Month: July 2017

Enlarge / The hardware Bixby button on the Galaxy S8. (credit: Ron Amadeo)

Voice assistant smart speakers are all the rage these days, and if Samsung is good at anything, it's at doing what everyone else is doing. To join the smart speaker lineup alongside the Amazon Echo, Google Home, Apple HomePod, and a Microsoft Cortana box, Samsung is apparently planning a smart speaker with its "Bixby" voice assistant integrated.

Samsung's "Bixby" voice assistant still isn't out yet in the US, but according to The Wall Street Journal, that isn't stopping Samsung from charging forward with a Bixby-in-a-box project apparently code-named "Vega." The report says "the timing is far from determined" and that "many of the speaker’s features and other specifications are yet to be decided," but Samsung has been plugging away at the project for more than a year.

Bixby is supposed to be Samsung's answer to other voice assistants like Alexia, Siri, and the Google Assistant, but troubles with the English language have led to a delay in the US and other English-speaking countries. Bixby was supposed to launch with the Galaxy S8 in April, and it was a feature Samsung thought so highly of that it put a physical button dedicated to Bixby on the side of its flagship smartphone. After the April launch delay, Samsung claimed it would be ready in May, but it wasn't until June that Bixby saw a "preview" launch in English. Apparently, the final launch will still be in a few weeks. "Samsung internally believes [English] voice features are unlikely before the second half of July" the WSJ report said. "The timing of its US launch has been in flux and could still be altered again."

Enlarge / The head of Roscosmos, Igor Komarov (right), talks to former cosmonaut Alexander Volkov. (credit: NASA)

For a long time, with its low production costs and efficient fleet of rockets, Russia has been the leading player in the global market for satellite launches. Some recent failures with its Soyuz and Proton boosters have not helped, but the biggest threat to Russia's preeminence now clearly comes from SpaceX.

Publicly, at least, Russian officials were slow to acknowledge the threat from SpaceX. Even last year, the country's space leaders dismissed SpaceX's efforts to build reusable launch systems to lower overall costs. But that tone has started to shift in 2017, as SpaceX has begun to fly used boosters and demonstrate this emerging capability.

Now, in a new interview posted on the site of the Russian space agency, Roscosmos, its chief executive Igor Komarov acknowledges that SpaceX poses a "serious challenge" to his country's launch industry. Accordingly, Komarov outlined a strategy for how he believes Russia will compete with SpaceX over the next five years, and his response to this is pretty telling.

Just one year ago, Pokémon Go was let loose upon the hapless denizens of Earth. The augmented reality game took gamers by storm by challenging players to catch pokémon IRL. Within just a few days, the title captured an absolutely insane 45 million daily users. And by the end of that first month in July 2016, Pokémon Go had simultaneously become the fastest growing, most popular, and most lucrative mobile game of all time.

That level of craze eventually died down, of course. Within a couple of months, the number of daily users had sunk to about 30 million. By the end of the year, that figure was closer to just five million. And then... the hemorrhaging stopped. Today, Pokémon Go continues to have around five million daily users and 65 million monthly active users, according to game developer Niantic. It's still one of the most popular mobile games in the world and still generating vast amounts of money.

Over its first year, Pokémon Go garnered as many headlines for offline activities as it did for the popular gameplay itself. The gaming community became so smitten it offered the title a Dreamcast port and the "Twitch Plays" treatment. And following a string of Pokemon Go-adjacent crime reports, the game's privacy situation caught the attention of everyone from US Senator Al Franken to filmmaker-turned-surveillance advocate Oliver Stone.

Last August we wrote about a crazy elevated bus that straddles road traffic in the Chinese city of Qinhuangdao near Beijing. In the weeks that followed, we received reports from readers that something about the Transit Elevated Bus (TEB) wasn't quite right: while the vehicle did roll up and down the road a few times, it had since been abandoned in the middle of the street. In December, CNN reported that the TEB had been sitting on its test track in the city for months, gathering dust and causing traffic jams. And now, you will be unsurprised to hear, police in Beijing are saying that it was all a scam.

On Sunday, Beijing's Dongcheng district police bureau announced on Weibo that it had started an investigation into the company behind the TEB project: Huaying Kailai, an online investing platform not unlike Crowdcube. The police say they are holding more than 30 people, including Bai Zhiming who runs both Huaying Kailai and the TEB project.