NEWS
Trello now belongs to Atlassian Popular task management, project planning, "oh shit I have to do this now" app, Trello, now belongs to Atlassian. They paid US$425m for it. Wired attempts to explains why Trello is worth half a million dollarydoos. People are a bit worried Atlassian will turn Trello into Jira, which is apparently bad. Compared to other ticketing system software I've used, Jira is a fucking iPod in a sea of Zunes. Discuss
Yahoo splits into Altaba and Marissa Mayer leaves the Yahoo board Verizon purchased (most of) Yahoo back in July for US$4.8b and hasn't done much with it since then except experience feelings of deep buyer's remorse. Today Yahoo is splitting out the stuff Verizon didn't buy - the juicy piece of Alibaba Yahoo owns, a few less juicy Asian startups and some shitty patents - into a separate company called Altaba. Oh, and Marissa Mayer quitting the Yahoo board, along with the Yahoo co-founder David Filo (not a delicious pastry). Marissa Mayer earned US$219m in her 4 year stint at Yahoo where she achieved practically nothing. I can't wait to read her regretful memoirs about the 4 years of her life she flushed down the toilet. Discuss
Alibaba chief to meet with Trump and promises 1 million new US jobs Speaking of Alibaba, Jack Ma is gonna head into Donald Trump's grotesque golden sky palace in New York to discuss how Alibaba will generation ONE MILLION new jobs in the USA. Basically, Ma wants the government to use Alibaba somehow to sell American stuff into China. The million jobs will come from the insane demand for US products that Alibaba will be the conduit for. Good luck to em. All the factories will be stuffed with robots and people with engineering degrees though, not high school grads and people over 50, so yeah - million jobs, sounds good. Discuss
New details on Microsoft's latest Windows 10 Creators Update Microsoft has outlined a bit more about what's gonna be in the next big Windows 10 update, dubbed the Windows 10 Creators Update. Edge will get a tab preview feature, the ability to block Flash and Microsoft Wallet support - the 3 people who use Edge and have a Microsoft Wallet are ecstatic. There will be a blue light reduction (i.e: F.Lux) option that's kinda neat and much improved high-DPI support. The full list is on Microsoft's Windows blog and the update should hit your Windows box in April. Discuss
Samsung has excellent new batteries for EVs, but won't be ready until 2021 Samsung has been at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit today, showing off some cool electric car batteries that it reckons have the highest energy density and will be the cheapest mass-produced lithium cells on the market. Samsung is saying its 2170 battery cells, when chucked into a current sized EV battery pack, will allow 600km of range and can be charged in 20 minutes. Sounds fucking fantastic to me! Oh wait, here's the catch - these batteries won't be in mass production until 2021. Ugh. Discuss
COOL SHIT
The company that got the rights to use the Nokia brand make a phone Nokia is back selling smartphones, just like how Polaroid is back selling TVs. You can now buy a Nokia 6 in China for US$252 - a 5.5" screen smartphone running Android 7, packing a mundane Snapdragon 430 SoC. Absolutely nothing special at all about this phone. I've no idea why you'd bother over a Xiaomi. Still, there it is for anyone pining for the good old days of Nokia phones. Discuss
Instagram explains how it build wide colour support into their iOS app Here's an interesting exploration from the Instagram engineering team about how they added wide colour support to what's arguably the world's most popular photo sharing platform. The iPhone's camera can capture more colours than what's contained in the sRGB profile and most new Apple devices have screens capable of showing all those beautiful colours - so why not make Instagram show all the colours the iPhone takes on an iPhone's screen? Discuss
Lawyer makes an easy to read version of Instagram's privacy policy And related to that - a UK laywer has deciphered Instagram's privacy policy from legal mumbo jumbo into normal English so that humans can understand what Instagram can and can't do with their data. Kids in particular, who love a bit of the Gram, have practically 0 knowledge of what's in that privacy policy. You can view the full translation from Lawyer to English on page 10 of this PDF. I wish there was a law that made it a requirement for a "plain English" version of these agreements to be produced. Discuss
Here endeth the sizzle (until tomorrow!) --Anthony
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