air review

brainyalk@gmail.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 27 Jan 2018 02:57:00 -0800

The DJI Mavic Air is the foldable drone that's so compact yet so powerful that it's ready to slip out of your jacket pocket and record your next adventure in 4K video. You don't have to choose one over the other in 2018.

That's the futuristic-sounding idea behind this new consumer drone, which is more sophisticated than the DJI Spark and priced cheaper than the DJI Mavic Pro.

The Mavic Air hovers that perfect middle-ground offering, high-end specs and a lower-end price, even if this shiny new gadget remains an expensive investment.

It has just about every bell and whistle you could ever ask for, according to our initial tests, from 12MP photos to 32MP panoramic pictures to 21-minute battery life.

Importantly, the DJI Mavic Air is easy to fly thanks to improved object avoidance systems and gesture controls, giving this drone more mainstream appeal.

SCIENCE SAYS FITNESS TRACKERS DON'T WORK. WEAR ONE ANYWAY

brainyalk@gmail.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 4 Jan 2018 09:09:00 -0800

Personal Technology is getting a bad rap these days. It keeps getting more addictive: Notifications keep us glued to our phones. Autoplaying episodes lure us into Netflix binges. Social awareness cues—like the "seen-by" list on Instagram Stories—enslave us to obsessive, ouroboric usage patterns. (Blink twice if you've ever closed Instagram, only to re-open it reflexively.) Our devices, apps, and platforms, experts increasingly warn, have been engineered to capture our attention and ingrain habits that are (it seems self evident) less than healthy.

Unless, that is, you're talking about fitness trackers. For years, the problem with Fitbits, Garmins, Apple Watches, and their ilk has been that they aren't addictive enough. About one third of people who buy fitness trackers stop using them within six months, and more than half eventually abandon them altogether.

As for that guy at work whose Fitbit appears to be bionically integrated with his wrist, it's unclear whether wearing the thing actually makes him more fit. Most studies on the effectiveness of fitness trackers have produced weak or inconclusive findings (blame short investigation windows and small, homogenous sample sizes). In fact, two of the most well-designed studies to date have turned up less than stellar results.

The first, a randomized controlled trial involving 800 test subjects, was conducted between June, 2013 and August, 2014. The results, which were published lastyear in The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology, found that, after one year of use, a clip-on activity tracker had no effect on test subjects' overall health and fitness—even when it was combined with a financial incentive. (In a perverse twist, volunteers whose incentives were removed six months into the study fared worse, in the long run, than those who were never offered them at all.) The second, an RCT out of the University of Pittsburgh conducted between October 2010 and October 2012, examined whether combining a weight loss program with a fitness tracker, worn on the upper arm, could help test subjects lose more weight or improve their overall health. The results, published last year in the Journal of the American Medical Association, showed that subjects without fitness trackers lost more weight than their gadget-wearing counterparts—a difference of about eight pounds. And while it's true that weight is not a great proxy for health, the findings also showed that the test subjects with fitness trackers were no more active or fit than those without.

All of which is, frankly, pretty embarrassing for companies that manufacture fitness devices—not to mention disquieting for the people who wear them.

And yet, none of this means you should ditch your fancy new fitness tracker. Have companies like Fitbit and Garmin been slow to incorporate sticky features into their products? Yes. Unequivocally. By 2013—the year Apple brought attention-enslaving push notifications to its phones’ lock screens, and around the time the Lancet study was getting off the ground—fitness trackers and their accompanying apps had only just begun to leverage theories from psychology and behavioral economics. But today's products are different.

The fact is, most existing studies on fitness trackers—including the two I cited above—hinge on devices that are several years old. (Think glorified pedometers that don't connect seamlessly with the supercomputer in your pocket.) And while peer-reviewed research on the latest wave of workout gadgets is still sparse, signs suggest newer wearables are finally becoming more addictive.

For starters, wearable fitness trackers themselves have turned into wildly capable machines. It's no longer enough to measure steps and active minutes; features like sleep-tracking and 24/7 heart rate monitoring have also become table stakes. So, too, have the beefy batteries necessary to make features like continuous heart-rate detection worth a damn. Fitbit's newest "motivating timepiece," the Ionic, can go four days between charges. The Fenix 5, Garmin's flagship fitness watch, can last up to two weeks.

"If it's comfortable, it's waterproof, the display's always readable, and it's got a long battery life, there's less excuse for people to take it off," says Phil McClendon, Garmin's lead product manager. For technology companies, few metrics matter more than engagement. Application developers call it time in app.nging."

Amazon Echo is three times as popular as Google Home, says new sales research

brainyalk@gmail.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 23 Dec 2017 04:05:00 -0800

The smart speaker market has gone from strength to strength over 2017, with loads of new devices and brands entering the fray. But when it comes to pure sales, it appears that a clear leader is emerging, and that's Amazon.

According to Consumer Intelligence Research Partners, Amazon's Echo devices are shipping at a rate of three to one when compared to its nearest rival, Google Home. According to the report, that puts sales at an estimated 20 million for the Amazon Echo range, versus 7 million for Google Home.

The numbers have been collated up to September 2017, which means the all-important Black Friday and Christmas sales periods have not been factored in. But given the growing brand awareness around the Echo line, and the fact that Amazon consistently pushes tempting deals around its smart speakers, it'd be hard to imagine that ratio having shifted dramatically in the meantime.

More to come

Both Google and Amazon have expanded their smart speaker offerings this year. Amazon revamped its existing Echo, and added the Echo Spot, Echo Plus and Echo Show to its stable that already included the diminutive Echo Dot. Google also put out the Google Home Mini and Google Home Max, each powered by its Google Assistant.

Increasingly, the two companies' smart assistants were seen propping up third party speaker feature lists too, with the likes of Sonos, JBL and Sony all adding either Google or Amazon voice-activated smarts to their wares.

But next year will be the true test of Amazon's dominance. Not only will Apple's long-awaited HomePod hit shelves, but Samsung's own smart speaker line, powered by its Bixby helper, is expected to make a big push, too. It'll be very interesting to see if the dial has shifted by this same time next year, when all the major players have set out their respective stalls

Huawei P11 release date, news and rumors

brainyalk@gmail.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 23 Dec 2017 04:00:00 -0800

The Huawei P11 is a promising flagship smartphone, as the Chinese firm finished off 2017 strongly with the Mate 10 and Mate 10 Pro.

[Update: The latest Huawei P11 rumors suggest it'll see a February 2018 launch, and will arrive sporting technology similar to Face ID from the iPhone X.]

Huawei has improved its smartphones every year, and it's now at the point where it's seriously challenging the established names in the mobile game.

It's the Huawei P11 which is the next big hitter to step up to the plate, and it builds on the well rounded, if a little unspectacular Huawei P10 from early 2017.

The Huawei P11 launch could be just a couple of months away now.

AirPods are sold out until January 2018 online and in many stores

brainyalk@gmail.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 23 Dec 2017 03:52:00 -0800

If you’re hoping to see a set of Apple’s AirPods under the tree this year, you may find yourself reenacting the Arnold Schwarzenegger classic Jingle All The Way. The Bluetooth earphones are selling out online and in stores.

If you want to buy straight from the source, Apple is now shipping any new orders of AirPods in January. The official Apple site – on the US side – claims that orders will be fulfilled in seven working days which (at the time of writing) is after Christmas but still in 2017.

When you actually click through to select a delivery date and enter your Zip Code, however, you’re given a delivery date in January. On the UK side, you don’t even get that far, with the site claiming the first delivery will be January 2.

What’s more, third-party retailers are also selling out, with online retailers estimating January shipping and physical stores appearing short on stock too. Long story short, it’s worth heading to your local Apple store as soon as you can to see if they still have any.

Magic Leap One finally revealed: augmented reality goggles coming 2018

brainyalk@gmail.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 23 Dec 2017 03:45:00 -0800

Magic Leap has finally revealed the Magic Leap One, its first consumer-orientated augmented reality goggles, are set to release to the public in 2018. After years of hype with very little sign of a product to match, it now seems the company is ready to unleash its AR technology upon the world.

Similar in principle to Microsoft's HoloLens, the Magic Leap One is worn around the head and over the eyes, but looks more like a pair of ski goggles than the VRor mixed reality headsets we've seen previously. Shipping with a handheld pointer controller, the unit works independently of a games console or phone, instead sharing processing duties between a computer embedded in the goggles, and a separate processing unit that sits in a puck that can be worn on a belt or in a shoulder pad.

That puck is said to have power relative to a MacBook Pro or gaming laptop, with the headset keeping track of "multiple input modes including voice, gesture, head pose and eye tracking,” through its less-powerful onboard chipset.

AR excitement builds

Elsewhere the Magic Leap One also features four built-in mics for voice control, built in speakers and six external cameras.

Rolling Stone were invited to try some demos of the technology, and came away impressed. Though Magic Leap rumors pointed to a troubled development, with their technology proving difficult to shrink down to a consumer product, Rolling Stone experienced "no stuttering or slowdowns" working with the new product. The demos themselves sound impressive, with characters able to maintain eye contact with a player in games, and virtual comic books legible enough to happily read floating in front of a Magic Leap One user.

"[P]lace a virtual TV on the wall over your fireplace and when you return later, the TV will be right where you left it,” reads an exciting extract from the Magic Leap website.

Comfort seems to be a priority too – while the field of view for vision is still below that of the human eye, it's said to be better than that of HoloLens, while multiple sizes of the goggles will be available, including custom inserts for different nose, forehead and temple sizes.

INNOSON THE FIRST MADE IN NIGERIA CARS,BUSES ,TRUCKS ...

brainyalk@gmail.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 15 Dec 2017 01:59:00 -0800

Dr. Innocent Ifediaso Chukwuma, popularly known as Innoson is the Group Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Innoson Vehicles Manufacturing Co. Ltd, the first indigenous vehicle manufacturing plant in Nigeria. He was born in 1961 in Umudim, Nnewi,in Anambra State. He is the last of six children born to Mr. and Mrs.
Chukwuma Mojekwu of Uru-Umudim Nnewi, in Anambra State. After his education, he started trading in spare parts under the name Innoson Nigeria Ltd in 1981. His company is next after Leventis and Boulos Enterprises in assembling branded motorcycles in the country.

Dr. Chukwuma loves playing tennis as a form of relaxation and he is married to Mrs. Ebele Chukwuma and they are blessed with children.

His business has expanded into four manufacturing companies namely: Innoson Nigeria Limited Nnewi, manufacturers of motorcycles, tri-cycles, spare parts and accessories; Innoson Tech. & Industries Co. Ltd Enugu, manufacturers of Household and Industrial Plastics, Health & Safety accessories, Storage containers, Fixtures & Fittings, Electrical components & accessories; Innoson Vehicle Manufacturing (IVM) Nnewi, manufacturers of Capacity City bus, Mini & Midi buses, Pick-Up trucks and Garbage Collecting vehicles; General Tyres & Tubes Co. Ltd Enugu, manufacturers of Tyres and Tubes.

The vehicles in IVM fleet range from cars, trucks, SUVs, compactors, etc . Presently, the company has made in-road into some African countries such as Ghana, Sierra Leone, Chad, Niger, Togo.

As the first indigenous motor manufacturing company in Nigeria, he says he wanted to prove that Nigerians can do it. This he says has been proved. According to him, the inspiration to go into vehicle manufacturing was drawn from a desire to see Nigerians drive new cars. According to him in an interview with Vanguard he says “Nigeria has become a dumping ground for second hand cars. I know it was the high price of new vehicles that made Nigerians resort to patronising old vehicles, but since we decided to manufacture the vehicles here, the price is affordable, and our people can drive new vehicles again,”

When the car manufacturing company began, he faced a lot of challenges because some people felt it will not work, but today, he is the first black man to embark on such a venture.

Due to his group of manufacturing companies, he has ensured employment of more than 7,400 Nigerians who work in the company’s factory and are all on his payroll.

Due to his outstanding contributions to the development of Nigeria, he has been given several awards both locally, Nationally and internationally.

In November, 2013, Innoson was made Deputy Chairman, Board of Trustees, National Coalition for Jonathan/Sambo Presidency. He was made the honorary Life Vice President of Nigerian Association of Chambers of Commerce, Industry, Mines & Agriculture (NACCIMA) on November 23, 2013; Ambassador for Peace by St. Andrews Anglican Church, Trans Ekulu, Enugu, April, 2012; Entrepreneur of the Year by Wesley University of Science and Technology, Akure, Ondo State, March 2012.

He was also given the Most Outstanding Indigenous Entrepreneur in the Manufacturing Sector by Enugu Chamber of Commerce, Industry, Mines and Agriculture (ECCIMA) in January 2012; National Council Member, Manufacturers Association of Nigeria.

He was Conferred the National Honour of the Officer of the Federal Republic (OFR) on November 2011 by His Excellency, President Goodluck Jonathan; Awarded Doctorate Degree in Business Administration (DBA) by Enugu State University of Science and Technology, Enugu in November 2011 amongst several other awards.

During an interview with vanguard, he recalls how the whole success story started. This is what he said: “I started as a small business man dealing on spare parts at Nnewi. At that time, people were bringing only second hand motorcycles to Nigeria, and I felt there should be a way to reduce the price of the new ones, so that people will be interested enough to buy new ones, rather than the second hand motorcycles.
“I travelled overseas and found out that there were four companies importing motorcycles into Nigeria. First was Leventis that was bringing the Honda brand, the second company was Yamaco that was bringing Yamaha, the other company was Bolus that was bringing Suzuki and the fourth was CFAO that was bringing moblet.
“These were the companies that were dealing on motorcycle in Nigeria, and my company was the next one. So when I went there, I discovered that when they brought the motorcycles in crate and each crate contained one motorcycle which took a lot of space and you can put about 40 units in one 40ft container. In one container with 40 units of motorcycles in a 40ft container, the motorcycle will become expensive. So after evaluating it, I went to overseas and packed 200 units in one 40ft container and my price came down by 40%. Of course, this was cheaper.” This feat he was able to achieve because he discovered that if he disassemble the parts and brought them in different parts to be manually assembled here, it reduced the initial cost of packing the fully assembled machines.

This ingenuity on the part of Innoson brought down the initial cost of
Motorcycles from N150,000 to N60,000.

It was in the course of motorcycle importation, that he discovered that there are a lot of plastics in a motorcycle, and that is one of the reasons he set up a plastic plant to produce the plastics components locally. These are some of the things he did to bring down the cost of motorcycle to about N60,000. Today, nobody thinks of buying second hand motorcycle anymore in Nigeria. Everybody wants to buy a new one because a new one is cheap, and he had promised that he was going to do the same thing with motor vehicles.

Today however, his promise has become reality as his company is now into full time manufacturing of new vehicles in Nigeria and at a very cheap rate.

FACEBOOK FOR 6-YEAR-OLDS? WELCOME TO MESSENGER KIDS

brainyalk@gmail.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 12 Dec 2017 05:28:00 -0800

Facebook built Messenger Kids, a new version of its popular communications app with parental controls, to help safeguard pre-teens who may be using unauthorized and unsupervised social-media accounts. Critics think Facebook is targeting children as young as 6 to hook them on its services.

Facebook’s goal is to “push down the age” of when it’s acceptable for kids to be on social media, says Josh Golin, executive director of Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood. Golin says 11-to-12-year-olds who already have a Facebook account, probably because they lied about their age, might find the animated emojis and GIFs of Messenger Kids “too babyish,” and are unlikely to convert to the new app.

Facebook launched Messenger Kids for 6-to-12-year olds in the US Monday, saying it took extraordinary care and precautions. The company said its 100-person team building apps for teens and kids consulted with parent groups, advocates, and childhood-development experts during the 18-month development process and the app reflects their concerns. Parents download Messenger Kids on their child’s account, after verifying their identity by logging into Facebook. Since kids cannot be found in search, parents must initiate and respond to friend requests.

Facebook says Messenger Kids will not display ads, nor collect data on kids for advertising purposes. Kids’ accounts will not automatically be rolled into Facebook accounts once they turn 13.

Nonetheless, advocates focused on marketing to children expressed concerns. The company will collect the content of children’s messages, photos they send, what features they use on the app, and information about the device they use. Facebook says it will use this information to improve the app and will share the information “within the family of companies that are part of Facebook,” and outside companies that provide customer support, analysis, and technical infrastructure.

“It’s all that squishy language that we normally see in privacy policies,” says Golin. “It seems to give Facebook a lot of wiggle room to share this information.” He says Facebook should be clearer about the outsiders with which it may share data.

WHEN YOUR ACTIVITY TRACKER BECOMES A PERSONAL MEDICAL DEVICE

brainyalk@gmail.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 12 Dec 2017 05:23:00 -0800

Fitbit Spent Its First decade selling activity trackers. With its latest moves, the company is starting to look less like a gear maker selling pricey accessories to fitness buffs and more like a medical-device company, catering to hospitals, patients, and health insurers. The company’s business-to-business arm, called Health Solutions, is now addressing four health conditions—sleep disorders including sleep apnea, diabetes, cardiovascular health and mental health—for employers, health insurers, healthcare providers, and researchers.

Fitbit has deals with insurers like UnitedHealthcare, which pays its clients up to $1,500 a year for hitting step-count goals. United has done years of research to calculate its return on these payouts, says Fitbit CEO James Park. “The business models are finally catching up to the data we have been collecting.” The next stage is to add in heart rate data, he says.

Fitbit’s newest product, the Ionic smartwatch, uses a blood-oxygen sensor to screen for sleep apnea and detect a type of heart arrhythmia. The company has completed clinical trials on the use cases and will submit them to the US Food and Drug Administration for approval. If it receives approval, Fitbits could replace expensive chest patch scanning to perform initial screenings for atrial fibrillation on some patients, Park says. The company’s data has been popular with cancer researchers.

There are plenty of reasons behind the company’s transition: For one, Fitbit will always battle high abandonment rates. (“Fitbit? More like Quitbit,” The Atlantic once quipped.) Fitbit’s sales of fitness trackers, and in turn, its stock price, have reflected that fatigue; revenue fell 22% last quarter and its stock is trading at a 77% discount to its opening price in 2014. But most important, the company needs to differentiate its offerings from the Apple Watch, which debuted in 2015 and has studies that address some of the same areas Fitbit is chasing. Fitbit beat Apple in the third quarter in terms of devices shipped, taking 13.7% of the market, according to IDC. Apple, which took 10.3% of the market, experienced a dramatic increase in sales, while Fitbit continues its decline.

Fitbit believes its position as a neutral player that works with any phone makes it desirable to insurance companies and hospitals. Apple Watches only work with iPhones; if an employer, hospital or insurer wants its clients to use them, it won’t be able to reach people who have Android phones.

Fitbit’s push into medicine is not without risks. Park agrees that over time the company’s products will become a form of medical device, but he’s reluctant to call them that outright. The company’s brand is valuable because of its association with fitness and self-improvement, and consumer psychology is a critical component in making sure something like a step tracker is successful, he says.

“There is a dramatic difference in consumer acceptance and engagement when you say, ‘Hey, here is a medical device from Medtronic, go wear it,’ versus, ‘Here’s a Fitbit, wear this instead,’ ” Park says. “One is aspirational, the other implies that you’re sick. Consumers just go in with a different mentality based on how it’s portrayed and that is actually really, really important.”

That’s why Fitbit is participating in a new FDA precertification program aimed at digital health products, announced in September. “The FDA recognizes that there is this potentially new class of devices that’s not a consumer device and not a traditional medical device, but somewhere in between, and that there needs to be a new regulatory pathway,” Park says. Fitbit’s rival, Apple, is also a participant.

THE LATEST TESLA CHALLENGER TAKES ON THE AUTO INDUSTRY WITH A STUNNING ELECTRIC SEDAN

brainyalk@gmail.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 8 Dec 2017 05:08:00 -0800

While The World'S most famous automakers were pulling the covers off their latest, shiniest offerings at the Los Angeles Auto Show, a dark gray sedan circled the convention center, almost silently. Riding on 21-inch wheels, the Lucid Air cuts a muscular stance, its door handles flush with the body of the car, one thin bar of light bars stretching across its front, another along the slightly boxy rear. Fully electric, it offers a tempting vision of the future.

“This is our very precious multimillion-dollar prototype—we are super careful with this machine,” says Lucid’s Chief Technology Officer, Peter Rawlinson. But a prototype, no matter how lovely, does not make a automaker. The Air is the first vehicle from Lucid, a Silicon Valley outfit presenting itself as a new Tesla. Because, as Elon Musk will tell you, there's quite a gulf between designing a great car and producing and selling that car. Tesla may have booked hundreds of thousands of preorders, but it's struggling to meet demand—let alone make a profit.

That's why you likely haven't heard of the other electric car startups that thought they could replicate Tesla's success, like Faraday Future, Fisker, Aptera, and Coda—each is struggling or has folded or fizzled out under the immense financial pressure.

Lucid, which has now built a grand total of five cars, believes it can not only do better than the other startups but also be competitive against the major automakers.

LUCID AIR

Usually when I’m offered a ride in an engineering preproduction car, I want to be up front, because that's where the action happens. But the Air—despite a claimed, grin inducing, 0 to 60 mph time of 2.5 seconds—is best experienced from the back. So I sink into one of the two seats, which recline so far back I'm gazing at the LA skyline through the glass roof, feeling like an Apollo astronaut about to be launched into space.

The car is finished beautifully. The wood, leather, and felt that cover the interior are meant to invoke California’s Santa Cruz waves crashing over rocks. As luxury, tech-happy buyers now expect, there are touchscreens everywhere. The ride was slightly harsh, because despite its finishes, this is a hand built test car, without a properly tuned suspension or sound deadening. Lucid promises a range of between 240 and 440 miles, depending on which battery pack you buy.

All very nice, but a comfortable interior, solid performance, and substantial range count as table stakes here. To rake in the chips, Lucid is counting on its CTO, Peter Rawlinson, the man who has done this before. The Brit was the chief engineer for Tesla’s Model S, the sedan that stacked up accolades and made Tesla a real automaker. And he has brought top talent along for the new ride. “I have the key brain power behind the Model S team with me today,” he says. “We know how to do this, and that is the differentiator.”

In fact, he seems relaxed about the company’s prospects, even though he admits no recent automotive startup can truly be classed as a success. “If you exclude Tesla, the last really successful startup was Porsche in the 1950s,” he says. Lucid, which is building a factory in Casa Grande, Arizona, has a slow and steady approach in mind. It will start by building 20,000 cars a year, which it calculates will require $260 million in investment. It plans to use revenue from those sales, plus another half billion, to increase production to 50,000 cars a year. It will eventually reach 130,000 cars a year, bit by bit.

“We’re taking a very pragmatic, almost humble approach to it,” Rawlinson says, in a thinly veiled comparison to Tesla's grand ambitions and aggressive timelines. “We’re not going in there all guns blazing, saying we’re going to spend a billion dollars on a factory. That’s madness.”

Lucid has one big advantage Tesla didn't have when it was getting started a decade ago: Electric cars are no longer an odd, ignored corner of the market. Countries from India to Germany to Norway have announced plans to ban gas and diesel engines in the coming decades. In China, the world's largest auto market, government regulators are mandating the sale of electrics on a wide scale.

“We’re talking about a couple million EVs—I don’t know where they’re going to find them,” says Rawlinson, spying an opportunity. “I think we can sell 100,000 units a year of this car, with a 50/50 split between China and the rest of the world.”

The country also has a taste for large sedans with luxurious back seats, if you were wondering why the Air's second row offers more room than a first class plane seat. Together with an alluring vehicle and a tech-heavy team with a proven record, Lucid seems to have a plausible business plan. In a few years, that could be enough to get the new automaker to the point of taking reservations inside the auto show, instead of looping around the edges.fr

UBER'S NOT THE ONLY ONE THAT SHOULD BE WARY OF DISAPPEARING MESSAGING APPS

brainyalk@gmail.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 8 Dec 2017 04:03:00 -0800

During a pair of explosive pre-trial hearings last week, the lawsuit between self-driving Alphabet spinoff Waymo and Uber over trade secrets got an unlikely, new star player. It wasn't an engineer, like Anthony Levadowski, the former Google engineer who allegedlybrought reams of Waymo trade secrets to his next big gig as head of autonomous driving at Uber. It wasn't a security analyst, like Ric Jacobs, a former Uber employee whose allegations of malfeasance within the company delayed the Uber-Waymo trial by two months as the judge reopened the document discovery process.

It was a messaging app. Anybody can download Wickr to send encrypted messages that destroy themselves, but its professional, workplace product takes the extra step of giving the employers the power to determine how long the messages stick around before it deletes them. It's [like Slack, but for the Impossible Missions Force. According to pre-trial testimony, intelligence gathering teams at Uber used Wickr and another app called Telegram to discuss sensitive information. Levandowski and Lior Ron, another former Google self-driving engineer who ended up at Uber, also used it to communicate, according to testimony from Uber employees.

Waymo’s theory is that Levandowski, Ron, and other Uber employees used Wickr and other "ephemeral" messaging apps, which delete conversations, to discuss the trade secrets they had stolen from Waymo. This “may explain why the 14,000 files stolen from Waymo by Anthony Levandowski have not yet been discovered on the Uber infrastructure,” Waymo’s legal team wrote in a brief filed this week. The company hasn't yet publicly produced decisive evidence that Uber used Waymo intellectual property to advance its self-driving efforts.1

Whatever the truth (the trail is now slated to start February 5), Wickr's sudden starring role in this high-profile case raises questions about how companies at risk of litigation should be using such systems, if at all.

Courts are already wrestling with new forms of electronic communications. Today’s office creates so much data, the discovery process no longer involves handing over all your communications, there's simply too much of the stuff. Instead, parties often agree on a set of search terms they'll use to scan their databases, and hand over any files those turn up. Ephemeral messaging apps, like Wickr, Telegram, and Snapchat, add a new level of complication. What happens when the tech biz’s fetish for privacy runs headlong into the legal profession’s fetish for documentation?

“The arguments that are being made by both sides in this case are happening in courtrooms all across the county,” says John Jablonski, a lawyer who specializes in data privacy and security.

The Uber-Waymo case probably won’t answer that question, but privacy law experts are watching. Could Uber be held culpable for destroying evidence because its employees used these apps, and the company failed to preserve their messages? (Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi tweeted last week that Uber employees no longer use Wickr or Telegram. Uber did not respond to a request for comment for this story.)

Businesses have good, non-nefarious reasons for using ephemeral messaging. “There’s very little doubt that there are really strong and persistent efforts by nation states to undertake computer theft of trade secrets,” says Joel Wallenstrom, Wickr’s CEO. He says Wickr is one part of a larger, industrywide realization: “We don’t need to rely on data persistence anymore.” Meaning, the best way to keep your stuff safe is to not keep it in the first place.

The legal community isn't so sure. There are a few federal, state, and local regulations that require specific sorts of companies to keep specific documentation, like tax records, on hand. And if you have an inkling that you could be sued, you're supposed to keep hold of your documents, instead of routinely destroying them. Thanks to federal court decisions dating back to the early 2000s, companies under threat of suit must save even electronic documents, and turn them over in discovery, if asked. (In a 2016 case in Colorado, a judge held a company responsible for failing to hand over text messages during discovery, even though a low-level employee accidentally deleted those messages.)

“Frankly, it’s appalling to me that someone could be using a network like Wickr for the express purpose of evading their potential obligations in litigation,” says John Marsh, a lawyer with the firm Bailey Cavalieri who specializes in trade secrets litigation. “I don’t think there would be many federal judges who would be happy with using a means of communication that would frustrate or impede discovery under the federal rules.”

Indeed, the judge overseeing the Waymo-Uber case has hinted he may the inform jury about Uber's wily legal dealings, including that the law firm handling the case tried to protect certain incriminating documents under attorney-client privilege. That's the kind of disclosure that could swing a jury in a tight case.

And judges are getting savvier about what sorts of data companies control. “Courts are starting to get much better at looking at the technical aspects of how the computer systems work and how this information is stored at the company on a person’s device, on a network, how it’s transferred out to a third-party network, and they’re expecting companies to know how all that works,” says Jablonski. This is all on a case-by-case basis, he says, so no legal outcomes are guaranteed. But if a judge thinks you used Snapchat wantonly? Expect the hammer.

Even if you’re not using an app like Wickr to hide your wrongdoing, you want to be careful. Legal experts say you still need to have a plan in case you end up in a legal brouhaha, and that means knowing exactly how this technology works. Most electronic messaging applications with business-friendly editions—like Wickr—allow companies to retain data for a set amount of time, and set erase dates. Your IT department might clear your email after 30 days; it might allow a vendor to keep retain your messages on their encrypted, cloud-based server for 48 hours. Whenever you think a lawsuit is coming, start hitting the "save" button. That’s doubly true if you’re a larger company, since a court is more likely to hold you responsible if it knows you have the resources to do the proper thing.

Hackers are taking advantage of Uber’s security breach with this dangerous phishing email

brainyalk@gmail.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 24 Nov 2017 07:00:00 -0800

Uber has become the latest company to reveal that it has been hacked after confirming that the details of some 57 million customers and around 600,000 drivers were leaked.

Understandably, the questions that customers and drivers will want asking is whether or not they’ve had their details leaked, what details were leaked and how dangerous this leak could be

What happened?

In 2016 a pair of individuals were able to hack into data that Uber had stored on a third-party cloud server.

Having gained access, the individuals were then able to steal information belonging to Uber and in turn demand a ransom from the company.

In a statement, Uber’s new CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said:

“At the time of the incident, we took immediate steps to secure the data and shut down further unauthorized access by the individuals. We subsequently identified the individuals and obtained assurances that the downloaded data had been destroyed.”

Those assurances obtained by Uber involved giving the two individuals $100,000 in exchange for their silence and the promise that the information wouldn’t be shared.

Founder of Huawei thanks Apple for allowing them to dominate the market

brainyalk@gmail.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 24 Nov 2017 06:47:00 -0800

Founder and president of Huawei Ren Zhengfei recently visited Huawei’s Research Institute in Japan where he touched upon the relationship with its rival Apple, Chinese media has reported.

Speaking of Apple, Ren said that Apple has opened up three eras: the first one was introducing the first PC, the second was Apple’s image processing technology, and the third one was its products iPhone and iPod Touch.

“Apple has changed the world, we really need to thank them for that,” he said noting that without the mobile internet economy, Huawei wouldn’t be where it is now. But now Apple’s decline is giving Chinese smartphone producers new opportunities.

Ren also said that these days Apple’s overconfidence and the arrogance towards its users is leading to a decline in iPhone sales in the global market. In the Chinese market, the decline has been severe giving Huawei and other domestic mobile phone manufacturers an opportunity to free themselves from iPhone’s pressure, said Ren.

Huawei has topped Apple in global smartphone sales since June becoming the world’s second-largest smartphone brand, next only to Samsung. On the other hand, Apple’s sales figures have been going down despite the iPhone X launch, which costs double the average salary in China. iPhone’s reputation in China is just not what it used to be.

Tesla has built the world's biggest battery in Australia

brainyalk@gmail.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 24 Nov 2017 04:27:00 -0800

Elon Musk is making good on his promise to help solve an energy crisis in Australia.

Tesla (TSLA) has "fully installed" the world's largest lithium ion battery in South Australia, the state government said in a statement on Thursday.

Tesla teamed up with a French renewable energy firm and the local government to install the battery, which Musk promised to deliver within 100 days of signing a contract -- or it would be free.

The battery needs to be operational by early December for Musk to meet his own deadline.

Black Friday 2017 on Jumia

brainyalk@gmail.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 24 Nov 2017 03:27:00 -0800

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AMAZON KEY FLAW COULD LET ROGUE DELIVERYMEN DISABLE YOUR CAMERA

brainyalk@gmail.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 18 Nov 2017 03:44:00 -0800

When Amazon Launched its Amazon Key service last month, it also offered a remedy for anyone—realistically, most people—who might be creeped out that the service gives random strangers unfettered access to your home. That security antidote? An internet-enabled camera called Cloud Cam, designed to sit opposite your door and reassuringly record every Amazon Key delivery.

But now security researchers have demonstrated that with a simple program run from any computer in Wi-Fi range, that camera can be not only disabled but frozen. A viewer watching its live or recorded stream sees only a closed door, even as their actual door is opened and someone slips inside. That attack would potentially enable rogue delivery people to stealthily steal from Amazon customers, or otherwise invade their inner sanctum.

And while the threat of a camera-hacking courier seems an unlikely way for your house to be burgled, the researchers argue it potentially strips away a key safeguard in Amazon's security system.

"The camera is very much something Amazon is relying on in pitching the security of this as a safe solution," says Ben Caudill, the founder of the Seattle-based security firm Rhino Security Labs, whose researchers discovered and demonstrated the Amazon Key attack. "Disabling that camera on command is a pretty powerful capability when you’re talking about environments where you’re relying heavily on that being a critical safety mechanism."

25 Things You Didn’t Know About Technology… Almost No One Knows About #7.

brainyalk@gmail.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 18 Nov 2017 03:24:00 -0800

25 Things You Didn’t Know About Technology… Almost No One Knows About #7.

You might appreciate modern technology for how it has simplified your life, but most people don't consider the fact that plenty of trial, error, and weirdness circles around the tech world. For example, in order for the iPhone to become what it is today, it had to go through some trial and error -- and have a little bit of an odd backstory.

Below are 25 bizarre and fascinating facts about tech products, the industry, and the people behind it all. These will definitely make you appreciate the process of invention -- and also inform you of the behind-the-scenes oddities of the industry. #19 definitely made us smile.

#1 There are more than 682 million iPhone across the globe.

#2 The word robot comes from the Czech “robota." In English, robota translates to "forced labor."

#3 The world's first camera took eight hours to snap a photo.

#4 The very first Apple logo featured Sir Isaac Newton sitting underneath a tree, with an apple about to hit his head.

#5 Alaska is the only state in America that can be typed on one row of a traditional English QWERTY keyboard.

#6 About 1 out of 8 married couples actually met each other on the Internet.

#7 Tech companies often test new products in New Zealand. The reasons for this? The country is diverse, its residents speak English, and if a product is a flop, news doesn't spread as fast because it is relatively isolated.

#8 Bill Gates's house was designed a Mac.

#9 In 2012, NYU-Poly constructed a robotic fish and placed it in a tank of golden shiners. The robot simulated the fishes' motions so well, it was eventually accepted and became their leader.

Google Assistant can now help troubleshoot Pixel 2 phones

brainyalk@gmail.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 18 Nov 2017 03:12:00 -0800

Google Assistant can help you troubleshoot issues you might encounter on your phone, though the feature is only available for Pixel 2 users at the moment, according to Android Police. A user running Android Oreo 8.1’s developer preview asked Google Assistant why their phone wasn’t charging fully, and a troubleshooting feature jumped into gear. A battery health check was run and the virtual assistant also scanned the phone for apps that might be causing the battery to drain.

Once that was complete, the Assistant displayed an option to connect the user to Google Support via phone or chat. The system seems pretty intuitive, the only minor issue was the Assistant didn’t recognize a phone number input when prompted.

GOOGLE OFFERS HELP TO INDUSTRIES IT HELPS TO DESTROY

brainyalk@gmail.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 19 Oct 2017 04:57:00 -0700

TWENTY-FOUR YEARS AGO, a young Indian engineer named Sundar Pichai boarded a plane for the first time, to fly to Pittsburgh. Thursday, he returned to Pittsburgh as CEO of Google, and announced plans to give away $1 billion.

The money will go to projects that offer training and career coaching to people short on skills for a rapidly digitizing economy where businesses and their workers need fluency in coding, mobile apps, and social media to compete. Google says it has already given out $100 million of the total to nonprofits, including $10 million to Goodwill, for a program offering digital-skills training. A "Grow With Google tour" will spin up training events staffed by Google employees across the country, after Pittsburgh comes Indianapolis.

“The nature of work is fundamentally changing,” Pichai said in a blog post today. “It’s a big problem and, at Google, whenever we see a big problem, we ask how we can make it easier for everyone to solve it.”

It’s arguable that Google might have seen this problem coming—services like its search engine, smartphone software, and video platform YouTube are contributing to those changes in work. Google’s philanthropic dollars are arriving just as policy makers and regulators previously favorable or indifferent to tech companies are beginning to take a more jaundiced view of the sector.

Google’s new initiative has echoes of earlier giveaways that pledged philanthropic dollars towards helping people adjust to changes wrought, in part, by Google.

brainyalkmooree

iPhone SE 2 could be imminent

iPhone SE 2 could be imminent

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Black Friday 2017 on Jumia

Black Friday 2017 on Jumia

AMAZON KEY FLAW COULD LET ROGUE DELIVERYMEN DISABLE YOUR CAMERA

25 Things You Didn’t Know About Technology… Almost No One Knows About #7.

25 Things You Didn’t Know About Technology… Almost No One Knows About #7.

#1 There are more than 682 million iPhone across the globe.

#2 The word robot comes from the Czech “robota." In English, robota translates to "forced labor."

#3 The world's first camera took eight hours to snap a photo.

#4 The very first Apple logo featured Sir Isaac Newton sitting underneath a tree, with an apple about to hit his head.

#5 Alaska is the only state in America that can be typed on one row of a traditional English QWERTY keyboard.

#6 About 1 out of 8 married couples actually met each other on the Internet.

#7 Tech companies often test new products in New Zealand. The reasons for this? The country is diverse, its residents speak English, and if a product is a flop, news doesn't spread as fast because it is relatively isolated.

#8 Bill Gates's house was designed a Mac.

#9 In 2012, NYU-Poly constructed a robotic fish and placed it in a tank of golden shiners. The robot simulated the fishes' motions so well, it was eventually accepted and became their leader.

Google Assistant can now help troubleshoot Pixel 2 phones

GOOGLE OFFERS HELP TO INDUSTRIES IT HELPS TO DESTROY