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// HAPPENING TODAY
- Mozilla is gearing up to release its Firefox OS smartphone in India.
- VMworld kicks off in San Francisco.
Good Luck Reducing Your Reliance on Android, Samsung
If Samsung wants to turn Tizen into a true alternative to Android, it’s not going to get any help from Huawei. The company has already decided the upstart OS is a non-starter. “We have no plans to use Tizen,” Richard Yu, head of Huawei’s consumer business group, told the Wall Street Journal. “In the past we had a team to do research on Tizen, but I canceled it. We feel Tizen has no chance to be successful.” For Samsung, which conceived Tizen as a means to lessen its own reliance on Android, that’s got to be tough to hear. Huawei is, after all, the world’s third-largest smartphone maker. This very public vote of no-confidence doesn’t bode well for the OS, which has little chance of success without a robust app ecosystem and significant developer support — let alone handsets on which to run.
New Wearables Data Reveals Strong Earthquakes Wake People Up
Jawbone has uncovered a new functionality for its Up fitness tracker — earthquake response monitoring system. The company’s data science team collated sleep information across Northern California after an early Sunday morning earthquake to determine what percentage of Up wearers were shaken awake. In Napa, Sonoma and other cities close to the quake’s epicenter, about 93 percent of Up wearers suddenly woke up at 3:20 am when the quake struck, while their counterparts 75 miles away in Santa Cruz continued to sleep peacefully.
A Follow-Up Study Called “Quantification of Cheese Bloat and Its Correlation With Pizza Coma Phenomena” Is Also Planned
Sonali Kohli, Quartz: “Researchers at the University of Auckland (in partnership with Fonterra, the world’s largest dairy products exporter) used a machine to measure the integral elements of possible pizza ingredients as precisely as possible, and then published a paper about it in the Journal of Food Science. Naturally, it was entitled ‘Quantification of Pizza Baking Properties of Different Cheeses, and Their Correlation with Cheese Functionality.'”
Does Experian Offer Free Intellectual Property Theft Monitoring as Well?
“We have no knowledge that any information has been or will be misused.” That’s what Kleiner Perkins General Counsel Paul Vronsky is saying about the theft of computers from the storied VC firm last month — presumably with fingers and toes crossed. Because among the machines stolen were two that contained Social Security numbers and other sensitive financial data. Kleiner Perkins is offering affected employees a year of free credit monitoring by Experian. It did not respond to a request for comment.
Xiaomi’s Mi4 Actually Not Bad for an iPhone Knockoff
Ron Amadeo, Ars Technica: “This review was not supposed to go this way. When we decided to order [Xiaomi’s] Mi4, we wanted to learn more about Android in China, but we also expected it to be kind of a laugh. It’s easy to look at the pictures and dismiss the Mi4 as a cheap iPhone knockoff, but it is so much better than that.”
You Should Have Seen the Data When He Worked the Maria Sharapova Match
Ralph Lauren VP David Lauren on the biometric shirts worn by ball boys at the U.S. Open: “It’s fascinating to see this guy at the peak of his youth and his health, to watch the stress that he’s under when Roger Federer is handing him a ball. You can actually see his heart rate spike. You can see his breathing.”
We Really Do Welcome Our New Robot Overlords
MIT News: “New research coming out of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab suggests that letting robots have control over human tasks in manufacturing is not just more efficient — it’s actually preferred by workers.”
Insert Lame “Rocket Science” Joke Here
SpaceX founder Elon Musk on a SpaceX rocket that exploded during a test flight: “Rockets are tricky …”
Three Months for Movie Piracy, 30 Months for Choice of Movie
Megan Geuss, Ars Technica: “On Thursday, 25-year-old Philip Danks was sentenced to 33 months in jail by a Wolverhampton judge for pirating a copy of ‘Fast and Furious 6.’ … Danks was arrested only six days after he’d uploaded the video, and two days later he wrote on Facebook, ‘Seven billion people and I was the first. F*** you Universal Pictures.'”
Off Topic
Game of Thrones S4 Retro Gaming Style.
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This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
