Apple to launch its own reality TV show

Apple Launching its Reality TV Show

Apple is in the development of launching its own reality TV show – Planet of the Apps and a casting call for the event had been put out recently for developers in the age of 18 and above who would be interested in making smartphone apps for the Apple setting. Apple had made an announcement earlier in the year that it intends launching it first original TV series and now the world seems to know a little more regarding what it would look like.

The show is said to be co-produced by a newly shaped company owned by Ben Silverman, a reality TV guru. Apple had partnered with Propagate, a new production company developed by the guy behind `The Biggest Loser’ together with Howard T Owen who had worked on MasterChef Junior with Musician Will.i.am also on board for the said project.

Mr Silverman had informed that the original program would follow on `how apps are developed and created and incubated’. The pair had drawn their vision for the show, in a report that had been published by tech blog 9to5Mac. It stated that `Planet of the Apps will give app creators the chance to break through and share their ideas with the world. This is an exciting format which taps into what is driving culture today. We can’t wait to see the ground-breaking ideas accepted for the show, grow into viable businesses’.

Pursing an Original Content Division

The ascension of Netflix together with the fragmented market of content providers laid by internet based services has been on the rise in companies interested in producing their own original content. When Apple had stated earlier in the year that it intended creating the TV show, the software and service boss of the company, Eddy Cue had mentioned that Apple was not moving wholesale in the production of innovative content.

 He had informed the New York Times in March that this does not mean that they would go into a huge amount of movie production or TV production or anything like that. But last year, rumours have been doing the rounds that Apple has been discovering the notion of pursuing an original content division and had been in talks with various leading television companies regarding launching an internet-based TV service.

Planet of the App – Accepting Online Applications

There is a possibility that the achievement of the forthcoming show would regulate the extent of the potential venture into original content of Apple. Casting call for the show `Planet of the App’ would be accepting online applications till August 26 together with filming set to take place somewhere next year. As per the show’s website, contestants would be receiving `hand-on guidance from some of the most influential experts in the tech community, featured placement on the App store.

The winners probably will get mentorship from tech and entertainment experts and those who would be chosen for the final round would get an opportunity to meet with top-tier VCs investing around $10m over the course of the season. The show is said to be shot in Los Angeles and is planned to be released in 2017.

A Submerged Floating Bridge

Submerged Floating Bridge – First-of-its-Kind Crossing

Driving the 680 miles from Norway’s bustling southern port of Kristians and to Trondheim in the north would take around 21 hours in the car which is an average of 30 miles per hour. The route along highway E39tends to cross seven elegant though inconvenient fjords which are approximately seven ferry trips. An infrastructure project of $25 billion has been developed which seems to reduce the trip to only 10.5 hours by installing permanent crossing on those fjords by 2035.

 These waterways being wide where the largest seems to be almost a mile deep, a typical bridge would not suffice. Hence Norway has considered fording its fjords with an alternative which the world has not seen before, in the form of a submerged floating bridge. It’s been a fancy term for a traffic tube which is under around 100 feet of water and above hundreds extra. Senior engineer with the country’s public roads administration, Arianna Minoretti, stated that it is not actually that crazy.

As per their uncertain plans, the 4,300-feet deep, 3,300-feet wide Sognefjord could be the appropriate applicant for this first-of-its-kind crossing. The structure is said to be made up of two curved of long concrete tubes of 4,000-foot, one for each direction, which would be hanging 65 to 100 feet below the surface.

Design Provides Advantage over Saner-Sounding/Conventional Alternative

Platforms on the surface would be holding up the tubes, wherein the connecting tethers would be keeping them stable. The structure could also be fastened to the bedrock below for the purpose of additional stability. Minoretti has commented that driving through one of these would feel like driving through any other tunnel.

The designs provides sufficient advantage over saner-sounding, conventional alternatives and rough weather would not interfere with the underwater structure, according to Minoretti, so Norway’s more rural inhabitants would not get stranded. She comments that `having this connection would mean that people there would not have to wait for a helicopter to go to the hospital’.

Moreover Norway has also been considering building a suspension or floating bridge over the water which would either mess with the Navy ships that tends to train sometimes in this water and ruin the regal, delicate and extremely bankable beauty of the fjords.

Serious Issues/Structural Questions

Engineers state that a floating tunnel forestalls those issues and would not be more expensive than the saner-sound, conservative alternatives. Henry Petroski a Duke University civil engineer, specializing in bridges states that `this idea of Norway is a kind of an intermediate technology of things which have been done before.

The structure has utilised concrete constructions techniques from tunnels, platforms from floating bridges and tether technology from offshore oil platforms. Minoretti has said that for an engineer working on this structure, it seems like being on the Discovery Channel each day.

However, there are some serious queries into the future and the Norwegians are yet working to fill up the geological blanks like `what do fjord sea beds really look like? Can the bedrock support the strong tethers needed to keep something like this from becoming a car-filled Subtle?

Besides these, there are structural questions also and Norwegians engineers have been busy calculating what type of wind and waves would a submerged floating structure handle and how the currents at various fjords could affect its movement.

Ex-Google Engineer Launches Blockchain Based System for Banks

Blockchain Technology – New Operating System for Banks

A company which tends to use blockchain technology in building new operating system for banks has been launched by a former Google engineer Paul Taylor, whose speech recognition software has been utilised in over a billion Android smartphones. A Cambridge University academic, Taylor having expertise in artificial intelligence, machine learning and speech synthesis had begun working on the system known as Vault OS, two years back, in a cellar in Shoreditch district, London which is known for being a tech start-up hub.

Thought Machine and VaultOS is said to be the brainchild of Taylor who had sold his speech recognition start-up Phonetic Arts to Google in 2010. He had spent around three years running it text-to-speech operation. Will Montgomery, another ex-Googler and former AdSense engineer is the director of applications at Thought Machine.
The thoughts of the financial industry have been captured by blockchain, wherein advocates state that it has the capability of shaking up how the markets tend to operate. The technology that supports the digital currency bitcoin is said to develop a shared database wherein participants could trace each transaction that is made. The ledger is said to be tamper-proof and transparent which means that the transaction can be administered the requirement of third party confirmation.

Secured System of Storing Transaction

Taylor had informed Reuters that most of the banks are inclined to use systems which were written in the 80s and 90s and were just not ready for the security-conscious internet app age at all. What the blockchain intends to do is to provide a much secured system of storing transactions. Moreover the system also disproves the requirements of costly in-house data centres since it have a tendency to use cloud-based methods wherein banks could utilise it on a `pay-as-you-go’ source which means that there is no particular point of failure. Taylor also added that major high street banks were spending about a billion pounds a year on computer technology. He mentioned that most of it was being utilised for propping up the present legacy systems instead on any innovative technology. Blockchain is said to be a promising technology and is estimated still to be some five to ten years away from extensive adoption but its reputation had be affected to some extent due to its association with bitcoin that had seen various company failures inclusive of Tokyo-based exchange Mt. Gox filing for bankruptcy, leaving investors around $500 million in debt.

Building Modern Computer System for Banks

Taylor had informed that the start-up had been operative with around ten banks, where at least one would be starting a trial utilising the new system in August. He is hoping that the system would function within a year. This project is said to be one of the first bottom-up attempts in building a modern computer system for the banks that can be utilised out of the box by any of the banks and then tailored as needed.

The platform attracts the latest technology like cloud infrastructure and blockchain. VaultOS is somewhat like Amazon Web Services of Google Drive, except for the `core banking’ system, the technology is said topermit the banks to hold deposits as well as accounts. The director of creative and design at Thought Machine, Mark Warrick had informed Business Insider that gettingthe technology updated seemed to be the `hardest problem in banking’s owing to its critical function.

Hasselblad Introduces Amazing Digital Camera

X1D – A Compact 50-Megapixel Medium Format Camera

Hasselblad, in the midst of mobile cameras together with selfie-infatuated unprofessional, has been making a proposition to customers with a new type of camera. However it is not meant for self-portraits and would be quite expensive. The Swedish-based luxury camera manufacturer, had recently introduced the X1D, a compact 50-megapixel medium format camera to the world which advertised as a `game changer’ in photography.

Latest addition is the wireless enabled lighter than the company’s standard issue to the Hasselblad’s fleet is provided with GPS and high-definition video capabilities. It also comes at a price of $9,000, a price that Hasselblad states are acceptable by the mirrorless technology of XID, something without the model in a digital medium format device.

Comparing with Hasselblad’s other luxe models, the H5D type is priced at $45,000, a surprising sum for consumers accustomed to spending out only hundreds of dollars on a Nikon or Canon, the price tag of X1D is fairly reasonable, according to Hasselblad America’s president, Michael Hejtmanek, as informed to CNBC in New York, this week. On the side-line of an event, Hasselblad had portrayed to the reporters, a pre-production model of the X1D, which Hejtmanek had called it as an `amazing camera’ whose functionality conceals the relative convenience and ease of the universal smartphone camera.

An Act of Boldness Against Bleak Financial Side

The expensive X1D could be considered as an act of boldness against the bleak financial side of the camera business. It was an impudent attempt to generate interest in high end cameras by the 75-year old company, during which, the market seemed to be under severe burden from smartphone cameras. Main camera manufacturers like Canon, Nikon and Sony, reported decline in camera sales, reflecting a multiyear fall in worldwide shipments which began moderating only last year, according to the Camera & Imaging Products Association.

CIPA data portrayed that camera sales had leapt by nearly 20%, in 2015 from the year prior to 35.4 million sales, down from 2010 peak of 121.5 million and corresponding with the boom in smartphones. In the meanwhile, global smartphones sales had climbed over 14% last year to over 1.4 billion units, as per figures from research firm Gartner.

Real Camera for Photography Enthusiasts

Hejtmanek had accepted that smartphone had been turning the overall population into unprofessional shutterbugs but had restrained the effect on high-end manufacturers like Hasselblad. He informed CNBC in New York this week that `this is a real camera for photography enthusiasts, so while you can with a camera phone shoot some great pictures, there are a lot of limitation to that. You have a sensor in the X1D that is many times larger than a camera phone. The difference is staggering’.

Most of the digital single lens camera possibly the most affordable as well as popular ones in the market, tend to cost only several hundred dollars, but they seem to pale in price comparison to the X1D.Hejtmanek commented that for someone who would have purchased a high-end DSLR, this camera is a big step up in technology though only a small step in price. It’s much more a camera for the dollar. The X1D is said to be available in stores in August.

Cheap Ransomware Takes Files Hostage

Stampado Malware – No Administrator Rights to Infect Computers

A Malware has been spottedby online security firm Heimdal on the dark web, which is a part of the World Wide Web which is not indexed by regular search engines and which needs specialists’ software or approval on access. The malware tends to give the victims 96 hours to pay a ransom before it tends to being deleting files from their PC. It is said that if the ransom is not paid, it continues to delete random file every six hours.

The newly discovered threat is known as Stampado malware and is said to be on sale for less than $50 for a lifetime licence. The difference between Stampado and the other malware alternatives is that it does not require administrator rights to begin infecting the computers. Ramsomware is malicious software which tends to ascent the data on the users’ PC and thereafter probes for payment before restoring the data to its original state.

The price of unlocking data may differ, with users usually paying a few hundred pounds and businesses a few thousand. A security firm Heimdal had mentioned in a blog that `cryptoware is a big segment of the malware economy, malware creators have to constantly release new products to keep their clients engaged and the money flowing. Researchers at Intel Security, in June, had mentioned that they had seen an alarming rise in the volume of ransomware available to hackers. They had informed that they had logged 124 individual variants of the malware.

Ransomware Attacks Doubled in Past Years

The FBI had also stated that it had envisaged ransomware attacks doubled in the past years, with over 2,400 complaints that had come up. The estimated losses from these attacks amounted to $24m within that timeframe. In recent months, banks, educational institutions and hospitals had all been affected by these attacks. Several made attempts of solving the issue internally before making the payment of any ransoms.Experts are of the opinion that the best way individuals can protect against ransomware is to back up files elsewhere outside the computers like an external hard drive or the cloud. In order to combat the cyber occurrence on a state level needs the efforts of the N.J. Office of Homeland Security and Preparedness. Dave Weinstein, New Jersey’s first chief technology officer, stated that federal departments have their focus on protecting national assets from cyber-attacks, in an effort of protecting the whole country but that could overlook several smaller objects which would only disturb state residents if disabled.

Ransomware a Serious Threat

He further added that there are a majority of assets in the state which tend to fall below the very high verge that if stuck unfavourably it would not influence the nation as a whole but would certainly affect the residents as well as the business of the state of New Jersey. The cyber security division of OSHP, earlier helmed by Weinstein also tracks dozens of well-known ransomware alternatives to inform victims on the decision of paying the attackers or not. Ransomware seems to be a very serious threat and the negative impact it tends to have on individual or corporation relates to the effort, cost and time connected in restoring the systems and devices back to its original working state. On comprehending the cost of recovery, the monetary as well as reputation, the victims are left with an option of paying or move forward with a recovery plan if one tends to exist.