Google is planning to abolish those 30-second non-skippable ads next year according to Slash Gear. However, YouTube will have to find another way to please the advertisers. Users with complete interest in ad free YouTube experience can opt for a subscription to YouTube Red, which cuts out ads completely and offers access to exclusive shows and other video content. So they have to watch it no matter what! It’s going to focus instead on formats that work well for both users and advertisers. But most likely, they will also be placing…
Read MoreMonth: February 2017
Tech devices in your home could be spying on you
We’re living in a digital world where being connected is critical to almost everything we do. Some of the tech devices inside homes could be spying on you and tracking every move you make, but there are some things you can do to stop it. Tech experts say technology today is watching, copying, and even sharing that information and you may not realize it. From teapots to toasters to refrigerators, is your technology spying on you? Jerry Irvine, a member of Homeland Security’s Cyber Task Force says home technology is…
Read MoreWhatsApp is the latest Facebook product to clone Snapchat stories
WhatsApp has launched WhatsApp Status, a new tab for sharing decorated photos, videos and GIFs that disappear after 24 hours. It’s another Facebook-owned Snapchat Stories copycat, but the twist is that it’s end-to-end encrypted like WhatsApp messaging. As on Snapchat, WhatsApp stories are posted from an in-app camera. Once you’ve taken a photo, you can adorn it with drawings, text, and emoji. Once you post your story, it appears in a new “status” tab, where your contacts can view it for the next 24 hours. You can reply to friends’ updates…
Read MoreGoogle and Microsoft agree crackdown on illegal downloads
US tech giants Google and Microsoft have reached a truce with the Government and the creative industries in a bitter and long-running battle over links to pirated films and music online. The search engine operators have signed up to a clampdown that will see the UK’s copyright watchdog monitor the search results they provide for unlawful websites. The agreement follows years of campaigning by record labels and film studios, which have accused Google and Microsoft of turning a blind eye to piracy and dragging their feet over measures to protect…
Read MoreVerizon to buy Yahoo for $250m less as deal to go ahead despite data breaches
Verizon will press ahead with plans to buy Yahoo despite the two historic data breaches the internet giant revealed it had suffered last year. The US telecoms giant Verizon has renegotiated its $4.8bn (£3.85bn) deal to buy Yahoo to pay around $250m less in the wake of the record-breaking cyber attacks, according to Bloomberg. The sale, which was due to go ahead in the first three months of 2017, was delayed and almost derailed after Yahoo revealed hackers had stolen details from around 1.5bn accounts in two separate attacks back in 2013 and…
Read MoreNew York unveils final cybersecurity regulations
Cybercriminals can cause significant financial losses for business entities as well as for consumers whose private information may be revealed and/or stolen for illicit purposes. The financial services industry is a significant target of cybersecurity threats. The New York Department of Financial Services unveiled the final cybersecurity regulations, which includes certain regulatory minimum standards while encouraging firms to keep pace with technological advances. New York is the financial capital of the world, and it’s critical that we do everything in our power to protect consumers and our financial system from the…
Read MoreGoogle’s AI Duet lets you make music with a virtual pianist
Google’s latest artificial intelligence experiment is a music-playing piano bot that digests whatever keyboard melodies you give it and tries to respond in kind. The neat tool is called Artificial Intelligence Duet, and it’s part of an ongoing push from Google’s Creative Lab division to help the public familiarize themselves with AI and all the ways it can mimic human behavior — and even create art. According to the Verge, a collection of music-focused Artificial Intelligence tools were first shown off last fall, but now AI Duet in particular has…
Read MoreMicrosoft Outgrows the Cloud Competition
As security continues to improve and enterprises increasingly move from on-premise data centers and infrastructure to the cloud, Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN) and Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) are positioned to soak up the largest shares of the unfolding market. A report from IDC estimates that public cloud spending will increase from $70 billion in 2015 to $140.1 billion in 2019 that’s a lot of potential business up for grabs for service providers. Amazon currently has a big lead in the space thanks to its multi-year head start, but Microsoft’s Azure offers comparable service and is…
Read MoreA Startup Has Developed An Artificial Intelligence That Can compete with Google
There is something familiar about fears that new machines will takeover human activities. Today, the machinery question is back with a vengeance. The entire tech industry has fallen hard for a branch of artificial intelligence called deep learning. The AI involves throwing massive amounts of data at a neural network to train the system to understand things like speech and images.The deep learning allows systems to learn and improve by crunching lots of examples rather than being explicitly programmed. Acording to Forbes, a new startup coming out of stealth called Gamalon , claims…
Read MoreYahoo paying small price for big hacks
Yahoo is on the verge of cutting the price of its core-business sale to Verizon Communications by $250 million to $350 million, less than a 10 percent discount to what was originally agreed, according to media reports. That would be a small price to pay for massive hacks that affected over 1 billion users’ account data reports Reuters. In an effort to add online value to its increasingly commoditized telecommunications business, Verizon acquired onetime internet darling AOL and last July agreed to buy $40 billion internet company‘s advertising and search…
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