Tech Hangout 2.0 #3: Did Ben Get Kicked Off the Internet?
Hosts
- Patrice Brend’amour
- Mikel Potts
- Paul Gans
- David Vaughn
- Ben Roethig
Big News
Most important news stories of the week
Discover, coming to Apple Pay
- Discover is joining rivals Visa, MasterCard, and American Express with Apple pay compatibility
- will include both Credit and Discover Debit cards
- Apple pay purchases will be eligible for all Discover benefits.
- implementation will begin this fall
Best Buy Coming too
- CurrenC member Best Buy has announced it will add Apple Pay support
- Previously disabled NFC in stores to prevent Apple pay because of CurrenC commitments
- has already added Apple Pay support to its mobile app
- will add support to brick and mortar stores at a later date.
CurrentC loses CEO
- Merchant Customer Exchange has a new CEO
- MCX is known to the consumer as CurrenC or would be if it was out in the wild
- Previous CEO Dekkers Davidson has “left to pursue other opportunities”
- Former Bank of America executive Brian V. Mooney will replace him
- He ran BoA’s Merchant services arm
Apple
News about iOS, Macs, Apple TV, Apple watch, etc
Apple Watch report by Patrice
- Patrice’s thoughts about his newly delivered watch.
Apple Again Makes all the Money in Q2 2015 results
- Apple Q2 Results
- $58 billion in revenue, $13.6 billion in profit
- 61 million iPhones sold (43 million Q2 ‘14). Up 40%
- 12.6 million iPads (16.3 last year) down 23%
- 4.5 million Macs (4.1 last year) up 10%
- Majority of revenue from iPhones with $40 billion, Macs $5.6 billion, iPads $5.4 billion, and services (iTunes, app stores, iBooks, Apple Pay) just under $5.0 billion. Other products (iPod, Apple TV, Beats Products) make just under $1.7 billion
- Americas still make up largest market for Apple Products. Greater china replaced Europe for #2.
Dark Tats don’t work with Apple Watch
- customers with Dark tattoos are having issues
- would lock in tattooed areas
- sayed unlocked with bare skin
- natural skin color had no effect
- darker tattoos which more ink saturation had more issues than lighter colored tattoos
- can be “fixed” by turning off wrist detection, which also disables Apple pay
- Apple’s heart sensor users a series of 4 leds 2 visual light and 2 infrared
News About Google and Android
LG G4
- New flagship Android phone from LG
- 5.5” IPS screen 2560×1440
- 25% brighter, 50% better contrast, 20% better color and 11% more power efficient than screen on last year’s G3
- 8-core snapdragon 808 cpu
- leather wrapped back in colors
- 16mp camera with f/1.8 lens
- only available with 32GB of internal storage, but up to 128GB card
- June availability. Pricing TBA
Tag Heuer Prices Android Wear watch at $1400
- New information revealed by Tag’s chief executive Jean-Claude Biver
- Intel powered
- 40hr battery life
- design and name not yet revealed
- $1400 price tag
Windows Corner
News Microsoft Products
Windows Brings tools to port iOS, Android apps to Windows 10
- Microsoft had its BUILD conference Keynote this week
- New developer tools announced
- OS X version of Visual Studio (and Linux as well)
- software can compile Objective-C code for easier porting of iOS apps
- Also supports Java/ C++ apps for bringing over Android Apps
- will have access to Windows APIs
- will also have options to port Win32 and .NET code into universal apps
Gaming
Computer, console, mobile, or tablet top gaming news
Valves allows paid Steam Mods… then changes its mind
Additional Coverage
* Earlier this week Valve added paid mod support to Steam Workshop
* developers were able to set their own prices
* started with Skyrim
* after negative feedback from users, Valve removed the paid mods
Picks
Each brings an item, app, device, show, etc they want to talk about
Mikel
- Authors Sharon Lee and Steve Miller’s Liaden Universe.
- Their Blog
- Author page on Amazon
- Baen Books
- iBooks: Agent of Change by Sharon Lee & Steve Miller