Episode 377 – Aussie Tech Heads Shownotes

posted in: Show Notes

GLENN’S SHOWNOTES

 
 
Stop Tony Meow: a Chrome extension that replaces photos of Abbott with cute cat photos.
 
Developed by a handful of Aussies in Sydney, Stop Tony Meow does exactly what it says on the tin, and sanitises the PM from your browser.
 
It’s only a Chrome extension right now, but Safari is on the way
 

 
 
OS is still used on three out of ten computers globally according to previous reports, it is now used by less than 10 percent of desktop users in Australia according to StatCounter.
 
That makes XP the fourth most popular OS on Australian desktops,
 
It is the third most popular in the US and UK and in many other countries the OS is still the second most popular on desktops.
 

 
Windows Phone grew to 5.2% of Australian smartphone OS sales share in the three months to December 2013, according to new data from Kantar Worldpanel ComTech. This is up from 3 percent in same period in 2012.
 
The gain follows a jump for Windows during the preceding three months to 9.3 percent sales share, a doubling of sales share compared with the same period a year earlier.
 
Meanwhile, sales share for iOS in Australia for the three months to December 2013 fell, down from 38.5 percent to 35.2 percent of local sales.
 
Android still holds the lion’s share of Australian consumer smartphone market, with 57.2 percent in the latest Kantar figures. Meanwhile, Blackberry fell slightly from 1 percent to 0.8 percent.
 
Kantar collects the figures by interviewing smartphones owners, asking if they have bought a smartphone in the last three months. In Australia, Kantar conducts 10,000 interviews each month.
 

Who am I?
 
I am 46. I’ve been married for 22 years and we have 3 kids. And like anyone else, a lot of what I do and how I think has been shaped by my family and my overall life experiences. Many who know me say I am also defined by my curiosity and thirst for learning. I buy more books than I can finish. I sign up for more online courses than I can complete. I fundamentally believe that if you are not learning new things, you stop doing great and useful things. So family, curiosity and hunger for knowledge all define me.
 
 
22-year company veteran Satya Nadella as its next chief executive officer on Tuesday and said co-founder Bill Gates would step down as chairman and advise the new CEO on technology
 
Nadella, a 46-year-old born in India who led the creation of Microsoft’s cloud services, is only Microsoft’s third CEO in 39 years, taking over from Steve Ballmer, who inherited the job from Gates in 2000.
 
The move ends a five-month search process triggered by the August announcement of Ballmer’s decision to retire.
 
 

 
The singer overtook Justin Bieber as the most followed person in November last year, although he was the first to hit the 40 million mark in June 2013.
 
Katy Perry is ahead of the teenage pop star by 800,000.
 
Ashton Kutcher was the first to get one million followers in 2009 with Lady Gaga the first to 10, 20 and then 30 million in October 2012.
 
However, it is unclear how many of Perry’s followers are real.
 
Status People surveyed 33,000 people across her first 1.25 million fans on Twitter last year and found 42% of them were fake.
 

 
 
According to data released by Spotify only 80% of the 20 million songs on its site have been listened to at least once.
 
The founders of Forgotify said that the four million unheard tracks were “a musical travesty”.
 
Users of Forgotify have to be logged in to Spotify for it to work.
 
Once logged in, listeners are presented with a track that they can listen to and share. If it is not to their taste there is a “next” button that will offer them another previously unplayed track.
 

 
 
Naoki Hiroshima, a software developer from California, has had the Twitter handle @N since 2007.
 
In a blog post he said he had previously been offered $50,000 to sell it and people had tried to “steal” it before.
 
This time, he said, someone took control of other online accounts he had until he agreed to give it up.
 
He explained said that a hacker gained access to his GoDaddy account – a domain name registration service – and had changed the account settings to gain access to his personal email.
 
In a subsequent email exchange, the hacker told Mr Hiroshima that he had managed to access his GoDaddy account by learning the last 4 digits of his credit card number.
 
He claimed to have done this by contacting PayPal, where Mr Hiroshima has an account, and posing as an employee. Then he said he used “some very simple engineering tactics to obtain the last four [digits] of your card”.
 
“We have carefully reviewed our records and can confirm that there was a failed attempt made to gain this customer’s information by contacting PayPal.
 
Twitter had not restored Mr Hiroshima’s access to the @N account a spokesperson said:
 
“While we don’t comment on individual accounts, we are investigating the report.”
 
In the latest development Mr Hiroshima tweeted from his new Twitter account that it seemed the hacker had deleted his old account.
 
“It seems the guy who stole @N from me just deleted the account. It’s available but unavailable to take.”
 
 
 

SHAYNE’S SHOWNOTES

 
 
 
Now that Google has finally opened up the Chromecast for developers, AllCast — pretty much the best Chromecast app you could ask for — is back in the game.
 
Developer Koushik Dutta pushed out an update early this morning that will let you push pictures and videos from your phone to your Chromecast with the greatest of ease. There are only two catches. If you don’t want to be limited to 1 minute clips, you have to shell out for the $5 licence (come on, it’s worth it). And you also need the newest version of Google Play Services which only just started rolling out. If you just can’t be patient, you can download it here.
 
It’s the 10th anniversary of Facebook today/yesterday, and there are some dizzying numbers surrounding the social network. But just how many Aussies are there using Facebook every day?
 
As of right now, Facebook has 201.6 billion friend connections, 1.23 billion monthly active users around the world, 945 million mobile monthly active users, and a staggering 3.4 trillion ‘Likes’.
 
 
Twitter just flipped the switch on a redesign on the web, and it looks totally different. Everything is flat, the font has changed, your profile picture shows up in the top left-hand corner, and it looks a whole lot cleaner.
 
 
The long-awaited Pebble App Store is now live, and you can start downloading watchapps like a fool, provided you’re using iOS and not Android. Here’s how you get it, and here’s how long Android users will have to wait.
 
The Pebble App Store will allow you to install new apps onto your Pebble smart watch. It also gives the controller app a fresh new design, and throws a whole bunch of new features onto your device thanks to Pebble 2.0.
 
 
It’s no secret that when it comes to getting their weekly injection of Game of Thrones, Australians have no qualms with heading to their favourite torrent site to grab HBO’s impeccably-produced fantasy epic. On the other hand, if you were willing to wait a day, you could also buy episodes via iTunes. Sadly, that won’t be the case with season four.
 
Windows 8 is an OS struggling to capture the imagination of the masses. Now, rumours suggest that Microsoft may alter the way its Start Screen works in Windows 8.1 Update 1.
When Windows 8.1 landed last year it included an option to bypass the Metro interface. But now “sources familiar with Microsoft’s plans” have told The Verge that Microsoft is planning to enable that setting by default, rendering the tiled interface an option rather than the norm. Apparently the latest builds of Windows 8.1 Update 1 at Microsoft boot straight to the desktop.
 

JASON’S SHOWNOTES

Australian Bitcoin ATMs is a company that does exactly what you think it does: roll-out Bitcoin ATMs around this great country of ours. Now the company has announced it will soon open 100 Bitcoin ATMs around the country so you can convert your digital currency to physical dollars on the street.
The ATMs will facilitate the conversion of Bitcoin to physical currency, and vice versa.
The head of the company tells the ABC that customers will tell the ATM how much Bitcoin they want to sell, before going out into the marketplace to conduct said trade and convert it into physical currency on the spot.
In the same way, the ATM will also allow you to deposit cash to purchase more Bitcoins.
The deregulated cryptocurrency is still fairly volatile, but its value appears to have levelled out in recent weeks. One Bitcoin will cost you around $US800-$US1100 at the time of publication.
 
Microsoft Invests $15 Million in Foursquare
Microsoft is investing $15 million inFoursquare as part of a licensing deal that will incorporate the the location-based service’s data into Microsoft’s web and mobile platforms.
The four-year deal, announced Tuesday, makes Microsoft the largest licensee of Foursquare data.
“In the near future, when you use Microsoft devices powered by the Windows and Windows Phone operating systems and products like Bing, places will be enhanced by Foursquare — to provide contextually-aware experiences and the best recommendations of any service in the world,” Foursquare wrote in ablog post announcing the partnership.
Exactly how Microsoft plans to use Foursquare’s immense amount of data, which includes everything from users’ location information to personalized recommendations and tips, isn’t completely clear. But the New York Timesreported that Microsoft will use Foursquare’s data to beef up search on its Bing and Windows Phone 8 platforms.
Glenn wants to start this story off please: I got a who am i?
Insider Nadella Named Microsoft CEO, as Expected, With Gates Stepping Down as Chairman to Help Him
Satya Nadella, the quiet and self-effacing Microsoft enterprise chief, prevailed over much splashier outside candidates and was named CEO of the Microsoft.
He is only the third CEO since the company’s founding, replacing Steve Ballmer. The first Microsoft CEO, of course, was co-founder and chairman Bill Gates.
As part of the changes at the top and perhaps even more significantly — at least from a symbolic perspective — Gates will be shedding his chairman role at the company, to be replaced by director John Thompson, former CEO of Symantec.
Instead, Gates will be spending more time helping Nadella especially in the technology and product area, with the title of “technology advisor,” working full-time several days a week at Microsoft.
But he still owns a four percent stake in Microsoft and will remain a powerful director; Gates will also continue to be deeply involved in his philanthropic efforts via the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Facebook’s Paper App for iPhone Is the Future of Facebook
The app — unlike other Facebook mobile efforts such asMessenger and thefailed Snapchat knockoff Poke — isn’t a specialized tool or a side project. It’s Facebook — almost all of it, anyhow — rethought for a small screen, with 2014 aesthetics.
By calling it Paper and leaving the original Facebook app untouched in the App Store, the company smartly avoids leaving users feeling like radical, jarring change is being imposed upon them. But it’s hard to imagine that Mark Zuckerberg & Co. don’t see the ideas in this app as a first rough draft of Facebook’s future, period.
Most of what you can do in the standard Facebook app for iPhone, you can do in Facebook Paper. There are some exceptions: You don’t see lists, apps or events, for instance. Whether you’re likely to want to use Paper full-time depends in part on whether you’re a heavy user of any of the missing items. And what’s new basically boils down into two things: The interface and the sections of news organized by topic.
Now everything’s cleaner, with a large content panel on the top, smaller horizontally-scrolling ones on the bottom, lots of big images and a profusion of fluid animation effects.
 

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