Tech

Tech News Today for June 8, 2017

Tech News for Thursday June 8, 2017

Since the announcement earlier this week of Apple's smart speaker called HomePod, a lot of us have been grumbling about how Siri would need to be smarter for this to work. But what if she could get some help? This week at the Wired Business Conference in New York, Amazon’s Senior Vice President of Devices, David Limp, said Siri should be able to talk to Alexa. According to a piece on Slate.com's Future Tense, this interoperability will limit redundancies in product development and improve innovation. But will it happen? Limp claims that Amazon isn't the one holding up this innovation. He told USA Today "You should be able to say to your Amazon Echo, ask Siri X. If Apple or Google want to come calling, my phone number is out there, they can call." Read more at usatoday.com.

We are another step closer to Verizon being the proud owners of a slightly used Yahoo, as shareholders approved the sale for $4.48 billion dollars. Next Tuesday, everything should be wrapped up with a bow, as that’s when the deal should close. Once that happens, the plan is to combine Yahoo and AOL into a single entity known as Oath, for some reason. And Marissa Mayer, CEO of Yahoo who was handed what amounted to a turd sandwich when she took the reigns in 2012, will step aside from that role officially. Read more at businessinsider.com.

Microsoft has acquired Hexadite, an Israel security company based in Tel-Aviv and Boston, to help beef up its Enterprise Security offerings. Executive VP Terry Myerson says cyberattacks can cost between 12 and 17 million dollars per incident. Microsoft did not say what it paid for the company, but sources say it's around 100 million. According to Mary Jo Foley, host of Windows Weekly, Hexadite was founded in 2014 by veterans of an intelligence unit of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). Read more at zdnet.com.

Amazon is switching things up and saying goodbye to unlimited cloud storage for Amazon Drive. Effective immediately, new users won’t have the unlimited option. Users with an existing unlimited storage plan will not lose it until their renewal is up, at which time they’ll be automatically downgraded to 1 terabyte and asked to pay an additional $59.99 per extra terabyte, or $11.99 per 100 gigabytes. Without purchasing extra data, anything remaining will stick around for six months at which time that data will say bye bye. Read more at techcrunch.com.

Bloomberg reports that Andy Rubin's Essentials startup that we told you about last week is now worth almost $1 billion — $993 million to be exact — so just short of unicorn status. The company recently raised 300 million dollars in funding and it could have been more. Rubin, the founder of Android, had tried to join the fund at SoftBank Group Corp, the group kicked out after Apple joined the fund to avoid comparison, according to sources at The Wall Street Journal. Rubin also spoke at Wired's conference this week where he said that the duopoly of Apple and Samsung has created complacency in the smart phone business. We should say that the funding numbers were calculated before the products were announced and not based on the public's response to them. Read more at bloomberg.com.

Megan Morrone and Jason Howell are joined today by Kyle Wiens of iFixIt to talk about what he discovered inside Apple's new 21.5" Retina 4K iMac. 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.

All Tech posts