Important announcements
Samsung acquires Harman International Industries for $8 billion
The acquisition of Harman International Industries is the biggest in the history of Samsung. Dinesh Paliwal, the President of Harman said that Samsung will provide Harman a platform, various technologies and a scale to accelerate their growth. This way, both the companies will also be able to extend their global market leadership in the automotive and smart audio technologies.
You can read more here.
Microsoft will stop supporting Windows Vista in less than a month
Microsoft will no longer support the operating system after April 11, putting an end to all security updates, non-security fixes, assisted support options and online technical content upgrades. The latest figures on operating system market share show that Vista is only operational on 0.78 percent of computers currently in use.
More info are available here.
Nvidia and Bosch will collaborate to build an AI supercomputer for the self-driving car
The two companies revealed that they are collaborating on an onboard computer capable of running the AI necessary for self-driving. Based on Nvidia’s Drive PX technology, Bosch will also use Nvidia’s forthcoming “Xavier” AI system-on-chip. Nvidia says that Xavier is capable of 20 trillion operations per second while drawing just 20 watts of power.
You can read more here.
Top new products
Xiaomi Mi 6
The phone will have Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 processor, 4GB RAM and a 3,200mAh battery. The Mi 6 will be launched on April 16.
More info here.
BlackBerry Keyone
The phone has a 4.5-inch display, a Snapdragon 625 Octa-core processor and 3GB RAM. Keyone comes with a 12-megapixel rear camera and 8mp front camera.
More info here.
Huawei P10 Lite
The P10 Lite comes with a 5.2-inch IPS display, a Kirin 658 octa-core processor and 4GB of RAM. It also has a 3,100mAh battery, 12 MP rear-facing camera and a 8MP front camera.
More info here.
Top interesting info
DeepMind’s new algorithm adds ‘memory’ to the AI system
Developed by Google’s AI company, DeepMind, the program has taken on a range of different tasks and performed almost as well as a human. Specifically, and uniquely, the AI does not forget how it solved past problems, and uses the knowledge to tackle new ones. “If we’re going to have computer programs that are more intelligent and more useful, then they will have to have this ability to learn sequentially,” said James Kirkpatrick at DeepMind.
You can read more here.
The quiz app Wishbone was hacked
The hack involved 2.2 million email addresses, as well as 287,000 phone numbers. Users have been alerted to the hack by way of an email from the company. According to this email, hackers appear to have accessed a private API to retrieve information on Wishbone users. This included usernames, personal names, emails and phone numbers.
More info can be found here.
A new algorithm from Google shrinks JPEG files by 35 percent
Google’s latest development is Guetzli, an open-source algorithm that encodes JPEGs that are 35 percent smaller than currently-produced images. This reduction method is similar to their Zopfli algorithm that shrinks PNG and gzip files without needing to create a new format, said Google in a blog post.
You can read more here.
