Technology Update 22 November 2014

If one has a Kindle Fire they are now going to be able to get twice daily editions of the Washington Post in the form of an app make exclusively for the Fire. The app will give owners a free way to access the Post, but after 6 months it will cost one dollar for the next month and somewhere between three to five Β dollars a month after that. The Post has not decided on the exact price yet. Jeffrey P. Bezos is Amazon’s chief executive and also owner of The Washington Post.
Facebook has a fleet of shuttle buses and the drivers just voted to join the Teamsters union on 19 November 2014. The drivers voted the union in to improve working conditions and improve wages. The union stated "I hope going forward this will set a trend with other drivers in Silicon Valley and the tech industry so we can set a pattern to make the companies pay these drivers decent wages and benefits so they can live a decent life." The representative for Facebook didn’t comment.

Here is something unusual. Honda Motor Company wants the regulators in this country to force drivers to bring their cars in when they are recalled. Honda asked state and federal officials to withhold registration renewals if a car isn’t returned to the dealer after a recall notice is sent and to take other measures. “Honda is going to use any innovative tools to find customers and get these recalls done,” said the North American executive vice president. It is being said that one car or truck in seven have unfixed recalls.

There is a new website on the Internet and this site shows feeds from thousands of webcams. It is not unusual for a site to contain multi webcams, but this site boasts 4,500 feeds. This feeds are only from the United States, but there are more hundreds of feeds from France, the Netherlands, Japan Italy, the U.K. and Hong Kong. The site is legal and only shows webcams from sites without passwords. The site is being pressured by some countries which want it taken down. The site is in Russia and the site claims it is performing a public service. The problem is many webcam feeds are available on the Internet and sometimes the owners have no idea their feed is public. Anyone creating a webcam feed should be aware it might not be as private as they think and should be password protected.
In case no one has noticed Mozilla has entered into a five year partnership with Yahoo and in turn Yahoo has promised an enhanced experience for Mozilla when they make the Yahoo search engine the new default search engine and dump Google which was formerly the default search engine. The old agreement between Google and Mozilla will expire at the end of this month, November 2014. The CEO of Yahoo said, “Mozilla is an inspirational industry leader who puts users first and focuses on building forward-leaning, compelling experiences. We’re so proud that they’ve chosen us as their long-term partner in search, and I can’t wait to see what innovations we build together.”

The FTC has announced it is going to go after tech support service scammers. These are the people who tell you that you have all sorts of things wrong with your computer and charge exorbitant rates to fix it. Recently two telemarketing scammers who were using deceptive practices, stole about 120 million dollars from many thousands of customers. Many people do not fully understand the technology they are using and because of this they may be easy prey for scammers.

Toyota has announced it is going to start selling a fuel cell car. The cars will start to go on sale in Japan on December 15, 2014 and in the U.S. and Europe in mid 2015. It is said they won’t be cheap but will be emission free. The Toyota Mirai will sell for the equivalent of $57,799 in Japan. Toyota is hoping for sales of 700 vehicles worldwide the first year. The cars will run on compressed hydrogen which is stored in two tanks below the car and there is no exhaust. It is believed price will decide if the car makes it. If the price cannot be brought down in the future, it is not believed hydrogen powered fuel cell cars will sell.

Vietnam has built an underwater vehicle named Hoa Binh. It was manufactured by the Vietnamese shipbuilding industry and the Vietnamese claim since it only cost 1.5 million dollars to design and build and it is 3.5 million dollars cheaper than a German vehicle with similar specifications. The vehicle carries four people and can dive to 50 meters. Personal submarines are a relatively new field.

Do you own or would like to own a hybrid car? Currently it doesn’t look like they have a future. Sure there are what seems to be a lot of Priuses around, but the total share of the market for hybrids is only 3% and hasn’t changed in two years. It seems the demand is satisfied at this number. The vehicle of the future was supposed to be the hybrid, but this no longer seems to be the case. It is said there is a greatly expanding lineup of hybrid cars and yet the market share is remaining the same.

Crowdfunding is becoming pretty common. A Finnish smartphone maker named Jolla managed to raise $380,000 it needed for a new tablet and raised it in just two hours. It went on to raise $748,614. The new tablet will run the Sailfish operating system. It is based on Linux and is used in the company’s smart phones.
IBM is taking on traditional email and trying to make it easier to handle. They want to create an email application which will have artificial intelligence and learn a user’s preferences and pick out the most relevant data. They feel email which was once considered a great application has become somewhat of a problem especially in large amounts.