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“It’s called I got a billion dollars and you don’t”
Welcome to this week’s episode of Yet Another Tech Show. This is the technology podcast where we as tech evangelist strive to bring you informative but also entertaining tech discussions. No talking heads here, just tech talk with a bunch of buddies. This week we have producer Mat Lee, Mike Rothman and myself I’m Ant Pruitt. Now that intros are out of the way, click the play button above and follow along with the show notes below.
Image Credit: Wall Street Journal
The big news of the week was the Apple acquisition of Beats streaming music service. We’ve discussed this in previous episodes of YATS as it was all rumors and uncomfortable drunken videos. We found this to be an interesting story as it doesn’t seem like the Apple of the old days. Apple has the reputation of controlling all of its services and products granting premium quality to consumers. Beats from a hardware perspective has been lacking on the side of quality. The streaming music service has been “just another music” service. Is it Apple’s master plan to take run of the mill streaming music service to the next level of greatness? Very interesting story and discussion. Congrats to Dr. Dre on becoming the first billionaire of hip-hop and also he and Iovine being on the Apple organization chart.
In other Apple news, there were reports of Apple iCloud accounts being compromised. The story states that the intruders are locking down devices and demanding ransom. Mike is a little fed up with the security news. It seems as with each week, another large company’s infrastructure is compromised. Looks like we need to change passwords every day. Spotify had also noticed some weird activity and forced users to download new apps on Android. Question is, who’s next on the weekly list of online compromise?
Google is now testing out a fleet of 200 self-driving cars. This is some great tech being used. What we should understand is the initial use case of the self-driving car is to aid people that can’t. Granted, down the road we all may be able to own self-driving cars, but right now it’s about helping people experience things we take for granted. As Mike said, allowing an elderly person to take themselves to the barber without having to inconvenience the family friend for help. With it being Google, you know this thing will have all of your personal preferences in music, locations and routes of interest.
Image Credit: Ant Pruitt
Skype will have some real-time translation in its application. Our Larry Press had mentioned seeing this a few episodes back. Being able to have open communication with people speaking different languages is an ambitious endeavor. Want to talk to a business vendor in China? Skype them and the both of you can speak normally into the app, but the translation will happen on the fly. No interpreter needed.
What are you doing each day on your internet connection? Chatting, emailing, sharing photos or streaming music? Mary Meeker shares some amazing stats and trends about the world wide web today. Granted there are a 164 PowerPoint slides, so I’ll condense this for you the listener. Of course photo sharing and social media takes of a large chunk of the traffic, but what about cryptocurrencies such as BitCoin mining? “Dual screening” is definitely a big part of this. Don’t lie, I bet you sit on the couch watching television with your mobile device in your lap live-tweeting about the tv show.
Image Credit: Google
In more security or ISP news, it’s reported that 1.3 million piracy notices were sent to consumers. In other words, our web traffic has been watched. Shocking, right? Of those 1.3 million notices, only 265 were actually challenged. Boy that sounds like we’re a bunch of guilty pirates. Ha!
Lastly we discuss the efforts of Re/Code and its tech conference held this week. This is essentially the form All Things D conference. Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg ventured out on their own and have an amazing property for tech news and discussions. We also give props to Google for openly discussing the social stats of its employees. There’s a great breakdown of how many men versus women are employed by Google as well as other diversity stats. It’s been a sensitive issue in the tech world to figure out how more women can get into tech. Google doesn’t hide from this issue.
That’s going to do it for this week’s YATS. We thank all of you for your continued support of our show. Be sure to follow the panel members on Twitter, Facebook and Google+. You can find those links in the crew page. Have you joined our Google+ community? Come check us out and join in on the show discussions. If you haven’t subscribed yet, you can do so via iTunes, RSS and Stitcher.
Check out the hangout video below. If you want to watch us live, check out YATS tv Wednesday nights.
