Ever since Apple launched its digital personal assistant Siri on iOS devices, companies have been trying to develop their own speech-recognition and natural-language-processing technologies. BlackBerry has the BlackBerry Assistant, Google has Google Now, and Microsoft has Cortana, for instance. The evolution of these virtual personal assistants started out as a way for these companies to … continue reading
Salesforce has unveiled Salesforce1, Analytics Cloud and the Wear Developer Pack for Apple Watch, the most recent additions to their line of open-source wearable apps. The Salesforce Wear Developer Kit for Apple Watch will leverage Apple’s WatchKit SDK by providing starter projects and design patterns for developers to build upon. The developer pack can be … continue reading
While Apple was announcing the final set of features for its watch on Monday morning, Wearables TechCon was taking place just 50 miles away. Wearables TechCon attendees were abuzz about the new watch, but not just because they wanted to purchase one: They were excited to see one of the world’s largest company validating the … continue reading
Security researches have exposed a software vulnerability in Dropbox’s SDK for Android. The bug could allow hackers to connect apps from a mobile device to their own Dropbox account without a user knowing. The vulnerability, which was discovered by IBM’s X-Force application research team, impacts Dropbox SDK versions 1.5.4 through 1.6.1. “The response from Dropbox … continue reading
The Apple Watch will be available for pre-order on April 12, and released worldwide on April 24. At Apple’s press event today, CEO Tim Cook introduced each version of the Apple Watch with pricing information, along with a new ResearchKit suite of medical research applications, a redesigned MacBook, and updates on Apple Pay and Apple … continue reading
Security researchers have revealed a new software vulnerability that is leaving Apple and Google users open to a hack attack. The vulnerability, Factoring RSA export keys (also known as the FREAK attack), was found in SSL/TLS—the protocol meant to provide secure Web connections. According to the miTLS team, composed of Inria (a research organization in … continue reading
Apple and IBM have announced an expansion to their mobile application partnership, unveiling banking and financial services apps in the IBM MobileFirst for iOS portfolio.The new services include a Passenger Care app for customer service assistance during travel and transportation; a Dynamic Buy retail app for real-time data-driven product recommendations; and an Advisor Alerts app … continue reading
Eight months after Apple debuted Swift, a new third-party implementation is extending the programming language beyond iOS onto Android and .NET. As new programming languages experience rapid spikes in popularity and adoption, the development communities around them often emerge to fill gaps in the tool chain the creators hadn’t yet addressed. It’s a natural cycle … continue reading
Since Microsoft introduced holograms to the world with Windows Holographic and the Microsoft HoloLens last month, there have been think pieces abound about which tech company is the “coolest” at this particular cultural and technological moment. The giants of Silicon Valley (and Seattle) each have a few acquisitions, pet projects and hallmark innovative technologies they’re … continue reading
The Apache Software Foundation announced the releases of Apache Lucene 5.0 and Apache Solr 5.0, with each project adding new features and major component changes. Apache Lucene 5.0 adds Java’s NIO2 API file access, unique ID storage and IndexWriter merger checking, along with reduced heap storage, auto-IO-throttling and payload support for memory indexes. The full … continue reading
The U.S. Defense Research Projects Agency (DARPA) announced it is developing a brain interface to inject images directly into the human visual cortex via a “cortical modem” chip implanted in the brain. DARPA announced the project at the Biology Is Technology conference this past week and subsequently in the transhumanist magazine Humanity Plus. DARPA Biological … continue reading
Developers can get their hands on the first build of Windows 10 Technical Preview for phones. Microsoft has announced the first build is available for Windows Insiders. “This is the earliest publicly available preview we’ve ever done for Windows on phones,” wrote Gabe Aul, engineering general manager at Microsoft, on the company’s blog. “This preview … continue reading