Tuesday, December 13, 2016

Facebook Launches Live 360 Video Streaming


Just yesterday it was announced that Facebook is going to launch its support for 360-degree Live streams, called Live 360.

Today on 13th December 2016, National Geographic’s Facebook page will publish the first 360 Live video at noon as scientists emerge from 80 days in isolation pods at Utah’s Mars Desert Research Station.
The Live stream will feature footage from the landscape of Mars and interviews with the researchers.

About the Mars Isolation Pods



These seven space scientists from around the world have spent their past 80 days in isolation pods, simulating every aspect of life on Mars.
National Geographic will be live in Facebook as these scientists emerge from their pods. The scientists will let us have a look on some behind the scenes action, allowing us to see how they suit up in their space suits, explore the living quarters, take a rover out for a drive across the surface of Mars, and much more.

Facebook Live 360 Videos

Facebook will even take questions from the Facebook audience in their Q&A session with the experts, writers and thinkers.
Live 360 videos is going to be made available to more pages via the Live API in the coming months, and it will roll out for all the pages and profiles next year.

An example of Facebook VR in action

Friday, December 9, 2016

Save Webpages Offline On Chrome Mobile Devices



After adding support for offline videos in YouTube, similar additions in Chrome are Google’s next steps for its mobile platforms. The latest update will bring the ability to download webpages for later access, as well as a built-in Download Manager, lower memory usage and web-sharing features.
The download feature was first made available in the Chrome S5 Beta program, before arriving for everyone. The S5 update has already been released for the desktop version.
To download a webpage, you only must press a new download option, which is present at the top when you press the three dots on the side. Not only webpages, but also HTML5 videos and audios can be downloaded unless the site uses custom controls or the content is part of a stream. The content remains available offline for as long as you want, until you delete it yourself.

These changes come as a part of the new Download Manager built into Chrome for the first time, which is a move away from the conventional Android download manager.
There are new performance enhancements, as well. JavaScript is handled more efficiently, resulting in a 50-percent drop in RAM usage, followed by a feature which frees up unused zones in script after the page has loaded.
Lastly, there’s a new Web Share API, which allows webpages to instantly share content with the apps installed on your phone. There are improvements in Search and spell-checking software, as well.
Expect to see the update in an action through a rollout in the near future.

Tuesday, December 6, 2016

Amazon Introduces Revolutionary way in E-commerce


Would it not be amazing to simply walk into a store, pick up the things you need and just leave? No, we are not talking about stealing!

We are talking about a new service called Amazon Go, that allows you to do exactly that.

Amazon Go

The online ecommerce giant has launched Amazon Go, which is a brick-and-mortar store. It allows the customers to walk out of the stores without wasting times in queues and instead have the items automatically billed to their Amazon accounts.
Using the Amazon Go application, the customers can enter the store to initiate their shopping session. Anything the customer picks up during the time period is added to the cart.
The application itself assesses what products have been picked up by the customer, rather than the customer manually entering the product ID or scanning it.
Amazon have named this technology as “Just Walk Out” technology. It is a combination of sensor fusion, computer vision, and deep learning algorithm to allow the store to track the items you pick up and walk out with.
Here’s how it all works:
The company’s promotional video states:
“It automatically detects when products are taken from or returned to the shelves and keeps track of them in a virtual cart. When you’re done shopping, you can just leave the store. Shortly after, we’ll charge your Amazon account and send you a receipt.”

Is It Open For Everyone Now?

According to an Amazon staff member, the store at 2131 Seventh Avenue, on the corner of Seventh Avenue and Blanchard Street in downtown Seattle is currently only available to Amazon employees while it’s being tested, but will open to the public in early 2017.
No further information regarding expansion in other countries or continents has been made available either.

Freakishly Scary Technology

Dr. Pedro Domingos, a University of Washington professor of computer science and engineering, assessed the Amazon Go technology and his remarks may leave you looking over your shoulder.
According to Pedro, the system deployed inside the Amazon Go is constantly learning what the people are buying. It does this by watching them through cameras and following them round the store.
He said that machine learning has crossed all boundaries and the hardware on these stores can learn very rapidly now.
“They can learn all sorts of things,” Domingos said. “Her facial expressions as she’s looking at the shelves, right?  There’s computer vision, machine-learning algorithms that can understand what emotions you’re feeling from your facial expressions. They’ll actually be able to look at her and like, what she’s thinking when she’s looking at one of the cupcakes. You know, does she scrunch up her face?”
He also added that through this system, shoplifting is impossible as the customers have to be identified via the application upon their arrival in the store.

Microsoft, YouTube, Facebook & Twitter - Working On Anti-Terrorism Database


Four of the biggest social networks, Twitter, Microsoft, YouTube and Facebook are going to be working together to build a database of photos and videos used to recruit people into terrorist organizations.

This shared database will identify images via a unique digital footprint, making it easier for them to identify and remove any imagery related to terrorism. Shared hashes will be used to help identify potential terrorist content on the mentioned social networks.
They said that hopefully this collaboration will lead to greater efficiency of helping to curb the global issue of terrorist content online.
A joint blog post by the 4 companies states:
“There is no place for content that promotes terrorism on our hosted consumer services. When alerted, we take swift action against this kind of content in accordance with our respective policies”.

Not the First Collaboration of Its Kind:

Exactly an year earlier, these big names had collaborated before as well to identify and remove child pornography from the internet using a similar technique. This technique was developed by the UK’s Internet Watch Foundation.
The companies said that the content flagged by the database will not be automatically removed from the platform, but instead it will be reviewed by each company, and by reviewing its policies it will be decided whether if it violates the company’s terms of service.
The companies also said that throughout this collaboration they will do their best to protect the users’ privacy and their ability to express themselves freely and safely on each of the mentioned platforms.
“We also seek to engage with the wider community of interested stakeholders in a transparent, thoughtful and responsible way as we further our shared objective to prevent the spread of terrorist content online while respecting human rights”
via The Verge 

Tuesday, November 22, 2016

Oracle Acquires Dyn - A Supereme DNS Provider in $600+ Million


Business software vendor Oracle announced on Monday that it is buying cloud-based Internet performance and Domain Name System (DNS) provider Dyn.

Dyn is the same company that was hit by a massive distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack by the Mirai botnet last month which knocked the entire Internet offline for a few hours, crippling some of the world's biggest and most popular websites.

Since the company provides cloud-based DNS service to customers such as Spotify, Netflix, Twitter and Pfizer, the acquisition will help Oracle's cloud customers to optimize their infrastructure costs and performance.


According to the press release, the Dyn acquisition "extends the Oracle cloud computing platform and provides enterprise customers with a one-stop shop for Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)."

"Oracle Cloud customers will have unique access to Internet performance information that will help them optimize infrastructure costs, maximize application and website-driven revenue, and manage risk," said Kyle York, chief strategy officer of Dyn.
The company said Dyn's immensely scalable and global DNS is not just a critical core component but also provides a natural extension to Oracle's cloud computing platform.


So, the deal would help its cloud customers improve access and page-load speeds for their websites using internet performance information.

Oracle did not disclose the acquisition amount it paid for Dyn, but a source close to the deal told Fortune that Oracle paid somewhere between $600 Million and $700 Million to acquire Dyn.


Dan Primack reported that Oracle paid around $600 million for Dyn, though Dyn has yet to respond to a request for comment.


Oracle is far behind Amazon Web Services (AWS), which is the market leader in the infrastructure cloud computing market. The deal would potentially make the company compete with Amazon's AWS and on Microsoft's Azure – Route 53 and Azure DNS.