Tech giant Amazon is building a new app, codenamed “Project Mic” that gives anyone the ability to make and distribute a live radio show complete with music.

According to The Verge, this project’s goal is to democratise and reinvent the radio. The app will be focused on the US initially.

Listeners will be able to tune in through the app as well as through Audible, Amazon Music, Twitch and Alexa-equipped devices.

With the Alexa devices, listeners will be able to interact with shows using just their voice. The app experience will also be optimised for the car, playing into Amazon’s idea of trying to reinvent radio.

A mockup app image viewed by The Verge depicts a screen listing shows that are currently live; trending topics like #NBA or #hot100; and featured creators. Users will also be able to search for content by topic, name or music.

Anyone will be able to pull from Amazon’s music catalogue to arrange their programme.

For launch, the company is planning to recruit celebrity talent along with smaller tastemakers to help launch the app and populate it with content. Although, the app is highly music-focused, programming will centre on three other areas: pop culture, comedy and sports.

With this app, Amazon joins the likes of Apple, Spotify and even Sonos, which are looking to programme radio-adjacent content.

All these companies work with music curators to host shows and try to replicate the radio experience digitally.

Read Complete Article

Photo-messaging app Snapchat on Wednesday said its monthly user base has reached 100 million in the country, and the company will continue to anchor its efforts towards growing and providing more resources to its community of Indian creators.

Snap Inc, the parent company of Snapchat, virtually hosted the second edition of ‘Snap in India’. At the event, Snap co-founder and CEO Evan Spiegel announced the milestone of reaching 100 million Snapchatters monthly in India.

“We have made significant investments to localise the Snapchat experience for the Indian community. We have added culturally relevant content, developed highly active and creative local creator communities, and invested in local products, marketing initiatives, and language support, he added.

Spiegel noted that these efforts to bring a localised experience to Indian Snapchatters has helped the company to reach the milestone and that the company will “continue to anchor our efforts around celebrating local culture and talent, while empowering, growing, and providing resources for our community of Indian creators”.

Snapchat’s app allows users to share photos with friends, and offers filters and lenses that are augmented reality-enabled.

Snap has also been partnering with a number of brands in the country. The company has announced a strategic partnership with homegrown e-commerce marketplace, Flipkart to develop innovative AR experiences for e-commerce.

This will be an India-first e-commerce partnership for Snap, and Snap’s Camera Kit will be an integral part of Flipkart’s ‘Camera Storefront’. Through this partnership, shoppers will be able to begin their shopping and e-commerce engagement journey through Snapchat AR.

Read Complete Article

The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has started looking into disclosures that Facebook Inc’s internal company research had identified ill effects from its products, the Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday, citing people familiar with the matter.

Officials are looking into whether Facebook research documents indicate that it might have violated a 2019 settlement with the agency over privacy concerns, according to the report.

Facebook and the FTC did not immediately respond to Reuters requests for comment. In a statement, Facebook said that it is “always ready to answer regulators’ questions and will continue to cooperate with government inquiries.”

The FTC has been in touch with Haugen’s team, the Journal reported, citing a source. The company has come under fire after Frances Haugen, who worked as a product manager on the civic misinformation team at Facebook, revealed that she was the whistleblower who provided documents underpinning a recent WSJ investigation.

In September, the Journal published a report that focused on data suggesting that Instagram had a harmful effect on teenagers, particularly teen girls, and that Facebook had made minimal efforts to address the issue.

Read Complete Article

As Reliance Jio gets ready to launch its next handset soon in the festive season, Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai said that in three-five years, the affordable JioPhone Next device will have a lot of impact in connecting and helping millions take advantage of a smartphone.

The upcoming JioPhone Next smartphone will house Pragati OS, powered by Android, which is touted as a world-class operating system built specifically for India.

“People are looking for access and there’s definitely been a wave of them who have adopted smartphones (in India),” Pichai said during the earnings call after announcing robust quarterly results late on Tuesday.

“There is still demand to shift from feature phones to smartphones. JioPhone Next is like building a phone beyond the English-speaking community and going local, doing it in a way that many more people can take advantage of a smartphone,” he elaborated.

The device is built with exciting features like the Google Assistant, automatic read-aloud and language translation for any on-screen text, a smart camera with India-centric filters and much more.

Pichai said that he views JioPhone Next as laying the foundation for the next wave of digital transformation.

“It’s a version of digital transformation. And I think over the 3-5 year time-frame, the Jio phone will end up having a lot of impact. But overall, India continues to be an exciting market for us. We see strength across the categories we are involved in. And you’ll continue to see us stay focused there,” Pichai noted.

The device will support all the available android apps which users can download and use on the device via Google Play Store.

In the span of five years, Jio has become a household name in India. With 430 million users, its services span geographies, economic and social classes.

Read Complete Article

Chinese smartphone maker OPPO is reportedly planning to launch its first foldable smartphone phone in November.

The upcoming OPPO Fold is expected to feature an inward folding design like the Galaxy Z Fold3 and the Huawei Mate X2, reports GizmoChina.

The device is said to come with an 8-inch LTPO OLED panel that offers a 120W refresh rate. Under the hood, it will be powered by the Snapdragon 888 mobile platform.

As per report, the device is expected to come preinstalled with ColorOS 12, but it is unclear whether it will feature the latest Android 12 or last year’s Android 11.

Earlier, OPPO patented a new technology that could be used in its future wearable devices. The new technology has a patent number of CN110298944B and describes a “Venous Unlocking Method and Vein Unlocking Device”.

In other words, a biometric system similar to facial recognition or fingerprint scanning but one that maps the veins on the users’ hands. Notably, this technology also bears a close resemblance to the Hand ID system from LG, which mapped the thickness and characteristics of a user’s veins for unlocking.

Read Complete Article

In March, as claims about the dangers and ineffectiveness of coronavirus vaccines spun across social media and undermined attempts to stop the spread of the virus, some Facebook employees thought they had found a way to help.

By subtly altering how posts about vaccines are ranked in people’s newsfeeds, researchers at the company realized they could curtail the misleading information individuals saw about COVID-19 vaccines and offer users posts from legitimate sources like the World Health Organization.

Given these results, I’m assuming we’re hoping to launch ASAP, one Facebook employee wrote in March, responding to the internal memo about the study.

Instead, Facebook shelved some suggestions from the study. Other changes weren’t made until April.

When another Facebook researcher suggested disabling comments on vaccine posts in March until the platform could do a better job of tackling anti-vaccine messages lurking in them, that proposal was ignored.

Critics say Facebook was slow to act because it worried it might impact the company’s profits.

Why would you not remove comments? Because engagement is the only thing that matters, said Imran Ahmed, the CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, an internet watchdog group. It drives attention and attention equals eyeballs and eyeballs equal ad revenue.

In an emailed statement, Facebook said it has made considerable progress this year with downgrading vaccine misinformation in users’ feeds.

Read Complete Article

Data breaches and cyber attacks are expected to grow to large scale with the adoption of digitisation by both businesses as well as consumers, Israel-based cyber security firm Check Point said on Tuesday.

The company expects cyber groups will continue to leverage fake news campaigns to execute various phishing attacks and scams.

“Going into 2022 we will see an increase in data breaches that will be on a larger scale. These breaches will also have the potential to cost organizations and governments more to recover. In May 2021, the US insurance giant paid USD 40 million in ransom to hackers. This was a record, and we can expect ransom demanded by attackers to increase in 2022,” Check Point said in its prediction report.

India is one the top 10 countries that faces most of the cyber attacks.

According to industry estimates, cyber crimes caused a loss of around USD 6 trillion to the global economy in 2020.

“We can expect ransom demand by attackers to increase in 2022. Going into 2022 we will see an increase in data breaches that will be larger scale. These breaches will also have the potential to cost organizations and governments more to recover,” the report said.

It said that mobile malware attacks are expected to increase with increase in use of mobile wallets and mobile payment platforms.

“The sophistication and scale of cyber-attacks will continue to break records and we can expect a huge increase in the number of ransomware and mobile attacks,” Maya Horowitz, VP Research, Check Point Software.

Read Complete Article

It hasn’t been long since Vivo launched its X60 series (review) that placed the Chinese smartphone maker at a fine spot in the cluttered smartphone market in India.

And Vivo did not take long to launch its X70 series, yet again in collaboration with lens major Zeiss.

The X70 series is geared towards content creators as imaging remains a focus here, not just that, the new series also features Vivo’s V1 imaging chip, which the company claims took almost two years to develop.

That said, Vivo’s X60 Pro and X60 Pro+ had already set the bar so high for rivals and now with a new iteration in the X series, it remains to be seen if Vivo lives up to the expectation. I took the X70 Pro+ for a spin—from photography to gaming, I put the phone to a stiff test to see what’s on offer. I’ll talk about everything this phone has to offer in this review:

Vivo X70 Pro+: Design and build quality

The very first thing one notices in the X70 Pro+ is the rear camera module that gives this phone a distinct look and premium touch. Right next to it is a reflective panel which, it seems, is only to add more element to its looks. The next thing is the smooth, fingerprint resistant matte glass finish which makes the piece all

Read Complete Article

The Russian-based agency behind last year’s massive SolarWinds cyberattack has targeted hundreds more companies and organizations in its latest wave of attacks on US-based computer systems, Microsoft said in a blog post.

Microsoft, in a blog post dated October 24, said Nobelium’s latest wave targeted “resellers and other technology service providers” of cloud services. Those attacks were part of a broader campaign over the summer, Microsoft said, adding it had notified 609 customers between July 1 and October 19 that they had been attacked.

Just a small percent of the latest attempts were successful, Microsoft told the New York Times, which first reported the breach, but it gave no further details.

US cybersecurity officials could not be immediately reached to confirm the report. US officials confirmed to the Times that the operation was underway, with one unnamed senior administration official calling it “unsophisticated, run-of-the mill operations that could have been prevented if the cloud service providers had implemented baseline cybersecurity practices.”

“This recent activity is another indicator that Russia is trying to gain long-term, systematic access to a variety of points in the technology supply chain and establish a mechanism for surveilling – now or in the future – targets of interest to the Russian government,” Microsoft wrote.

Read Complete Article

Google has teamed up with Facebook to work around Apple’s privacy tools in Safari to continue tracking end-users, an update to an antitrust lawsuit claims, with the search engine also doing what it could to slow down other regulatory initiatives surrounding privacy.

A lawsuit was filed against Google in December 2020 by a group of attorneys general, accusing the search engine of “engaging in market collusion to rig auctions,” reports AppleInsider.

While the lawsuit largely focuses on a deal between Google and Facebook to cooperate in the online advertising business instead of competing, an update accuses the two tech giants of trying to work against initiatives by Apple to help protect the privacy of its users.

The amended complaint filed on October 22 and first reported by The Register, expands on the original claim in some directions, revealing more ways that Google may have tried to subvert user privacy.

As part of the complaint, it is alleged Google and Facebook “have been working together to improve Facebook’s ability to recognise users using browsers with blocked cookies on Apple devices, and on Apple’s Safari browser, thereby circumventing one Big Tech company’s efforts to compete by offering users better privacy.

This was apparently prompted by the two companies working closely and in integrating their SDKs “so Google can pass Facebook data for user ID cookie matching,” the complaint reads.

Read Complete Article