Google has announced a partnership with Cloudera to bring its Dataflow programming model into Apache Spark. According to the company, developers need a powerful, flexible and easy-to-use programming model to stay productive, and the Dataflow model provides maximum productivity and seamlessly portability. Dataflow currently offers a direct pipeline runner, a Google Cloud Dataflow runner, and … continue reading
Tech companies poaching employees from one another is a longstanding Silicon Valley scandal, but after several years of litigation, the poachers may finally be about to pay up. According to a report from Reuters, Adobe, Apple, Google and Intel have agreed to settle an antitrust class-action lawsuit filed in 2011 by 64,000 software engineers. After … continue reading
Firefox Hello, the WebRTC in-browser chat feature first included in Firefox 34, is now available to all with the launch of Firefox 35. The real-time communication feature allows users to start plug-in-free video chats within the browser in the form of a pop-up box, without the aid of a service such as Google Hangouts and … continue reading
Members of the Future of Life Institute, a “research and outreach organization working to mitigate existential risks facing humanity,” has signed an open letter pledging to protect humankind from the dangers of artificial intelligence. The signatories, including Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk, consist of programmers, scientists, and artificial intelligence researchers from universities and tech giants … continue reading
Microsoft isn’t happy about Google’s disclosure of a zero-day vulnerability in Windows 8.1, and the company has publicly voiced its displeasure. In a blog post entitled “A Call for Better Coordinated Vulnerability Disclosure,” senior director of Microsoft’s Security Response Center Chris Betz admonished Google for disclosing the vulnerability only two days before Microsoft was scheduled … continue reading
Code.org has revealed a milestone with its computer-science learning platform, Code Studio. The organization announced that more than 1 million girls, along with 1 million African-American and Hispanic students, have enrolled in Code.org’s computer-science education program. “We all know tech has a diversity problem. The problem in computer-science education is even worse. To work to … continue reading
BlackBerry is jumping into the wearables space. The company just announced BBM support for a wide range of Android Wear wearable devices. “The integration of BBM to support wearable technology is just one way we’re expanding the capabilities of our portfolio and delivering exciting options for customers to easily access BlackBerry’s cross-platform technologies,” said Herman … continue reading
Now that Android TV has officially launched, Google has announced that it will no longer support Google TV. Existing Google TV apps developed for the platform will continue to work, but most Google TV devices will not support the company’s new platform. “With this shift, we encourage you to transition your living room development efforts … continue reading
Facebook announced it has acquired Wit.ai, a voice-recognition and natural-language processing startup with technology akin to Apple’s Siri. The Wit.ai platform and natural-language processing API, which has a community of more than 6,000 developers, will remain free and open source, according to a Wit.ai blog post The acquisition could help draw more developers to Facebook, … continue reading
Google released a list of its must-have Android apps, rattling off 127 of the most highly recommended and highest rated apps in the Google Play Store. The apps, most of them free, range from popular favorites including Netflix, Shazam and Spotify to mobile applications with fast-growing user bases such as Quip, Pushbullet and Lumosity. Google’s full … continue reading
In 2014, “mobile” evolved into a more widely unified and interconnected concept. The last several years have seen smartphones, tablets and mobile apps take control of how we consume and compute information, redefining how we communicate with each other. A train with that much momentum doesn’t stop when the market reaches its peak; it barrels … continue reading
Google has unveiled the first prototype of its self-driving vehicle. The vehicle was first revealed in May, but the car Google presented was just a mockup without headlights. “Since then, we’ve been working on different prototypes-of-prototypes, each designed to test different systems of a self-driving car—for example, the typical ‘car’ parts like steering and braking, … continue reading
