It’s the unofficial start of the Fourth of July weekend! Yes, it’s Thursday, which means it’s time for tech talk with Mark Starling and the First News 570 crew. This week, we’re talking about Google’s acquisition of wearable computing company, North, how corporate America is boycotting Facebook, and a quick round up of this year’s World Wide Developer Conference. You can listen to Mark and I point and laugh while talking about the wild and crazy technology world every Thursday morning, LIVE at 6:43am Eastern.
BIG BRANDS BOYCOTT FACEBOOK AD BUYS
Just in time for Facebook to roll out their new user experience, major corporations aren’t buying ads on the platform. A consistently growing list of companies are joining an ad buying protest on the platform, because Facebook doesn’t do enough to halt the spread of hate and racist speech on the platform. This isn’t the first time we’ve reported on Facebook not being able to stop all hate speech and whether or not it does enough. After employing tens of thousands of human moderators to halt hate, speech more than enough content still goes through. List of companies boycotting Facebook is a Who’s Who of American business spanning across all industries. The boycott is expected to last through July or when Facebook changes its policies.
APPLE FANBOY WILL FINALLY MAKES COMMENTARY ON WWDC
Yes, that’s right folks, I went a whole week without commenting on WWDC, because I let it marinate. Apple punched a bunch of stuff in its first ever streamed edition of WWDC. I’ve been waiting for a few enhanced features myself, a big one is that Apple Watch faces will be switchable and shareable for WatchOS 7. For the longest I’ve been wanting a new styled watch face. The Apple Watch will track dancing in its next iteration which I think is cool, because I like to dance. And…it can also track hand washing. A big update is Apple Car Key for iOS, meaning yes, you’ll be able to start your car with CarPlay enabled cars. Something I’m not looking forward to is that macOS will be becoming more and more like iOS which is not a good idea for me. Computers should be computers with more open and unlimited capability and Apple is making computers less and less accessible. The second big news for macOS is that Apple will be building its next generation of computers using its own microprocessors. Since using its own silicon for phones, this move is not unexpected.
SETTINGS THEIR SIGHTS AHEAD, GOOGLE BUYS NORTH
It’s true. Somewhere out there on these Internets is a picture of me thinking I look cool wearing a pair of Google Glasses. Lo, I didn’t look cool, those things were ugly. Fast forward a couple of years, and Google is trying to make due on its promise of delivering a solid augmented reality product. Yesterday, Google announced purchasing wearable computing maker North in a bid to improve its Glasses product. North was working on a new style of augmented reality glasses that actually look like glasses. Admittedly, I’d buy a pair of AR glasses as long as they aren’t too distracting.