Tech News Today for July 26, 2017

Tech News for Wednesday July 26, 2017

Yesterday we mentioned that Taiwan-based Foxconn Technology Group might unveil plans to open up a factory in the United States, and sure enough, the announcement came with $10 billion dollars being invested in a display plant that will bring up to 3,000 jobs to Wisconsin to start with. On its surface, it doesn’t appear that Apple is involved with the announcement directly, though it's hard to imagine that Apple won’t be involved with the new facility once it's up and running. Read more at nytimes.com.

After all our talk of robots and AI becoming our unwelcome overlords, I thought I'd take the opportunity today to talk a little bit about robot helpers. The Verge reports that a swimming robot called Little Sunfish might have just spotted nuclear fuel that melted six years ago. This could be the first step toward cleaning up the dangerous mess from the Fukushima power plant disaster in 2011. Scientists are still analyzing which portions of the rocks are fuel. Read more at theverge.com.

Facebook released its second quarter earnings report and things aren’t slowing down yet, with the company’s best quarter of revenue to date at around $9.32 billion dollars, an increase of 45% year over year. Net income was up 71% from the previous year at $3.89 billion. Big big numbers. However, the company is warning that ad growth will drop in 2017, and revenue growth is seeing a downward trend. And net user growth continues to slow which only partially matters consider the more than 2 billion users already on Facebook are incredibly active and engaged, and that’s good for exposure to ads. Read more at qz.com.

Search Engine Land reports that Google is killing Instant Search, the feature that would show search results as you typed them. The move is an attempt to make searching easier where most people search, on mobile. Fun fact, Instant Search was launched in 2010 by then Google executive Marisa Meyer in a time when the desktop was king. Now, whatever device you're using to search, you'll see search suggestion terms, but you'll no longer see results. I'm not sure how this will affect anyone on a daily basis, but it does look like a harbinger of things to come in terms of the dominance of mobile. Read more at searchengineland.com.

Tech News Today streams live weekdays at 4PM Pacific, 7PM Eastern at twit.tv/live. Subscribe to the show and get it on-demand at twit.tv/tnt.