Lenovo to integrate Amazon Alexa in Moto smartphones

Lenovo is working with Amazon to get the Alexa voice assistant into a range of Motorola smartphones, and in the process, looking to depose Google's voice assistant technology.The partners will first focus on developing an Alexa "Mod," a block that will attach to a Moto Z modular handset. The companies will then integrate Alexa directly into a variety of Moto handsets and devices, Lenovo said during a press conference in Barcelona on Sunday.The Moto Z is much like Google's Project Ara, where individual parts like speakers and projectors can be added to boost the functionality of the handset.The exact details of the Alexa Mod for Moto Z weren't provided, but an onstage image showed a speaker that could hook up to the handset. It looked like a flatter and curved version of Amazon's Echo or Echo Dot.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Samsung’s Galaxy S8 launch set for March 29

At Mobile World Congress (MWC) over the weekend, Samsung finally gave us a clue as to when we might see an official launch introduction for the company's highly anticipated Galaxy S8. To be sure, you can bet that Samsung is eagerly counting down the days so that they can firmly put the fiasco that was the explosion-prone Galaxy Note 7 behind them once and for all.Cutting right to the chase, Samsung's Galaxy S8 will be unveiled at what will presumably be an extravagant launch event on March 29 in New York City. To help build excitement for the event, we were also graced with a short but sweet teaser video which takes us on an incredibly quick journey through the history of cellular phones.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cloud companies are eyeing cell services, Nokia CEO says

Enterprises and cloud companies will start trying their hands at cellular this year, Nokia President and CEO Rajeev Suri predicts.“Enhanced reality” and events such as concerts may be where cloud giants first get into mobile services, Suri said at a Nokia event in Barcelona on the eve of Mobile World Congress.“The first webscale players will enter the wireless access domain with mainstream technologies,” Suri said. Webscale usually refers to operators of big clouds, like Google, Facebook, and Alibaba. Suri didn’t name any names.For enterprises, an emerging technique called network slicing will allow them to virtually run their own private services on mobile operator networks. Meanwhile, systems that bring LTE to unlicensed or shared frequencies, like LAA (Licensed Assisted Access), will also help open doors to private cellular networks. Nokia is already working with some energy utilities on these kinds of deployments, and at MWC it will join Qualcomm in demonstrating a private LTE network, Suri said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cloud companies are eyeing cell services, Nokia CEO says

Enterprises and cloud companies will start trying their hands at cellular this year, Nokia President and CEO Rajeev Suri predicts.“Enhanced reality” and events such as concerts may be where cloud giants first get into mobile services, Suri said at a Nokia event in Barcelona on the eve of Mobile World Congress.“The first webscale players will enter the wireless access domain with mainstream technologies,” Suri said. Webscale usually refers to operators of big clouds, like Google, Facebook, and Alibaba. Suri didn’t name any names.For enterprises, an emerging technique called network slicing will allow them to virtually run their own private services on mobile operator networks. Meanwhile, systems that bring LTE to unlicensed or shared frequencies, like LAA (Licensed Assisted Access), will also help open doors to private cellular networks. Nokia is already working with some energy utilities on these kinds of deployments, and at MWC it will join Qualcomm in demonstrating a private LTE network, Suri said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Samsung’s disjointed OS strategy poses a hurdle for users

Samsung's Windows-based Galaxy Books, unveiled Sunday at Mobile World Congress, point to a critical weakness in the company's multiple-OS strategy. The company uses Windows 10 in PCs, Android in smartphones, and Tizen across wearables and smart appliances. This has led to a lack of coherence among Samsung devices, in contrast to the near-seamless product integration that has fueled Apple's success as the world's most valued company. The specific issues with the Galaxy Books are relatively small, but are nevertheless symptoms of the larger problem: walls among devices and an inconsistent user experience across the company's product line. The lack of a broad app ecosystem for Samsung devices has not helped.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Google Spaces headed to the graveyard

Google has begun populating its 2017 graveyard, with its Spaces app for group discussion and messaging grabbing an early plot. Google Space won't even last one year: It was introduced in May of 2016 and will be shut down on April 17, 2017, according to a Google support page. Google Google MORE: What Google killed in 2016To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Google to kill Spaces group discussion & messaging app

Google has begun populating its 2017 graveyard, with its Spaces app for group discussion and messaging grabbing an early plot.Google Space won't even last one year: It was introduced in May of 2016 and will be shut down on April 17, 2017, according to a Google support page. Google Google MORE: What Google killed in 2016To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Nostalgia rules as classic phone brands come alive at MWC

Classic phone brands from yesteryear are coming alive in Barcelona.Nokia, Blackberry and Moto were among the unlikely headline makers ahead of the Mobile World Congress trade show, which starts on Monday. Moto is owned by Lenovo, and the unit is still called Motorola Mobility.The new smartphones mixed up retro ideas with new features. A new Nokia 3310 candy-bar phone is the modern version of its classic namesake, while the new Blackberry KEYOne handset has a hard keyboard, which made previous smartphones under the brand popular.The Blackberry and Nokia brands have tremendous cachet, and fans will root for these brands to win again, said Roger Kay, principal analyst at Endpoint Technologies Associates.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Akyumen’s Hawk smartphone packs a projector

Over the past decade there have been several attempts to cram video projectors into smartphones. All ultimately failed, but a Silicon Valley startup reckons it has the recipe right and is hoping for a warm response from consumers when its phone debuts later this year. The Akyumen Hawk is a 5.5-inch Android handset that packs a low-profile projector into the upper half of the phone. The 35-lumen projector has enough power to display an image over a distance of about a meter in a normally lit room and at up to 100 inches in a more dimly lit room. Akyumen says the secret to its phone is a proprietary projector that stays cool even after hours of use. And indeed, during a demonstration in Barcelona on Sunday, the phone was only slightly warm despite the projector being used for at least 20 minutes.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Samsung mulls iris scanners on smartphones to log into Windows PCs

Soon, your Samsung phone may be able to recognize your iris and log you into your Windows PC. Iris-scanning via phone is not yet a feature available for Samsung's latest Galaxy Book 2-in-1s, which were announced at Mobile World Congress. But the company wants to quickly bridge the gap between its Galaxy smartphones, which run on Android, and its Windows PCs and 2-in-1s. Software called Samsung Flow links the company's Android smartphones to Windows PCs. Samsung and Microsoft are looking to collaborate on logins via Windows Hello -- designed to use biometric authentication to log into PCs -- and one big Flow feature is the ability to use Galaxy smartphones to wirelessly log into the new Galaxy Book.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Huawei’s P10 camera-phone comes in more colors than the rainbow

Huawei Technologies calls the P10 a smartphone, but its CEO doesn't have much to say about its communication capabilities.Richard Yu, CEO of the company's consumer business group, might instead have been talking about a new camera when he boasted of the device's Leica-style portraiture and, in fact, like its predecessor it was "co-engineered" with camera-maker Leica.The device runs Android 7.0 on a Huawei Kirin 960 processor with four 2.4GHz ARM Cortex A73 cores and four 1.8GHz ARM Cortex A53 cores and has 4GB of RAM and 32, 64 or 128GB of flash depending on the model.It has a 5.1-inch Full-HD screen and a 3,200 mAh battery with USB-C charging. It measures 145.3 millimeters by 69.3 mm by 6.98 mm, and weighs about 145 grams.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Ransomware attacks targeted hundreds of MySQL databases

Hundreds of MySQL databases were hit in ransomware attacks, which were described as “an evolution of the MongoDB ransomware attacks;” in January, there were tens of thousands of MongoDB installs erased and replaced with ransom demands. In the new attacks, targeted MySQL databases are erased and replaced with a ransom demand for 0.2 bitcoin, which is currently equal to about $234.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Ransomware attacks targeted hundreds of MySQL databases

Hundreds of MySQL databases were hit in ransomware attacks, which were described as “an evolution of the MongoDB ransomware attacks;” in January, there were tens of thousands of MongoDB installs erased and replaced with ransom demands. In the new attacks, targeted MySQL databases are erased and replaced with a ransom demand for 0.2 bitcoin, which is currently equal to about $234.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

CCDE – A different Journey

Wednesday the 22nd of February, in a testing center in the middle of London, my journey towards achieving the CCDE certification, finally ended in me passing this beast of an exam.

This learning journey was a very different one than either of my CCIE’s. Whereas going for the CCIE meant spending countless hours at the command-line, the CCDE meant spending all of those hours reading and discussing use cases for technologies. It also meant stepping my toes into the business side, picking up the “Why?” behind selecting a specific technology.

It all started a few years ago when my friend Daniel (lostintransit.se) and I started going back and forth on how to approach this thing. We decided we should team up and share notes, discuss technologies and generally use each other as a sparring partner.

At that point I had already decided, that this was going to be a marathon for me, because I could at the time, not allocate as much time each day for study, as I had been for the CCIE’s. Fast forward a good amount of time and I had finally passed the written part of the exam and was ready to Continue reading

Pre-crime, algorithms, artificial intelligence, and ethics

I just binge-listened to an outstanding podcast, LifeAfter, which, without giving too much away, is about artificial intelligence and its impact on people. Here's the show's synopsis: When you die in the digital age, pieces of you live on forever. In your emails, your social media posts and uploads, in the texts and videos you’ve messaged, and for some – even in their secret online lives few even know about. But what if that digital existence took on a life of its own? Ross, a low level FBI employee, faces that very question as he starts spending his days online talking to his wife Charlie, who died 8 months ago…To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Gearhead Raspberry Pindex

I've been writing about the Raspberry Pi, the Internet of Things, and supporting technologies for some time and here, for all of you RPi aficionados, is my list of related Gearhead posts in reverse order. Enjoy ... and to get early warning of a new Gearhead post, sign up for my newsletter. Internet of Things Messaging, Part 3: Testing Mosquitto Internet of Things Messaging, Part 2: The Mosquitto MQTT broker Cluster HAT, the easiest way to build a Raspberry Pi Zero cluster 10 amazing Raspberry Pi clusters PIXEL, the latest Raspberry Pi OS ... for x86! Internet of Things Messaging, Part 1: Introducing MQTT Putting Alexa on a Raspberry Pi What's in a Raspberry Pi name? How to rename your RPi under Raspbian Using the Raspberry Pi to thwart the creepy clown menace Building a Raspberry Pi-powered Barkometer, Part 4 Building a Raspberry Pi-powered Barkometer, Part 3 Building a Raspberry Pi-powered Barkometer, Part 2 Building a Raspberry Pi-powered Barkometer, Part 1 The discerning nerd's guide to Raspberry Pi hardware (2016 mid-year edition)  9 Raspberry Pi programming tools bundled with Raspbian 7 ways to make your IoT-connected Raspberry Pi smarter Ultimate Guide to Raspberry Pi Operating Systems Part 1 Ultimate Guide to Raspberry Continue reading

The new BlackBerry has a physical keyboard and will arrive in April

The new BlackBerry KEYone smartphone, unveiled Saturday, is the first smartphone to carry the brand that doesn't come from BlackBerry.It will go on sale globally in April, said Nicolas Zibell, CEO of TCL Communication, the phone's manufacturer and licensee of the brand, at a launch event in Barcelona on the eve of Mobile World Congress.Like the BlackBerries of old, the KEYone has a physical keyboard with raised keys. A neat twist is that it also acts as a touchpad of sorts, and each letter can be used as a shortcut, with or without a modifier key, for 52 shortcuts in all.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The new BlackBerry has a physical keyboard and will arrive in April

The new BlackBerry KEYone smartphone, unveiled Saturday, is the first smartphone to carry the brand that doesn't come from BlackBerry.It will go on sale globally in April, said Nicolas Zibell, CEO of TCL Communication, the phone's manufacturer and licensee of the brand, at a launch event in Barcelona on the eve of Mobile World Congress.Like the BlackBerries of old, the KEYone has a physical keyboard with raised keys. A neat twist is that it also acts as a touchpad of sorts, and each letter can be used as a shortcut, with a short or long keypress, for 52 shortcuts in all.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Learning Python -Kirk Byers Python Course

Learning is process and there is no end to it. I came across Kirk Byers free python series and subscribed to the same . The next Learning Python course starts on April 13th. I should receive the first class on that day. Reviews for this course is positive .Hopefully i will be able to follow the course as schedule and would share my […]

IBM, Vermont Electric spawn intelligent energy software company

IBM today said it would partner with Vermont Electric Power to create Utopus Insights to research develop and product intelligent analytic software for the energy industry.IBM said Utopus will bring to market a full-featured energy analytics platform, built for cloud (SaaS), on-premises and distributed Internet of Things (IoT) operation.+More on Network World: NASA embraces IBM’s Watson for future space, aerospace technology development+The platform will be built with open APIs that allow integration of third party tools and will include applications that enable best-in-class renewable forecasting, grid asset health and network risk analysis, and Distributed Energy Resource management, according to IBM Fellow, Dr. Chandu Visweswariah, who will be President and CEO of Utopus.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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