Google Fiber gets a new head, trims employees

From CNET: After showing signs of emerging from last year's funk with Fiber 2.0, Google announced a new CEO to lead the Fiber unit, according to a report from Bloomberg.

Google's parent company Alphabet tapped broadband veteran Gregory McCray to take over the Access unit -- Alphabet's team...

You can now ask your Google Home to buy things

From The Verge: Google’s Home digital assistant has been compared to Amazon’s Alexa a lot over the last few months, and now it’s getting the ability to order things through voice commands, just like Alexa can.

Of course, Home is still a Google product, so instead of buying things through Amazon...

YouTube has auto-captioned a billion videos

From CNET: YouTube, the biggest video site on the planet, deals a lot in big numbers, so its latest milestone is no exception.

Thursday, the Google-owned video service said it has automatically captioned 1 billion videos.

Captions, subtitles on clips that transcribe dialogue and note other audio...

Intel adds official support for Vulkan, but only for certain GPUs

From ExtremeTech: After months in beta, Intel has announced official Vulkan support for Skylake and Kaby Lake GPUs. Intel’s 15.45.14.4590 driver is the first release to add full Vulkan API support (previous releases were all various flavors of beta). In keeping with Intel’s previous remarks on OS...

Apple granted patent for fingerprint-reading touchscreen

From CNET: The iPhone's home button may not be long for this world.

Apple has been granted a patent for an "interactive display panel with IR diodes" -- a method that would let users activate a device through a virtual home button placed within the touchscreen. The technology, described in a...

Toshiba Announces MN-Series HDDs: Up to 8 TB

From AnandTech: Toshiba has announced a new family of 3.5" hard drives for home and SOHO NAS devices. The new MN-series HDDs have up to 8 TB of capacity and support some of the features found in Toshiba’s enterprise-class hard drives. The performance of the new HDDs is similar to the performance of...

Apple smartphones outsold Samsung's in Q4

From InfoWorld: Apple has overtaken Samsung Electronics in smartphone sales for the first time in two years—but don’t count on it staying ahead for long.

Samsung sold 76.8 million smartphones in the fourth quarter, giving it a market share of 17.8 percent, but it was just beaten by Apple, which...

Amazon Chime goes after WebEx, Skype for Business, and GoToMeeting

From InfoWorld: Companies looking for a new video- and teleconferencing system have a fresh face to turn to in the market: Amazon Web Services.

On Monday, the public cloud provider announced the launch of Amazon Chime, a new service that’s designed to compete with the likes of WebEx, Skype for...

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