Google will add special touches to Nexus phone software
For years, Google’s Nexus devices have been synonymous with stock Android. While they may be showcases for new features, they still represent the baseline for what the platform can do. That might not last for much longer, though. CEO Sundar Pichai told guests at the Code Conference that Google will “thoughtfully add more features” to Android on Nexus phones going forward. The company will also be more “opinionated” about the design, the exec said. Third-party companies will still make the hardware, but it’s evident that rumors of Google taking greater control of the Nexus program were well-founded.
You can see the Nexus-related remarks below, starting at the 20:24 mark.
The chat also saw Pichai tackle concerns about privacy, especially for Google Home. No, you won’t have to share your voice command history with Google — there will be an “off the record” mode that doesn’t send your data. The CEO also mentioned hopes for tighter control over privacy as a whole. He imagined telling Google to forget the last 4 hours of search activity, as an example.
On top of this, Pichai was adamant that Google “want[s] to be in China” and is taking a “thoughtful” approach to making it happen. Just what that means isn’t immediately apparent, although there has been talk of Google Play and a handful of Android services coming to China. The big challenge is balancing the company’s desire for profit with its historical aversion to censorship. As much as the company hates that its services aren’t available on Android phones sold in China, it also doesn’t like having to remove apps or search terms in the name of silencing political dissent.
Via: Business Insider
Source: The Verge, Recode, YouTube
Google Keep can autocomplete your grocery list entries
In the years since Google launched Keep, its note taking app/service has continued to slowly add new features, and today it’s rolling out a couple of new tricks. The Keep website has a lightly refreshed design that looks similar to the new Google+ web layout, while across platforms (Chrome extension, Android and iOS) it’s now able to show previews for links to websites with a picture, the page title and domain. It has a new autocomplete feature that only works on lists so far, and it can also detect duplicates as soon as they’re entered. They’re not huge changes, but they should make staying organized a little easier, or at least prettier.
Source: Google Docs (Twitter)
Apple Releases First Preview of Swift 3.0 for Developers
Apple yesterday released the first preview build of Swift 3.0, a major update to Apple’s open source Swift programming language. Swift 3.0’s official release is expected to come in late 2016 after proposed changes are finalized.
The Swift 3.0 preview can be downloaded from the official Swift website. There are versions of Swift 3.0 available for Xcode 7.2, Ubuntu 14.04, and Ubuntu 15.10.
Swift 3.0 is not source compatible with Swift 2.2 as it introduces source-breaking changes, but going forward, the goal is to make Swift 3.0 source compatible with future Swift language updates. To meet that goal, Swift 3.0 “focuses on getting the basics right for the long term.”
Apple will likely show off Swift 3.0 at its upcoming Worldwide Developers Conference, debuting it alongside iOS 10, OS X 10.12, and new versions of tvOS and watchOS.
Tag: Swift
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Early Apple Pay Reception Tepid Outside of United States
Apple Pay is seeing a lukewarm reception in many countries outside of the United States and is making just a “small dent” in the global payments market, according to a new report from Reuters.
In 2015, Apple Pay usage totaled $10.9 billion, most of which came from the United States. That figure is perhaps unsurprising as Apple Pay has been available in the United States since 2014 and only began rolling out to additional countries in 2015. Apple Pay is now available in the United States, the UK, China, Canada, Australia, and Singapore.
Though Apple Pay is in the early stages of adoption outside of the United States, it seems to be struggling to gain a foothold in the countries where it’s now available. In China, Apple Pay has to compete with established payment services Alibaba and Tencent, and according to research conducted by Reuters, Chinese users have complained that using Apple Pay is not as seamless as WeChat, Tencent’s payment service.
In Britain and Australia, contactless payment cards are in wide use, so iPhone users need to go to the trouble of adding their cards to Apple Pay. Juniper Research analyst Windsor Holden told Reuters that the prevalence of contactless cards makes it more difficult to persuade people to adopt Apple Pay.
“You have over 86 million contactless cards in circulation, you have to persuade Britons to register their cards to the (Apple Pay) service when they can already use them to make a contactless payment,” Holden said
Bendigo Bank in Australia says it is experiencing “some unforeseen technical issues” accepting Apple Pay payments at select merchant terminals, something Apple Pay vice president Jennifer Bailey told Reuters was “not representative” of the Apple Pay experience.
Apple Vice President Jennifer Bailey said such experiences were premature and not representative. “Like any set of major technology changes, it takes time,” she said. “We want to move as quickly as possible, we push it as quickly as possible.”
In addition to a lukewarm reception in the countries where it is available, Apple Pay is seeing a slow global rollout due to the need to negotiate transaction fees with multiple partners. Apple makes approximately 15 cents for every $100 spent in the United States, but has had to negotiate lower fees in some countries. Apple has also faced resistance in locations like Australia, Canada, and the UK because banks in these countries are building their own competing payment products.
Apple Pay hasn’t yet caught on globally, but Apple is “working rapidly” to expand Apple Pay to additional locations in Asia and Europe. Apple Pay is expected to debut in Hong Kong in the near future through a partnership with American Express, which will also bring the payments service to Spain later this year. Rumors and leaked documents also point towards negotiations to bring Apple Pay to France, Brazil, and Japan in the not-too-distant future.
In a recent interview with TechCrunch, Bailey said Apple considers a number of factors when deciding where to deploy Apple Pay, including the size of the Apple product market, credit and debit card penetration, and existing contactless payment coverage.
Related Roundup: Apple Pay
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The NBA’s fitness app gives you training tips from the pros
The options for fitness apps are seemingly endless these days, and now the National Basketball Association (NBA) is adding yet another. Thanks to a hand from Under Armour, the pro basketball league now has it’s own exercise and training app: NBA Fit. The NBA says the mobile software combines Under Armour’s Connected Fitness platform with fitness tips and videos from players in the league and the WNBA. There’s also pointers from strength and conditioning coaches.
While the advice will be focused on training and nutrition as it relates to basketball, there will be challenges for you to compete against your pals. If you’re familiar with Under Armour’s Connected Fitness platform, you can expect a similar experience here. To keep tabs on a workout though, you’ll have to also install the UA Record app as NBA Fit is more of a content and social hub than an activity-tracking tool. Bummer.
Partnering with UA is an interesting move for the NBA, as Adidas is its current uniform and apparel provider for the league and Nike is set to take over in 2017. However, the reigning MVP, Steph Curry, is one of Under Armour’s biggest athletes and it also has quite the slate of exercise and nutrition apps already. Need some training tips? The NBA Fit app is available free of charge via Google Play and iTunes.
Source: NBA Fit
Facebook intros diverse Messenger emojis for all platforms
Facebook has created brand new emojis for Messenger, redesigned its old ones and standardized them for all operating systems. The social network will begin rolling out 1,500 newly designed emojis tomorrow, which will show up the way you see them on your device no matter the recipient’s platform. No more empty boxes taking their place if you’re chatting with someone using another OS. Even better, the new graphics embrace diversity — they include hand gestures and human faces in different skin colors, as well as images of same sex couples.
If you have an iPhone or an iPad, you already have access to Apple’s diverse smileys. But Messenger’s new selection is accessible everywhere the app is available, including Android and the web. At the moment, you can only use hand gestures in FB’s original blue-and-white coloring on Android, and you barely even have choices on the web. Messenger will ask for your preferred skin tone when you get the update, though you can change it again later.
Facebook is also taking a leaf out of Google’s book and launching more emojis that represent women, showing them in professional attire (e.g. police officer) and doing various activities like swimming, running and surfing. Finally, all 1,500 options will be available through the app’s new emoji picker when they make their way to your device.
NASA satellite finds 39 unreported sources of air pollution
Scientists at NASA’s Environment and Climate Change Canada and researchers at University of Maryland, College Park and Dalhousie University discovered 39 unreported “major” sources of toxic air pollution. Using the space agency’s satellite imaging, the group located the man-made sources where toxic sulfur dioxide is being emitted. Sulfur dioxide (SO2) is a contributor to acid rain and is regulated on the ground by the EPA. However, to properly police the emissions, the government agency has to know the location of the pollutants.
These revelations were made possible by new computer processing tech that can take raw data from the Dutch-Finnish Ozone Monitoring Instrument on NASA’s Aura spacecraft and translate it into sulfur dioxide concentration estimates. The advancements also allow scientists to detect smaller sources, like “oil-related activities” and more modestly-sized power plants.
Using satellite imagery of sulfur dioxide sources, the scientists were able to pinpoint “hotspots,” locating unreported emission sites after analyzing data collected between 2005 and 2014. The study found that the sources were coal-burning power plants, smelters and oil and gas operations mostly in the Middle East, but also located in Mexico and Russia. NASA says that reported emission levels in some of these areas was two to three times lower than the levels scientists found after studying satellite data from the 9-year span.
In total, the unknown sources and the discrepancy in the reported numbers could account for 12 percent of the total human-made sulfur dioxide emissions. That’s quite the swing, and it can potentially have a major impact on the air quality in the regions where the sites are located. The study also found 75 natural sources of SO2, some of which are in unmonitored remote locations. This study was the first to provide annual measurements for those non-active volcanoes that are slowly leaking toxic gas.
Source: NASA (PR Newswire)
Rare galactic alignment produces beautiful light ‘ring’
First predicted by Einstein’s theory of General Relativity, an “Einstein Ring” is a rarely observed, but incredibly interesting astronomical phenomenon that occurs when two distant galaxies are perfectly aligned, millions of light years apart. The light from the more distant “source” galaxy becomes bent and distorted as it passes through the gravitational field caused by the mass of the less-distant “lens” galaxy, resulting in a circle of light around the glow of the lens.
This newest Einstein Ring was discovered by PhD student Margherita Bettinelli of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias while she was examining images captured by the Dark Energy Camera in Chile. Bettinelli recognized the tell-tale shape and her team used a spectrograph on the Gran Telescopio CANARIAS to confirm the discovery, which is now being called the “Canarias Einstein ring.”
And it’s a beautiful example, apparently. According to Phys.org, the ring is “one of the most symmetrical discovered.” Its near-perfect circular shape indicates the two galaxies are almost exactly aligned even though the source galaxy is 10 billion light years away. Due to universal expansion, it took about 8.5 billion years for the light from the source to reach us here on Earth, which means we’re actually seeing the more distant galaxy as a bright, blue galaxy full of new stars. The lens, meanwhile, is a mere 6 billion light years away and already appears as a older, “more evolved” galaxy.
Google’s new tools let anyone create art using AI
Google doesn’t just want to dabble in using AI to create art — it wants you to make that art yourself. As promised, the search giant has launched its Magenta project to give artists tools for bringing machine learning to their creations. The initial effort focuses around an open source infrastructure for producing audio and video that, ideally, heads off in unexpected directions while maintaining the better traits of human-made art.
Ultimately, Google doesn’t just want the technology to produce ‘optimal’ art based on what it learns from samples. It’s hoping for the same imbalance (that is, focusing on one element over others), surprise and long-term narratives that you see in people-powered projects. It should feel like there’s a distinct personality to a song or video.
You can look at Google’s early Magenta code right now, and the company is vowing to accept both code and blog posts from outsiders who have something to add. If enough people rally around the idea, you could see a budding community of artists who add AI flourishes to their productions.
Source: Magenta, GitHub
Y Combinator basic income test makes up for jobs lost to tech
Whether it’s rational or not, there’s a fear that the technology industry is stealing jobs, leaving people without a way to make a living. Startup accelerator Y Combinator thinks it might have a solution, however: give people a basic income. It’s devising an experiment that tentatively gives 100 Oakland families a minimum wage as a way to compensate for tech-driven obsolescence. The 6- to 12-month dry run will offer $1,000 to $2,000 per month to people of various economic backgrounds (not just the unemployed) to see how it influences everything from education to recreation. Ideally, this baseline would both soften the blow of working less and give you a better chance at training for (or creating) a new career.
The test is still under development, so don’t consider everything settled. With that said, it’s no shock that this experiment exists in the first place. Both the tech world and politicians have been floating the idea of basic income for a while. Moreover, Silicon Valley is increasingly convinced that it can solve many of the world’s ills — witness efforts by Facebook and Google to bring internet access to less fortunate regions.
Of course, whether or not the concept succeeds is another matter. Y Combinator argues that the march of technical progress will not only make basic income necessary at some point (once the robots have your job), but lower the cost of living enough to make the concept realistic. Critics, however, argue that it’ll simply be too expensive, won’t motivate people or won’t offer enough cash to get by. As it stands, the idea might be premature even if it’s reasonably sound — it’ll be a while before AI is good enough to take over some of the more challenging jobs.
Via: Quartz
Source: Y Combinator
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