Tech News Today for January 31, 2017
Tech News for Tuesday January 31, 2017
Apple reported its earnings for its first quarter of 2017 and set a new record for sales of its iPhone with 78.3 million sold for the quarter. Apple also set revenue records for “iPhone, Services, Mac, and Apple Watch” according to a letter written to its investors. With $78.4 billion in revenue for the quarter, Apple continues its trend of increasing revenue when compared to the same time year over year. Read more at cnbc.com.
While everyone was deleting Uber, the ride-hailing service inked a deal with with Daimler, the parent company of Mercedes-Benz. Over the next few years the German car maker will operate their own self-driving cars on Uber’s ridesharing network. The cars will be built by Daimler and The New York Times reports that the deal is not exclusive. As for Uber, they say the partnership will get them to the future faster than going it alone. Read more at nytimes.com.
Nintendo reported its quarterly earnings of $569 million in profit, which is a major improvement over last quarter’s $57.1 million loss. Nintendo credits Pokemon Sun and Moon for the 3DS for much of that movement with $14.69 million in sales. Nintendo revealed that Super Mario Run was downloaded 78 million times and saw a 5 percent conversion to the $10 paid version, which works out to around $53 million in revenue. Read more at techcrunch.com.
The story about the ransomware that had locked a hotel full of guests out of their rooms wasn't entirely true. According to The Verge the computers were attacked, but hotel patrons were neither locked in or out of their rooms. Hotel staff had some trouble programming new keys, but that was it. Also, if the card system is hacked, they have a backup system that's not connected to the networked computers. Read more at theverge.com.
The Nextbit Robin vowed to do things differently when it launched on Kickstarter by offering virtually unlimited storage thanks to smart cloud storage mechanics of low priority files, as well as looking different from its competitors from a design standpoint. Razer, the gaming company that made waves at this year’s CES for its 3-screen gaming laptop design, announced that it bought Nextbit and all 30 team members will now continue their work on Nextbit products as Razer employees. Read more at cnet.com.
Megan Morrone and Jason Howell are joined today by Quartz contributor Adrienne Matei to talk about chatbots. Tech News Today streams live weekdays at 4PM Pacific, 7PM Eastern at twit.tv/live. You can subscribe to the show and get it on-demand at twit.tv/tnt.
