What will happen to the smart home hub?, and more for Sunday, February 22, 2015

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 » 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 » Mobile recap: LoopPay vs. Apple Pay; new Pebble; LG Watch Urbane Kevin C. Tofel Feb 21 2015, 5:00am PDT Samsung has a new way to fight back against Apple and it has nothing to do with Google. This week, Samsung bought LoopPay; a company that adds mobile payments to phones using a magnetic field. Early reports and rumors about Samsung’s Galaxy S6 handset — expected to debut […] 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 » Two great examples of how journalism has changed for the better Mathew Ingram Feb 20 2015, 1:43pm PDT The power of amateur or "citizen" journalism becomes obvious when you look at two recent examples: one being the tracking of military activity in Ukraine, and the other the effort by residents of one of Rio's biggest slums to document police violence 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 » Study shows patent licenses don’t lead to tech transfer Jeff John Roberts Feb 20 2015, 7:51am PDT It’s been another bad week for America’s benighted patent system: a Texas jury ordered Samsung to pay a patent troll $16 million for using Bluetooth — even though the “inventor” admitted Bluetooth had been on the market for years before he patented it. The system is a mockery. Still, […] Read More » Google fits more search results on mobile screens Kevin C. Tofel Feb 20 2015, 6:47am PDT Search Google for something on your handset today and you might get more information than you expected. That’s generally a good thing though, and Google is making it easier to view a wider range of search results on mobile devices. The company is adding groupings of […] Read More » Will Samsung’s mobile wallet plans work? We’ll know in 7 months Kevin Fitchard Feb 20 2015, 6:00am PDT Samsung has entered the mobile payments fray with its acquisition of LoopPay, giving it the technology to turn its smartphones into wireless credit cards that can purchase goods and service with a wave of the wrist. LoopPay is clearly Samsung’s answer to Apple Pay, but there’s still […] Read More » Smart devices can make the insurance biz proactive, not reactive Stacey Higginbotham Feb 20 2015, 5:00am PDT Insurance companies are looking for ways to reduce the amount of money they have to pay out on claims, and one promising way to reduce that risk is through connected security and home automation devices. In this week’s podcast I spoke with Dan Reed, managing director […] Read More » At long last, the New York Times is thinking about digital first Mathew Ingram Feb 19 2015, 2:41pm PDT The New York Times is taking a small but important step towards its digital-first future by getting rid of the traditional "Page One" print meetings and emphasizing the web and other platforms instead Read More » A massive database now translates news in 65 languages in real time Derrick Harris Feb 19 2015, 2:40pm PDT I have written quite a bit about GDELT (the Global Database of Events, Languages and Tone) over the past year, because I think it’s a great example of the type of ambitious project only made possible by the advent of cloud computing and big data systems. In a […] Read More » The internet of things goes extraterrestrial Kevin Fitchard Feb 19 2015, 12:22pm PDT As the internet of things grows to encompass many more “things,” so are the number of wireless ways to connect them. Wi-Fi, ZigBee, Z-Wave, Bluetooth Low Energy and cellular are being embedded in every manner of gadget from thermostats to cars, but industrial IOT specialist Sigfox […] Read More »