Tech News 2Night 166 (Transcript)

[Top TN2 Animation ] Tonight! Alibaba sets a share price for the upcoming IPO (and it's a doozy), the Moto 360 smartwatch sells out, and what were the coolest products that came out of IFA. Tech News 2Night is Next! [TWiT Open] [Main TN2 Open] This is Tech News 2Night Episode #166, for Friday September 5, 2014 This episode of Tech News 2Night is brought to you by ZipRecruiter. ZipRecruiter makes hiring faster, easier and cheaper. Post your job to 50+ job boards with one click. Try ZipRecruiter with a FREE 4 day trial now at ziprecruiter.com/tn2. That’s zip recruiter dot com slash tn2. I'm Jason Howell, Let's get right to the Tech Feed! In a regulatory filing today, China's largest e-commerce company Alibaba Group set the estimated price range of its initial public offering in the range of $60 to $66 a share, which values the company at a whopping $155 billion. Alibaba estimates the offering could raise up to $24.3 billion, which would be the biggest IPO in history. The Chinese e-commerce company is expected to launch the deal this month and plans to list under the symbol "BABA" on the New York Stock Exchange, with shares slated to start trading on September 19th. Last week, Alibaba reported a surge in revenue and earnings for its latest quarter, in part from increased activity on mobile devices. Revenue jumped 46% to 15.77 billion yuan (U.S. $2.57 billion) from a year earlier, while earnings surged to 12.34 billion yuan from 4.38 billion yuan. / Motorola announced today that it has sold out of its initial supply of Moto 360 watches available online. The company isn't saying how many of the devices it has sold, but the $249 round Android Wear smartwatch went on sale earlier today. The Moto 360 will also be available in all Best Buy retail stores by Sept. 14 and is being sold on Best Buy's website as well as via the Google Play store. Motorola has also said it will add additional carriers and retail partners later this year. / In other Motorola news, the company has announced the new Moto X, a bigger version of its predecessor with a 5.2-inch AMOLED screen and a 1080p display instead of the previous 720p one. Instead of a plastic frame, Motorola went with aluminum wrapping around the entire edge of the phone, plus the Moto X now offers a back made with one of four different leathers: Natural, Cognac, Black and Navy. The X has a 13-megapixel camera, a Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 processor with a 2.5GHz quad-core CPU, a 578MHz Adreno 330 GPU, and 2GB of RAM. Oh, and forget about "OK Google" as a voice prompt - you can also customize that voice command prompt to anything you want. The Moto X retails for $99.99 on-contract or $499.99 unlocked. / The Information reports anonymous Apple employees familiar with the so-called "iWatch" that say there are "low expectations" for the device's battery life. And even though it sold out online, poor battery life is one of the complaints about Motorola's new Moto 360 watch, which uses Google's new Android Wear OS. However, rumors have suggested Apple's rumored "iWatch" will be the company's first device with OLED display technology, which can use considerably less power than traditional backlit LCD displays. The Information's Jessica Lessin also said she expects the "iWatch" to boast voice-enabled controls, mobile payments, health monitoring, and most of the other features that have been rumored to be integrated into the device. Although next Tuesday's Apple event is widely believed to be an iPhone and possibly a wearable announcement, prominent Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo of KGI Securities says he believes a so-called "iPad Air 2" will also be unveiled by Apple next Tuesday. In a research note, Kuo stated that "only iPad Air 2 will see significant spec upgrades," which suggests the iPad mini may not be given as much of a spec bump. Specifically, Kuo believes the next iPad Air will have an anti-reflective screen coating, a full-lamination touch panel, a new gold-colored casing, and a next-generation A8 processor. He also expects the device to adopt the Touch ID fingerprint sensor that debuted last year in the iPhone 5s. In the wake of last weekend's iCloud privacy scandal, Apple has announced it plans to add additional steps to keep hackers out of user accounts, while still denying that the breach was due to insufficient iCloud security. CEO Tim Cook said celebrities' iCloud accounts were compromised when hackers correctly answered security questions to obtain their passwords, or when they were victimized by a phishing scam to obtain user IDs and passwords, and that none of the Apple IDs and passwords leaked from the company's servers. Going forward, Apple will alert users via email and push notifications when someone tries to change an account password, restore iCloud data to a new device, or when a device logs into an account for the first time. Apple also says a majority of users don't use two-factor authentication, and it plans to more aggressively encourage people to turn it on in the new version of iOS. / Coming up, do you know who authored the words on Microsoft's Blue Screen of Death? We'll tell ya. And next I'll talk with Brad Chacos from PCWorld about the newest gear to come out of the IFA electronics tradeshow. [AD] "Are you hiring? Do you know where to post your job to find the best candidates? Posting your job in one place isn’t enough to find quality candidates. With ziprecruiter.com, you post your job to 50 plus job sites including Cragslist, LinkedIn, and Twitter. All with a single click. Find candidates in any city or industry, nationwide. 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And we thank ZipRecruiter for their support of Tech News 2Night" [Segment #2] The IFA consumer electronics tradeshow is underway now through Sept. 10th and here to go over some of the newsest gadgets is Brad Chacos, Senior Writer at PCWorld. Brad you wrote an article today: ""Best of IFA: The eye-catching new gear you need to see, from dirt-cheap PCs to smartwatches galore"" and you've helped oversee all the IFA news coverage for PCWorld and its sister sites, Greenbot and TechHive -What stood out? -What trends do you see? -What are things we should look for? -Any sleeper hits? //Thanks Brad Chacos, Senior Writer, PCWorld " [Kicker!] Where were you the first time you experienced The Blue Screen of Death? Every Windows user knows what it is, but who made that horrible screen, anyway? According to a blog post on MSDN, it was none other than former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer while he was leading the Systems Divisions. As the story goes, Ballmer was showed an original error message by the Windows team, and Ballmer reportedly said he didn't like the text, and so he rewrote the message himself. All legacy, that Ballmer. All legacy. [good bye] That's it for this edition of Tech News 2Night. Subscribe to this show at Twit.tv/tn2, and write us at tn2@twit.tv Don't miss our morning news program, Tech News Today, every weekday at 10am Pacific, 1 pm Eastern. I'm Jason Howell, thanks for watching.