Tech in last 7 Days - Week Ending Friday, 1-May-2020
This is a weekly column of curated tech news, highlighting interesting and/or valuable tech developments from the past 7 days, which are impacting our society directly or indirectly. It also gives some vague sense of the trajectory that the technology as a whole is taking. The aim is to share the information concisely, in an easy to understand manner, with not more than 5-10 min read time.
1- WEBSITES COMING UP WITH USEFUL COVID-19 DATA VISUALIZATION TOOLS TO HELP SUPPORT COMMUNITIES
Different new websites have sprung up during this COVID-19 pandemic to support the communities. Thanks to Google Maps APIs, these websites are developing important data visualization tools through which they are helping people find critical information such as …
First known Long-Term Care COVID-19 Tracker
2- EARNINGS REPORT: MICROSOFT, ALPHABET, APPLE & FACEBOOK
KEY TAKEAWAYS:
Apple’s services business revenue was an all time high. Apple News now has 125 millions subscribers.
For Alphabet ad revenues took a hit as expected due to impact on travel and entertainment industry. YouTube and Google Cloud sales grew 33.4% and 52% respectively.
Microsoft beat market expectations. Cloud usage increased. Despite supply chain constraints, because of COVID-19, remote work helped boost revenue for Windows and its surface computing.
Facebook still managed to double its profit and increase its ad revenue by 17% despite the uncertainty surrounding COVID-19.
3. GOOGLE MAPS & PLUS CODES INTEGRATION
A plus code is a street address for people and places that don’t have one.
It describes an area by splitting the world in a grid.
Give plus codes to other people and they can find you using Google Maps. This functionality has been there since 2018. So, what’s new? Google has now integrated Plus Codes into its Place Autocomplete, Place Details and Geocoding APIs. What this means?
If you are using an app or service which has a google place autocomplete feature, you will now be able to see suggestions for plus codes as well. Previously, it was only for names and addresses.
Developers can make use of Place Details and Geocoding APIs to have their app convert the plus codes into geographic coordinates or can use them directly for directions.
4- INTRODUCING MAVIC AIR 2
Air 2 is $200 more expensive than the older model. A bigger camera sensor, 48 MP capability, H.265 video format are some pretty good features, which were not available in the older model. For some people just the OcuSync 2.0 technology alone, is worth the upgrade. Read more here.
5- ZOOM CHOOSES ORACLE AS A CLOUD PARTNER
It may come as a surprise to many, but it could be that Zoom got a good deal as Larry who considers it as an essential service, may wanted to have a competitive advantage over other cloud providers. Zoom indicated that it uses AWS and Azure as well.
6- AMAZON MAKES IT EASIER FOR DEVELOPERS TO ADD HUMAN REVIEW ON MACHINE LEARNING PREDICTIONS
There can be a number of use cases, where not only a higher confidence score on ML predictions is desired but a human review is also needed. For example, use cases relating to law and order or relating to identifying counterfeit items. In other instances you might need a human review when confidence score is not that high.
It can be challenging to organize and manage any tasks relating to human reviews, let alone finding the reviewers. Amazon announced general availability of Augmented Artificial Intelligence (A2I), which makes human reviews easier by providing over 60 pre-built workflows. Developers can make use of these workflows to have the results sent for human reviews, if certain conditions such as confidence level thresholds are not met or more scrutiny is needed.