AT&T extends the deadline for its Time Warner merger to April

When AT&T announced that it was going to buy Time Warner for $85.4 billion back in 2016, the deal was expected to close by the end of 2017. Now, it’s clear that won’t happen, and as a result, AT&T has extended the deadline for the merger to April 22nd, according to a document filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Last week, the Department of Justice brought an antitrust suit against AT&T in order to block the acquisition. It’s not really surprising, considering that the merger would give the telecommunications company access to Time Warner’s vast media properties, including HBO and Warner Brothers. Rumors swirled that the DOJ had not been able to come to terms with AT&T, and that the Justice Department was demanding that the company sell off significant assets to make the deal happen. President Trump also mentioned blocking the deal back on the campaign trail, so it’s possible there is a political element to the DOJ’s actions as well.

The deadline extension (which is the second that AT&T has filed for; the deal was originally supposed to close by October 22nd) gives the merger a little room to maneuver, and extra time for the parties involved to figure out how to make all of this work. It remains to be seen what will happen with the lawsuit, but it’s worth noting that Comcast did purchase the majority of NBC Universal in a similar deal back in 2011. AT&T is “confident that the court would reject the government’s claims and permit this merger under longstanding legal precedent.”

Via: CNET

Source: Securities and Exchange Commission

Thieves tell cops ‘Mr. Telsa’ said it was okay to swipe Teslas

Tesla’s aren’t easy to steal, but thieves in Utah allegedly made off with three $80,000 models by breaking into a dealership and stealing the fobs. After that, however, their master plan fell comically apart. “One guy claimed a family member had died and left them all this stuff, but two of them actually said (it was given to them) by (a man named) Tesla,” South Salt Lake police detective Gary Keller told Fox 13.

Investigating a break-in at the dealership, police tracked down a suspect in one of the stolen Teslas and found him to be was in possession of keys, the dealership’s business license and a check for $49,500 made out to Tesla. In a burst of what may have been alcohol-fueled inspiration, he claimed his name was Telsa and that someone he barely knew gave him the car and keys.

While police checked clues at the dealership, a stolen Tesla happened to drive right by them. It ran out of battery power a moment later, so police easily picked up the 27-year-old female suspect, who apparently forgot about the whole “never return to the scene of the crime” thing.

Later in the morning, the third stolen vehicle was found parked outside (wait for it) a liquor store. The latter two individuals said they were part of the “Tesla family” and the woman said she received the high-priced vehicle from “Mr. Tesla” himself.

Luckily the cars were undamaged and the doors not pried, likely because the thieves had the keys to get in. After getting lucky with the initial theft, it’s pretty clear they weren’t criminal masterminds, though. “It’s one of those cases where you’re going, ‘What?’ and you’re scratching your head,” Keller told KSL.com. “The good thing is we have four people in custody and hopefully all the property returned.”

Source: Fox 13

Apple TV 4K With 64GB Storage Faces 4-5 Week Shipping Delay

If you were planning to purchase a new Apple TV 4K with 64GB of storage from Apple in time for the holidays, you may have to look elsewhere.

As spotted on Reddit, the 64GB model is currently out of stock at most Apple retail stores, and estimated to ship in 4-5 weeks on Apple’s online store around the world. Orders placed today might not be delivered until as late as early January.

The reason for the delay is unknown. Lengthy shipping estimates can sometimes foreshadow a product refresh, but the Apple TV 4K was just released in late September, so it’s unlikely a new model is on the horizon.

Notably, the 32GB model is still available for pickup at most Apple retail stores today, and estimated to ship in approximately one week on Apple’s online store in the United States and over a dozen other countries we checked.

The latest Apple TV supports both 4K and HDR video playback. The set-top box starts at $179 in the United States.

If you are looking to purchase an Apple TV 4K with 64GB of storage, some resellers such as Best Buy, Costco, MacMall, Sam’s Club, Staples, Target, and Walmart may still have stock available online or in stores.

Related Roundup: Apple TVBuyer’s Guide: Apple TV (Buy Now)
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AirPods and iPad Listed as Top Selling Electronics During This Year’s Record-Setting Cyber Monday

Yesterday was Cyber Monday, an annual shopping event in the United States, United Kingdom, and many other countries that’s part of the holiday shopping season and offers users notable discounts on a vast array of consumer products. Last night, Adobe released its online shopping data for this year’s Cyber Monday, stating that November 27, 2017 is projected to set a new record and become the “largest online sales day in history” with a total of $6.59 billion spent by the day’s end.

Compared to 2016, Cyber Monday 2017 saw a 16.8 percent year-over-year increase in sales, and it fared better in revenue compared to last week’s big shopping days: Black Friday 2017 brought in $5.03 billion and Thanksgiving Day brought in $2.87 billion. Adobe’s statistics leveraged Adobe Sensei and Adobe Analytics to analyze data from one trillion visits to over 4,500 retail sites and 55 million SKUs. Of all these data points, Apple and its products were found at the top of a few lists.

The AirPods were listed as overall top sellers yesterday, while iPads were included in the best-selling electronics category, alongside AirPods again, Google Chromecast, Samsung Tablets, Nintendo Switch, and more. In terms of discounts, Walmart was one of very few retailers with a brief sale on AirPods yesterday, marking the $159.00 earphones down by $15. Numerous retailers had sales on a variety of iPads, including the 9.7-inch iPad and 10.5-inch and 12.9-inch iPad Pro.

Shoppers on mobile helped set a new record with 47.4 percent of visits coming from mobile devices (39.9 percent on smartphones and 7.6 percent on tablets). Revenue earned from users shopping on mobile grew 39.2 percent year-over-year and reached a new all-time high of $1.59 billion. Of all mobile devices used to shop on Cyber Monday this year, iOS was in the lead with an average order value of $123, while Android was at $110.

“Shopping and buying on smartphones is becoming the new norm and can be attributed to continued optimizations in the retail experience on mobile devices and platforms,” said Mickey Mericle, vice president, Marketing and Customer Insights at Adobe.

“Consumers are also becoming more savvy and efficient online shoppers. People increasingly know where to find the best deals and what they want to purchase, which results in less price matching behavior typically done on desktops. Millennials were likely another reason for the dramatic growth in mobile, with 75 percent expecting to shop via their smartphone.”

The biggest discounts were for TVs (21.1 percent off of the normal price on average), toys (18.8 percent), and computers (14.7 percent). In total, the 2017 holiday shopping season so far (marked as beginning on November 1) has seen a total of $50 billion in online revenue, jumping up 16.8 percent from 2016. According to Adobe, “this will be the first-ever holiday season to break $100 billion in online sales.”

Tag: Cyber Monday
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Samsung made an app that adjusts its TVs for color blindness

Samsung has launched an app that makes watching TV a more vibrant experience for people with color vision deficiency (CVD) — the inability to distinguish certain shades of color (also known as color blindness). Through the SeeColors app, users can test their visual color spectrum, and based on their unique diagnosis their QLED TV will adjust settings to give a more accurate color display (something a number of video games have been working on for a while, too).

The app has been developed in partnership with the department of mechatronics, optics and mechanical engineering informatics at the Budapest University of Technology, and uses color filters and mathematical modelling to diagnose levels of CVD. Some 300 million people around the world have CVD, but according to Samsung the majority are unaware of their condition, so the app could make TV-viewing a richer experience for those who’ve been watching just fine for years. Or it could just be a novel app to test out when there’s nothing else on. It’s available from the Smart TV App store, Google Play and the Galaxy App Store for Galaxy Smartphones S6 and newer.

Source: Samsung

HP quietly installs system-slowing spyware on its PCs

Lenovo has only just settled a massive $3.5 million fine for preinstalling adware on laptops without users’ consent, and now it seems HP is getting in on the stealth installation action, too. According to numerous reports gathered by Computer World, the brand is deploying a telemetry client on customer computers without asking permission.

The software — first identified on November 15 — is called “HP Touchpoint Analytics Service” and appears to replace the self-managed HP Touchpoint Manager solution. According to the official productivity description, it features “the tools you need to ensure all your managed devices’ security — and brings you greater peace of mind”. The problem is, it’s installing itself without permission and is wreaking havoc on customers’ systems.

One complaint on the HP support site says: “It’s been making my computer work so hard I can hear it like cranking away and the light in the back of my computer is flashing rapidly in-tune with the cranking. In Task Manager I can see it starting and stopping numerous applications.”

It’s not yet clear how the new driver is being installed. It may have come with the latest Windows updates, or via HP and its support assistant processes, but regardless, customers aren’t happy. “I understand that it hoovers all sorts of telemetry data — and I am not willing to share too much of it really, definitely not without my knowledge,” says one user on HP’s forums.

The offending driver can be removed relatively quickly and easily, but against a wider backdrop of repeated privacy scandals that’s hardly the point. There’s no sign of an official response — or even acknowledgement — from HP on the matter, but they can be sure their customers will take them to task over it. We reached out to the company for a comment on the issue and will update this post when we hear back.

Source: Computer World

Photoshop uses AI to make selecting people less of a hassle

Masking a human or other subject out of a scene is a pretty common trick nowadays, but it’s is still arguably one of the hardest and lowest-tech parts of Photoshop. Adobe’s about to make that a lot easier, thanks to an upcoming AI-powered feature called Select Subject. Using it is pretty much idiot-proof: From the main or “Select and Mask” workspaces, you just need to click anywhere on the image, and it’ll automatically select the subject or subjects in the image. From there, you’re free to change the background or tweak the subject separately.

The tech is powered by Adobe’s AI platform, Sensei. “Complicated details around the subject aren’t an issue, because this feature is using machine learning to recognize the objects,” Adobe Photoshop Product Manager Meredith Payne Stotzner says in the YouTube video (below). During the demo, she uses it select a single person on the street, a group of volleyball players, a couple on the beach and a red panda.

In some cases, details like hair and fur aren’t properly selected, but using the tool would certainly give you a big head start. It pretty much eliminates the tedious hand-drawn or tweaked masking process, letting you focus on the fine details. Since it uses machine learning tech, it should also get better over time.

There are already plenty of Photoshop plugins like Akvis SmartMask and Fluid Mask that can do something similar to Select Subject. However, it’ll be nice to have such a feature as part of Photoshop, rather than paying extra for a plugin. And the new feature is more than just a technology “sneak” — it’s an actual feature coming in a future Photoshop build. Adobe has yet to say exactly when it’ll arrive, however.

Source: Adobe (YouTube)

Samsung bolsters Bixby with another AI startup

Samsung may have botched the launch of its virtual assistant Bixby, but it has already promised to patch things up with the next release, which will leverage “deep linking capabilities and enhanced natural language abilities” in order to deliver “a predictive, personalized experience.” In addition to integrating Viv’s technology for Bixby 2.0, the Korean giant has now acquired Fluenty, an AI startup co-founded by local accelerator FuturePlay.

Fluenty is best known for its chatbot and assistant service that suggest smart replies, which is similar to what Google and LinkedIn offer but is instead made for various social networking services, including WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Telegram, Line, Kakao Talk, Naver Talk and more.

As simple as it sounds, Fluenty relies on a deep learning model initially based on “over 700 million public chat conversations, searching for patterns in replies most frequently used by people.” The startup then spent over two years to reduce the loading times from seven seconds to a mere 50 ms. Recent iterations have evolved to suggest personalized smart replies that match the user’s messaging habits (such as signing off with “cheers” instead of “bye”), thus making the interaction more human-like. And this, of course, fits Samsung’s “next-generation intelligence” initiative quite well.

What’s more, Fluenty’s deep linking engine also predicts what the user may want to do based on the messages — be it launching a navigation app or taxi app at the mention of a location name, opening Yelp to make a reservation when it knows you’re planning dinner, or launching YouTube or any music player when an artist is mentioned.

Due to the acquisition, Fluenty has already unpublished its apps as of yesterday, and it’ll be shutting down its services on December 31st (customers who subscribed for an upgrade between June 30th and November 27th this year are eligible for a $0.99 refund). In other words, folks who want to give Fluenty a spin will just have to wait for its integration into Bixby 2.0.

Samsung’s acquisition of Fluenty — founded by former employees of LG Electronics, Naver and Kakao — is also a big win for FuturePlay. “Fluenty is the first Korean AI startup to be acquired by Samsung, and I believe this could be the starting point to change the way larger corporates view startup acquisitions,” FuturePlay CEO Jung-hee Ryu told Engadget. “While some Korean tech startups tend to have brilliant tech, founders, and patents, it’s been hard to find acquisition cases due to rather conservative Korean tech giants. We believe that with the right support, entrepreneurs with engineering backgrounds can build extraordinary startups. I guess our experience in co-founding Fluenty, and even inventing some of their IPs kind of proves that.”

Via: ZDNet, The Korean Herald

Apple Stores to Host Free ‘Hour of Code’ Sessions in Early December

Apple today announced it has opened registration for free “Hour of Code” sessions between December 4 and December 10 of this year at all of its nearly 500 retail stores around the world.

Apple also introduced a new Hour of Code challenge in the Swift Playgrounds app for iPad that invites students to build a digital robot, and added new teacher resources to the Everyone Can Code curriculum to help students learn Swift.

Apple’s new Everyone Can Code curriculum includes a free Hour of Code guide featuring the new Swift Playgrounds challenge to make it easy to get started teaching code in schools, community centers and after-school programs. Schools can easily host their own one-hour Hour of Code event anytime simply by downloading the Swift Playgrounds app and Hour of Code guide.

Apple has offered Hour of Code sessions for five consecutive years in celebration of Computer Science Education Week.

Related Roundup: Apple StoresTag: Hour of Code
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Members of Apple’s PrimeSense Team Patent Method of Interacting With Mac Using Hand Gestures

Apple today was granted a patent originally filed in August 2016, describing a method in which users would be able to control a Mac computer — and potentially other devices — using a “non-tactile three dimensional (3D) user interface” (via Patently Apple). The patent’s inventor credits go in part to Amir Hoffnung and Jonathan Pokrass, two current Apple employees who joined the company from PrimeSense after Apple acquired it November 2013.

Some of PrimeSense’s tech, which was originally used in Microsoft’s Kinect devices on Xbox platforms, now resides in the front-facing TrueDepth camera of the iPhone X, and the new patent hints at a potential future where this technology expands in function to Macs as well. Instead of recognizing faces, Apple’s patent describes a Mac that recognizes a “gesture by a hand,” allowing users to interact with the computer without tactile inputs like a keyboard, mouse, or trackpad.

Images via United States Patent and Trademark Office
The patent includes a variety of gestures that users would use to control the 3D user interface, including what are called “push,” (figure 2) “wave,” (figure 3) and “up” (figure 5) interactions, which are all grouped into a category of “focus gestures.” According to the patent, some of these could be used to perform basic app interactions, like scrolling through a menu, as well as change the state of the system from locked to unlocked.

Gestures described herein include focus gestures and unlock gestures. A focus gesture enables the user to engage (i.e., take control of) an inactive non-tactile 3D user interface. An unlock gesture enables the user to engage a locked non-tactile 3D user interface, as pressing a specific sequence of keys unlocks a locked cellular phone. In some embodiments, the non-tactile 3D user interface conveys visual feedback to the user performing the focus and the unlock gestures.

Examples of unlock gestures include an “up” gesture (e.g., raising hand 30 a specified distance), a sequence of two sequential wave gestures, and a sequence of two sequential push gestures, as described in detail hereinbelow.

Apple has previously been granted patents related to 3D sensing and gesture controls, but the company has yet to release a product that takes advantage of these features. Some of these previous patents included gesture controls on iPads and iPhones as well as on Magic Keyboards, which would allow users to gain access to virtual buttons and potentially streamline certain elements of the user interface.

Of course, with Face ID already launched on iPhone X, it’s predicted that Apple will look into adding the facial recognition software into future iMacs and MacBooks before it focuses on a new unlocking system. It’s also unclear whether the new 3D user interface patent would include both pieces of technology — 3D gestures and Face ID — to further augment a Mac’s unlocking process.

As with any patent, the technology in question might not make it to an Apple product in the near future, if at all, but it is an interesting glimpse into what Apple might be planning to do with PrimeSense’s technology down the line.

Tag: patent
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