Without much fanfare, Google just released the final, stable version of Android 13 operating system.
As usual, the new operating system is already available for all supported Google Pixel phones, starting with Pixel 4 series. Pixel 3 and older wont be eligible for the update and they're considered to have reached their end.
Android 13 beta is already available to selected handsets outside the Google Pixel family. All major Android manufacturers (Samsung, OnePlus, Xiaomi and more) have at least one of their models enrolled to Android beta program.
Android 13 improves privacy controls, the way how audio can be cast to various output devices and much, much more.
Nvidia released a warning before the final quarterly results, due in two weeks. The company's previous prediction was off by over $1 billion.
On Monday, graphics card manufacturer Nvidia has released the preliminary financial results for the second quarter of the current fiscal year. These preliminary results act as a warning for the investors ahead of the final results, and earnings call on August 24.
The revenue of $6.70 billion is a far cry from the company's outlook as consumers wait for the next round of GPUs.
In May, Nvidia predicted the quarter to top $8.10 billion in revenue, which would have been a slight decline from the previous quarter but a major uptick from the year prior. However, expectations weren't met and the stock market responded predictably.
Stock price slid from last week's high of $192 by approximately 10 percent to $172, but bounced back to $178 by the time of NASDAQ closing.
The company's lackluster performance was blamed on Gaming revenue, which did take a tremendous hit. Gaming revenue fell 33 percent year-over-year and nearly halved compared to the previous quarter which had record-breaking revenue for both Gaming and Data Center segments.
Twitter released a statement on Friday confirming that a vulnerability they had patched earlier this year was, in fact, used in a malicious attack to collect user data.
The company was forced to come clean after media reports about hacked account details surfaced on the web. According to Twitter, the company became aware of the problem in January 2022 via the company's bug bounty program. The bug had been in the code since June 2022 and was quickly fixed.
Now, the actual vulnerability and the exploit of it has to do with a form that provides the Twitter ID associated with the submitted phone number or email address. This shouldn't be publicly available, and according to a HackerOne report to Twitter, this happened even when the user had explicitly prohibited this action in the Twitter privacy settings.
This was abused to create lists consisting of Twitter IDs, phone numbers, and email addresses.
Last month Restore Privacy reported that over 5 million Twitter accounts were exposed by a hacker that was selling the database with Twitter IDs, phone numbers, and email addresses. For $30,000, the hacker by the name of "devil" claimed, you could receive information about "Celebrities, Companies, randoms, OGs, etc."
Shopping giant Amazon has somewhat unexpectedly moved in to acquire leading robot vacuum manufacturer iRobot. The acquisition cost is $1.7 billion, companies' press release states.
While Amazon's purchase of Roomba maker came as a surprise, the acquisition does make sense for the world largest shopping network that has been investing in smart home technology for years.
Amazon was the first to launch a line of voice assistant speakers in the form of Echo, shortly after Apple and Google had introduced their smartphone-tied assistants. The Alexa-equipped speakers, that Amazon has expanded tremendously over the years, have been a massive success for the company.
Later the company acquired a high-profile home tech in smart doorbell company Ring.
Some have suggested a somewhat hilarious, perhaps even sinister, reason for the iRobot purchase, as seen below. While it seems more like a baseless stab at Amazon's possibly nefarious nature, there's some truth to the concern.
The leading semiconductor corporation Qualcomm has announced new Snapdragon chips for wearables. The upcoming Snapdragon W5 Gen 1 and Snapdragon W5+ Gen 1 system-on-chips provide vastly improved power management among other changes.
In their documentation, the company has focused on the superior, in what they call the "most advanced leap yet", the Snapdragon W5+ Gen 1 chip, which is the one that you'll see on many of the upcoming Wear OS smartwatches. The featured chip is a successor to the wide-adopted Snapdragon Wear 4100+ platform, and offers upgrades throughout the device.
The regular W5 Gen 1 is aimed at segment-specific devices, which can be found in kids toys, health equipment, or enterprise solutions. Although undoubtedly an important part of Qualcomm's wearable business, the chip is less of a consumer product.
Market research firm, Sensor Tower, has released a quarterly report on spending on mobile apps and games. Their Q2 2022 Data Digest suggests that apps have overtaken games in spending on U.S. App Store for the first time ever.
The report details customer spending on mobile platforms between April 1 and June 30, 2022, and concludes, among other things, that due to the stagnation of game spending, apps have taken the spot for the most revenue generated in the second quarter of the year as it relates to the U.S. App Store.
The app store ecosystems of Apple and Google combined a total of 35 billion downloads, which was a minor, although telling, year-over-year decline of 2.5 percent. App Store declined 1.3 % from 7.9 to 7.8 billion, and Google Play 2.9 % from 28 to 27.2 billion.
Nothing is a fascinating company with golden, likely-to-fail promises only rivaled by those of Elon Musk, a marketing ideas inspired perhaps by old Apple Inc., and an enigmatic image of a high-fashion brand.
However, to understand Nothing, and the recently announced first smartphone of theirs, we must investigate the origins of OnePlus. This isn't some sort of theoretical mathematics conundrum, instead it is a guide to the inner workings of Carl Pei's new company.
After all, OnePlus is the spiritual progenitor, albeit maybe not the direct ancestor, of Nothing Technology Limited.
The London-based technology brand Nothing, lead by a former OnePlus boss Carl Pei, has announced their second ever product at the Return to Instinct event. The Nothing Phone – or Nothing Phone (1), as they call it – is a mid-range smartphone with some creative, never-before-seen features.
To get the dull specifications out of the way, the phone features a mid-range Snapdragon chip, Snapdragon 778G+, a 6.55 inch Full HD+ panel with 120 Hz refresh rate, 8 or 12 gigabytes of RAM, and 128 or 256 gigabytes of UFS 3.1 storage.
"What looks and feels like a real paper money, but doesn't work?" Well, obviously, that is Russian paper money.
Russian Central Bank officially introduced the updated 100 rouble bill today. The bill shows a Soviet Soldier Memorial as its main image and bill is supposed to replace the previous 100 rouble bill currently in circulation.
But there's a small problem with all that: you can't withdraw the new bill from ATMs and you can't pay with it in stores.
And why is that? Because ever since Russia launched its attack against Ukraine, Western companies have refused to deliver any technology to Russia. And it just happens to be that 60 percent of all Russian ATMs are made by Western companies and whopping 100 percent of all the cash registers in the country are made by Western companies.
Thus, in order to get the new bill into circulation, the ATMs and cash registers need to be updated in order to recognize the new bill. And Western manufacturers simply wont do that due the sanctions against Russia. Even banks refuse to take the bill, as they don't have updated hardware to detect fake bills from authentic ones.
So, new paper money theoretically exists, but it can't be used.
Japanese electronics behemoth, Sony, has announced a new gaming brand under their computer hardware and peripheral department. The company calls the new gaming gear Inzone – or INZONE, as they'd like them to be stylized.
Sony's obvious plan is to challenge the Asian electronics competitors that have already created their own gaming brands, and in many cases sold branded gear for years, even decades.
These companies include the likes of Asus with their Republic of Gamers that was brought about as early as in 2006. The brand has become one of the company's most valued possessions, and spans across computer hardware like motherboards all the way up to more mainstream gaming gear like headsets and even gaming-focused smartphones.
Others, like Lenovo with their Legion line of devices and Acer with Predator offer similar lineup of products, including but not limited to laptop and desktop computers, monitors, gaming mice and keyboards, and headsets.
While the range of devices in the gaming gear market is expansive, Sony has decided to enter it in a careful manner with just a few products that are to be released this summer.
Very rarely any piece of computer software is so loved and hated as Microsoft's browser, Internet Explorer has been throughout its lifespan. But finally, after 27 years, IE is being killed off.
Microsoft released the first version of IE back in 1995. But it wasn't until the turn of the millennium when the browser finally managed to become the most popular web browser in the world.
Partially that success was because of Microsoft's shady tactics, like bundling IE tightly with its Windows operating system. But partially, the reason was also due the fact that back then, IE was simply a faster and more nimble browser than the previous #1, Netscape Navigator.
IE quickly solidified its top position, despite the arrival of open source contender, Firefox. Firefox never manager to get past IE in terms of global popularity and IE became quickly de facto browser during the first years of 2000s.
Microsoft was so certain of its pole position that the company didn't even bother to do any major updates to its browser: Internet Explorer 6 was released in 2001, but it took over five years for IE7 to arrive.
That era when IE dominated is remembered with horror by many old-time web developers, as IE was notoriously bad at supporting any web standards, whatsoever. Basically during those years, web developers had to create two separate versions of their websites: one for everything else and one for IE only.
Damn. Time flies. Our news output has temporarily slowed down quite dramatically during the past year or so, but we're still here, after all these years.
Yes, 23 years ago today, our site officially launched, back in 1999. Since those days, lots of things have changed - in technology, culture, our personal lives and Internet. But our site is still here, having survived all these years - good times and the bad ones.
I wont go over our history and our roller-coaster years now, as I've done so three years ago, extensively when our site turned 20 years old.
Again, I'd like to thank all of you who have supported our site over all these years. Thank you, everybody!
-Petteri Pyyny, CEO
AfterDawn Oy
P.S. Now, AfterDawn has existed over half of my life, which is kinda weird thing to think about..
Sure, there were digital music players well before Apple introduced its first iPod back in 2001. But iPod was the device that made digital music a mainstream reality.
It also paved a way for new music industry revenue models by introducing legal and easy-to-use ways to purchase digital music. Since then, the digital music purchase model has died and been replaced by a streaming services, such as Spotify. But it was the iPod and Apple's music store that acted as catalysts for that transition.
Apple has already retired most of its iPod models, but the iPhone-like Apple iPod touch has remained in production. Until now.
Apple has announced that it will cease the production of iPod touch immediately and the device will be available through retail channels until the supplies last.
Sometimes history is shaped by small steps, leading into giant leaps. Those steps were taken in late 1990s by several tech companies - and as the result, the entire music business industry went through a shock that changed it permanently. One of those catalysts was a small Windows music player.
Legendary Winamp was arguably the first user-friendly audio player capable to play MP3 audio files. The very first version of Winamp was released back in 21st of April, 1997. So, it has been now 25 years since that event.
With hindsight, it is easy to see how various factors were in play back in those days. German tech institute Fraunhofer had developer the first digital audio file format that produced good enough quality with small enough filesizes.
CD-ROM drives were getting more and more popular, allowing people to transform their CD discs into digital MP3 files. And finally, along came the first MP3 player that made it easy and fun to manage massive music libraries - and not to hog your slow Pentium PC's all resources while doing all that.
Since those days, MP3 players have mostly vanished in favor of streaming services, such as Spotify. Even Winamp has been in hiatus for ages now - despite making a small comeback back in 2018 with its latest version.
After the initial developer edition, Google has now launched the first official beta version of Android 13 operating system.
While the developer edition, launched back in February, was meant for .. well, developers, the new beta version is meant for all Android enthusiasts. Obviously, those willing to test the new OS are supposed to be users that can tolerate inevitable bugs, missing features and even data loss. But also for those who are willing to sacrifice such minor things in order to get a taste of the future.
Compared to the developer edition, Android 13 beta 1 doesn't cater much new to play with. Most notable changes involve the way media players work in Android.
In previous Android versions, if an app requires an access to files stored into the device, user must grant full permissions for the app to do so. With Android 13, app can specifically request access to only selected file types, such as images, videos or music - thus, mitigating the risk that the app could get into more sensitive data stored on the phone.
Another media related enhancement is for audio playback. Now Android can tell the app what output devices are available and which one of those the app could use. This should made it easier to add smart functionalities to media apps, like ability to choose the output device directly within the app (say, you might want to blast your Spotify playlist to your Bluetooth speaker while also having several other BT devices connected to your phone).
Without much fanfare, Google just released the final, stable version of Android 13 operating system.
Nvidia released a warning before the final quarterly results, due in two weeks. The company's previous prediction was off by over $1 billion.
Twitter released 
