Tech Roundup: Jan 27, 2013
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| Apple shares in free fall, a screengrab from Yahoo! Finance |
Twitter might have dilly-dallied about acquiring the photo-sharing app Instagram (which was later snapped up by Facebook), but it's in no mood to repeat its past mistake. After buying a startup firm Vine last year that allows its users to upload and share 6-second videos, Twitter has claimed it as the new means of video-sharing. Six seconds may seem so short, but that's what people where were thinking when Twitter opened to public - what's one supposed to post in 140 characters? Times have changed, haven't they?
In addition to creating your own user account, there is also an option to sign-in via Twitter or Facebook. Termed the 'Instagram of Video', Vine is already becoming popular for its short GIF like-videos which are set to loop by default. Currently the app is available only for iPhone and can be downloaded right here. But within hours of Twitter launching the Vine app, Facebook has reportedly cut off access to Vine's 'Find People' feature which lets users to easily add their FB friends using the app. The move is similar to what Twitter did by cutting off Instagram from accessing its user data last year. Facebook has clarified that the access was revoked due to the app's inability to share stuff back to the social network in return for getting its user information.
As The Verge remarks, though the app does provide an option to share videos to FB, it only sends a link to the video and not the video itself. It may be noted that the social network behemoth recently cut off access to other apps like Voxer and Russia's social search app Wonder due to alleged competition concerns. While Facebook Messenger's recently added voice calling feature more or less resembles what Voxer does, its Graph Search is akin to Wonder. Time and again, companies prove that serving their customers is the last thing on their mind!
Google and LG, where is the Nexus 4 in India?
One may recollect that Google Nexus 4 smartphone was in fact confirmed for a late October announcement by a LG India executive. He had also added that the phone would land on Indian shores by the end of November. Two months on, there's still no sign of the phone here. One reason could be that the phone itself is short of supply and given the back-and-forth blame game between Google and LG, there doesn't seem to be a chance for it to arrive in the Indian markets anytime soon. While Google is pointing fingers at LG for not having been able to supply enough phones, the latter is accusing the search giant of underestimating the demand. There may be an iota of truth there.
The previous Galaxy Nexus was not a very popular phone and that might have prompted Google to reassess the public demand for Nexus 4. But according to CNN-IBN, there's another probable reason for all this. It reports that the delay in the launch is because Google and LG are debating over the price tag. Being sold for $299 currently in the US, Google is of the opinion to launch the phone at the same price whereas LG is aiming for a price revision. (Asus Nexus 7 comes to my mind!) In all probability, I feel that it's going to be a repeat of Galaxy Nexus, which never saw the light in India due to Samsung as it felt its launch could hamper the sales of its Galaxy S series smartphones. And if at all the phone does come, it's going to be too late by then!
Ah yes.. it's time for quarterly results:
Apple's quarterly results were eagerly anticipated and as every other quarter, the company reported record sales of iPhones and iPads, though the individual splits weren't given out. The iPad minis have sure made a huge contribution to their profits but their Mac sales were lower than expected. The fact that Apple's profits were flat against the previous year was an indication that the company is losing its 'premium' tag. The Street's worry over the company's future steps and its lower revenue guidance for the current quarter have played havoc with the tech giant's shares which have tumbled to an year low of $439.88 (the shares breached the $700 mark on the the eve of iPhone 5 announcement mid-September last year, see the graph above). The company has since then lost the 'Most Valuable Company' status to ExxonMobil, which has a market capitalization of $418 billion (opposed to Apple's $413 billion).
Rumours are abound that Apple plans to unveil three different iPhone models this year - an incremental upgrade of the current iPhone 5, a low-cost iPhone and a 4.8 inch high-end variant. An Apple TV venture is said to be parallelly in the works as well. With the markets in US and Europe almost saturated, a cheaper iPhone will definitely boost its penetration into developing markets like India. After all, why do you think Android became so popular? So much for Apple; Microsoft is at the crossroads as well. Although its results were largely in line with the estimates, it faces an uphill battle with the current environment increasingly veering from PC's to tablets. Windows 8 tablets seem to be the next big thing from the company as it prepares for the Surface Pro tablet (which runs on a full version of Windows 8) launch next month.
Samsung and Google, meanwhile, had a great run over the last three months and the same can be surprisingly said about the Finnish handset maker Nokia, which returned to profit zone after selling 4.4 million Lumia smartphones. Adopting the Windows Phone only strategy, the company had struggled to stay relevant amidst Apple and Samsung's leviathan market success. As it gears up for a PureView based Windows Phone later this year, Nokia took the opportunity to state its PureView 808, equipped with a 41 MP camera, to be the last Symbian device. It must have been no doubt a sad moment!
Shakespeare's sonnet stored inside DNA:
We all know that the minute DNA (Deoxyribonucleic Acid) is the building block of life and that they store the genetic information in the form of A (Adenine), G (Guanine), C (Cytosine) and T (Thymine) which gets handed down from one generation to the other. Of late, scientists have been trying to use this molecule as a form of storage and now the efforts have paid off rather remarkably well. The entire 154 sonnets of playwright Shakespeare, along with a MP3 file recording of Martin Luther King's famous speech and the research paper outlining the double helix structure of DNA by Francis Crick and James Watson, have been encoded onto strands of synthetic DNA by mapping the digital equivalents of the contents (1's and 0's) to different combinations of A, G, C and T.
But this is just one side of the story. In order to test if the data had been stored correctly, they ran the encoded DNA through a gene sequencing machine and found that they were able to read the data back with 99.9% accuracy. Citing their enormous storage potential, the researchers have said that a gram of DNA could hold as much information as more than a million CD's!
DNA is no more a double helix, it's a quadruplex!
While on the matter of DNA, here's is another interesting piece of news. As I mentioned in the previous item, DNA has always been associated with a double-helix structure, but not any more. Scientists at the Cambridge University have announced the presence of quadruple helix DNA for the very time in human cells. Called the G-Quadruplex due to its richness in Guanine, they seem to be a pointer towards the development of cancer and if proved could help in tackling cell proliferation.
In other news:
- Nokia Drive+ app out for all Windows Phones.
- Microsoft working on DAV support for Windows Phone 8.
- PC maker Lenovo mulls RIM acquisition.
- Instagram has 90 million active users; 40 million photos uploaded every day.
- France bans hashtag usage from all forms of communication; to be replaced by the term mot-dièse.
- Apple remove apps of the popular photo-sharing site 500px from its App Store citing it's too easy to search nude images.
- Samsung, Apple, Huawei, Sony and ZTE are the top smartphone vendors for last quarter, says IDC.
- 5-inch Samsung Galaxy Grand launches in India for Rs. 21,500 as Micromax debuts its own 5-incher Canvas HD.
- Sony announces the thinnest Xperia Z tablet in Japan.
- Samsung Galaxy S IV reportedly set for an April launch, reports Sammobile.
- HTC Sense 5 user interface shots leak; reveals a toned down approach.
- Microsoft's Surface Pro tablet launches for $899 on Feb 9 next month.
- Mozilla outs two smartphones running Firefox OS for developer preview.
- BlackBerry App World rechristened BlackBerry World ahead of BB10 OS debut next week.
- Popular game Temple Run 2 now out for Android; a week after its iOS counterpart.
- League of Legends is the most played PC game in the world; gamers clock a record 1.3 billion hours of play time last year.
- UK based information watchdog fines Sony $400,000 USD over 2011 PlayStation security breach that compromised more than 70 million user accounts.
- Brazilian police inspector criticizes his female colleagues on Twitter; gets fired from the job.
- North Korea sheds some of its iron curtain; lets tourists make international calls.
- Cuba is connected to the global internet for the first time through a high speed fiber-optic cable.
- Climate change causing massive melting of Andes glaciers; ice shrunken at an unprecedented rate of 30-50% since 1970's.
- Nearby lightning strikes may induce migraines, says a new study.
- Antibiotic resistance as 'apocalyptic' as a terrorist attack or global warming, warn medical experts.
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