Tech News 2Night 175 (Transcript)

?[Top TN2 Animation ] Tonight! Amazon announces a new batch of tablets and e-readers, Larry Ellison steps down as Oracle CEO, and Microsoft cuts 2,100 jobs. Tech News 2Night is Next! [TWiT Open] [Main TN2 Open] This is Tech News 2Night Episode #175, for Thursday September 18, 2014 This episode of Tech News 2Night is brought to you by NatureBox. NatureBox ships great-tasting, healthy snacks right to your door. Forget the vending machine, and start snacking smarter with healthy, delicious treats like Dutch Cocoa Sun-Crunch! To get your free NatureBox sampler go to naturebox.com/twit. That’s naturebox.com/twit. I'm Sarah Lane, Let's get right to the Tech Feed! Following some web leaks yesterday, Amazon officially announced two new e-readers, the Kindle Voyage, a six-inch e-reader with a lighted e-ink screen and pressure-sensitive sensors that let you squeeze to turn pages, and also a lower-end, basic e-reader without a light, starting at $79, which offers twice as much storage as Amazon's previous entry-level Kindle. Not only that, but two new updates to the Kindle Fire tablet line- a new six-inch Fire tablet, which starts at $99, and comes in five colors, and a 7-inch version of the tablet which starts at $139. Amazon also released a new high-end tablet, the Kindle Fire HDX 8.9 , which starts at $379. All are available for pre-order and the company says the devices should be available to consumers sometime in October. In other Amazon news, the company has revealed the fourth version of its smartphone and tablet platform, Fire OS 4, built on top of Android 4.4 KitKat, with deeper cloud integration, an updated user interface, and profiles for multiple accounts — including individualized preferences for email, social, and settings. A few features include Smart Suspend: which sets up a device-specific profile over time to proactively turn off wireless functionality and save battery life....Advanced Streaming and Prediction: Dubbed "ASAP," which predicts which movies and TV content you may want to watch next, while caching them in the background... and Free cloud-based photo storage: Fire OS 4 users now have free and "unlimited" photo storage in Amazon's cloud, and photos are uploaded wirelessly. Fire OS 4 is not yet availalbe on Amazon's Fire Phone, but the company says it will be early next year. / Oracle announced today after the stock markets closed that its long-time CEO Larry Ellison is stepping down. Former HP CEO Mark Hurd will take over the job in partnership with Safra Catz. Catz will manage finance and manufacturing, while Hurd will handle sales. Ellison isn't leaving the company though, he'll take on the titles of Executive Chairman of the Board and CTO. In after-hours trading, Oracle’s took a 2.5 percent dip. The company is currently worth around $180 billion. The company had more than $11 billion in revenue in its most recent quarter. / Mary Jo Foley's sources are solid - two days ago we passed along her report that layoffs would be coming this week, and A Microsoft spokesperson has confirmed that 2,100 jobs are being cut, noting that 747 of those laid off will be in Washington state, with the remaining cuts at other Microsoft locations worldwide. With 13,000 cut in the first round of layoffs back in July, and another 2,100 today, Microsoft still is planning to eliminate another 2,900 jobs by July 2015. One of the casualties of the latest round of job cuts at Microsoft is the Microsoft Research (MSR) Silicon Valley lab. Researcher Derek Murray tweeted that "Today they (Microsoft) announced that the lab in Silicon Valley will be closing, effective Friday." Microsoft Research is located in Mountain View, Calif., was founded in 2001 and currently employs close to 50, according to a company spokesperson, who noted that an undisclosed number of those researchers will be offered jobs at other Microsoft Research labs. / Well, this is interesting - a few weeks after Twitpic announced it was shutting down its service due to a trademark conflict with Twitter. Today, Twitpic's Twitter account tweeted that the company isn’t shutting down anymore, but being acquired, although the tweet didn’t say by which company, only that “We will post more details as we can disclose them". / Samsung has announced that The Galaxy Note 4 will launch in the US on October 17th and pre-orders start tomorrow, september 18th. AT&T has separately announced that it will start shipping pre-orders on October 14th, though the carrier isn't specifying a date for retail availability. The Note 4 is priced at $299.99 on-contract, or Unsubsidized and contract-free for $825.99. T-Mobile starts its pre-orders on September 24th, with availability on October 17th as well. Coming up, Alibaba's IPO is set for tomorrow, but what can you buy on its site? Some weird stuff, turns out Next I'll chat with journalist Jon Seff about Apple's privacy statement and how the company is protecting customer's data from search warrants. 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And we thank Nature Box for their support of Tech News 2Night" [Segment #2] Jon Seff, from jonseff.com, Former Executive Editor MacWorld - After the celeb photos issue, the new iPhone launch, Apple Pay announcement and his comments on Charlie Rose that Apple does not make money from customer’s data Tim Cook addressed privacy in a letter to customers. What did he cover and why? - Apple has reengineered the security on their devices to make it impossible for the company to turn over data to authorities. How? "- There’s been some talk about the removal of the “warrant canary” from Apple’s Transparency reports. Explain this to us. ## Jon Seff, from jonseff.com, Former Executive Editor MacWorld" [Kicker!] Alibaba will start trading on the New York Stock Exchange tomorrow, september 18th... but for those in the US unfamiliar with Alibaba's offerings, what can you buy on alibaba.com, the company's English site featuring sales between importers and exporters in more than 240 countries? Business Insider found a few weirder items, such as the barf bib, which is better than a barf bag because you wear it, Buddha-shaped pears for only $12 a set, a $30,000 worm train, an inflatable "castle," that is sure to scare children, and a fat freezing machine! Just in time for the holidays. [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, tomorrow and every weekday at 10am Pacific, 1 pm Eastern. I'm Sarah Lane, thanks for watching.