Bluetooth 5 Will Be

Late last year we got an early look at improvements coming to the next version of Bluetooth, and now the Bluetooth Special Interest Group has revealed the name of the upcoming version plus more specifics about the new standard. Bluetooth 5 will be the successor to Bluetooth 4.2, which was released at the end of 2014, suggesting a notable release this year. The new standard will be announced next week, and this is what we know so far.

Specifically, Bluetooth 5 will increase the range of the wireless connection standard by 4x and greatly increase transfer rates for low energy connects with a 2x boost in speed. The Bluetooth SIG also shared (not their link inverses numbers by mistake) that Bluetooth 5 will open up some new possibilities (that could boost iBeacon usage):

 But there’s more. Bluetooth 5 will also provide significant new functionality for connectionless services like location-relevant information and navigation. By adding significantly more capacity to advertising transmissions, Bluetooth 5 will further propel the adoption and deployment of beacons and location-based services to users around the world.

With Bluetooth becoming increasingly important in our computer hardware these days, general improvements to the wireless standard directly impact products like the iPhone, Apple Watch, and more than ever wireless headphones. The Bluetooth SIG will officially announce Bluetooth 5 next Thursday at a London press event.

Facebook is testing social commerce payments in Southeast Asia

Facebook is expanding its focus on payments with a new trial in Southeast Asia that allows users to pay for products listed on Facebook Pages with just a few clicks.

The social network is running a trial in Thailand which allows users to make a payment to a Page owner without leaving the social network. Qwik, a product that is powered by Southeast Asia-based fintech company 2C2P, which raised a $7 million Series C last year, allows users to make payment via a credit card, debit card or bank transfer online, according to numerous sources with knowledge of the trial.

Facebook and 2C2P both declined to comment.

The test might sound a little bizarre to anyone in the West, where the dominance of Facebook is under question thanks to the emergence of companies like Snapchat, but in Asia — China aside — the social network is a staple part of the internet for most people. Indeed, Asia Pacific is its largest region with 566 million monthly users, according to Facebook’s latest data.

That social dominance in Asia also extends to commerce, with many small and independent retailers using Facebook Pages to build and engage their audience and, of course, sell products. It’s difficult to track transactions on social, but Page365, a Bangkok-based startup that helps small retailers sell products via social media, previously estimated the industry to be worth over $500 million per year in Thailand alone.

That figure came from 2014, and the social network no longer enables its pages to be crawled to make such estimates, but PWC reports that Thailand is the world’s largest c2c — consumer-to-consumer — commerce market with more than half of the people polled buying items from social networks.

Typically, the process of buying from social — which is mentioned in Mary Meeker’s latest report: slide 106 — goes something like this:

• Buyer browses Facebook Page and finds an item they like
• Buyer clicks the ‘Message’ button next to the product to express an interest in it via Facebook chat/Messenger
• Seller/Page admin chats with buyer to check on stock and confirm order
• Seller provides bank account details so that buyer can make a bank transfer for payment
• Buyer leaves their house/office to go to the nearest ATM and wire the funds to the seller’s account, buyer adds a note to the transaction with order details, address for delivery and perhaps a reference number provided by the seller
• The goods are then prepared for delivery once the buyer’s bank transfer is confirmed by the seller

It’s a hugely cumbersome process that most people in emerging markets are forced to undertake. That’s because few have internet banking, the small number who do own a credit card can’t use it in this scenario, and cash-on-delivery isn’t preferred by small merchants.

Details aside, the key point is that people are so keen to buy online that they’ll jump through all manner of hoops to do.

The big problem for Facebook, however, is that many of these hoops don’t belong to the social network.

Page365 co-founder Prathan ‘Pop’ Thananart told us that, among his company’s base of 25,000-plus retail partners, nearly all transactions start on one social network and finish on another.

“One finding that is consistent across all our merchants, aside from customers engaging in chat-and-haggle buying behavior, is where those conversions happen. Merchants report that 80 percent of transactions are carried out across two or more platforms — most notable Facebook and Line,” he said.

That could mean buyers and sellers connect on Facebook but agree the final steps and payment via Line, Thailand’s top chat app with 30 million users in the country. Or, as is increasingly happening, Instagram is the key ‘store front’ for social commerce sellers to find their customers, with deals completed at non-Facebook properties like Shopee, the social commerce app from Singapore-based unicorn Garena.

This trial, which is more like alpha stage than even beta right now, is an early indicator of Facebook’s intent to keep all the processes of the social commerce transaction on its platform.

“While chat or ‘conversational commerce’ is the up-and-coming trend in the West, it’s already a reality in emerging Southeast Asia. In Thailand, for example, 33 percent of the total e-commerce spend is already going through Facebook and Instagram and ending on Line,” Sheji Ho, Group CMO of aCommerce, a startup that provides e-commerce marketing and logistics services for retailers, told TechCrunch.

TechCrunch understands that Facebook is trialling Qwik with an unspecified number of top Facebook Pages in Thailand, some of which have multiple millions of fans. Once a user taps the link, it redirects them to a new site where they can enter their credit/debit card details or provide their bank account which, with authorization, triggers a bank transfer like an ATM.

We’ve been in contact with a number of Facebook users who have successfully used the product this week, but we were unable to replicate the process ourselves.

We have seen screenshots of the transaction process but are not publishing them with this story since Page owners in the trial have signed NDAs and media coverage could impact their relationship with Facebook, which owns the platform that they are reliant on for a large portion of their online sales.

Multiple sources in Thailand’s e-commerce space told us that Facebook is planning to widen the trials to other countries in Southeast Asia over time, but it picked Thailand first because of the large market for social media commerce.

Either way, this trial is the loudest signal to date of Facebook’s interest in Southeast Asia and potentially other parts of Asia and emerging markets. The company has dabbled with commerce with a feature to let users find local services which is being tested in India and Indonesia, and, while the technology behind Qwik is hardly revolutionary, entering the payment space is a major move.

It isn’t clear when the trial was started, the users we talked with began to notice it this week, but it plays into Facebook’s other payments initiatives elsewhere in the world. The company has enabled peer-to-peer money transfers in the U.S., and most recently UK. Those plays were almost certainly about raising user engagement rather than making money, and this social commerce trial is not dissimilar in that respect, but with an Asian twist.

Facebook might not be the only social network company stepping into this space in Southeast Asia, however. Line, which operates its own payment service and a shopping appin some parts of the region, is also talking to small retailers with a view to launching its own new service, one source with knowledge of discussions told TechCrunch.

Southeast Asia is one of Line’s most important geographies since Indonesia and Thailand are among its top four countries based on active user numbers. The Japanese company claims 218 million active users worldwide is reported to be planning for an IPO this year.

Google co-founder Larry Page is secretly building flying cars

(Kimberly White/Getty Images)

Google co-founder Larry Page has been personally funding a pair of startups devoted creating flying cars, according to Bloomberg Businessweek. Page has reportedly funded one startup, named Zee.Aero, with more than $100 million since its creation in 2010, and putting money into another, named Kitty Hawk, since last year. His interest in the companies is a personal ambition, says Bloomberg, and he even retained an office at once of the company's headquarters, where he was referred to pseudonymously as GUS — the guy upstairs.

Zee.Aero and Kitty Hawk have been developing designs for flying cars completely separately, says Bloomberg, with Zee.Aero conducting test flights of its prototypes at an airport about an hour's drive away from Google's Mountain View headquarters.Bloomberg reports that Zee.Aero has hired aerospace designers and engineers from organizations including NASA, Boeing, and SpaceX, and has been testing two single-seater prototype designs — one that looks like a "small conventional plane" and another with propellors dotted down its sides.

One of Zee.Aero's patents filed back in 2012. (Image credit: USPTO)

Previously known patents registered by Zee.Aero show a craft that matches this description, with a thin central fuselage and twin rows of propellors like outriggers. The patent, filed in 2012, says the aircraft is capable of vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) and is described as a "safe, quiet, easy to control, efficient and compact aircraft." Not quite a flying car, then, but certainly a vision of personal aviation.

The other startup Page has been investing in, Kitty Hawk, has reportedly been building its own craft "that resembles a giant version of a quadcopter drone," according toBloomberg's sources. The startup is smaller than Zee.Aero, and kept separate from its older rival. Some of its engineers come from AeroVelo — a firm that previously won the $250,000 Sikorsky Prize in 2013 for building a human-powered helicopter that can stay aloft for more than a minute (see the video below). And Kitty Hawk wouldn't be the first firm to design a quadcopter-inspired aircraft; similar concepts have been floated by Chinese firm Ehang and even built by lone engineers.

But as Bloomberg points out, the dream of flying cars has long been one that's dear to tech types, and so Page's involvement in these two companies is not that unusual. Numerous firms — such as Volocopter and Aeromobil — are developing aircraft built for personal use, although it should be noted that not all of these designs function as cars as well as planes. It's not clear, though, whether Page's involvement signals an increased seriousness in the personal aviation game, or whether this is just another billionaire looking for a fun new toy.

Google tests a cleaner look for Search

      Google has begun to test a new Material Design layout for its desktop search results. The company introduced Material Design in 2014 at its annual I/O conference during its Android Lollipop unveil, promising to spread the new grid-based look across Android, Chrome OS and the web. It's... taken a while to get there, and arguably the most important of Google's web properties -- YouTube and Search - still haven't made the switch. Last month, Google began testing a fresh look for its video streaming site, and now, we're beginning to see that familiar grid of floating cards show up in google.com search results.

The change isn't exactly monumental: Google Search has always returned results in a grid, so the basic layout is functionally identical to the current one. The biggest change is a visual one: the background in the test is a light gray, and individual search results are boxed in white with a small drop shadow to imply elevation.

Another major change is to the informative modules that Google shows for certain terms. Typing "Run The Jewels," for example, would bring up a list of search results accompanied by a card displaying information on the musicians and upcoming events on the right. In the new layout, this card is shown inline, before the regular search results. Given this is just a limited test, there's every chance this behavior will change if Google makes the Material Design layout the default.

Small changes elsewhere include new iconography for the magnifying glass in the search box, and switching out the settings cog for the three vertically aligned dots. Both the changes will be familiar to Android users. The google.com homepage has also been modified in line with the new aesthetic.

The test seems to have begun fairly recently, and on a small scale: There have been a few mentions of the new layout on Twitter and Reddit over the past week, and it's only showing up in one Engadget editor's search results. The company frequently trials new features and layouts on a small group of its users, seemingly at random. Many of the changes never make their way out of the testing phase. We've reached out to Google to ascertain its plans for the new design.

Microsoft’s Planner project management app is now available to all Office 365 users

After launching a preview for select customers last September, Microsoft is now rolling out free access to Planner, its project management app, to all users of its Office 365 productivity suite. 

The tool lets you plan projects for your team, whether it’s for your business, school or non-profit organization. Once you’ve added collaborators, you can assign them tasks with due dates, share files and get a visual overview of everyone’s progress. 

The board-based interface is similar to apps like Trello and Asana, but the obvious advantage here is that it will instantly become available to the numerous companies and teams that have already adopted Microsoft’s popular Office 365 suite.

However, it’s still early days for Planner – unlike its rivals, it doesn’t have native mobile apps and you’ll instead have to log in to the service through your browser, and rely on email notifications to know when you’ve been assigned a new task.

Microsoft says it’s working on apps for Android, iOS and Windows, as well as features like reusable plan templates, an option to grant external users access to your boards and the ability to assign a task to multiple users.

IBM signs $300 million IT deal with Emirates Airline

ABU DHABI (Reuters) - IBM on Tuesday said it signed a $300 million, ten-year technology services agreement with Dubai’s Emirates Airline.

IBM will provide information technology services, allowing the airline to improve efficiency on its passenger support systems and functions, a statement from IBM said.

Under the managed services agreement, this will include assistance in encrypting the airline's data in near real-time and systems which allow different software components to communicate more effectively, the statement said.

In October 2015, IBM signed a $700 million deal with Abu Dhabi’s Etihad Airways for a range of IT services and infrastructure.

Emirates, the world’s fourth-largest carrier of international passengers reported a profit of $1.93 billion for the financial year to March 31, a jump of 56 percent over the year.

Samsung might launch smartphones with foldable screens next year

The company is said to be aiming to reveal two new devices next year, including one that folds in half a la flip-phones, as well as a 5-inch handset that unfurls into an 8-inch tablet. They might be similar to the concepts Samsung showed off in a video from 2014. 

However, those models aren’t likely to be flagships. Instead, they’ll serve to gauge the market’s interest in phones with foldable screens.

We’ve been hearing about this technology for some time now, and Samsung isn’t the only company experimenting with foldable screen tech. LG, Sony and Sharp have been at it as well.

But while the ability to bend and fold your screen sounds ultra-futuristic, I’m not sure it’s going to drastically change the mobile device market immediately.

Of course, it’ll help designers create devices that are easier to carry in your pocket or purse. But we’ve only been getting used to bigger handsets in the recent past. Barring the 4.7-inch iPhone SE, there are almost no new phones that come in at under 5 inches.

At the same time, we’ve come to expect more from our phones in terms of battery life, processing power and imaging capabilities. Since those attributes have only been improving incrementally over the past few years, it seems like reducing the overall size of a device to half may push manufacturers to compromise on specifications.

However, even if these two new devices only appeal to a small niche of the market when they launch next year, Samsung would benefit by learning firsthand about how people use bendable and foldable screens in the real world.

This technology might also aid in the development and adoption of modular phones.LG’s G5, shown off at Mobile World Congress in February, gave us a taste of what it might be like to switch out components on our phones. And Google is set to begin shipping its Project Ara modular devices to developers this fall.

Imagine being able to carry around a cube of smartphone components that plug into each other and then connecting it to a pocketable screen that unfurls to create a large mobile workspace. If modular phones take off, Samsung might be in a position to develop and deliver screens to other manufacturers.

Google's Deepmind AI will play Go against the world number one

After it beat Korean grandmaster Lee Sedol by four games to one earlier this year, Google's AlphaGo has become the Go player to beat. Even while the series was still being played, 18-year-old Chinese Go champion Ke Jie remarked that he could beat Google's Deepmind computer. Now he has his chance. At the 37th World Amateur Go Championship in Chinese city of Wuxi this weekend, a spokesman for the Chinese Go Association revealed that representatives have been in contact with the team behind AlphaGo and will set up a match before the end of the year.

It's an interesting turn of events, particularly after Ke once said he didn't want to play Google's Deepmind computer because it would learn his playing style. "I don't want to play against AlphaGo because I can tell from its performance that it is weaker than me," he told Chinese media. "I don't want it to copy my patterns and learn from me."

Those emotions changed when 33-year-old 9th dan professional Lee Sedol was finally defeated by AlphaGo. The win is considered a huge milestone for artificial intelligence given the complexity of the Chinese board game.

Although Ke is also a 9th dan player and currently the world's number one (beating Sedol on his way to a championship win earlier this year), the Korean is considered the Roger Federer of Go and was chosen for the Deepmind showdown based on his experience. Ke now has the chance to prove he's not all talk and cement his reputation as the game's best player.

Source: GB Times

Make music by touching waveforms, sampling, in new Novation app

reating digital music is all about the business of mucking about with sounds. But somehow, the actual sounds themselves have been tangled up in immense grids and spreadsheets and mixers and things called piano rolls and so on.

Blocs Wave is the latest attempt to use mobile apps to get back to basics. Here, whether you’re on an iPhone in your hand or the enormous iPad Pro, the sounds are at the center. Touch your way through the waveforms to make music – whether using soundpacks or adding your own.

There are two basic paths to getting your musical materials. First, there’s the soundware way. There are six Soundpacks, for a total of 300 loops, included the app. From there, you can add more across genres via a Store, updated weekly. (At launch, 12 are available, with more to come.) To keep all of this manageable, there are browser tools for finding what you need. (There’s even optimized downloads in case you’re on the go on your phone.)

If you’re not keen on using sounds someone else designed, the alternative is to add your own. Blocs Wave can both both import and export, and has Audiobus support for grabbing sounds from other apps.

That done, Blocs Wave lets you combine sounds via more touch, adjusting key and tempo. There’s a built in stretch engine so you can change tempo without re-pitching sounds, plus a keep-everything-in-key bit.

Blocs Wave is the kind of app you may see more of. It’s certainly simpler than what we’ve seen on desktop. Indeed, Blocs Wave looks like a single audio clip was grafted out of Ableton Live, was planted like a seed, and then sprouted its own app. That enormous grid of clips is gone (Novation’s own Launchpad app has treaded those waters), and now touching the waveform is really the whole app.

And adding in those Soundpacks to a simplified instrument, clearly this is another entry in the “you don’t need to know anything about music” or, alternatively, “you don’t need to be technically advanced” app category.

But here’s where the narrative changes. While those things are indeed beginner-friendly, this isn’t just an app for the unwashed punters. There’s low-latency loop recording. There’s hardware audio support, so you can record and monitor from external gear. Import and export works via Audiobus, AudioCopy, AudioShare, and Mail (so, sort of everything).

In other words, it’s not so much whether you’re advanced or beginner. Rethinking the app to make it simpler can prove useful to everyone – particularly when designing inexpensive tools that you use on the go. And that may be a necessary formula for success. Apps have to be sophisticated enough to win over enthusiasts – the people who care passionately about making music on, well, their phone, even when everyone else is satisfied with Tinder and Snapchat. But given those apps are trading for only a few bucks a pop, appsalso have to have broad appeal, or the business doesn’t work.

Novation seem to think that this is a formula that merits investment. They’ve even accompanied the launch with a behind-the-scenes video that looks at the Blocs team and their philosophy. As it happens, I visited this office last year, and found a passionate group of developer-musicians who really wanted to think about how music software should look from the ground up, and told me they were already seeing swaths of customers they hadn’t seen before.

You’ll see these lads also have the kind of complexion one gets when lit entirely by Apple displays and English winter weather. (Hey, I’m not doing a whole lot differently myself!)

Facebook is going to start showing you pieces people actually read

Facebook is changing its algorithm yet again, and this time it wants to show you more things that you’ll actually spend time reading or watching.

The social network looks at a wealth of data when deciding which posts you actually see on News Feed, but until now it hasn’t cared too much about what you actually do when you click away from Facebook. It says that’s going to change.

Facebook considers tip jar proposal as part of push to monetise posts

 

Read more

“We’re learning that the time people choose to spend reading or watching content they clicked on from News Feed is an important signal that the story was interesting to them,” said software engineer Moshe Blank and research scientist Jie Xu in a post on the company’s website.

As a result, the site will now attempt to pick links which have a higher reading time. But don’t think that you’ll have a News Feed filled with 30,000 word New Yorker epics. “We will also be looking at the time spent within a threshold,” the pair said, “so as not to accidentally treat longer articles preferentially.”

It seems that part of the reason for this change is that only recently has Facebook had enough data on user behaviour off-site to create the right metrics. The site still can’t tell what happens to desktop users who click a link that takes them outside Facebook, but the steadily increasing proportion of users who are on the company’s mobile apps, as well as the introduction of Instant Articles, means that Facebook can now hoover up data about a critical mass of its users.

That also lets it be smart in terms of how it measures reading time. For instance, the algorithm won’t count loading time towards average time reading, only actual time spent reading and watching content.

The change is the latest example of Facebook tweaking the News Feed in ways that it hopes will encourage users to spend more time on the site. Last summer, it put a similar change in place when it came to posts on the site, promoting the posts which were read for more time even if no links were clicked. And in 2014, it changed the algorithm to penalise “clickbait” – links which users opened then immediately closed. “We learned that this often happened when the article someone clicked on wasn’t what they had expected from the post or the headline,” Blank and Xu wrote.

But when the algorithm changed, so did the traffic. In January this year, Upworthy laid off 14 of its 97 employees and pivoted towards video content. The company’s video traffic had grown 33 times in the previous 11 months – thanks, partially, to another change in Facebook’s algorithmFacebook traffic is so important to most media organisations that the tweak to the algorithm will likely have a direct effect on what gets produced by some. Most famously, an algorithm change in August 2013, which reposted particularly popular stories to your News Feed again if you didn’t scroll down far enough to see them the first time, resulted in an explosion of traffic to news websites from the social network, and almost single-handedly popularised the style of headline invented by leftwing viral media site Upworthy (“When a flood left people stranded, this man had the perfect rescue vehicle.” “These bizarre circles have baffled scientists for years. Now we may know what they are.” “Coral bleaching is about to cause one of the biggest breakups of all time.”)

Acer debuts new gaming PCs with VR support

Acer introduced a range of new products on Thursday at a press event in New York City. The Taiwanese electronics company announced a variety of gaming products, a high-end 2-in-1 notebook, an enterprise-level Chromebook and more.

Beyond computers, Acer also highlighted a new smartphone and a range of health and fitness devices, including a GPS-equipped biking computer with a built-in camera.

2017 Bugatti Chiron: The $2.6-Million, 1500-hp, 261-mph Image Booster

 

With the Bugatti Veyron’s top-speed records, a price tag over $1 million, and distinctive melted-scoop-of-ice-cream styling, it was an instant rolling superlative when it debuted in 2005. Its successor, the new Chiron, is even more of a record- and headline-grabbing show pony. Is it faster? A 310-mph (500 km/h) speedometer and Bugatti’s claim that it’ll do 261 mph say it is.

Never mind that there are few places in the world where anyone could achieve 261 mph, and even fewer owners who will ever attempt the feat, what could hypercars such as the Ferrari LaFerrari, Porsche 918 Spyder, or McLaren P1 offer in retort? That their top speeds are lower, they’re less comfortable, or, critically, that they’re—gulp—cheaper? The Chiron’s game is to be so unattainable, so unimaginable, so magical as to reestablish Bugatti as the ultimate automotive accouterment for those who measure their cash reserves not by face value but with a yardstick. 

Make Bugatti Great Again

Bugatti says the 4400-pound Chiron is “the world’s first production sports car with 1500 hp.” It’s best to simply shelve any expectations of modesty on Bugatti’s part. After all, when the car you’re replacing produced 1200 horsepower, hit 258 mph, and cost more than $2 million, adding an extra 300 horsepower, 3 mph of governed top speed, and half a million to the window sticker matters. Oh, and just 500 will be made, because nobody wants a mass-produced $2.6-million car. 

Between Bugatti’s braggadocio and posturing, there are real improvements to the Veyron’s formula. Does it matter that, if every strand of carbon fiber in its new central tub were laid end to end, they’d “stretch nine times the distance between the earth and the moon”? No, and we pity the Bugatti employee charged with checking the arithmetic on that factoid. But it is indicative of a real effort to reduce—or at least hold the line on—the Chiron’s weight relative to that of the somewhat pudgy Veyron. All of that carbon fiber—the body panels also are made of the stuff—helps keep the Chiron right around the same weight as the 4486-pound Veyron, despite being 3.2 inches longer, 1.6 inches wider, and 0.3 inch taller. Bugatti further claims that the Chiron’s structure is as stiff as those underpinning LMP1 racing prototypes.