On this week’s episode, El Kaiser continues his foray into the world of wireless Bluetooth earbuds after the weekly news roundup with J.D. And in these news this week: The stress of Internet shopping on New York City streets, more software updates from Apple and a leak peak at Windows 10X.
Freshly returned from spring break, El Kaiser and JD jump into the week’s headlines — including government attempts to regulate technology platforms and robots rolling through Walmart. JD also has a (Hopefully) Helpful Hint for wrangling the massive photo collection stuffed on your smartphone. Push play to hear it all on Episode 306!
Facebook’s public-relations department probably had another busy week, with all sorts of walkbacks and investigations concerning the company’s products and practices. El Kaiser and J.D. discuss some of the major events, as well as changes to the way Twitter enforces its rules and the State of New York investigating the net neutrality comments wars. J.D. also offers a look at the SmartNews app — which as its name implies — tries to gather online news in an intelligent way. Set your nav computer for Episode 290!
This past week saw two big developer conferences unload several boxes of announcements, as Google I/O and Microsoft Build fought for media attention like Godzilla vs. Gamera. El Kaiser and J.D. discuss the ramped-up interest in artificial intelligence coming out of both conferences, along with other headlines from around the technosphere. J.D. also offers suggestions for dealing with an excess of emoji, and previews new characters under consideration by the Unicode Consortium. Come sit a spell and join us for Episode 272!
Things got loud last week down in Dallas, but it wasn’t just at a Mavericks game as hackers managed to set off every public-safety alarm in the city and freak out a lot of people. Meanwhile, a Russian spam king got collared, a new version of Windows 10 rolled out and Google confronted accusations about a gender pay gap at the company. This week’s episode also features the welcome return of journalist Laura M. Holson to the Pop Tech Jam recording table as she offers insight on her recent story about John Dean, the White House counsel back in Richard Nixon’s Watergate days — and a discussion on how some things never change.
It seems like everybody’s got something on the way this week: Samsung’s new phone waits in the wings, Amazon’s Alexa is calling in for a six pack, robots are rolling out with restaurant orders and Apple even quietly slipped a few new products into the retail channel. El Kaiser and J.D. discuss it all — including that very special package sent down from the International Space Station.
The discerning pop-culture geek has so many video services to choose from these days, all without being yoked to a pricey cable TV subscription. Netflix and Hulu are the obvious big players here, with shows like Stranger Things orMarvel’s trio of Daredevil, Jessica Jones and Luke Cage on Netflix; Hulu’s got 10 seasons of Smallvilleand the upcoming original adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale among its nerd bait. Cable-free fans of Game of Thrones can now watch legally with the a la carteHBO Now streaming service, while Showtime has its own standalone streamer for those who only want to watch Homeland. Life is good.
But for Star Trek fans, there’s only one service if you want to see the entire television canon — including all 22 episodes of Star Trek: The Animated Series: The CBS All Access streaming channel. Among tons of other CBS shows, the service hosts almost 700 episodes of Star Trek programs. That number will get higher soon because there’s another entry in the works.
Star Trek: Discovery is currently in production and will hopefully debut later this year (after slipping from January to May as possible arrival dates). For those who vaguely remember the announcement, the series will have a new ship, new characters and new missions, all firmly rooted within the established Star Trek Universe. The show is set about a decade before the events depicted in The Original Series and the season-long storyline reportedly revolves around “an incident and an event in Star Trek history that’s been talked about but never been explored.”
According to early reports, the new show focuses on Lieutenant Commander Rainsford, the Number One serving aboard the USS Discovery. She’s played by Sonequa Martin-Green, who many genre TV fans will recall from her work on Walking Dead and Once Upon a Time. James Frain, who played Ferdinand on Orphan Black, is in the cast as a younger version of Sarek, Spock’s father. You can’t have a Star Trek show without Klingons, and Chris Obi from Ghost in the Shell, Shazad Latif, (MI-5 and Black Mirror), and Mary Chieffo represent Team Bat’leth. And fans of Michelle Yeoh will get to see her in a recurring role as captain of the USS Shenzhou.
If you’re on the fence about plunking down either $6 or $10 a month for CBS All Access (prices varying based on limited or no commercials), you should be able to see the first episode for free when the series kicks off, as CBS plans to show it on its regular broadcast TV channels before switching over exclusively to the streaming service. The extra cost may be annoying, but some may find it a small price to pay for fresh new Star Trek stories.
On this week’s episode, Don Donofrio returns to discuss possible paths ahead for of Apple this year as the company comes off a record-breaking quarterly profit and a surging stock price. El Kaiser and J.D. have some things to say about Facebook’s new autoplay audio on videos, the price war between Verizon Wireless and
T-Mobile for unlimited data plans, and new tools for Google Maps. Oh, and the Queen of England is doing her part in the global war on cybercrime. Tally-ho!
This week, Gizmodo has another post up, as several former Facebook contractors came forward to say they manipulated those news topic feeds by suppressing stories that may have appealed to conservative readers. All this brought out a statement from Facebook Trending Topics product manager Tom Stocky, and soon, an update from Gizmodo: “Several hours after this report was published, Gizmodo editors started seeing it as a topic in Facebook’s trending section. Gizmodo’s video was posted under the topic but the “Top Posts” were links to RedState.com and the Faith and Freedom Coalition.”
Researchers at Purdue University say they have developed the prototype for a new system that would allow law enforcement officials and public-safety agencies to tap into the feeds of thousands of cameras used by city and state governments along highways, as well as around national parks, construction sites, parking garages and other public venues. This new system would work with the existing closed-circuit security cameras already available to authorized personnel. The project, dubbed “Analyze Visual Data from Worldwide Network Cameras” won a grant from the National Science Foundation.
Speaking of surveillance, Twitter’s live-streaming app Periscope has announced that it’s adding a search tool to find contents, the ability to save broadcasts beyond a 24-hour period and for previously recorded events and support for drones to beam their streams from above. Also in drone news, a collation of groups that includes the United Parcel Service Foundation, the Gavi Vaccine Alliance, and startup drone-maker Zipline are coming together for a project that will be delivering vaccines and other medicine to those who desperately need them in Rwanda. Good job, drones!
Apple’s earnings may have been down the other week, but the company is not alone in weaker sales figures. Shipments of personal computers and tablets worldwide were down 13 percent for the first three months of this year, dropping to a level analysts say they haven’t seen since the second quarter of 2011.
The creator the Siri virtual assistant seems to have found a way to pass the time after selling the software to Apple. At the TechCrunch Disrupt event in New York this week, developer Dag Kittlaus demoed his new artificial intelligence system called Viv for the crowd and said the new system wants to be “the intelligent interface for everything” and that it could “breathe life into the inanimate objects of our life through conversation.”
The mobile version of the Opera browser is giving a little love to iOS users. The company announced its new, free Opera VPN app that lets its users jump onto a virtual private network to disguise their true locations. Opera VPN also blocks tracking cookies.
The Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Trade Commission want your mobile device to be safe from malware. Both agencies issued statements this week saying they were looking into security practices and said they’ve sent letters to the major mobile carriers and eight mobile device manufacturers. The letter from the FCC to carriers asks questions about the companies’ process for reviewing and releasing security updates while the FTC asked the mobile device makers to give them a report on how they send out security updates to patch vulnerabilities in smartphones, tablets and other devices.
Microsoft has announced that Windows 10 is now running on 300 million active devices and reminds everyone that its free Windows 10 upgrade offer ends this July 29th. For those who spurn the offer now but want to update later, Microsoft said those people can get Windows 10 after July 29 by either paying $119 for it or buying a new machine. So there.
And finally, SpaceX has done it again – this time completing what was called its hottest and fastest landing yet, as it successfully set down one of its reusable rocket boosters on a drone ship at night. Before it happened, SpaceX itself was unsure of the mission’s chances, noting that the landing was “unlikely” — and using a barge called “Of Course I Still Love You” as the booster’s target. However, once the booster nailed it, company founder Elon Musk issued a series of excited tweets, including one that said “Woohoo!” and another that said, “May need to increase the size of rocket storage hanger.” Congratulations again, SpaceX!
Making a video can take a lot of time and effort, especially if one is not trained in the art. Magisto, a popular consumer app that uses algorithms to analyze raw footage and create a video narrative for home users, has just rolled out a business version designed to help small and mid-sized companies easily craft clips to promote their products. Dr. Oren Boiman, the chief executive officer and a co-founder of Magisto, explains how it all works and what makes for a good business video.
And, as with each and every episode of Pop Tech Jam, El Kaiser and J.D. discuss the latest developments in technology and pop culture, including news from New York Toy Fair 2016 and NASA’S Help Wanted pages.
The independent audio magazine devoted to mashing up pop culture, technology and more. J.D. Biersdorfer and Pedro Rafael Rosado are your hosts. It's an Internet Radio revolution!
