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Tech News Today for May 10, 2017

Tech News for Wednesday May 10, 2017

Last year, a company called Nucleus received $5.6 million dollars in funding from Amazon’s Alexa investment arm. That helped Nucleus bring its product called Nucleus Anywhere, the first touch-screen intercom with a camera for audio and video calls that’s powered by Alexa, to market for around $250. The CEO of Nucleus, Jonathan Frankel, says that Amazon’s action of competing with its own Alexa Fund portfolio with its announcement of the Amazon Show is a wake up call for other Amazon partners. Read more at recode.net.

Microsoft BUILD 2017 started today with the announcement that 500 million devices are now running Windows 10. That's up from 400 million in September of last year. The company also revealed Azure Cosmos DB to help with globally distrubuted applications. Dharma Shukla, Microsoft engineer and artchitect of Azure Cosmos DB says the seven-year project is designed not just for global reach, but for customer accountability. In his keynote, CEO Satya Nadella said the company is no longer focused on mobile first. Their new mantra is intelligent cloud. In other Microsoft News, the company demoed what's next for Cortana, including more skills, and the ability to tell where she was helping you from, in a car, on a phone, or a computer. And then Cortana will change her behavior accordingly. And like the Harmon Kardon speaker deal we talked about earlier in the week, Microsoft hopes to continue to make deals to add Cortana to third party device manufacturers. Read more at news.microsoft.com.

Beddit, a Finland-based company that creates sleep tracking products, has been acquired by Apple according to changes in its privacy policy that reveal user information will be disclosed according to Apple’s own privacy policy. Beddit isn’t expected to operate differently as the result of the acquisition, at least not in the short term, though longer term integrations into Apple’s own product lineup could eventually keep the company from operating independently. Read more at macrumors.com.

Snap released earnings for the first time today. The makers of Snapchat went public last month and today's earnings did not meet Wall Street's expectations. Despite the successful IPO, Snap says the company is now losing twice as much money as they did last year. They did, however, bring in $149.6 million in revenue from January through March. One would expect that most of that comes from ads, although their CFO did say that Spectacles, the smart glasses, were a million dollar business. Snap is an ad-supported network so advertisers were looking at the daily active users or DAUs from today's news. Last September Snap told us they had 153 million DAU's compared to Instagram's 200 million. Today they said they had 166 million daily active users at the end of March. Snap stock toppled, as expected. Of course both Facebook and Twitter's stock plunged right after they reported earnings for the first time. So, all hope is not lost. But, it should be said that when Facebook and Twittter stock plunged, they didn't have companies like Facebook and Twitter breathing down its digital necks, copying its features and stealing its users. Read more at recode.net.

Google tracks a lot of things, and now the Google app and website will help users tracks events and activities nearest to them. When a user searches an event related query, Google will return results in a calendar list format, noting the source of that event and allowing the user to click right through and purchase tickets or find more information. Users who don’t have a clue what they want but know they want something close can search for “events near me” to see what’s around them. Read more at techcrunch.com.

Megan Morrone and Jason Howell are joined today by David McCabe of Axios to talk about Mark Zuckerberg's real political strategy. 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.

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