Tech News Today for August 14, 2017
Tech News for Monday August 14, 2017
If you've shielded yourself from non-tech news over the weekend, I regret to inform you that racist white supremists incited violence over the weekend in Virginia, leading to at least one death. One White Supremicist website, the DailyStormer, was hosted by GoDaddy until last last night when the site was given 24 hours to move its domain off the service for violating their terms of service by encouraging additional violence. Today many news outlets are reporting that Google has also refused to host the site. Read more at businessinsider.com.
Snapchat has released a new feature in its Stories section that should make music fans happy. Crowd Surf is a new way to take Snapchat videos recorded at big events and merge them in an interactive viewing experience that puts the viewer in control. Snapchat demoed the new feature using collective footage taken at the Outside Lands festival in San Francisco where musician Lorde performed. Snapchat has collected and synced up videos taken from many users at the performance, so the viewer can hit play and basically switch between the videos as a song plays, essentially making Snapchat users the Technical Directors of their own live music performance video. Read more at mashable.com.
Paul Thurott has obtained a leaked Microsoft memo that reveals how the company plans to deal with the fallout from Consumer Reports bad reliabillity rating of all Surface products. The memo also included a chart with return rates for Surface Book that reached 17 percent during launch and then remained above 10 percent for six months. Surface Pro 4 return rates hit 16 percent during launch and then dropped below 10 percent after the first month. Surface Pro 3 return rates, however, were much lower. Thurott has been covering this story for a while and says that Microsoft originally blamed Surface problems on Intel. But sources at the company tell him that real problem was Surface-specific custom drivers and that Microsoft made up the story about it all being Intel's fault. Read more at thurrott.com.
Netflix sees Disney pulling its catalogue from the service and counters with Shonda Rhimes. She is one of the premier producers in television with hits like Grey’s Anatomy, Scandal and How to Get Away with Murder, and she has been signed to a $10 million per year exclusive deal for Netflix, wooed away from ABC and Disney after 15 years generating more than $2 billion dollars for the company. Rhimes with be developing new shows for Netflix and further illustrates the kind of money the company is willing to pour into creating exclusive new content instead of relying on the content supplied by Hollywood studios. Read more at recode.net.
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