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Today’s guests: Darren Kitchen and Breki Tomasson
Headlines
- The Wrap reports Mog founder David Hyman has filed a lawsuit claiming he was fired before he could receive the benefits of his incentive plan after MOG was purchased by Beats in 2012. Hyman says he would have received between 2.5 to 25% of the company's equity depending on market valuation but he was fired before the incentives kicked in as part of a deliberate effort to deprive him of compensation. Hyman wants more than $20 million in damages. Beats has note yet commented.
- As JohnEllsworth3 pointed out on our subreddit, Google appointed a new leader of its Google Glass team. The BBC reports as of May 19, Ivy Ross replaces Babak Parviz. Ross previously worked for Art.com, Calvin Klein, Mattel and Gap, among others but most relevant to Glass, she was once the lead designer at eyewear maker Bausch & Lomb. This follows on news tekkyn00b pointed out from 9to5 Mac that Google's lead electrical engineer working on Glass, Adrian Wong, has left to join Oculus VR.
- IT Worlds reports the EFF released its 4th annual "Who Has Your Back" report, ranking trustworthiness of tech firms with your data. In the wake of reaction to Snowden revelations, nine companies received the maximum 6 stars across categories, Apple, Credo Mobile, Dropbox, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Sonic.net, Twitter and Yahoo. On the other end of the scale, AT&T and Amazon earned only two stars, and Snapchat got just one.
- Recode reports at least 10 members of the nonprofit Bitcoin Foundation have resigned after Brock Pierce was named Director of the Foundation last week. Pierce, once the star of Disney's "First Kid" has been troubled by lawsuits regarding his past ventures, though all have been dropped or settled out of court. Some members of the board called for more careful vetting of future candidates and the removal of Pierce. The Foundation has more than 1500 members.
- The Next Web reports Google will acquire Quest Visual, the makers of the app Word Lens Translator. Word lens changes words in images from one language to another to help viewers read them. Quest says it will incorporate the Word Lens technology into "Google Translate's broad language coverage and translation capabilities." Quest has been authorised to make Word lens free to download during the transition.
- Reuters reports ongoing anti-China protests in Vietnam gave caused Foxconn parent Hon Hai precision to order Vietnamese workers to take a three day leave beginning Saturday. The protests have been spurred by disputes in the South China sea and have targeted both Chinese and Taiwanese companies.
- Recode reports China's tech giant, Baidu hired artificial intelligence researcher Andrew Ng to be chief scientist and create a new Baidu Research initiative with labs in Beijing and Sunnyvale, California. Ng co-founded education startup Coursera and once worked on the Google Brain team. He specializes in deep learning which teaches machines to process large amounts of data by mimicking neural networks.
- KAPT_Kipper posted the Ars Technica report on Adobe's Creative Cloud outage that started Wednesday and was finally resolved today, Friday. During the outage, users who signed out could only sign back in as trial users, unless they had already expired their trial in which case they could not use their software. Adobe told Reuters customers can apply to get compensation for the outage which will be considered on a case by case basis.
- spsheridan sent us the BBC story that a program called Vital has been appointed to the board of directors of the venture capital firm Deep Knowledge Ventures, which focuses on drugs for age-related diseases. Vital will process data and vote on prospective investments. Professor Noel Sharkey of the University of Sheffield pointed out that most companies use recommendations from algorithms to inform investment decisions, so having one vote is maybe a tad bit gimmicky.
“My pick is a site called PCPartPicker. It's a one-stop shop for people wanting to build their own custom PCs by letting you "build" your PC with a compatibility checker to ensure you don't mix things up like putting an Intel CPU in a AMD motherboard or cramming a graphics card into a case that can’t fit it.
The other killer feature it has is price comparison and history. It compares component prices from popular stores such as Amazon and Newegg in the US and others from 7 different countries. Also you can generate Reddit Markups to show Redditers your build and ask for help or BBCode for other forums. If you're going to build a PC, look no further than PCPartPicker.”
Monday’s guest: Iyaz Akhtar
