Weekly Tech Roundup for December 18th 2020
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Tech Snippets
The app industry is as hot as ever, with a record 204 billion downloads and $120 billion in consumer spending in 2019. This Week in Apps, is a TechCrunch Series that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy. K.J
Gionee has been found guilty by a Chinese court of intentionally inflicting malware in over 20 million phones. A Trojan horse malware was injected into Gionee phones through an app, and this malicious activity was carried out between December 2018 and October 2019. Gionee is said to have used this app to plague users with ads and make profits.
The Federal Trade Commission filed an antitrust lawsuit against Facebook today, as did 48 attorneys general representing 46 states.
They’re separate suits, although the two groups coordinated their investigations. Both suits claim that Facebook has behaved illegally when it acquired Instagram and WhatsApp, and that it used its monopoly power to suppress competition. The FTC suit also calls for Instagram and WhatsApp to be split off from the company. O.W
Google CEO says company will review events leading up to Dr. Timnit Gebru’s departure — In CEO Sundar Pichai’s memo, he said the company needs to “accept responsibility for the fact that a prominent Black, female leader with immense talent left Google unhappily.” O.W
Google Assistant is rolling out a Scheduled Actions feature that will let users schedule a smart home command to trigger at a later time. For example, you can say, “Hey Google, turn on the lights in five minutes” to control your smart lights. You can reportedly also specify a duration for the action, such as “turn on the light for five minutes.” As per Google, commands can be scheduled for any day within a seven-day period. The scheduled commands will also work with other smart home gadgets.
Gmail, Google Docs, YouTube and other Google-based services were reported to be down across multiple countries on Monday morning. Some services were reported to be back online beginning at 7:30 am ET.
How Zoom scaled from 10 million to 200 million concurrent sessions almost overnight. By and large, Zoom was able to handle that surge in demand with minimal service disruption, thanks to a global hybrid cloud network of self-managed data centers and the cloud resources of AWS and Oracle.
Google Photos will soon be able to take your 2D images and make them appear as if they’re 3D, the company announced in a blog post on Tuesday. Google is calling these types of images “Cinematic photos,” and they’re a new type of image the app can show as part of its Memories feature.
What a read. Rob Enderle personal opinion on The Evolution of Personal Communications Technology through 2050. A.J
Facebook escalates Apple criticism
Facebook will obviously be affected by Apple’s change (apps will have to ask users for permission before it can track their IDFA identifier, which will presumably lead to a steep drop in ad targeting), the company said that small businesses relying on targeted ad campaigns will be hurt even more. O.W
