Despite warnings and flagged accounts, Zello left accounts with ISIS flag avatars and jihadist descriptions live on its service.
Source: Wired
Tokyoflashis one of my favorite watchmakers. Unabashedly analog, the watches pay homage giant robots and old tech, looking like a cross between something that you could find in the hatch in Lost and a Shinjuku fever dream.
Now the company has launched the Radar LED watch, a clever piece that shows the time with sweeping beams of light that flash across the watch face. The watch features a USB-rechargable movement and a mineral crystal with silk-screen cross hairs and markers. Behind the glass are a set of LEDs that either blink when you raise the watch to look at the time or tap a side button.
No step counters or notifications mar the stark simplicity of this strange watch. The time flashes up on the face and disappears just as quickly.
Like most Tokyoflash watches this thing is hard to read at first I suspect it becomes an acquired skill. While you won’t be able to scan for bogeys for real on this decidedly unsmart watch, it makes for an interesting – if bold – conversation starter. It’s shipping now for $189.
Source: TechCrunch
Google today announced that it has expanded its recently launched Cloud Platform region in the Netherlands with an additional zone. The investment, which is worth a reported 500 million euros, expands the existing Netherlands region from two to three regions. With this, all four of the Central European Google Cloud Platform zones now feature three zones (which are akin to what AWS would call “availability zones”) that allow developers to build highly available services across multiple data centers.
Google typically aims to have a least three zones in every region, so today’s announcement to expand its region in the Dutch province of Groningen doesn’t come as a major surprise.
With this move, Google is also making Cloud Spanner, Cloud Bigtable, Managed Instance Groups, and Cloud SQL available in the region.
Over the course of the last two years, Google has worked hard to expand its global data center footprint. While it still can’t compete with the likes of AWS and Azure, which currently offers more regions than any of its competitors, the company now has enough of a presence to be competitive in most markets.
In the near future, Google also plans to open regions in Los Angeles, Finland, Osaka and Hong Kong. The major blank spots on its current map remain Africa, China (for rather obvious reasons) and Eastern Europe, including Russia.
Source: TechCrunch
Service departments have ways of keeping millennials engaged, and they’re working.
Source: CNET
Even better, save another $7 with a cashback option. Plus: three bonus deals, all freebies!
Source: CNET
The first big tech IPO of the year has opened with a bang. Zscaler, a security startup that confidentially filed for an IPO last year, started trading this morning as ZS on Nasdaq at a price of $27.50/share. This was a pop of 71.9 percent on its opening price of $16, and speaks to a bullish moment for security startups and potentially public listings for tech companies in general.
That could bode well for Dropbox, Spotify and others that are planning or considering public listings in the coming weeks and months.
We’ll continue to monitor the price as the day continues to see how the stock does, and also hear from the company itself.
Initially, Zscaler had expected to sell 10 million shares at a range between $10 and $12 per share, but interest led the company to expand that to 12 million shares at a $13-15 range, which then moved up to $16 and Zscaler last night raising $192 million giving it a valuation of over $1.9 billion — a sign of strong interest in the investor community that it’s now hoping will follow through in its debut and beyond.
Zscaler is a specialist in an area called software-defined perimeter (SDP) services, which allow enterprises and other organizations to better control how they allow employees to access apps and specific services within their IT networks: the idea is that rather than giving access to the full network, employees are authenticated just for the apps that they specifically need for their work.
SDP architectures have become increasingly popular in recent years as a way of better mitigating security threats in networks where employees are using a variety of devices, including their own private mobile phones, to access data and apps in corporate networks and in the cloud — both of which have become routes for malicious hackers to breach systems.
SDP services are being adopted by the likes of Google, and are being built by a number of other tech companies, both those that are looking to provide more value-added services around existing cloud or other IT offerings, and those that are already playing in the area of security, including Cisco, Check Point Software, EMC, Fortinet, Intel, Juniper Networks, Palo Alto Networks, Symantec (which has been involved in IP lawsuits with Zscaler) and more — which speaks both of the opportunity and challenge in the market for Zscaler. Estimates of the value of the market range from $7.8 billion to $11 billion by 2023.
Source: TechCrunch
Marvel’s latest superhero smashup hits theaters April 27.
Source: CNET
On the heels of last week’s rollout on Android, Google’s new AI-powered technology, Google Lens, is now arriving on iOS. The feature is available within the Google Photos iOS application, where it can do things like identify objects, buildings, and landmarks, and tell you more information about them, including helpful details like their phone number, address, or open hours. It can also identify things like books, paintings in museums, plants, and animals. In the case of some objects, it can also take actions.
For example, you can add an event to your calendar from a photo of a flyer or event billboard, or you can snap a photo of a business card to store the person’s phone number or address to your Contacts. (Turning photos into Contacts is something that Microsoft just added to its Pix app, too, with the option of also locating the person on LinkedIn.)
Google Lens was first announced last year at Google’s I/O developer conference, and is made possible by the recent advancements in machine learning and image recognition technologies. The eventual goal is to allow smartphone cameras to understand what it is they’re seeing across any type of photo, then helping you take action on that information, if need be – whether that’s calling a business, saving contact information, or just learning about the world on the other side of the camera.
During the demo at I/O, Google showed off how Google Lens could do other things, too. It could be used to help you configure your Wi-Fi, for instance. That is, if you took a photo of the sticker on your router, it could help you to paste that information in your Wi-Fi settings to get you connected. The company also demonstrated a translation feature that converted signs in a foreign language to English.
It doesn’t seem we’re quite there yet with all these promised features, but they could become possible in the future as Google Lens matures.
According to a tweet from the Google Photos’ Twitter account, Google Lens in Google Photos on iOS began rolling out on Thursday to those who have the latest version (3.15) of the app installed.
The rollout will complete over the course of the week ahead.
Source: TechCrunch
A Wrinkle in Time director Ava DuVernay is closing a deal with Warner Brothers to direct a movie based on DC’s New Gods comics.
The news was first reported in Deadline, and DuVernay seemed to confirm it by subsequently tweeting a tribute to New Gods creator Jack Kirby.
While beloved by many comics fans, The New Gods aren’t as well-known as DC or Marvel’s biggest superheroes. They were part of an interconnected series of 1970s titles known as Kirby’s Fourth World, which told the story of the cosmic war between the planets Apokolips and New Genesis.
The Fourth World included some of Kirby’s most compelling heroes, including the brooding soldier Orion and the escape artist Mister Miracle (true story: my first tattoo is drawn from Mister Miracle), but the most durable character was Darkseid, ruler of Apokolips and master of the Anti-Life Equation.
Darkseid’s relationship with Orion provided a clear model for the Star Wars movies (it almost seems too on-the-nose that his name is pronounced “dark side”). Thanos, the villain in Avengers: Infinity War, is sometimes described as a Darkseid knockoff. And DC often brings him back as one of its most reliable bad guys.
“Our dreams make us large.”
Thank you, #JackKirby. pic.twitter.com/gv3SiccV6a
— Ava DuVernay (@ava) March 15, 2018
Batman v. Superman and Justice League seemed to be setting Darkseid up as the ultimate villain of the DC Cinematic Universe. However, those plans may be changing due to the disappointing performance of Justice League.
In fact, Deadline suggests that DuVernay’s New Gods film (to be scripted by Chasing Mavericks screenwriter Kario Salem) will be unconnected to the other DC movies. DC is supposedly working on a slate of standalone, creator-driven titles including Todd Phillips’ Joker origin story — a strategy that should result in some interesting films, even if it’s confusing for casual moviegoers.
Back in December, DuVernay tweeted that one of the New Gods characters, Big Barda, was her favorite superhero. DuVernay had previously said she passed on directing Black Panther because she and Marvel had “different ideas about what the story would be.”
Source: TechCrunch
Facebook Lite, a trimmer version of the mothership app, rolls out to the US, UK, Canada, and more on Friday.
Source: Wired