TECH Archives | Nigeria News

The Founder Of Telsa, SpaceX, Elon Musk unveils new subway-like system called Hyperloop [VIDEO]

Editor — Sun, 11 Mar 2018 07:41:43 +0000

The Founder Of Telsa, SpaceX, Elon Musk unveils new subway-like system called Hyperloop

Watch the VIDEO

Elon Musk unveils new subway-like system called Hyperloop

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Facebook announces new Messenger features to help couples ‘feel the love’ this Valentine’s Day

Editor — Wed, 14 Feb 2018 05:11:12 +0000

Starting when the clock officially turns to February 14th in your location, Facebook Messenger will offer a slew of Valentine’s Day features for those couples who are madly in love. The company announced the features in a blog post, saying that they allow for you to “feel the love with Messenger.”

Facebook says that starting on Valentine’s Day, when you make your relationship “Facebook official,” you’ll get a Messenger notification that instantly connects you to your new partner. From there, you can make it rain hearts, quickly send the heart eyes emoji, and more:

It’s raining hearts! A heart shower will fall across your screen.
Spread the love: Your custom emoji (in the lower right hand corner) will be , so expressing your love will be fast and easy
Get personal: You’ll be prompted to personalize your chat and set your own custom text color, emoji, and nickname in case you want to switch things up even more.
Chatting with bae: Your loved one will be the first person to appear on the Active tab, so you can easily see when they’re available to chat.

In the same blog post, Facebook also offers up some statistics on the love that is spread through Messenger. The company says that people share over 2 emoji every day through Messenger, with the kissing face, heart eyes, and traditional heart ranking in the top five.

https://9to5mac.com

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MTN Nigeria to raise US$500m from shares sales at Nigeria Stock Exchange by Mid-2018

Editor — Mon, 12 Feb 2018 00:28:20 +0000

Nigeria’s biggest mobile-phone company, MTN, plans to raise about $500 million from the sale of shares during the first half of the year.

The move is to enable the company in fulfilling the terms of a deal struck with the Nigeria to settle a record fine imposed on it in 2016 over SIM registration default.

Standard Bank Group Ltd. and Citigroup Inc. have been advising Africa’s largest company on the disposal of as much as 30 per cent of unit on the Nigerian Stock Exchange.

The details of the transaction have not been made public.

According to Bloomberg, most of the shares will be sold to local institutions and individuals, though foreign investors could be brought in to ensure the process is a success, one of the people said.

Discussions are ongoing and a final decision hasn’t been made, they said.

Spokespeople for MTN and Citigroup in Johannesburg didn’t comment.

Standard Bank didn’t immediately respond to calls seeking comment.

MTN agreed to list the Nigerian unit as part of a June 2016 agreement to pay a $1 billion fine for missing a deadline to disconnect unregistered subscribers amid a security crackdown.

The penalty, originally set at $5.2 billion, led to the resignation of the Johannesburg-based company’s then chief executive officer, a first ever full-year loss and a slump in the share price that’s yet to be clawed back.

The stock extended gains on Wednesday, and traded 4.5 percent higher at 128.83 rand as of the close in Johannesburg, giving a market value of 243 billion rand ($20 billion).

If successful, the Lagos share sale will be the biggest on the Nigerian Stock Exchange after Starcomms Plc, which raised $796 million when it listed in 2008, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

MTN with over 50 million subscribers as of end September, slumped to a loss in 2016 as it absorbed the financial impact of the fine, though said last month it returned to profit the following year.

Nigeria and other sub-Saharan African governments are trying to gain more from international mobile-phone operators taking advantage of rising smartphone use and faster data speeds.

Bloomberg

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Facebook will give up to five people as much as $1 million in a community leadership program

Editor — Sun, 11 Feb 2018 01:43:25 +0000

Facebook will hand up to $1 million to as many as five people, and give away a total of $10 million, via a new program for community leaders.
The company unveiled its Facebook Community Leadership Program at an event in London this week.

Facebook will give up to $1 million to as many as five people and hand out a total of $10 million to community leaders who use its services “to bring people closer together.”

The company unveiled its Facebook Community Leadership Program at its Communities Summit event in London this week.

“This program is about finding and supporting great community leaders wherever they are,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post.

The company has faced intense scrutiny from critics who say it allowed Russian propagandists and other groups to use its advertising tools to target users with divisive messages, hate speech and other harmful content.

The company wants to reward those who use its platform for good, according to Zuckerberg.

“Our goal is to find people who are using Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger to bring people closer together,” he wrote in the post.

“We’ll pick up to five leaders around the world and give them up to $1 million to fund their ideas for doing even more. We’ll invite 100 leaders to be part of our fellowship program that includes training, mentorship, and up to $50,000 for a specific initiative,” Zuckerberg wrote.

CNBC.com

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Operations of Multichoice, DSTV/GOTV In Nigeria To End By June 2019

Editor — Thu, 08 Feb 2018 19:29:54 +0000

Operations of Multichoice, DSTV/GOTV In Nigeria To End By June 2019

Feb 8, 2018: The Federal Government may have notified the management of MultiChoice DSTV/GOTV that their operations, in Nigeria, will come to an end in 2019 as their license expires June next year.

According to a letter to that effect issued, on Tuesday, by the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation(NBC), the license issued to them in 2014 by NBC will not be renewed because it was not in line with Digital Switch Over (DSO) White Paper.

If Multichoice DSTV/GOTV will ever operate in Nigeria again after expiration of its license, the only option left for them is to go to licensed Signal Distribution company, that is Pinnacle Communications Ltd or ITS.

GOTV has been accused of being used as a conduit to siphon foreign exchange from Nigeria by its parent company, South African Multi Choice DSTV.

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This is mind blowing: Microsoft introduces the world to ‘holoportation’

Editor — Wed, 07 Feb 2018 02:23:43 +0000

February 5, 2018 | Just teleport yourself to chat with loved ones: You can even play back the meeting as a memory.

While teleportation is still in the realm of science fiction, Microsoft has introduced “holoportation” – a 3D, real-time hologram of someone who is a world away, but still interacts with you.

It’s a newly revealed project coming out of Microsoft Research’s Interactive 3D Technologies team and using HoloLens, the company’s augmented reality headset.

It also has a special camera rig setup to allow you to see, hear and interact with real-time holograms of “remote participants” in 3D, as if they are actually in the same room with you.

Microsoft hasn’t quite detailed what the camera rig requires, however it is able to capture how a person is moving around in their environment. This allows a HoloLens user to see an augmented real-time capture of that person in their own environment.

Of course, it doesn’t provide the sense of smell or physical touch, and due to current HoloLens technology, the hologram of the other person will appear in the middle of your field of view. That means it may look like they are floating or standing inside your couch or table.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7d59O6cfaM0]

Still, aside from needing a special camera rig, what’s been shown of the technology is impressive. It gives us a glimpse of how the way we communicate could evolve from 2D video calls like FaceTime.

Alex Kipman, head of the HoloLens project, showed holoporation technology during a TED talk earlier this month, and had NASA scientist Jeff Norris join him on stage via holoportation. This allowed Norris to talk to the audience about how NASA is applying the HoloLens to research.

The video, which you can see here, is mind blowing to watch, but it should be noted that the HoloLens is still in development stages (the dev kit alone right now costs $3,000).

Forget Facebook, Skype and Snapchat, a professor in Dubai believes “HoloPortation” will be the new social media craze in less than a decade.

The honorary professor at Amity University and founder of Dubai Solar Schools, David Provenzani, said humans will be able to teleport anywhere through holographic figures of themselves. The virtual meetings can be recorded, which means users can send or “post” their interactions to other humans, and play it back as “memories”.

Microsoft has already invented a programme as such, where a staff member got to interact with his daughter through HoloPortation. He recorded their entire interaction and played it back.

“This will help with communicating with people that are physically distant to us. HoloPortation is an example from Microsoft and I can suspect that, within five to seven years, we will have technology that we can apply to our house and HoloPort ourselves in another room, to have a meeting, to talk or to interact with family and friends,” Provenzani told Khaleej Times at the sidelines of the “A Journey to the World of 2040” conference by Amity University.

“I would suppose this would be the new social network. So, now we use Facebook, where we share photos and videos, but in the future, we will post our HoloPortation sessions because you can record them and play them back as memories.”

Because the holographs are 3-D images, the Microsoft employee was also able to zoom-in and out of the holographs, making him and his daughter appear much smaller and easier to view. However, users can also keep the holographs to human-size.

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WhatsApp hits 1.5 billion monthly users and sees 60 billion messages sent per day

Editor — Sat, 03 Feb 2018 04:26:30 +0000

Feb 2, 2018: Facebook’s $19 billion acquisition of WhatsApp sounds smarter and smarter. CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on the Q4 2017 earnings call today that WhatsApp now has 1.5 billion users and sees 60 billion messages sent per day. That’s compared to 1.3 billion monthly users and 1 billion daily active users in July.

The massive growth makes Facebook’s choice to pay more than $19 billion to acquire WhatsApp look prescient. At the time in 2014, WhatsApp had just 450 million monthly active users and 315 million daily active users.

In a slight to Snapchat, Zuckerberg also noted that Instagram and WhatsApp are the No. 1 and No. 2 most popular Story-sharing products, referring to those apps’ clones of Snapchat Stories. Each now each has 300 million daily active users, compared to 178 million on Snapchat as a whole. He also mentions that Facebook’s research suggests that across apps, total social media posting to Stories will soon exceed that of feed posting.

People thought Facebook was crazy to pay such a high price. But messaging is the most critical and time-consuming activity on mobile. And if Facebook didn’t buy WhatsApp, Google probably would have, and messaging would be a two-horse race. Instead, Facebook is massively dominant everywhere but China, between the 1.3 billion-user Messenger and 1.5 billion-user WhatsApp.

Now Facebook is finally getting serious about monetizing WhatsApp with the recent launch of the WhatsApp for Business app. Facebook plans to charge business owners for additional commerce, customer service or broadcasting tools. And with such a massive audience, merchants will be clamoring for them.

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Facebook will start prioritizing local news in user feeds

Editor — Sat, 03 Feb 2018 03:52:07 +0000

Feb 02, 2018: Facebook’s latest step in its on-going effort to fix its embattled news delivery offering involves prioritizing local sources. The social media giant announced recently in a blog post that, along with efforts to elevate content from friends and outlets designated as “high quality,” the site will be working to push local news offerings to the top of users’ feeds.

The addition is an attempt to prioritize outlets focused on (and in service of) demographics in smaller pockets — an attempt to step away from national outlets that often regarded as more divisive and/or politicized.

The new feature will elevate news that’s clicked on by users in a tight geographic locale, along with outlets based in that area. Content will also be prioritized as users follow or share stories from specific publications.

Mark Zuckerberg addressed the change through his own page, citing a recent fact-finding trip around the U.S. as a basis for this new feature.

“Many people told me they thought that if we could turn down the temperature on the more divisive issues and instead focus on concrete local issues, then we’d all make more progress together,” Facebook’s founder writes. “Local news helps build community — both on and offline. It’s an important part of making sure the time we all spend on Facebook is valuable.”

The feature will roll out first in the States. The company admits that it will be a sort of work-in-progress, and the site will likely treat it as such as it works out the kinks of its new system. After all, a hyperlocal, decentralized version of Facebook’s news feed could ultimately have the effect of further polarizing sources if not balanced with broader, national news coverage.

“This update may not capture all small or niche-interest publishers at first, but we are working to improve precision and coverage over time,” the company writes in the post. “All of our work to reduce false news, misinformation, clickbait, sensationalism and inauthentic accounts still applies.”

That last bit also comes as a sort of consolation to publishers, who have grown concern how their own social reach will be impact by sweeping changes made to Facebook’s newsfeed. Google, meanwhile, has been testing its own take on local news recently, with the addition of the Bulletin app, an effort to crowdsource local news reporting.

-techcrunch

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To fight propaganda, YouTube will add notices below videos uploaded by govt-funded broadcasters in the US

Editor — Sat, 03 Feb 2018 03:27:43 +0000

Feb 2, 2018: YouTube today said it’s launching a change to its service that will offer viewers more transparency around where news broadcasters get their funding. According to a company announcement, YouTube will now add notices below videos that are uploaded by broadcasters who receive some level of government or public funding.

“Our goal is to equip users with additional information to help them better understand the sources of news content that they choose to watch on YouTube,” explained Geoff Samek, Senior Product Manager YouTube News, in the company’s blog post.

The feature’s launch was earlier reported by The WSJ, which explained how the change may help to tackle the ongoing “fake news” problem that’s spanning the web, where fringe conspiracy theories and propaganda are often given equal visibility and attention as legitimate news sources.

The change will affect sources like the U.S.’s Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), but will also increase the visibility around foreign state news organizations, like Russia’s RT. As The WSJ also pointed out, U.S. intelligence officials dubbed RT “the Kremlin’s principal international propaganda outlet.”

This new label will initially appear only to users in the U.S., and it may not always be accurate.

A “Send Feedback” form will also be available in the case that issues with attribution arise, YouTube says.
While increasing the transparency around government-funded news reporting will help, to some extent, in providing more context around news videos on YouTube’s site, it doesn’t at all go far enough to address the larger issue with fake news, conspiracy theories, or other content that’s designed to influence public opinion for either financial or political gain.

However, YouTube says that addressing the fake news problem is one of several goals it has for 2018.
As part of its efforts in tightening its content policies, the company says it’s planning to work with news partners to roll out more solutions to highlight authoritative news sources on its site in 2018.

YouTube claims it has already made progress in this area by better surfacing content from authoritative news sources on the homepage in a new “Breaking News” section as well as in search.

This goal was announced alongside several others this morning, as part of YouTube’s to-do list for the year.

Other initiatives include better communication with creators, giving creators better monetization tools, the expansion of social features like the Community tab and Reels, and increased investment in educational content.

-techcrunch

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Apple says some iPhone 7s show “No Service” when they shouldn’t, will repair them for free

Editor — Sat, 03 Feb 2018 03:01:46 +0000

Apple says some iPhone 7s show “No Service” when they shouldn’t, will repair them for free

Does your iPhone 7 say “No Service” when you’re oh-so-certain the signal is fine? Good news! You might be totally right.

Reports and rumors of a “No Service” bug impacting iPhone 7s have been floating around for well over a year now — and as of this afternoon, Apple is acknowledging the issue.

The company says it’s determined that “a small percentage” of iPhone 7s will claim no service even when service is available.

The bad news: it’s not an easy fix. A software update won’t help this time. Apple says this issue stems from a faulty logic board, which means they’ll have to physically repair your device.

The less-bad news: Apple will repair it for free, and if you’ve paid for such a repair already at the Genius Bar, they’ll reimburse you. You can find details on that here. (One catch: if your device’s screen is busted, you’ll need to pay to have that fixed before they can get inside.)

Apple says devices made between September 2016 and February 2018 (basically the entire lifespan of the iPhone 7) might be impacted, particularly those sold in the US, China, Japan, Hong Kong, or Macao.

techcrunch @Oath Tech Network

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