Month: January 2018

Jimmy Iovine announces new Apple Music app. (credit: Megan Geuss)

Famed music mogul and Beats Electronics co-founder Jimmy Iovine plans to leave Apple this August, according to multiple reports. Bloomberg, Billboard, and Hits Daily Double all cite sources close to Iovine, who say he is unlikely to change his mind. Some or all of those sources believe that Iovine's departure is timed with the concluding payout to Iovine related to Apple's acquisition of Beats in 2014.

Iovine joined Apple with that acquisition and has acted as a creative and business lead for the Apple Music streaming service in partnership of Eddie Cue, who heads up Apple's Internet software and services division. Iovine has reportedly been a key figure behind initiatives like exclusive content on Apple Music, like special albums or video series like Carpool Karaoke. However, Bloomberg reports that Iovine and Cue did not always see eye to eye.

While Apple Music—born out of Iovine and Dr. Dre's own Beats Music streaming service—has been successful, it has not become the market leader. It has 30 million paying subscribers, but Spotify has 70 million. Experiments like Carpool Karaoke have not made a significant impact on the market, though Iovine's efforts to push curated music and other perks are laudable to music obsessives.

Enlarge / NASA's version of what a deep space gateway might look like. (credit: NASA)

Russia is assembling a new group of engineers who will be responsible for crafting the nation’s lunar exploration strategy. It’s another sign that a highly ambitious human space program is gaining steam in Moscow.

The new department was created inside RKK Energia space corporation, Russia’s premier developer of human spacecraft that is responsible for the venerable Soyuz.

Officially, Moscow has been on a path to put a human on the Moon since 2013, when President Putin approved a general direction for human space flight in the coming decade. The program had been stalling for several years due to falling prices for oil, the main source of revenue for the Russian budget. Last year, however, the Russian lunar exploration effort was given a new impetus when the Kremlin made a strategic decision to cooperate with NASA on the construction of a habitable outpost in the orbit around the Moon, known as Deep Space Gateway, DSG.

HMD Global

HMD is launching a second generation of the Nokia 6. Compared to the old Nokia 6, a lot has changed. There's a bigger-than-you'd-expect spec boost and a more modern design. The good things are still the same, though—it's still made of metal, and it still costs about $230.

First, the specs: the Nokia 6 has been upgraded to a full tier higher in Qualcomm's SoC lineup—the 2017 version has a low-end Snapdragon 430, while this 2018 version ships with a more mid-range Snapdragon 630. For the same price, that's a great upgrade. You also get one more gigabyte of RAM in the base version, which is now up to 4GB. The new Nokia 6 is also upgrading from micro USB to the newer, reversible USB-C standard.

The next frontier for Amazon's Alexa may be the devices you keep on your person most of the time. Amazon announced the new Alexa Mobile Accessory Kit today, which will allow manufacturers to more easily integrate the company's voice assistant into headphones, smartwatches, fitness trackers, and other small devices. The kit is currently in developer preview and partner companies including Bose, Jabra, and iHome are already testing it out.

The developer kit lessens the development load that manufacturers have to take on when making an Alexa-friendly accessory. Instead of using all of the code necessary to build Alexa into a device like a home speaker, manufacturers rely on only some of the code as well as Bluetooth connectivity to the Alexa mobile app. Headphones, wearables, and other Bluetooth-audio capable devices made with the Mobile Accessory Kit can connect to the Alexa mobile app on the device with which they are paired and access the Alexa Voice Service from the app.

That means users can speak to these accessories, asking Alexa to perform various tasks like stream media, control smart home devices, and provide news and weather updates. Amazon also claims users can call upon Alexa "without worrying about Wi-Fi connectivity," but Alexa will require connection to access certain skills and pieces of information. In those cases, the Alexa app would use the device's LTE data.