Tech News Today for April 26, 2017
Tech News for Wednesday April 26, 2017
Changes are coming to government oversight of net neutrality rules that were approved two years ago. Ajit Pai, the FCC’s new chairman, announced a new plan which will be detailed in full tomorrow that signals a move away from those rules, and towards self regulation of the industry itself. The changes include two parts. One, moving back to being a Title I information service resulting in significant deregulation that Pai thinks will increase innovation in things like infrastructure for starters. Two, rescinding the Internet Conduct Standard which is the rule used to investigate ISPs for zero-rating services from monthly plan. Read more at nytimes.com.
Instagram now has 700 million active monthly users, gaining 100 million just in the last quarter. The photo sharing site is experiencing meteoric growth having doubled its user base in the last year by adding snapchat-like stories, signups on the web, and better onboarding for low-end Android phones, according to TechCrunch. In comparison, Twitter just announced that they have a paltry 328 million active monthly users. Read more at techcrunch.com.
Twitter may be up to a relatively meager 328 million monthly active users, but it may finally be showing signs of new life after all. Today the company announced its quarterly earnings and revealed its best quarter for user growth in two years, with nine million new users in Q1. Not only that, Twitter says daily active users jumped 14 percent over Q1 2016, surpassing its rate of growth, meaning more users are returning to the service more often. Read more at recode.net.
You've heard of road rage, but have you heard of robot rage? It's a thing. According to Business Insider, a 41 year old drunk silicon valley engineer knocked down a 300 lb security robot. The robot from a company called Knightscope is called K5. It spins, it whistles and it looks like R2D2. According to the companies director of PR, the robot did exactly as it was suppose to do. After being attacked the robot sounded an alarm and alerted a security non-robot. Also known as a person. The suspect was detained and arrested. Read more at businessinsider.com.
Amazon has a new product to sell you that will help it sell you other products eventually, naturally. The Amazon Echo Look is like that friend, perhaps named Alexa, that you take with you when you go shopping for clothes. Everyone wants to know if “this looks good” on them, and Echo Look can do that with the help of machine learning. The Echo Look has all the voice activated assistant smarts found in the Echo, but includes a camera and flash that can take head to toe pictures of you and beam them to your phone so you can see how you look, front to back. The Echo Look is available now for $200. Read more at techcrunch.com.
Megan Morrone and Jason Howell are joined today by Alex Kantrowitz of Buzzfeed to talk about artificial intelligence. Tech News Today streams live weekdays at 4PM Pacific, 7PM Eastern at twit.tv/live. You can subscribe to the show and get it on-demand at twit.tv/tnt.