Google Hangouts has had a more material design update recently which has been followed up by the announcement of dedicated web portal for the chat, voice and video chat app by Google.
Hangouts which was previously available as a native Android or iOS app, a chrome app & extension and also accessible inside Gmail and Inbox will now also be accessible at hangouts.google.com. The dedicated website removes the clutter involved with having to access hangouts from another service and it looks rather beautiful with a randomly changing background image but the beauty fades away when you tap a chat.
The chat popup doesn’t follow material design guidelines and it kills the impression you get at first sight. The number of chats you can have open at once really depends on how wide your monitor is and majority seem to have the ability to open up to 3 chat simultaneously.
Well if you are the kind that wants to use hangouts for plain charting without installing an extension or getting distractions then you will definitely love this.
Samsung unveiled two devices during its Samsung Unveiled press event in New York. The Samsung Galaxy Note 5 and Galaxy S6 Edge Plus are the new phablets that Samsung unveiled today among other announcements.
The Samsung Galaxy Edge Plus is a bigger variant of the S6 Edge and both the Edge Plus and Note 5 come with a 5.7″ display that fits in the same footprint as the iPhone 6 Plus which Samsung brings up in all their press events. The Galaxy Edge Plus and Note 5 come with built-in faster wireless charging which takes one hour less charging.
The Galaxy Edge Plus even has a new case Samsung called the Keyboard Cover which comes with a hardware keyboard for the Note 5. Both phones will also support the newly announced Samsung Pay. By the way these two phablets come with nearly the same specifications:
Samsung Galaxy S6 edge+ and Galaxy Note5 Product Specification
These new devices will be available in Canada and USA next week on 21st August. Samsung was not shy to tease the upcoming Gear 2 that will be announced in Berlin on 3rd September.
Samsung Pay is an android payment system on Samsung Device that is powered by Samsung Knox. It involves the use of NFC to tap and pay for items using Samsung Pay compatible payment terminals.
Samsung Pay also enable users to swipe their phone along some traditional Credit Swiping machines meaning you can leave your credit cards at home. Samsung Pay works on almost all credit card readers because it uses a Magtape stripe reader and existing credit card machines are compliant and their is no need for specific hardware like Apple Pay requires.
Samsung Pay will now be available on all compatible devices will launch in Korea on August 20 and in the U.S. on September 28.
Google Founder and former CEO Larry Page just dropped a major announcement which that Google the multi-venturous company will now be called Alphabet. (abc.xyz) as an umbrella company for Google and its Google-owned sub companies. Larry Page and Sergey, the founders of Google also announced Sundar Pichai as the CEO of Google.
Alphabet will be the parent company of the ‘new Google’ together with other businesses that previously operated under Google will have their own CEO with Google having Sundar Puchai and Alphabet will have Larry and Sergey at the top still managing the resource allocation and compensations for the various CEOs.
Some of the divisions that will be separated from the old Google include X labs, Google Ventures, YouTube and Google Life Sciences. The new Google will maintain what we have known to be Google’s core businesses such as Search, Android, ads etc.
Alphabet’s stock will still be traded on Nasdaq under the GOOG and GOOGL symbols and Google’s stock will be transformed one-to-one into shares of Alphabet. And Google will report quarterly results separately from other Alphabet companies.
All this comes after an open letter penned by Larry Page which states that “Google is not a conventional company. We do not intend to become one.” As part of that, we also said that you could expect us to make “smaller bets in areas that might seem very speculative or even strange when compared to our current businesses.”
Apple Music was launched on 30th July this year and yesterday Apple Executives shared numbers with USA Today.
Apple Music which is running a three month trial music trial which costs up to $9.99 in the US and $4.99 in other markets has been able to lock in 11 million subscribers within a period of 30 days.
“We’re thrilled with the numbers so far,” says Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of Internet software and services, adding that of that sum 2 million have opted for the more lucrative family plan at $14.99 a month for up to six people.
This is a major leap for Apple Music considering that Spotify has been able to gather 20 million premium and 70 million trial subscribers within 8 years.
But I don’t think we should judge these numbers just yet considering that some users just love free things and we shall be waiting for a time when the trial period for majority of the users has expired.
Hellofood, the world’s leading online food delivery marketplace, has expanded its operations to Entebbe municipal council. This move is great for Entebbe restaurants, because now they can grow their delivery business by tapping into the growing e-commerce and internet penetration. Many restaurants worldwide have not even scratched the surface of the potential of their delivery part of their business.
Ron Kawamara, Managing Director HelloFood Uganda, said, “This move to Entebbe is a big milestone for Hellofood Uganda because it is our first expansion since launching in Kampala, and it is also great for the customers and food lovers in Entebbe because they can now order food online from restaurants across Entebbe from the convenience of their homes or offices, plus be able to pay the same price they would at the restaurant.”
The expansion to Entebbe has not been an easy one, getting restaurants on board that have never heard of Hellofood is a challenge. Setting up delivery operations is difficult and building the right platform to serve Entebbe is expensive. But thanks to a dedicated and talented Hellofood team we have managed to launch here in a short period, added Ron.
Kayanja Vincent De paul, Mayor Entebbe Municipal Council, said, “Entebbe’s food gap or missing link has been a company like Hellofood, to provide better service delivery of food and that Hellofood is going to create comfort and quality in the new generation of service delivery and he also thanked Hellofood for creating employment for the Entebbe people.”
For those that would like to take advantage of this New expansion, or to see what else HelloFood has to offer, orders can be placed online at www.hellofood.ug or through the app, which is available for Android, iOS, Blackberry, and Windows Phone devices.
Arduino Srl which is known for their open source hardware products such as the Arduino Uno is a micro-controller board based and Arduino Yun for DIY (Do it Yourself) projects will be supporting/ partnering with a Ugandan startup called EWERDIMA which is currently incubating at Outbox Hub.
EWERDIMA which stands for Early Warning Early Response Disaster Management is a startup by ILICIT Africa that is working on a project to redefine methods in which individuals, friends, families members communicate and respond in critical and emergency times like disasters.
Arduino will providing hardware for the mesh network project that Ewerdima will use to avoid single points of failure when disaster happen such as telecom/cable outages which have been a previous hindrance to communication during emergencies.
This mesh network will run on the EWERDIMA Unit which is an Arduino powered wireless electronic device that uses solar power and automatically creates a disaster mesh network enhancing communication between various users during natural disasters, when communications systems don’t work anymore, as it often happens during and after earthquakes, flooding, avalanches, tsunamis and the like.
I managed to talk to Daniel Nanghaka the project leader about the support from Arduino and his happiness about how the hardware would help the Ewerdima team build prototypes that will have buttons that are connected to robust GSM and GPRS networks along with their own mesh network that reports back to the Ewerdima dashboard. Daniel was not hesitant to share that the startup had already started building the prototype but still need additional funding.
The EWERDIMA dashboard will be used to monitor different units and notifications sent during emergencies which improves communication during emergencies. Currently, Ewerdima released and android app which is in public beta testing that enables users send emergency alerts to their contacts which you can download from the Google Play Store.
It is nice to a Ugandan startup get support to solve a real global problem such as communication during disasters and emergencies which has been a big problem to the entire planet.
We are at a time and age where hacking is rather common for websites, corporations, governments, agencies and many more but it is more embarrassing when a security company like BitDefender gets hacked.
BitDefender has been among the leading antivirus firms and this data breach is more embarrassing not because they failed to secure sensitive user data but the failure of BitDefender to encrypt user data such as usernames and passwords. One would expect a security based company like BitDefender to encrypt their data in the event of a breach but no they didn’t in fact the login details were in a pure unencrypted format.
The hacker who goes by the alias DetoxRansome was able to breakinto a BitDefender server which hosted the cloud-based management dashboard for small and medium sized business clients which had the usernames and passwords that belonged to them.
The hacker has demanded a $15,000 ransom otherwise he will publically release the credentials of its customers after he exposed a list over 250 BitDefender Accounts as proof. However BitDefender which admits that the system was breached and said the hacker didn’t penetrate the server but a security hole which could have been an SQL injection.
BitDefender is currently working with law enforcement agencies to investigate the issue and they claim that the issue was immediately resolved no other servers or services were impacted.
Much as this breach only affects less than 1% of its customers, it is still disappointing to read a headline about an anti-virus company getting hacked.
Following the official global release of Windows 10 yesterday, many users who had reserved their upgrade earlier were able to upgrade to the latest version of Windows and Microsoft shared a blog post about the first 24 hours of Windows 10.
Yusuf Mehdi stated that over 14 million devices are currently running Windows 10 and they expect more to upgrade considering that not all who reserved the upgrade have already received the upgrade. Microsoft expects Windows 10 to run on over a billion year to come and all we have to do is wait and see.
But 14 million in the first 24 hours is a pretty huge leap but we must remember that some windows insiders (testers) were already running a prelease version of Windows 10.
This is For all the music lovers.
Apple has really taken long to revamp their iPod line. The 6G has finally come after a period of 3 years. As you would expect, this moves with the latest functionality that is packed in the iPhone, iPad and Apple watch.
ipod-touch-2015
This beast of a music player has Apple music streaming straight out of the box. Primary and front facing camera. The front facing camera is able to take burst shots and 120 FPS slow-mo filming, people are really taking selfies seriously of late. The 6G has more gaming ability. Where the 5G spends minutes to push through a given number of pixels, the 6G cuts through them like a hot knife in butter. This is all powered by the A8 processor it is rocking compared to the 5G’s A5. All current Apple devices are running on A8 processor with exceptions of the Apple TV. The RAM has gotten bigger from 512MB to 1GB. This will enable iOS 9 and 10 compatibility for the next 3 years at most. The Audio quality through headphones will be similar to all the other Apple devices since the audio chip-set is the same.
ipod-touch-avalable colors
The 6G having more processing going on will rock a slightly bigger 1043 mAh battery than the 5G’s 1030 mAh but having the same battery endurance.
The iPod 6G will be available in 6 colors; silver, space grey, gold, red, a deeper shade of blue and pink.
Almost unnoticeable in the pocket it comes in a 6.1mm thick and only 88grams. The 4 inch screen gives it a one handed-operation. Despite the screen being an 1136 x 640, Apple stubbornly chooses retina 360 pixel display over HD. This means the images are sharper with more detail but not at the iPhone Level. The A8 in the iPod Touch is under-clocked to 1.1 GHz, that allows for an increased yield on the A8 manufacturing, again lowering Apple’s bill of materials on the device. The biggest feature for me is the family group in iClould where an app or song can be bought once and made available to all other members of the group at no extra cost.
ipod-touch-one hand-opartion
The cons here are that the back thingy for attaching a strap is no more, then design-wise, the 6G and 5G look no much different. The iPod 6G does not have an auto brightness sensor as the iPhone so it’s best you keep the Brightness at a higher level so as to cope with indoor and outdoor light or just get used to working with the slider in the quick settings panel already. GPS was also tweaked out although the functionality of wi-fi compensates for that. The vibration motor is also not present.
The fingerprint sensor is also not available which means no TouchID which rules out Apple pay and authorizing downloads from iTunes using fingerprint.
ipod-touch-colors
These beauties are already on market so you can already get an upgrade in your music wardrobe from trusted Apple resellers around town. It’s also not a crime to import one or buy one online.
Most low cost iPhones have all the functionality this media player has. The only question is whether you really need an iPod since Apple knows its market pretty well.
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