Samsung announced yesterday that it’s set to bring a 5G phone to market in the first half of next year, name-checking Verizon in the promise. This morning, however, AT&T was quick to note that it will also be getting its hand on the still-unnamed handset in the first half of 2019.
The carrier issued a next day press release which, like Verizon’s, is less focused on information about the handset than self-congratulatory statements about the two companies involved. AT&T promises “unforeseen possibilities for the tech,” while pledging to “bring the best in technology and innovation to our customers.”
The company’s also quick to note that the untitled Samsung isn’t its first planned 5G device. That title belongs to a mobile hotspot the company announced back in October. The company hasn’t offered up a release date on that one, but the first half of 2019 seems like a pretty safe bet for that product, too.
As noted yesterday, company like OnePlus and Motorola have already promised to release 5G handsets at some point next year. Apple, on the other hand, isn’t expected to go 5G with the iPhone until 2020.
Samsung announced yesterday that it’s set to bring a 5G phone to market in the first half of next year, name-checking Verizon in the promise. This morning, however, AT&T was quick to note that it will also be getting its hand on the still-unnamed handset in the first half of 2019.
The carrier issued a next day press release which, like Verizon’s, is less focused on information about the handset than self-congratulatory statements about the two companies involved. AT&T promises “unforeseen possibilities for the tech,” while pledging to “bring the best in technology and innovation to our customers.”
The company’s also quick to note that the untitled Samsung isn’t its first planned 5G device. That title belongs to a mobile hotspot the company announced back in October. The company hasn’t offered up a release date on that one, but the first half of 2019 seems like a pretty safe bet for that product, too.
As noted yesterday, company like OnePlus and Motorola have already promised to release 5G handsets at some point next year. Apple, on the other hand, isn’t expected to go 5G with the iPhone until 2020.
YouTube on Monday announced a significant change to its mobile app – it will now autoplay videos by default when users are browsing the app’s home page, aka the “Home” tab. Fortunately, the videos will not autoplay with the sound enabled, the company says. Instead, the feature is meant to give users a preview of the video while scrolling through the Home section, so they can better decide if it’s something they want to watch.
The feature, which YouTube calls “Autoplay on Home,” is enabled by default. However, the app will introduce settings that will allow users to control their experience. Users can opt to turn the feature off entirely, if they choose, or they can opt to have autoplay only enabled when they’re connected to a Wi-Fi network.
Autoplay for Home is not an entirely new feature. It’s actually been up-and-running for over half a year for YouTube Premium members on Android. Premium is YouTube’s subscription offering, which removes the ads from YouTube while also offering other perks like downloads for offline access to videos, background play, and access to YouTube Music and YouTube Originals.
Starting this week, Autoplay on Home is rolling out beyond Premium subscribers to all those who use the YouTube app on iOS and Android. As with most launches across YouTube, it’s a staged rollout – meaning you may not see autoplay immediately. YouTube says it will take a few weeks for the rollout to complete.
The company notes it made the decision to expand autoplay because it increases users’ engagement time with videos.
As YouTube explains in an announcement on its product forum (spotted first by Tubefilter): “previewing videos helps you make more informed decisions about whether you want to watch a video, leading to longer engagement with videos you choose to watch.”
The company also detailed its decision further in a YouTube Help video (embedded below) where it noted that autoplay’s launch doesn’t mean thumbnails are going away. Instead, YouTube will display the thumbnail first during a brief pause, before the video begins to autoplay.
With the launch of autoplay, YouTube also noted that captions would become more important.
Today, the number of videos with captions enabled tops 2 billion, it said. The site offers a variety of options for captions, including automated captions (which aren’t always perfect), creator-uploaded captions, and crowdsourced community captions.
It’s not surprising to see YouTube adopt autoplay, given that rivals including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and others already do the same, as do some streaming services, like Netflix.
User reaction, following YouTube’s announcement on Twitter, has been mixed. Some people said they were looking forward to the feature, while others lamented that it’s now just another setting they have to turn off.
YouTube on Monday announced a significant change to its mobile app – it will now autoplay videos by default when users are browsing the app’s home page, aka the “Home” tab. Fortunately, the videos will not autoplay with the sound enabled, the company says. Instead, the feature is meant to give users a preview of the video while scrolling through the Home section, so they can better decide if it’s something they want to watch.
The feature, which YouTube calls “Autoplay on Home,” is enabled by default. However, the app will introduce settings that will allow users to control their experience. Users can opt to turn the feature off entirely, if they choose, or they can opt to have autoplay only enabled when they’re connected to a Wi-Fi network.
Autoplay for Home is not an entirely new feature. It’s actually been up-and-running for over half a year for YouTube Premium members on Android. Premium is YouTube’s subscription offering, which removes the ads from YouTube while also offering other perks like downloads for offline access to videos, background play, and access to YouTube Music and YouTube Originals.
Starting this week, Autoplay on Home is rolling out beyond Premium subscribers to all those who use the YouTube app on iOS and Android. As with most launches across YouTube, it’s a staged rollout – meaning you may not see autoplay immediately. YouTube says it will take a few weeks for the rollout to complete.
The company notes it made the decision to expand autoplay because it increases users’ engagement time with videos.
As YouTube explains in an announcement on its product forum (spotted first by Tubefilter): “previewing videos helps you make more informed decisions about whether you want to watch a video, leading to longer engagement with videos you choose to watch.”
The company also detailed its decision further in a YouTube Help video (embedded below) where it noted that autoplay’s launch doesn’t mean thumbnails are going away. Instead, YouTube will display the thumbnail first during a brief pause, before the video begins to autoplay.
With the launch of autoplay, YouTube also noted that captions would become more important.
Today, the number of videos with captions enabled tops 2 billion, it said. The site offers a variety of options for captions, including automated captions (which aren’t always perfect), creator-uploaded captions, and crowdsourced community captions.
It’s not surprising to see YouTube adopt autoplay, given that rivals including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and others already do the same, as do some streaming services, like Netflix.
User reaction, following YouTube’s announcement on Twitter, has been mixed. Some people said they were looking forward to the feature, while others lamented that it’s now just another setting they have to turn off.
Microsoft and Docker today announced a new joint open-source project, the Cloud Native Application Bundle (CNAB), that aims to make the lifecycle management of cloud-native applications easier. At its core, the CNAB is nothing but a specification that allows developers to declare how an application should be packaged and run. With this, developers can define their resources and then deploy the application to anything from their local workstation to public clouds.
The specification was born inside Microsoft, but as the team talked to Docker, it turns out that the engineers there were working on a similar project. The two decided to combine forces and launch the result as a single open-source project. “About a year ago, we realized we’re both working on the same thing,” Microsoft’s Gabe Monroy told me. “We decided to combine forces and bring it together as an industry standard.”
As part of this launch, Microsoft is launching its own reference implementation of a CNAB client today. Duffle, as it’s called, allows users to perform all the usual lifecycle steps (install, upgrade, uninstall), create new CNAB bundles and sign them cryptographically. Docker is working on integrating CNAB into its own tools, too.
Microsoft also today launched Visual Studio extension for building and hosting these bundles, as well as an example implementation of a bundle repository server and an Electron installer that lets you install a bundle with the help of a GUI.
Now it’s worth noting that we’re talking about a specification and reference implementations here. There is obviously a huge ecosystem of lifecycle management tools on the market today that all have their own strengths and weaknesses. “We’re not going to be able to unify that tooling,” said Monroy. “I don’t think that’s a feasible goal. But what we can do is we can unify the model around it, specifically the lifecycle management experience as well as the packaging and distribution experience. That’s effectively what Docker has been able to do with the single-workload case.”
Over time, Microsoft and Docker would like for the specification to end up in a vendor-neutral foundation. Which one, remains to be seen, though the Open Container Initiative seems like the natural home for a project like this.
Microsoft Edge has failed to capture the public’s attention since launching back in 2015, so you can’t really blame the company for switching tacks. According to new reports that first surfaced in Windows Central, the browser isn’t not long for this world. Microsoft could announce its replacement as early as this week.
As for what’s next for the Windows 10 default browser, the company is reportedly looking to Google for some help on that front. The next-gen browser is said to find Microsoft swapping Edge’s EdgeHTML rending engine for Chromium.
All of this is still early stages for the project that has been floating around with the internal name “Anaheim,” but Internet Explorer’s replacement’s replacement will hopefully address some stability and compatibility issues that have hampered adoption. It could also help the browser work better on those ARM-powered Windows machines.
The Chromium-powered browser would likely have more flexbility, should the company ever choose to really go all in on a Chromebook competitor, rather than pushing a stripped-down version of Windows 10. Distinguishing the browser from Chrome will be another question entirely.
Microsoft’s going to need some help on that front if it hopes to regain a solid chunk of browser market share from Google. According to recent numbers, Chrome controls well over half of the global browser market.
Microsoft Edge has failed to capture the public’s attention since launching back in 2015, so you can’t really blame the company for switching tacks. According to new reports that first surfaced in Windows Central, the browser isn’t not long for this world. Microsoft could announce its replacement as early as this week.
As for what’s next for the Windows 10 default browser, the company is reportedly looking to Google for some help on that front. The next-gen browser is said to find Microsoft swapping Edge’s EdgeHTML rending engine for Chromium.
All of this is still early stages for the project that has been floating around with the internal name “Anaheim,” but Internet Explorer’s replacement’s replacement will hopefully address some stability and compatibility issues that have hampered adoption. It could also help the browser work better on those ARM-powered Windows machines.
The Chromium-powered browser would likely have more flexbility, should the company ever choose to really go all in on a Chromebook competitor, rather than pushing a stripped-down version of Windows 10. Distinguishing the browser from Chrome will be another question entirely.
Microsoft’s going to need some help on that front if it hopes to regain a solid chunk of browser market share from Google. According to recent numbers, Chrome controls well over half of the global browser market.
More evidence has emerged that the e-scooter sharing market faces a bumpy ride, as news circulates that authorities in Madrid have revoked licenses for all three operators in the city.
Lime, Wind and Voi, are being given a maximum of 72 hours to remove scooters from the city’s streets, whilst I understand the follows a recent change in mobility laws in Madrid that stipulate where and at what speed e-scooters can be driven.
Specifically, e-scooters can only operate in designated bike lanes and on only roads that have a speed limit below 30 kilometres per hour. Sidewalk and pedestrian areas were also recently banned following Spain’s first death from a e-scooter accident in August.
Meanwhile, my sources in Madrid tell me a meeting has just taken place between the city’s transport authorities to presumably find a resolution for the conflict. What the outcome of those talks are isn’t yet known, although the path to compliance may actually be relatively simple.
Lime, Wind and VOI will need to make changes to their respective apps, which could include geo-fencing where the e-scooters can be ridden, as well as communicating those restriction to users and legally enforcing them via their terms of service. In other words, this may yet prove to be little more than a speed bump in the current e-scooter frenzy.
Voi is working closely with the authorities in Madrid to make sure that our app complies fully with the city’s new guidelines. We are confident that we will be able to get our scooters back on the streets of Madrid in a short time, to help residents and visitors travel around the city quickly and safely, in an environmentally-friendly, low-impact way.
I’ve also reached out to Lime and Wind and will update this article if and when I hear back.
FortressIQ, a startup that wants to bring a new kind of artificial intelligence to process automation called imitation learning, emerged from stealth this morning and announced it has raised $12 million.
The Series A investment came entirely from a single venture capital firm, Light Speed Venture Partners. Today’s funding comes on top of $4 million in seed capital the company raised previously from Boldstart Ventures, Comcast Ventures and Eniac Ventures.
Pankaj Chowdhry, founder and CEO of FortressIQ, says that his company basically replaces high-cost consultants who are paid to do time and motion studies and automates that process in a fairly creative way. It’s a bit like Robotics Process Automation (RPA), a space that is attracting a lot of investment right now, but instead of simply recording what’s happening on the desktop, and reproducing that digitally, it takes it a step further in a process called “imitation learning.”
“We want to be able to replicate human behavior through observation. We’re targeting this idea of how can we help people understand their processes. But imitation learning is I think the most interesting area of artificial intelligence because it focuses not on what AI can do, but how can AI learn and adapt,” he explained
They start by capturing a low-bandwidth movie of the process. “So we build virtual processors. And basically the idea is we have an agent that gets deployed by your enterprise IT group, and it integrates into the video card,” Chowdhry explained.
He points out that it’s not actually using a camera, but it captures everything going on, as a person interacts with a Windows desktop. In that regard it’s similar to RPA. “The next component is our AI models and computer vision. And we build these models that can literally watch the movie and transcribe the movie into what we call a series of software interactions,” he said.
Another key differentiator here is that they have built a data mining component on top of this, so if the person in the movie is doing something like booking an invoice, and stops to check email or Slack, FortressIQ can understand when an activity isn’t part of the process and filters that out automatically.
The product will be offered as a cloud service. Chowdhry’s previous company, Third Pillar Systems, was acquired by Genpact in 2013.
Walmart this morning announced a new plan to help its retail store customers complete their purchases — even if the items they want aren’t available on the store’s shelves. The retailer says it will arm its sales associates with a new in-store app that will allow them to assist shoppers by helping them find and pay for items from Walmart.com, then have it shipped to the store or to the customer’s home.
The customers will receive a receipt or email they can use to pay at the register in the store, after completing the ordering process with the sales associate’s help, Walmart says. And the item will ship immediately after the customer makes the payment at checkout.
The move to better connect the brick-and-mortar operation with Walmart.com’s e-commerce site should not be surprising — it’s something Target shoppers have been able to do for over a year now, in fact. Back in October 2017, Target said that its store staff would now be able to use their in-store device to create online orders for customers when local merchandise was not available. Target’s system even includes a mobile credit card reader for easier checkout.
Amazon also now operates its own brick-and-mortar locations beyond Whole Foods, including its cashierless Amazon Go stores, its bookstores, pop-ups and its newer 4-star stores.
Walmart has also been experimenting with and rolling out mobile checkout to its stores, but that doesn’t appear to be part of this new initiative. Its mobile checkout system, “Check Out With Me,” was first rolled out to its Garden Centers, where it can be cumbersome to haul heavy merchandise to the register.
While it may be more convenient to pay directly with the sales associate during the ordering process, it’s likely that many Walmart shoppers taking advantage of the new service came in for more than just the one item, and are planning to visit a register anyway.
In addition, the customers will be able to pay cash for online purchases. That’s something that could help Walmart.com better serve the under-banked customer base — without requiring them to buy a gift card or load cash onto a Walmart MoneyCard by Green Dot first.
Walmart says customers at its stores can choose to pay for the purchases with checks, credit cards or Walmart Pay, as well, when completing their purchase at the register. The service is available across 4,700 Walmart stores and will be offered year-round. For the time being, it supports items sold on Walmart.com, not marketplace items — but that will change in the future. (The app is not available in Arkansas, Hawaii and Puerto Rico.)
“The Dotcom store offers customers even more assortment options than what’s on our physical shelves — whether that be different sizes, colors or varieties,” said Tom Ward, head of Walmart’s digital and central operations,” in a statement.
