Tech News Today for June 19, 2017
Tech News for Monday June 19, 2017
Tim Cook, Jeff Bezos, Eric Schmidt, Satya Nadella, as well as the leaders of Oracle, IBM, Akami and others met with President Donald Trump today to discuss improvements to government IT and to review the HB-1 visa program to continue to bring highly skilled workers into the US. In total, twenty technology company CEOs attended all day meetings in DC to offer ideas on how to overhaul the government's tech infrastructure. ReCode's Tony Romm reports that Tim Cook called for coding to be a requirement in schools and Jeff Bezos called on the government to use more commercial technology. Read more at recode.net.
Time Warner is working with Snap to bring 10 original shows per year exclusively for Snapchat in a $100 million dollar two year deal. Turner cable channels, Warner Brothers studio,and possibly even HBO will develop shows that run from 3-5 minutes and can only be viewed inside the app with vertical video, of course. So don’t be surprised if you see content from Ellen DeGeneres, Samantha Bee and Wonder Woman on your Snap TV sometime soon. Read more at wsj.com.
Google is launching a four step plan to fight the spread of terrorism in its products, including YouTube. The company aims to take a tougher stance on extremist videos and inflammatory religious content. In a blog post today General Council Kent Walker writes that they are working with government, law enforcement, and civil society groups to tackle the problem, that there is no place for terrorism on their network, and he admits that there is a lot more work to be done. Read more at blog.google.
Virtual Reality is neat, sure, but even on high end units, the resolution for each eye is still far behind what we are accustomed to seeing in real life. A Finnish startup named Varjo has developed a prototype of hardware it plans to market to high end business customers that tackles this costly problem creatively. Through a complex series of magnifiers and mirrors, each eye is given .7” displays at 3,000 pixels per inch that are then magnified to fill the space with a 20 degree field of view. All of this results in full HD per eye while in use, significantly eliminating the screen door effect we see today. Varjo says that hardware utilizing the 20/20 display should cost under $10k when it releases sometime next year. Read more at techcrunch.com.
Ikea is partnering with Apple to create an AR app to help you see how furniture will look in your home. This isn't the first app of its kind, but it might be the first with Apple's ARKit technology. In a recent interview, Tim Cook gave Ikea a specific shout out and Ikea says they're hoping to have the app available at the launch of iOS 11 this fall. According to the Swedish website Digital DI, there will be 500-600 products available at launch. Selling furniture in the app is a possibility, but not the goal yet. Read more at imore.com.
Megan Morrone and Jason Howell are joined today by Iain Thomson of The Register to talk about the massive leak of 198 million Americans' personal voter data. Tech News Today streams live weekdays at 4PM Pacific, 7PM Eastern at twit.tv/live. You can subscribe to the show and get it on-demand at twit.tv/tnt.