Brexit’s good for tech, Brexit’s bad for tech
Ever since 52 percent of referendum voters helped decide that life would be better outside of the European Union, Britain’s economic future has been less than certain. The government continues to insist “Brexit means Brexit” and is attempting to negotiate trade terms before invoking Article 50 early next year, leaving markets and statisticians to estimate its true impact.
While those talks are held behind closed doors, some of the world’s biggest technology companies — Google, Facebook and IBM — have seized the opportunity and confirmed their commitment to the UK. “Leavers” may see it as justification of their vote, but there’s more to these announcements than meets the eye.
It started when Google CEO Sundar Pichai visited London last week and announced plans to bring VR to one million UK schoolchildren. He later followed that up with updated plans for its new London HQ in Kings Cross. With help from Heatherwick Studio and Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), Google’s first “wholly owned” building outside of the US will be constructed in the capital, creating up to 3,000 new jobs.
Facebook’s commitment to the UK came yesterday with a promise to hire 500 workers when it opens its new London HQ in Fitzrovia next year. Nicola Mendelsohn, Facebook’s European chief, underlined Britain’s importance as a tech centre and that it’s “an important part of Facebook’s story.” When its new offices open next year, the company will employ a total of 1,500 people in the UK.
Today, IBM announced it will triple the number of its datacentres (from two to six) in the UK, allowing it “keep pace with growing client demand” and underscore its “long-standing commitment to providing innovative solutions to the UK.” The company didn’t note the referendum in its statement, but IBM Europe’s General Manager for cloud services, Sebastian Krause, told Reuters that “everyone has concluded the UK economy will continue to be very strong and there will be significant opportunities with or without Brexit.”
All three announcements can easily be positioned as pro-Brexit, confirmation that tech giants aren’t phased by the UK’s current economic status. Matt Hancock, Minister of State for Digital and Culture, and London Mayor Sadiq Khan are happy to proclaim that “Britain is open for business.”
Yet another endorsement of a UK free of EU regulation as a tech hub for the world
https://t.co/7Q7IG6mrq8 #becauseofbrexit— jamie martin (@jamieamartin1) November 21, 2016
Before the vote, UK tech was earmarked as one of the industries that would experience the brunt of the impact. In fact, when we asked 50 technology companies that are either based in the UK or have large operations there, only one (Dyson) supported the Leave campaign.
Skeptics will also be aware that Google’s Kings Cross redevelopment has been on the books since 2013, when it spent $1.6 billion buying the land on which its new offices will reside. As for Facebook, it confirmed it was starting work on its new London HQ in September 2015. Both companies were committed to the UK months, if not years, before the EU referendum.
Building offices is one thing, but finding skilled workers to fill them is another matter.
Britain, more specifically London, is renowned for bringing in talent from across Europe, but its standing could be affected should the UK impose tougher immigration policies. Building offices is one thing, but finding skilled workers to fill them is another matter.
An average 15 percent fall in the value of the pound certainly makes hiring UK workers more cost-effective for Google and co. as a whole, but that same fall will make hiring non-UK talent hard: A £100,000 salary that used to be worth €140,000 is, at the time of writing, worth €117,000. With every aspect of Brexit, both sides can tout their own positives and negatives, but the reality is, until Article 50 is triggered, and the trade deals signed, no one really knows what the future has in store.
Study: most students can’t spot fake news
If you thought fake online news was a problem for impressionable adults, it’s even worse for the younger crowd. A Stanford study of 7,804 middle school, high school and college students has found that most of them couldn’t identify fake news on their own. Their susceptibility varied with age, but even a large number of the older students fell prey to bogus reports. Over two thirds of middle school kids didn’t see why they shouldn’t trust a bank executive’s post claiming that young adults need financial help, while nearly 40 percent of high schoolers didn’t question the link between an unsourced photo and the claims attached to it.
Why did many of the students misjudge the authenticity of a story? They were fixated on the appearance of legitimacy, rather than the quality of information. A large photo or a lot of detail was enough to make a Twitter post seem credible, even if the actual content was incomplete or wrong. There are plenty of adults who respond this way, we’d add, but students are more vulnerable than most.
As the Wall Street Journal explains, part of the solution is simply better education: teach students to verify sources, question motivations and otherwise think critically. That’s happening in some schools. However, the data also illustrates the responsibilities that internet companies and parents share in keeping a lid on fake news. Facebook and Google can help by taking down these stories or depriving their creators of ad money, but parents also need to talk about accuracy and prevent younger kids from accessing sites with significant accuracy problems.
Source: Wall Street Journal
Google Maps will help you avoid Black Friday hordes
For over a year now, Google Maps and Search have been telling people when stores, bars and restaurants are likely to be busy. Now, it’s going one step further. From today, searching for a business via Google will not only show you when it’s typically crowded, but also an estimation of how busy it is right now. So if you see that a particular store is very full you can plan to head somewhere else. It’s hoped that the feature will help users avoid the worst of the crowds over Thanksgiving long weekend, and beyond.
There are a couple of other additions rolling out today. Place listings in Search and Maps will now tell you how long the typical stay is at a location, so if you people usually spend two hours at a restaurant, you can plan the rest of your day accordingly. Finally, Maps will now list more complex opening hours. “You’ll know what time to pop by the pharmacy at your local drugstore or supermarket, when food delivery begins at a nearby restaurant and what the service hours are at the auto dealership,” said Google.
Google readying tap-to-pay for Android Wear smartwatches
Google may finally be ready to bring tap-to-pay to Android Wear, judging by evidence discovered in the Google Play Services version 10.0 by Android Police. Text prompt strings with messages like “Try holding your watch to the terminal again” make it fairly clear that Google is in the late stages of testing the feature. If you have a compatible Android Wear watch (one with an NFC chip), it will let you touch your watch to an NFC-equipped retail terminal to pay for goods.
Another new feature that appears to be coming soon is Instant Apps, a way to get apps (for one-time use or other reasons) without actually installing them. Android Police notes that the Instant App services have been switched on and a flag set from false to true, meaning the feature is likely being tested in the wild.
You can actually tap to pay on Android right now if you really want to, but you have to use a Samsung Gear S3 watch and Samsung Pay, ironically. That feature works on any Android device with KitKat 4.4 or later, because Samsung just made its payment service available to other Android smartphone brands, provided you’re using its Tizen OS-based watch. The Gear S3 is equipped with the same magnetic stripe payment tech as Samsung’s phones, letting you pay with the watch just about anywhere in the US. (iPhone users have also been able to pay with the Apple Watch and Apple Pay for over a year, of course.)
Samsung’s Gear S3 smartwatch
Smartwatches and wearables in general have disappointed of late sales-wise, and companies like Intel are reportedly scaling back development. It probably didn’t help matters that Google delayed Android Wear 2.0, expected this fall, to 2017. Hopefully, Mountain View used the time wisely to improve the software and give folks more reasons to buy a smartwatch (and use Android Pay, which hasn’t exactly set the world on fire either).
Despite its appearance in Google Play Services, you likely won’t see tap-to-pay now until Android Wear 2.0 arrives early next year. It could arrive at the same time as a pair of rumored Android Wear watches designed and built by Google to be the smartwatch equivalent of its Pixel phones.
Via: Android Police
Source: APK Mirror
Alphabet’s autofocusing contact lens won’t be tested in 2016
Bad news if you were hoping that Google’s (now Alphabet’s) smart contact lenses would be available relatively soon: they’re running into some hurdles. Novartis, which is partnering with Alphabet’s Verily Life Sciences on an autofocusing lens that addresses farsightedness, says it won’t make its goal of testing the technology in 2016. It’s “too early to say” when trials would start, a spokeswoman explains to Reuters. It’s also uncertain when tests for the other lens, which monitors blood sugar levels, would likely begin.
According to Novartis, the setback is due to a “very technically complex process” where both companies are “learning as [they] go along.” That’s not totally surprising. Both lenses were were considered long-term bets on the future of health care, and there was no guarantee that they’d be ready all that quickly. The question is whether the hurdles are relatively modest, or if these smart contact lenses are still years away from reaching your eyes.
Source: Reuters
Kanye West says Facebook and Google ‘lied to you’
You’re not the only one upset that the internet might have misled you. Kanye West cut short a Sacramento concert with an epic 15-minute speech where he railed against the state of the music industry, politics, and… the internet. The superstar says that people feel like they lost (due to the election, among other issues) because Facebook and Google “lied to you.” He even calls out Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg by name around the 12-minute mark. Supposedly, the internet mogul reneged on a promise that he “would help” Kanye and then decided to “look for aliens.” We’re not sure where that last part comes from, since Facebook’s out-there projects are largely limited to Earthly concerns like solar-powered internet drones.
He also tells people to only put their iPhones in the air, since he wants “only originals.” Guess we know where he stands on smartphones, then (although he recently got rid of his phone to focus on creativity).
Is Kanye presenting a complex, nuanced take on the problems of internet accuracy and corporate responsibility in Silicon Valley? Hell no. This is a shoot-from-the-hip diatribe. However, it shows that concerns over online authenticity are bubbling to the surface. If Kanye sees it as a problem as serious to him as unfairness to Obama and alleged corruption at the MTV Video Music Awards, you know it’s in the mainstream consciousness. In that sense, efforts to fight fake news are overdue — Kanye’s speech is a reflection of frustration that, in some ways, has been simmering for months or even years.
Lost in all of this: ‘If you ain’t got an iPhone, don’t put it up. Only originals.’ He’s in Ye mode now. https://t.co/0LYyxhz1Rz
— Edgar Alvarez (@abcdedgar) November 20, 2016
Source: Fader (1), (2)
A new supersonic jet, and more in the week that was
Tesla currently makes the world’s best electric vehicles, but Jaguar’s first EV could give the automaker a run for its money. Meet the I-Pace: a svelte, stylish electric SUV that’s faster than most sports cars and can drive 220 miles on a single charge. In other auto news, a new law requires all electric vehicles to make noise by the year 2019, and VW’s new e-Golf can drive further than the Nissan Leaf at 124 miles per charge. Long-haul flights are the worst, but a new supersonic jet called the Boom could cut them in half. And Noordung launched a stylish vintage-inspired e-bike with a built-in sound system.
Tesla is attempting to merge with SolarCity, and this week the automaker’s shareholders overwhelmingly approved the move. That’s great news:The company’s new solar roof is taking off, and some installations are already cost-competitive with grid-based electricity. Scandinavia is gearing up to build the world’s largest offshore turbine array, and when it’s complete it will produce the cheapest wind power on earth. At the COP22 climate conference France announced plans to shut down all coal plants by the year 2023, and Al Gore reached out to work with Donald Trump on climate change.
Seattle is building the world’s first flexible bridge, which will be able to withstand major earthquakes once it’s finished. In other design and technology news, BIG and Heatherwick Studio unveiled plans for Google’s new London HQ at King’s Cross. This year’s James Dyson Award went to a paper bike helmet that collapses down to a tiny form factor. Adidas announced plans to make 1 million pairs of sneakers from recycled ocean plastic, and a scientist was inspired by Back to the Future to create fabric that can harvest and store solar energy.
Google Home review – the future of the home?
Bottom Line
Google Home shows a lot of promise and while this first generation somewhat fails to deliver right now, it’ll only get better with future updates and third-party support. If you regularly use voice assistant services, Google Home is a no-brainer, but if you’re not, it’ll be nothing more than just another audio speaker to you.
Voice assistant services have infiltrated nearly every aspect of technology, but it has profoundly been more prevalent in smartphones. Its usefulness continues to grow thanks in part to iterative improvements that have made them “smarter” over time, however, it’s still going to be a while before it gets to the same level as Star Trek’s voice assisted system. Regardless of that, we’ve already begun to see voice assistant services moving into the home space – like Alexa, Amazon’s voice service powering its Echo speaker.
For a long time now, Google has been refining its own voice assistant service in its mobile devices, but just like Amazon, they see a promising future in the home. And that’s where Google Home comes to light, which just like the Amazon Echo, is aiming to go beyond being just a smart voice assistant services by commanding your audio, delivering relevant answers to queries, learn more about you, and integrate seamlessly with other smart connected devices in the home.
It’s the first step, but is it a good one?
Design
Unlike the Amazon Echo, Google Home opts for a more inviting design that allows it to blend into wherever it’s placed – without being too obstructive in the process, or clashing with other décor lying around. It’s a stark contrast to the hard-lines of the very distinctive speaker design of the Amazon Echo. That’s a good thing, especially more so if you prefer a more homely styling, as opposed to how our electronic gadgets can sometimes be pervasive and overrun our spaces.
It’s diminutive in size and features a peculiar looking shape, one that can be mistaken for one of those Glade air fresheners you might find throughout a home. Adding to its warm and inviting design, the bottom compartment of the Google Home that’s shielding its array of speakers feature a mesh-like fabric, which does a better job we feel in complementing your furniture. And if you want some customization, the base can be swapped out for other colors to match the ambiance of where it’s going to be placed.
The apparent emphasis of favoring a discrete design continues in how the Google Home has a clean look to it, such in the way you won’t find a ton of buttons on it. In fact, there’s only a single one used to mute the microphones. Looking at the top surface, it appears completely flush and free of any buttons, with the exception of two small holes used for its far-field microphones, but it’s been ingeniously designed with touch controls. When we place a finger on it, the embedded LEDs light up to indicate the volume level – or alternatively, it’ll light up in those familiar Google Assistant colors when you speak the activation phrase (okay Google).
All of this helps Google Home to come off as being innocuous with its design, favoring simplicity and discreteness above all. Those characteristics alone, propel it to integrate nicely with other furniture and décor. The only thing you’ll need to decide is where to place it, just because it requires a constant power source via its power chord. At first, we felt as though it was restrictive, but given its always-on premise, it makes perfect sense going with this implementation.
Software and Performance
You’re going to need to download the new Google Home app to initially connect it to your home network, and subsequently, it’s also the hub that allows us to link various services to it. The setup process is a breeze, so once it’s connected to your Wi-Fi network, all that’s left to do is tell Google Home what to do by speaking the activation phrase; “okay Google.” Unfortunately, this can’t be customized at all, so if you have other Google Assistant activated devices around, they’ll also be initiated by this verbal command. We will also say that Google Home can’t distinguish one voice over another, so if you happen to be watching a video when someone says “okay Google,” Google Home will initiate and listen for a command.
Being a Google product and all, there’s no surprise at all that it integrates seamlessly with most of Google’s services. That means playing songs via Google Play Music, watching a YouTube video on your TV through Chromecast, and leveraging all the power of Google Assistant. Anyone that has used the Google Pixel will know Google Assistant’s effectiveness in delivering relevant actions and answers, so there’s nothing out of the ordinary here with Google Home. You ask questions, it’ll try and produce answers. Trivia, of course, seems to be the kind of thing Google Home was bred to handle, since it’s tied intimately to Google’s Knowledge Graph – a service that enhances searches using information procured through various sources.
For example, Wikipedia is heavily source when asking things like “who signed the declaration of independence?” Right now, its functionality is limited, seeing that it can’t yet do simple voice assistant functions such as asking it to read our last text message, or read the last email sent to us. Despite that, it’s always learning and evolving, such in the case when we ask it obscure questions, such as “what’s my favorite camera?” Google Home follows it up by asking what’s your favorite camera, which we then proceed to say, and then it ends by saying it’ll remember that.
Impressively enough, Google Home’s far-field microphones do an excellent job of recognizing our voice – even while it’s playing a song. It’s accurate in deciphering “okay Google” even while it’s playing tunes on high volume, and it then proceeds to lower the volume to listen to our voice command.
While all of this is fine and dandy, it’s just the tip of the iceberg, so even though its support for services is still rather light, you know that it’ll be only time before it reaches the same level as the Amazon Echo. Music services supported out of the gate include Google Play Music, YouTube, Spotify, and Pandora, but Amazon Prime Music is noticeably absent – no shocker there!
Another intriguing prospect about Google Home is how it’s able to integrate with connected devices in the home. So far, that support extends to only a few products consisting of Google Chromecast, Nest, Philips Hue, and SmartThings. That’s not a whole lot, which is a shame because right now, for us to be exact, Google Home is mainly a stationary speaker first and foremost with a very light voice assistant service. We have several other connected devices in the home, such as the Ring Doorbell, other network connected speakers, and a couple of Piper’s all-in-one security camera system.
Google Home can’t integrate with them yet, but Google promises to get more devices supported over time – so to that degree, there’s hope on the horizon for its support grow. Faster would be better, naturally.
Audio Quality
Don’t underestimate its diminutive size for a moment! Yes, its quaint design might lead you to believe otherwise about its punch, but we’re astounded by how much bite that comes along with that punch. Right from the get-go, there’s no hiding its preference for the audio in the low ranges – producing a thumping level of bass in the process. That noticeable hum is evident even at the lowest volume setting, so if you’re the kind of person that loves the beats, you won’t be disappointed by Google Home’s punchy quality.
Conversely, though, its quality is tested when it’s placed to its highest volume level. Even though the roar of the bass continues to be distinguishable, its speaker array seems to be inept in retaining a moderate, clean tone at the loudest setting. You get a sense that it’s straining, which makes for an unpleasant listenting experience, so we wouldn’t recommend adjusting it any higher that ¾ of its volume level.
The beauty of Google Home, though, is that multiple units can be arranged throughout a space to deliver a unison audio experience. Meaning, all Google Home speakers connected in the space will play the same song simultaneously, which is one way to delivering a better audio experience throughout a space – as opposed to cranking a single one to the max, which would be a lot more unpleasant.
Should you buy the Google Home?
There’s a promising future for Google Home, even with its price tag of $129.99. Indeed, that might be a hefty sum for a speaker by itself, but the lure of it being the ambassador for the home with its voice assistant service is enough to recommend it – just as long as it continues to add support for various services and home-connected products in a timely manner. In its current form, however, some will certainly say that it pales in comparison to what Alexa is able to provide with the Amazon Echo.
Buy at Google Store $129
From its warm and inviting design, to its astounding immersive audio quality, Google Home is a pleasant complement to the home. While it’s not entirely integrated with Google’s ecosystem yet, you know that it won’t be long before it can do additional functions – such as read your last text message, scour old emails for reference, and even behave more like a human with some of its responses. Obviously, if you’re the kind of person that religiously uses voice assistant services, Google Home is a no-brainer complement to how we live and interact with our devices in the home. However, if you’re not, then it’ll be nothing more than just another audio speaker to you.
Google relents, unlocks accounts for Pixel resellers
After about a day of scrutiny, Google is reinstating the accounts of people who bought Pixel phones on behalf of a New Hampshire dealer and shared in the profits once the devices were sold again with a markup. At this point it’s still unclear exactly how many people’s accounts were disabled because of their roles in the reselling scheme, but Daniel Eleff — owner of the deal-spotting website that first broke the story — mentioned over 200 people were locked out of their accounts, some for multiple days.
Just to be perfectly clear, Google had every right to disable the accounts in question — the company’s terms of service clearly prohibits the commercial resale of devices purchased from its online store or through Project Fi. To hear Google tell the tale, the company is unlocking the accounts because some customers “weren’t aware” of that particular rule.
Google went on to say that “many of the accounts suspended were created for the sole purpose of this scheme” — in other words, they were secondary accounts that probably didn’t have a lot of personal data associated with them. Still, anyone who used their primary Google account to buy phones for that unidentified dealer got a taste of swift, secretive corporate retribution. Remember: Google’s original response to these people was that they were simply locked out because of a “violation of [Google’s] Terms of Service,” leaving people to puzzle over their situation while coming to grips with their reliance on a single company for so much.
Emails sent to these people were bounced back to senders, and still others (as pointed out by ABC News) couldn’t access work documents and medical records. That, suffice to say, screwed up a lot of people’s days. Google’s move to block offenders from the company’s services was widely seen as overkill, especially since the scope of Google’s response has been hard to pin down. There was at least one reported case in which a Google account was disabled because the account attached to its recovery email was used to buy phones for resale, though others who did the same weren’t affected. Neither the would-be resale conspirators nor Google handled this whole situation very well, but hey — at least it’s all over.
Google’s DeepMind AI gets a few new tricks to learn faster
When it comes to machine learning, every performance gain is worth a bit of celebration. That’s particularly true for Google’s DeepMind division, which has already proven itself by beating a Go world champion, mimicking human speech and cutting down their server power bills. Now, the team has unveiled new “reinforcement learning” methods to speed up how the AI platform trains itself without being directly taught.
First off, DeepMind’s learning agent has a better grasp of controlling pixels on the screen. Google notes it’s “similar to how a baby might learn to control their hands by moving them and observing the movements.” By doing this, it can figure out the best way to get high scores and play games more efficiently. Additionally, the agent can now figure out rewards from a game based on past performance. “By learning on rewarding histories much more frequently, the agent can discover visual features predictive of reward much faster,” Google says. The company laid out the entire concept for the abilities in a paper, “Reinforcement Learning with Unsupervised Auxiliary Tasks.”
These skills, along with DeepMind’s previous Deep Reinforcement Learning methods, make up the group’s new UNREAL (UNsupervised REinforcement and Auxiliary Learning) agent. That’s a mouthful, but the big takeaway is that DeepMind is beginning to teach itself much like humans. The group describes the methods as being similar to the way animals dream about positive and negative events (though I wouldn’t really say DeepMind has learned how to “dream”).
In a 3D maze environment called Labryinth, Google says the UNREAL agent was able to learn stages around ten times faster. It has managed to achieve 87 percent of “expert human performance” in that game, and around nine times typical human performance in a bevy of Atari titles.
On the face of it, UNREAL should help DeepMind’s agents significantly. But we’ll have to wait and see if those performance gains can actually be used in scenarios beyond games.
Source: DeepMind
AIVAnet 