LG’s affordable phones get back-mounted buttons, but no G4 in sight, and more for Monday, February 23, 2015

LG’s affordable phones get back-mounted buttons, but no G4 in sight Kif Leswing Feb 23 2015, 6:35am PDT Ahead of Mobile World Congress, where Samsung, HTC, and other handset makers are planning to unveil their high-end devices for 2015, LG has bolstered its lineup with four new devices — but the anticipated successor to last year’s high-end LG G3 isn’t one of them. At a […] Read More » Leaked image may show Pebble’s new colorful watch Kevin C. Tofel Feb 23 2015, 6:35am PDT Last week we saw a countdown timer on Pebble’s website, suggesting the company may introduce its next smartwatch Tuesday morning. On Monday, an image from Pebble’s own servers shows what the new device may look like. 9to5 Google found the image, which shows a wider but […] Read More » Beyond Superfish: Turns out SSL-trashing spyware is widespread David Meyer Feb 23 2015, 6:07am PDT Last week Lenovo found itself in deep trouble over the Superfish spyware that it installed on many recent consumer laptops. Designed to insert ads into customers’ browsing experiences, the software has very insecure foundations and basically made users vulnerable to hacking attacks. Turns out it’s not […] Read More » Transparency reports on trial: New front for free speech? Jeff John Roberts Feb 23 2015, 6:00am PDT The latest high profile free speech fight isn’t over a book, a movie or even a video game. Instead, the court case is over a corporate report, and has led media companies to join Twitter in an unusual First Amendment challenge of government gag orders. The court case highlights the growing […] Read More » Watch this: iPhone notifications on Android Wear Kevin C. Tofel Feb 23 2015, 5:41am PDT Despite the fact that both Google’s and Apple’s smartwatches are designed only to work with their own respective mobile platforms, you can get notifications from an iPhone on an Android Wear watch. Well, maybe you can’t, but Mohammad Abu-Garbeyyeh can. MohammadAG, as he’s known in developer circles, […] Read More » Racing, from a drone’s point of a view: a day with UAV advocate Raphael Pirker Signe Brewster Feb 23 2015, 5:00am PDT There is a zen moment when you are flying a drone in the first-person perspective when the ground drops away and the camera stabilizes. There is a horizon in every direction, and the only question left is, “Which way do you want to fly?” “It’s the […] Read More » Apple unveils $2B plans for Irish and Danish data centers David Meyer Feb 23 2015, 1:21am PDT Apple is set to spend €1.7 billion ($1.93 billion) on two new European data centers, one in Ireland and one in Denmark. The Galway and Jutland data centers will each measure 166,000 square meters and will, in line with Apple’s other data facilities, be powered entirely […] Read More » How Spotify is ahead of the pack in using containers Jonathan Vanian Feb 22 2015, 8:00am PDT In late December, CoreOS CEO and container guru Alex Polvi proclaimed in a tweet that he believes 2015 will be the year of the production-ready container, which would be a testament to how fast companies are adopting the technology that promises more portability and less overhead […] Read More » What will happen to the smart home hub? Adam Lesser Feb 22 2015, 6:00am PDT Last week’s acquisition of UK-based smart home platform provider AlertMe capped off a smart-home acquisition spree that includes Nest picking up Revolv in October and Samsung taking out SmartThings in August. If the last six months have shown the market anything, it’s that a number of […] Read More » Cloud hosting services and the future of lock-in Florian Motlik, Codeship Feb 21 2015, 10:30am PDT For a software product, identifying a product–market fit, getting to market, and then scaling to meet business demands needs to happen instantaneously. Time is still money and we’re now thinking in terms of dozens of deploys per day that need to happen. Optimizing your time and […] Read More » Remember when machine learning was hard? That’s about to change Derrick Harris Feb 21 2015, 9:56am PDT A few years ago, there was a shift in the world of machine learning. Companies, such as Skytree and Context Relevant, began popping up, promising to make it easier for companies outside of big banks and web giants to run machine learning algorithms and to do […] Read More » How your iPhone can help keep your financial world in check Geoffrey Goetz Feb 21 2015, 9:00am PDT More important than your online social identity is your financial identity. It seems like every year another major security breach can potentially put your information at risk. Here are some tips on how to keep your financial identity in check. Read More » Have we figured out what we want in a smartwatch yet? Kevin C. Tofel Feb 21 2015, 8:09am PDT Next month will be the one-year anniversary of Google’s smartwatch platform introduction. And the month after that will see the Apple Watch ship to its first buyers. While smartwatches have been around for far longer, it’s only been the last year or two where they’ve become […] Read More » Verizon is laying down 400 tiny cells in SF to boost LTE capacity Kevin Fitchard Feb 20 2015, 1:54pm PDT In the coming months, workers and visitors along San Francisco’s major tech corridors may notice some very big improvement in Verizon’s 4G network speeds in some very specific places. The carrier plans to blanket the city’s SOMA, Financial District, Market Street and North Beach neighborhoods with […] Read More » MIT researchers claim they have a way to make faster chips Jonathan Vanian Feb 20 2015, 1:18pm PDT A team of MIT researchers have discovered a possible way to make multicore chips a whole lot faster than they currently are, according to a recently published research paper. The researchers’ work involves the creation of a scheduling technique called CDCS, which refers to computation and […] Read More » For now, Spark looks like the future of big data Derrick Harris Feb 20 2015, 1:05pm PDT Titles can be misleading. For example, the O’Reilly Strata + Hadoop World conference took place in San Jose, California, this week but Hadoop wasn’t the star of the show. Based on the news I saw coming out of the event, it’s another Apache project — Spark […] Read More » Check out this cool connected water shut-off valve from Lowe’s Stacey Higginbotham Feb 20 2015, 11:44am PDT Lowe’s has added a smart water shut-off valve that you attach just inside your water meter to its selection of connected devices, which means for about $500 or maybe a bit less if you’re truly a DIYer, you could leak-proof your home. Take this valve, a […] Read More » Why Samsung is right to bypass Google Wallet for LoopPay Kevin C. Tofel Feb 20 2015, 10:05am PDT Don’t look now, but there may be discontent between Google and one of its key Android partners: again. On Friday, the Wall Street Journal reported growing tensions between Samsung and Google. It’s not the first time we’ve heard that the relationship is strained. So what’s the […] Read More » Is this the fuel cell that will crack the code to the data center? Katie Fehrenbacher Feb 20 2015, 8:31am PDT The controversial idea of using fuel cells to power data centers has been under discussion for the past couple of years. Probably the most famous project out there is Apple’s 10 MW fuel cell farm, which uses 50 fuel cells from Silicon Valley startup Bloom Energy […] Read More » The Druid real-time database moves to an Apache license Derrick Harris Feb 20 2015, 8:22am PDT Druid, an open source database designed for real-time analysis, is moving to the Apache 2 software license in order to hopefully spur more use of and innovation around the project. It was open sourced in late 2012 under the GPL license, which is generally considered more restrictive than […] Read More »