What’s new
Hundreds of Android and iOS apps are tracking the user’s TV viewing using the smartphone’s microphone
Alphonso, a company that collects TV-viewing data for advertisers, has included its software in hundreds of apps and games. The company says its software does not record human speech, but identifies audio signals in TV ads and shows, matching them with their viewers. This data can then be used to target ads more accurately. New York Times said that at least 250 games use Alphonso software and are available in both the Play Store and the App Store.
You can read more here.
Google avoided taxes on €15.9 billion in 2016
Google used the a tax trick that involves shifting revenue from an Irish subsidiary to a Dutch firm with no staff, and promptly moving the funds to a Bermuda mailbox owned by another Ireland-listed company. Google defended the practice in a statement to Bloomberg, reiterating its position that it “pay all of the taxes due and complies with the tax laws in every country we operate in around the world.”
More info are available here.
New products
Lenovo K320t
The phone has a 5.7-inch HD+ display, a quad-core processor, 2GB RAM with 16GB of internal storage. It comes with a 3000 mAh battery and Android 7.1.1 Nougat.
More info here.
Sharp Aquos S3
Sharp Aquos S3 will have a 5.99-inch screen, Snapdragon 630, 4 GB RAM and 64 GB storage. It will have a dual main camera with 12 MP and 13 MP sensors, and a 16 MP camera on the front.
More info here.
You might want to know about this
Samsung’s C-Lab projects include private portable speakers and smart glasses
Samsung launched the C-Lab (Creative Lab) five years ago in an attempt to pursue innovative tech products. The program has three new projects that Samsung will unveil at CES this year. The first project is S-Ray (Sound-Ray) that consists of three directional speakers, the second is GoBreath, a breathing exercise app, and the third project is based on smart glasses called Relumino.
You can read more here.
Apple acquired app development service Buddybuild
Buddybuild offers tools for developers that are designed to let them quickly and easily build apps through GitHub, BitBucket, or GitLab. With the acquisition finalized, Buddybuild’s team will be joining Apple’s Xcode engineering group where they will work on building tools for iOS developers.
More info can be found here.
Fun stuff
Researchers have created stickers that cause AI to ignore items in a picture
Other attempts to trick computer vision systems have generally relied on making repeated small changes to images to see if with a few strategically placed pixels an AI can be tricked into thinking a picture of a turtle is in fact a gun. But these stickers constitute a different and very interesting threat.
You can read more here.
