If during the week you were too busy to catch up on your tech news appetite, here we're to your rescue. Here are top 10 things that happened in tech this week:

1) Samsung Considering Splitting Into Two: Report

According to reports going around in the South Korean tech market, South Korea’s tech giant Samsung Electronics Co Ltd is considering splitting itself into two. The idea has reportedly been proposed by Elliott Management, the United States based activist hedge fund.

A split has been suggested because it would allow the company’s founding Lee family to strengthen their position in the global Smartphone leader brand, which is considered as the crowing jewellery of the humongous Samsung Group business empire. The split was suggested last month by the Elliott Management so as to boost their shareholder value.

2) Milestone Achievement As R3 Blockchain Opens to All

R3 CEV, the financial technology firm led by former ICAP electronic broking CEO David Rutter, is the latest to make its Blockchain, which is a kind of distributed ledger that has the potential to completely revamp the banks’ back offices with modernised software, open to all.

Speaking to Forbes about the company’s move to open source its Blockchain, Richard Brown, R3’s chief technology officer said, the main intention of the company in taking this step is to encourage other people in the community to contribute to it, to build on top of it, to drive its design and adoption. He also said that he is quite hopeful that a lot of people will be downloading it and making a substantial use of it.

3) Just Eat In London Is Replacing Delivery Men With Robots

Just Eat, Europe’s biggest online takeaway food company, has recently delivered its first take away via its delivery robot to a customer residing in Greenwich. The delivery marked the launch of Just Eat’s pilot project that involves transporting food all around the city by employing autonomous vehicles.

It was only in July this year that the food company had announced about its partnership with Starship Technologies, the firm behind the slow moving pavement droids, and its plans to make delivering food via robots on the London streets, a reality soon.

4) Soon You Could Send Scented Odors In Your Online Messages

Recently, a Chinese study was carried out which involved 54 people and aimed at studying whether humans can express their emotions with scent during digital communication. The researchers have named the concept “odor emoticon.”

Published in The International Journal of Human-Computer Studies in April this year, the study basically took place in three main phases. It involved selecting separate groups of participants, reviewing them, and then corresponding them with one another by making use of scents.

5) Bangalore Based Entropik Launches World’s First Patented Technology That Predicts User Emotions Based On Smartphone Touch Gestures

This week saw Entropik Technologies, a Bangalore-based tech startup launching ‘Chromo’ — a patent pending technology breakthrough invention. Chromo has the ability to predict user emotions based on their touch gestures on smartphone/digital wearables/IoT sensors.

Chromo.io is the startup’s first product that machine learns on mobile touch data and Smartphone Motion/ Gesture sensor data to predict Emotion Sense, Motion Sense, Semantics and Gestures as the user makes use of the app. These rich insights are then fed to help businesses trigger relevant actions on recommendation and notifications. Further, they simulate this sequence of emotions and activity to predict the propensity of outcome that includes sales, customer engagement, sharing etc.

6) UCI Student Accidentally Creates A Rechargeable Battery That Lasts 400 Years

Mya Le Thai, a doctoral student at the University of California, Irvine, accidentally ended up discovering a rechargeable battery that can last up to 400 years, while playing around in the lab. For the humans, this discovery could lead to longer-lasting laptops and smartphones. In addition to this, it would also result in fewer lithium ion batteries piling up in the landfills.

7) This Aerospace Startup Is Getting A PSLV From ISRO To Launch India's First Private Moon Mission

TeamIndus, an aerospace startup founded in the year 2011, recently signed a verified commercial launch contract with Antrix Corporation, Indian Space Research Organisation's (ISRO) commercial arm.

This made TeamIndus the first startup ever to successfully contracting an entire launch vehicle for a space mission from ISRO. The deal finally came to a conclusion almost two years after the startup had first approached Antrix for the launch in the year 2014. During the two years time, the organisation was busy doing its due investigation in order to make sure that the spacecraft completely met its specifications.

8) Apple strongly hints that it’s working on a self-driving car

Apple enthusiasts might be aware that tech giant Apple has been kind of secretive about its workings when it comes to talking about its self-driving car efforts. But, the giant recently gave its strongest clue ever about its self-driving car project, reportedly called Project Titan.

In a letter that Apple had recently submitted to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, it clearly stated that it is “investing heavily in the study of machine learning and automation, and is excited about the potential of automated systems in many areas, including transportation.”

9) Introducing Smart duvet: the bed that makes itself

How about owning a bed that can make itself after being slept in? Sounds an amazing thing to own, right? While this could soon be a possibility. A person in Montreal, Canada has developed a smart duvet, which is a grid of inflatable tubes that can be concealed inside a bedspread. The invention can considerably provide a helping hand to people with limited mobility.

10) Fake news detector plug-in developed

The recent much controversial US elections ended up mounting pressure on tech giant's like Facebook, Twitter, and Google etc. to do more to tackle fake news on their respective platforms. Some of these firms are finally taking things into their own hands to tackle this issue.

Daniel Sieradski, a renowned technologist, has now developed a new plug-in - known as BS Detector - that has the ability of flagging up "questionable" websites on popular social networking sites Facebook and Twitter.

The plug-in makes use of a list of fake news sources as its reference point to mark fake stories. It can be easily added to Mozilla and Chrome browsers. Whenever it detects a false story, it flags it with a red banner reading: "This website is considered a questionable source."
Advertisements

Post a Comment

Previous Post Next Post
Like this content? Sign up for our daily newsletter to get latest updates.