People love the Amazon Echo but it seems people are loving the smaller Echo Dot with it being the top selling device on Amazon (US) since November 1st.
People are taking time to learn the device as the device learns them – sometimes the device doesn’t always understand what you’re asking it.
In the video below a small boy asks Alexa to play a song……he and his family get something completely different!
To listen to the guys chatting about this please click here!
What Marcus has been saving for WEEKS has actually come true. (Who knew he’d be such a tastemaker for great tech!)
France has just launched it’s first solar panel road. French Ecology Minister Ségolène Royal launched the road December last year in an attempt to increase the ways in which the country uses renewable energy and reduce it’s greenhouse gas emissions. The road took 5 years to develop and cost $5.2Million dollars. The road includes 30,000 square footage of solar panels which are coated with a clear silicon resin which is able to resist the impact of constant flow of traffic.
They won’t be rolled out across the country just yet as they are still incredibly expensive to manufacture in large quantities. France however have stated that if costs can be kept low and the efficiency of the panels up then they could install them across another 1,000 kilometers of its roads and then who knows what the future holds for their roads and beyond.
To listen to the guys talking about this please click here!
Reuters
Apple are getting green fingers! According to a Chinese regulatory filing e Cupertino company has invested in four wind turbine Chinese Companies that are owned by Beijing Tiarun New Energy Investment, which is a subsidiary of Goldwind – China’s largest wind – turbine manufacturer. Marking this step as Apple’s largest clean energy scheme to date.
These investments will yield A LOT of power, 285MW of clean energy to be exact, and the power generated from these turbines will power Apple’s supply chain manufacturers.
While their supply chains are getting greener it’s not just those warehouses and factories like the widely known Foxconn, Apple has been looking to make its offices and stores a lot greener too. In 2015 Apple announced a joint venture with SunPower to build two solar projects, you only have to look at Apple’s brand new campus to highlight how serious Apple are taking this. The main building’s roof is covered in solar panels and 80% of their campus will be green space!
To listen to the guys chatting about this on the show please click here!
According to a report by Bloomberg, Apple is in talks with major movie studios to offer early rentals in iTunes – as early as two weeks from their theatre release. The studios in question are apparently 21st Century Fox, Universal Pictures and Warner Bro’s. While this is cool, Bloomberg also notes that Hollywood may “end up choosing another technology platform” what that is, could be anyone’s guess.
While this seems like an interesting idea in theory it is still taking away the experience of going to the cinema, so you’d expect Hollywood to want to slap a HUGE premium on this service, so expect more than the usual price of a rental be that £5 or £6.
To listen to the guys chatting about this please click here!
There’s a new underwear brand in town and their hilarious but functional at the same time!
They’re called Eletrunks and they allow a user to adjust himself without having to shove his hand down ‘there’ The website describes the underwear as ‘chafe-free’ and keeps ‘you from sticking to yourself’ – regarding the issue of not putting your hand down ‘there’ the website describes how and where you place your baby maker and when you need to ‘adjust’ just give the ‘lifter’ a tug.
Founder Michael Walker, told Mashable how he came up with this crazy idea:
“I quit my job last September to travel through Peru, Ecuador and Colombia. Somewhere in the first week of Ecuador I convinced myself to buy a motorcycle to carry me through the rest of my journey,” he told Mashable. “Here is where I realized how incredibly uncomfortable each type of men’s underwear can be and how there is no true functionality. Somewhere crossing the Colombia boarder the idea for Eletrunks crystallized.”
Click here to listen to the guys talking about this cool product on the show!
Denver based aerospace based start-up Boom has revealed a new really cool way to get from NYC to London in just 3 short hours, a brand new supersonic jet! They’re partnering with Richard Branson and Virgin Galactic to create plans ot launch this new jet in 2023.
This will mark the first time a commercial supersonic jet has flown since the retirement of the Concorde Jet in 2003, which at the time was twice the speed of sound at Mach 2.04. While the speed sounds super quick, don’t expect a flight to be super cheap – at $5,000.
Click here to listen to the guys chatting about it on the show!
Facebook have a tendency to look at Snapchat for inspiration as shown by Mashable:
Mashable has confirmed Facebook have essentially copied Snapchat – AGAIN. They are rolling out a navigation bar for their new video feed for live video/video on demand for the pages that you follow.
This new video feed is accessed by clicking a play button at the bottom of the app which will be to the right of the news feed icon, which will bring up this new feed and this new navigation bar which looks just like Snapchat. But its not Snapchat. Ok.
Facebook confirmed to Mashable on Friday that this new Video tab has been rolling out ever so slowly since April but have increased efforts to get it in the faces of more of its users (Currently on in the US)
This new feed has a notifications panel which shows up videos that are currently live from the pages that you are following, yet if you scroll Facebook shows you some suggested videos that you may be interested in.
Again much like snapchat you exit a pages video by tapping or dragging down a button in the top left hand corner of the screen – and scroll left to right along the navigation bar, which has circles with your pages logo’s in them – sounds like Snapchat to you?
A week earlier Mashable reported that they were testing a “Messenger Day” feature where you can add stickers to photo’s which expire within 24 hours.
Earlier this week too Mashable have reported that Facebook have been adding geofilters to photo’s which have frames around them.
Business Insider reported too that Facebook have been working with media partners to create a system similar to Snapchats Discover.
Do Facebook just want to become Facebook?
Listen to the guys talking about this on the show here!
Japan have taken steps to keep their elderly in check, they’re adding barcodes to their thumbnails and toenails. Weird,Crazy and slightly concerning…but hear us out!
There’s a company in Iruma, which is a company 40 miles from Tokyo that want to add this tagging system to the elderly, not to tag us all in some sort of scary dystopian underworld. But a way to help elderly people in Japan suffering from dementia be found if they go wandering by themselves and get lost. They are ‘tagged’ with a transparent one inch sticker which has a QR code on it. The seal is water resistant and lasts roughly 2 weeks. Embedded within the QR code is a patient’s name, address, phone number and who to contact if they’re found. While it doesn’t have any tracking technology built in, it certainly goes a long way to identifying any lost patients so they’re able to get home safely.
As crazy as this sounds, this isn’t out of the ordinary for the people of Japan. There’s even a small economy of elderly people tracking and tagging from things like GPRS Trackers and wearable soles!
Dementia is quite common in Japan, with Japanese outlet ‘Yomirui’ estimating nearly 3,000 elders have early symptoms of dementia, couple this with The Guardian reporting that 12,000 dementia patients were reported missing last year in Japan and while most a found relatively quickly 450 were found dead and 150 were never found.
While weird, crazy and slightly funny at the same time, this scheme will help out a lot of families whose loved ones go missing due to dementia.
Click here to listen to the guys talk about this on the show!
