Amazon’s Alexa devices were some of the most exciting tech products of 2016, and immediately there were rumors that Apple was planning to follow suit with a standalone Siri — possibly even with the addition of facial recognition tech.
A new report, however, claims that despite its popularity, Alexa has been a massive money drain on Amazon so far. In 2016 alone, it lost Amazon $330 million, and this figure is set to rise to $600 million-plus this year.
Jake Harms was on his way to the warehouse when a supervisor asked him to take a cart full of garbage to the dumpster. On top of the cart was an old indigo blue iMac G3.
Crossing the warehouse floor, Harms needed to turn left toward the dumpster. Instead, he steered the cart right toward the parking lot so that he could offload the broken iMac into his car.
That rescued iMac would become the first of more than 700 to get a second life as an aquarium.
Siri may have celebrated five years since its iPhone 4s debut this week, but Apple didn’t rush to acquire Viv, the follow-up AI assistant created by Siri’s makers.
Instead, Samsung snapped up Viv for an undisclosed amount.
There have been plenty of rumors about Apple creating a bezel-less iPhone, but a new concept by designers DeepMind, in collaboration with SvetApple, may be my favorite yet.
It’s a nifty feature which would keep the iPhone looking like the current model — only with the neat addition of letting users enlarge photos and video right to the edge of their devices.
Check out the video below.
If you’re as confused as we were when we first heard about the major App Store hack over the weekend, we’re here to help.
Here’s a compilation of everything we know about the XcodeGhost story, and we’ll be updating it as more develops.
Nest has acquired Revolv, the Colarado-based startup which allowed users to control their smart home devices from a single interface using their smartphone.
No price has yet been announced for the purchase, which follows Nest’s $555 million Dropcam purchase back in June, and Nest’s own acquisition by Google for a massive $3.2 billion earlier this year.
Alien Blue, the most popular third-party Reddit client for iOS, has been acquired by Reddit itself. To celebrate, the ‘Pro’ upgrade in-app purchase is available for free instead of $2. The iPad app is also free to download.
Developer Jason Morrissey has joined Reddit, and he will continue to develop Alien Blue and add new features.
Microsoft is going through some major turbulence. Today it has announced major layoffs, beginning with 13,000 positions to go immediately, with a total of 18,000 expecting to find themselves out of a job sometime during 2014.
The vast majority of these sackings involve the company’s Nokia division. Microsoft acquired Nokia’s Devices and Services unit back in September 2013 for $7.2 billion. Along with taking ownership of the Finnish firm’s entire smartphone lineup — giving it complete control over both hardware and software– the acquisition saw 25,000 Nokia employees join the Microsoft ranks.
The current Microsoft layoffs means that up to half of the Nokia people will probably leave the company, although it will also likely signal the end for some previous Microsoft employees to allow for incoming Nokia talent.
Amazon has been rumored for years to be making its own smartphone, but now, according to reputable analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, it’s actually going to happen.
But the weirdest thing isn’t that Amazon’s planning on releasing a smartphone… it’s that they are going to release a smartphone with six cameras per unit. What what?
Given Samsung’s habit of shamelessly copying everything Apple does, I wasn’t at all surprised to see this morning’s report that the South Korean company had just spent $650 million on a fingerprint scanning firm called FingerPrint Cards. In fact, I simply rolled my eyes when I saw the news and thought, “there’s a surprise.”
But it appears that the whole thing was completely fabricated. The press release that went out announcing the move was false, and both Samsung and FingerPrint Cards have denied the acquisition.
