Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:00:17 — 28.2MB)
“Google’s not evil, then, whatever.”
Welcome to YATS episode 94. This is the tech podcast where we thrive to share informative, but entertaining tech discussions. This week producer Mat Lee is joined by Larry Press and myself, Ant Pruitt. Here are the show notes for the week. Click download on the player above and follow along with the notes for a good flow. Here we go…
Amazon announced a new service tying into your Twitter account. With this new service, you can reply to the tweet with a hashtag #AmazonCart and the item listed in said tweet will be added to your Amazon cart automatically for purchasing. The question we ask is, WHY is this needed or useful when it’s only a few clicks to use the mobile Amazon app or the web page? Do you see this being a useful service?
Next we discuss the changes to Google Drive on Android. First we confused Larry on the functional changes, but we explain that it’s affecting the editing features on the mobile app. Not the web interface. Essentially, write access to files will be removed. You’ll have to use Google Sheets to edit spreadsheets and Google Docs to edit documents. Larry also brings up the use of Office 365. Have any of you used it? It looks nice and very much like the full Office client.
I wrote a piece on aNewDomain sharing my concerns with design and functionality. We’re unable to get the symbiotic relationship between design and functionality. Some things look great but don’t work well. Some things work well and look hideous. As I mentioned in the commentary, Apple’s iOS is the first thing in my opinion to show great design and functionality working harmoniously. Why make smartphones so slippery? Instead of forcing consumers to buy sleeves and covers for their new phones, make the phones more “grip friendly.”
Google announces Google Classroom platform to begin testing in June. Of course this is up our resident educator’s alley. What’s interesting about this is the cost. It’s FREE. Also, Google (supposedly) won’t use the data collected for ads. It’s a nice way to get more people using Google products, but what is really getting out of this?
Image Credit: Ant Pruitt
This week we give you a few minutes of sports talk. Yes. Sports. Recently Floyd Mayweather fought and won. Mayweather also cashed in on an insane amount of money per hour. How about $888,889 per minute?
Next we looked at the retaliation to the proposed FCC bill from “Mr. Money Face Wheeler.” Google, Amazon, Netflix and other tech giants put together a presentation fighting the proposal and pleading cases for making the internet open and free of “fast lane” prioritization. Larry thinks that getting competition in the world of internet providers can fix all of this for the consumers and online content creators.
So the NSA gives you a free field test to see if you could work with them. The world of Twitter was used in this matter trying to get users to decipher encrypted tweets. Mat and I would have passed the test because we would have Googled how to crack it. FTW!
Are you one of the over two million people using AOL dial up? Hopefully not. Can you believe that the service is still profitable? Looks like this service will be killed within five years. About time, right? Over two million people are still logging in and not tethering via smartphone. I don’t know if I could live that way online. Yes, I know. First world problems, Ant.
Some absolutely beautiful video from the ISS is shared via a live stream. Don’t click on that link just yet. Finish the show notes and show download first as you will truly get caught in a time suck looking at the images. Beautiful stuff.
Happy 50th anniversary to BASIC. Larry shared a blog post discussing the old uses and where we are today with programming languages. It also includes a cool video.
Ericsson shared an annual report regarding the state of the internet. This is an interesting display of how mobile data and voice is used across the web over the years. Anyone surprised by these results?
Thanks for listening to the show, everyone. Be sure to follow us in our Google+ community as well as our other social connections found on the crew page. Leave your comments below on this week’s episode and be sure to give us likes and plus ones. They’re appreciated. Until next week, guys.
Check out the hangout video below. If you want to watch us live, check out YATS tv Wednesday nights.
