Ben Lovejoy is a British technology writer who started his career on PC World and has written for dozens of computer and technology magazines, as well as numerous national newspapers, business and in-flight magazines. He has also written two novels.
He thinks wires are evil and had a custom desk made to hide them, known as the OC Desk for obvious reasons.
He considers 1000 miles a good distance for a cycle ride, and Chernobyl a suitable tourist destination. What can we say, he’s that kind of chap.
He speaks fluent English but only broken American, so please forgive any Anglicised spelling in his posts.
UploadVR reports that Magic Leap has poached Jeff Gattis, the global marketing head of HTC’s Vive, a virtual reality headset expected to ship by the end of the year.
Comments made by Gattis add fuel to speculation that Magic Leap’s own VR headset is close to launch, but also suggest that it is significantly more advanced than the HTC product he’s been pushing for the past eight months …
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A report by the UK’s telecoms and Internet watchdog Ofcom says that children are too trusting of what they find on the web, a surprisingly high percentage of them taking search results on trust, and unable to identify paid ads.
One in five online 12-15s (19%) believe information returned by a search engine such as Google or Bing must be true, yet only a third of 12-15s (31%) are able to identify paid-for adverts in these results.
The report found that the position was even worse with YouTube …
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Update: Google has now advised that the original version is included as well as the demo.
If you don’t already have Michael Jackson’s hit album Thriller in your music library, Google Play is offering the chance to download it free of charge.
There is, though, a catch. The album is described as a ‘Google Play Exclusive Version,’ and from our sampling of Billy Jean, you may find the special edition a little disappointing. It’s a demo version which sounds like he was singing it in the car …
But hey, free is a very good price.
One thing you won’t get for free on Google Play Music is Adele’s new album, 25. While it is available for preorder on both Google Play and iTunes, the singer’s management has said that it won’t be available for streaming.
Many YouTube videos include short clips of copyrighted material for the purposes of commentary or parody, uses that are protected by copyright law. However, most users would be intimidated by legal threats and so back down when faced by a takedown notice.
Google has today said that it will be fighting to protect the fair use principle by offering “legal support” to a handful of videos that it believes represent good examples of legitimate use. For these videos, Google will refuse takedown notices, keeping the videos live on the service, and will meet all the legal costs of defending any court action …
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If you use Uber for both business and work, it can be a pain handling the accounting, having to remember to claim the business rides back on expenses. But the service will soon allow you to register a second credit card for business use, and then simply tap your Personal or Business profile in the app to charge the appropriate card.
Look out for an update shortly, when you’ll find Profile in Settings.
Uber added AMBER alerts to its drivers’ app last month.
Via TNW
T-Mobile is extending its popular Music Freedom service, which allows unlimited use of Google Play Music and other streaming music services without eating into your data allowance, to MetroPCS prepaid customers – albeit under a slightly different name. T-Mobile said that its Music Unlimited service would be available on a range of plans, starting from just $40/month.
Music Unlimited includes more than 30 music streaming services, including Apple Music, Pandora, Spotify, Slacker, iHeart Radio, and Google Play Music. Music Unlimited is available to new and existing MetroPCS customers on Metro’s new $40, $50, and $60 unlimited plans.
The company is also offering a Binge On equivalent, known as Data Maximizer. This compresses streaming video streams down to DVD quality to allow customers to stream three times as much video content for the same data usage …
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Google has launched a new ‘About Me’ page, which lets you see and change what personal information is visible to others when you use any of Google’s services. The company has most likely introduced the service in an effort to counter concerns about data privacy.
Don’t expect too much from it: it’s essentially the same information you can see on Google+, and mostly appears to be an alternative for those of us who long ago consigned Google+ to history. When I checked my data, it showed only my name, gender, birthday and occupation. But if you shared contact details with any Google service, those may also be visible, so it’s worth a quick look.
You can edit the information shown, as well as choose who can view each piece of data. Personally, I always enter a false date of birth on web forms, as it’s a key piece of information used by identity thieves. I set it to private simply to ward off any mistaken birthday wishes.
You can check your own data at aboutme.google.com, where you’ll also find a link to Google’s existing privacy checkup.
Update: The TAG Heuer Connected is now official. It goes on sale for $1500 very soon, has a 46mm case, connects with Android and iOS phones and will be available with a choice of 7 different color straps. Watch the promo video, see the official press renders and read up on the full official details here.
Swiss watchmaker TAG Heuer has announced that its Android Wear-based Carrera Connected smartwatch, launching today in New York, will have go on sale at $1500, a little lower than previously expected.
TAG Heuer CEO Jean-Claude Biver told Le Matin Dimanche that he didn’t want to reveal too much ahead of today’s official unveiling, which takes place at 11am ET. Although it runs on Android Wear, the company appears to be targeting Apple rather than existing Android brands …
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There are many watch guys out there who are reluctant to give up their beautiful analog watches in favor of a smartwatch, but still feel slightly envious about the convenience of wrist notifications. Chronos is a $99 gadget geared to solving that problem.
It’s a 3mm thick disk designed to be discreetly worn underneath an analog watch. It offers multi-color flashing lights and vibrations for notifications from your iPhone, and also offers limited tap-based control of iPhone apps. You can, for example, skip to the next track in the Music app.
The Verge reports that it’s probably something you’ll want to use only with larger watches.
Chronos does add an appreciable thickness to the watch, setting it higher off of your wrist, but it isn’t particularly noticeable when placed beneath a larger model.
Chronos will retail for $129, but the first 250 people to pre-order can snag one for $79. The bad news is that you’ll have to wait until the spring to receive it.
The backpack-based Google Trekker tours have taken us to some pretty spectacular places in the past, and the latest addition won’t disappoint. The Street View imagery covers seven of New Zealand’s world-famous ‘Great Walks,’ including some of the settings for the Hobbit movie trilogy …
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With Google potentially facing a fine of up to $6.6B after the European Commission charged the company of abusing its dominant position in search, its lawyers have now filed a 130-page rebuttal. In it, the company attempts to use a legal technicality to argue that it cannot be fined for favouring its own products in search results …
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Google co-founder and now Alphabet CEO Larry Page has given his first major interview since the formation of Alphabet, addressing a wide range of topics which include his concerns about heading into uncharted territory with the company, privacy, Project Loon and Steve Jobs …
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If you’ve ever felt like Facebook didn’t put quite as much focus on its Android app as on the iPhone one, that’s something that should be changing soon. Facebook’s chief product officer Chris Cox is insisting that an unspecified but substantial number of staff switch from iPhone to Android, in order to have an experience of the service more typical of the majority of users, reports Wired.
“I am mandating a switch of a whole bunch of my team over to Android, just because people, when left up to their own devices, will often prefer an iPhone,” said Chris Cox, who said the move is “so that they can be reporting bugs and living in the same experience that most Facebook users experience today” …
Google’s self-driving cars are aware that children can be less predictable than adults, being programmed to act more cautiously around them. But to do that, they first need to be able to identify them as children – something which can be more challenging when they’re wearing costumes – so Google took advantage of Halloween to give the cars some additional learning.
This week, lots of little ghouls, superheroes and even robots were running around Google with their families, so we asked them to hang out around our parked cars. This gives our sensors and software extra practice at recognizing children in all their unique shapes and sizes, even when they’re in odd costumes …
Discussing Q3 net losses equivalent to $139M – amounting to a painful 23.1% of revenues – HTC has given up on trying to predict its financial future. According to a tweet by the WSJ‘s Eva Dou, the company refused to give any Q4 guidance during today’s earnings call, and said that it will not be doing so for future quarters.
While the loss isn’t as bad as the $265M it made in the previous quarter thanks to ruthless cost-cutting measures, revenues are down and the loss as a percentage of revenue is up – leading some to question whether the company has a future …
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Two separate market share reports show that Samsung, Lenovo/Motorola and Xiaomi all lost out in global smartphone market share year-on-year, while Apple and Huawei made gains. Huawei yesterday reported that it was on track to ship 100 million phones this year.
Strategy Analytics estimates that market leader Samsung saw its market share fall from 24.5% in Q3 2014 to 23.7% in Q3 2015, while Counterpoint has the numbers at 23.9% to 22.9%. Lenovo/Motorola saw a big fall from 7.6% to either 5% or 5.3%, while Xiaomi experienced a smaller drop …
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Samsung reported higher than expected Q3 profits of 7.39T Korean won ($6.4 billion) on revenue of 51.68T won ($45.2 billion), achieving its predicted first return to profit growth in eight quarters. However, while the company reported increased sales of the Galaxy Note 5 and Galaxy S6 Edge+, this was only achieved by cutting the prices.
Samsung admits that smartphone growth will be slow compared to previous years, but Re/code notes that the company believes it can generate growth in two ways …
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Support for Samsung Pay, which launched in the U.S. last month, will be expanded to thirteen more U.S. banks and credit unions “in the coming months” – with the Discover card also being added at some point next year …
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While it seems near-certain that Google plans a full-scale commercial rollout of its self-driving cars, it has also made clear on several occasions that it has no plans to manufacture the cars itself. As a recent opinion piece on sister site Electrek argued, actually manufacturing a car is massively complex undertaking.
Google will therefore be looking for partners to pull together different elements of the car, and Re/code has put together an interesting look at the most likely candidates. Though the piece is focused on the Apple Car, the analysis applies to Apple and Google alike …
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Google’s modular phone concept, Project Ara, has taken a little longer to develop than some had hoped — it’s apparently having issues with the attachment/detachment system and the number of possible permutations.
Finnish company PuzzlePhone is hoping that leaves room for competition, with its own take on the modular smartphone expected to hit Indiegogo next month. PuzzlePhone is, however, less ambitious than Ara, with just three replaceable components …
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It’s no surprise that Google employs artificial intelligence to help parse search queries, but it did surprise me to learn that a full 15% of Google searches are ones its systems have never seen before. It’s these that the company has been decoding with the help of an AI system called RankBrain, reports Bloomberg.
For the past few months, a “very large fraction” of the millions of queries a second that people type into the company’s search engine have been interpreted by an artificial intelligence system, nicknamed RankBrain, said Greg Corrado, a senior research scientist with the company, outlining for the first time the emerging role of AI in search.
As you’d expect, Google uses literally hundreds of different ‘signals’ to make sense of searches, and the vast majority of these are based on discoveries and insights that people in the team have had – but RankBrain is the first system that genuinely learns …
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Following Synaptics’ announcement that it would be offering pressure-sensitive touchscreen controllers to allow Android manufacturers to offer features similar to 3D Touch on Apple’s latest iPhones, it appears that Xiaomi will be adopting the technology.
It has previously been suggested that Samsung plans to use the Synaptics system in next year’s flagship Galaxy handsets.
The report from a well-known Chinese tipster says that Xiaomi has patented a technology similar to 3D Touch, notes GforGames. It’s unclear whether Xiaomi plans to use the Synaptics controller or has created its own technology.
Following Google’s donation-matching program, which has so far raised more than $12M to fund humanitarian aid for refugees from Syria and other war zones, the company says that it is now providing technological assistance too.
In a blog post today, Google says that it has developed an open source project called the Crisis Info Hub to provide migrants with access to the immediate information they need on arrival in Greece in a lightweight, battery-saving way. The company says that it is also helping to beef-up mobile data connectivity locally …
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When we reported yesterday that Alphabet was planning to buy back $5,099,019,513.59 of its own stock, you may have wondered how the company came up with such a strangely specific number.
RBC Capital’s Mark Mahaney actually figured out the answer during the earnings call – appropriately enough, by Googling the number. The alphabet has 26 letters, and the square root of 26 is 5.09901951359. Multiply that by a billion and, yep, you get $5,099,019,513.59.
Alphabet financial chief Ruth Porat reassured analysts that the number wasn’t merely arrived at by whimsy: the company first figured out what made financial sense and later decided to have a little fun by slightly modifying the $5B number it came up with.
The WSJ notes that it’s not the first time Google has had this kind of fun with formulae.
The name Google is a play on googol, which is the number 1 followed by a hundred zeroes. When it first filed to go public, it said it planned to raise $2,718,281,828, a billion times the value of “e,” an important mathematical concept in calculus.
Nearly a year later, it said it was going to sell 14.2 million shares of stock. Well, not exactly 14.2 million, but 14,159,265, the numbers that follow the decimal in pi. And when the company made a move to buy Nortel Network patents, one of its bids was actually “pi” — around $3.14 billion. (Its other bids were plays on numbers, too; Google lost the bid.)
The market appears to approve of Google’s numbers: at the time of writing, the stock is up more than 10% in pre-market trading.