Tech News Today for March 20, 2017
Tech News for Monday March 20, 2017
Google wants you to know, it's sorry. In the last two days, it has issued to apologies for YouTube-related errors. On Sunday, Google's YouTube Creators account tweeted an apology for mistakenly filtering out videos uploaded by LGBTQ users when anyone used the service's Restricted Mode, which is meant to filter out mature content, such as videos with cuss words. The tweets said: "Sorry for all the confusion with Restricted Mode. Some videos have been incorrectly labeled and that’s not right. We're on it!" The other apology came Monday, when Matt Brittin, who oversees Google's businesses in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, issued an apology for allowing ads to appear next to offensive, and sometimes racist and homophobic content on YouTube in Europe. Brittin said: "I would like to apologize to our partners and advertisers who might have been affected by their ads appearing on controversial content." The apology comes after some advertisers said last week that they'd pull their ads from Google over the issue. Read more at theoutline.com.
It's certainly beginning to look like Uber is that proverbial sinking ship and the rats are getting out as fast as they can. Yesterday, President Jeff Jones announced his departure from the company, the latest top exec to flee the scandal-ridden company. Jones was previously a CMO at Target and told Kara Swisher at Recode that the beliefs and approach to leadership that have guided his career are inconsistent with what he saw and experienced at Uber. He was only at the ride-hailing company for 6 months. CEO Travis Kalanick thanked Jones and said he had decided to leave the company as a result of the annoucement that Kalanick planned to hire a COO. Read more at recode.net.
Instagram rolled out an update on Monday that allows users to save their own live videos to their phone's camera roll. Twitter's Periscope, Facebook Live and Google's YouTube have let users do this for a long time now, so Instagram is catching up to everyone else with this feature. But this is a change in tone for live video. Last November, when live video first came to Instagram, emperality was the touted feature -- nobody could see the video after the live stream was done. Now you can save your own videos to watch later, giving some one sided permanence to the feature. Read more at blog.instagram.com.
The much anticipated Bixby personal assistant is here, but you can only use it on a Samsung device. According to Samsung, Bixby is also a different kind of assistant. They prefer the name, Agent, like a spy. But they probably wouldn't like us to use the word "spy" either. According to the press release, Bixby is context aware, so it knows about where you are and what you might want from the particular interaction. It will release next week with the new flagship Samsung Galaxy S8 and will work with pre-installed apps and soon the company says they'll release an SDK. Read more at engadget.com.
Could augmented reality be Apple's next big hit? Could it someday be bigger than the iPhone? Bloomberg's Mark Gurman has a detailed report that says Apple has a plan to roll out augmented reality glasses, and AR-camera equipped iPhones over the next three to five years. Bloomberg says that AR, and not self driving cars or the Apple Watch, is being pegged inside of the company as the next iPhone-level revenue generator for the company. Apple, as you might expected, declined to comment on the story. Read more at bloomberg.com.
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