Amidst a growing concern of Cyber Threats, and a US administration that is yet to acquire the trust of its people, consumers are flocking to protect their digital lives. A part of the ongoing need for virtual private networking, PureVPN has increased its network to 750+ servers.
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Japan Recognises Certification Management Limited (CML) in the UK as the World's First Registered Type-Examination Agency for Ex Equipment Used in Hazardous Areas
On Tuesday, YouTube unveiled YouTube TV, its competitor to cable and satellite television that delivers a package of traditional TV channels over the internet for $35 a month. There's a lot to like about YouTube TV, such as the low price point, cloud DVR, and integration with YouTube's other offering. But the streaming-video service has a huge programming hole compared with traditional cable. YouTube TV is primarily based on deals with the four big broadcast networks: CBS, Fox, ABC, and NBC. This means YouTube gets access to content from those networks plus about 35 of their affiliated cable channels, according to Bloomberg - that includes "ESPN, Disney Channel, MSNBC, National Geographic, and Fox News." But YouTube hasn't struck deals with some marquee cable networks like Turner, Discovery, Viacom, AMC, and A&E. That means no CNN, TBS, TNT, History, AMC, A&E, Comedy Central, HBO, and so on. Though its programming offering isn't as robust as its competitors - AT&T's DirecTV Now, Sony's Vue, and Dish's Sling - YouTube said that trying to replicate the traditional TV bundle would be too expensive. It's going after people, particularly younger ones, who don't want to pay for a big bundle. Sports offerings, however, was something YouTube was eager to keep intact. YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki told Bloomberg that YouTube TV is designed to be "great for sports lovers" and that it will include pro and college football, basketball, baseball, and other sports. "YouTube TV includes major sports networks like ESPN and regional sports networks like Fox Sports Networks and Comcast SportsNet, so you can watch your favorite NBA or MLB teams," YouTube said in a press release. "We've also partnered with local TV stations, so you'll also get sports and local news based on where you live." Still, YouTube is missing the rights from Turner, for instance, which shows a ton of sports: NBA games, the NCAA basketball tournament, MLB, and others. YouTube TV's programming could expand over the next few years, and there could be additional price tiers eventually, YouTube said. Streaming rights are incredibly complicated, and YouTube TV is facing regional problems that have plagued competitors like DirecTV Now. That's why it will launch in "limited US markets, where it has full coverage," according to Recode's Peter Kafka (and why you won't be able to stream NFL games on your phone). SEE ALSO: YouTube will now let you stream cable channels live for $35 per month Join the conversation about this story » NOW WATCH: Here's what would happen if the Earth stopped rotating X.ai, the company behind the "Amy Ingram" personal assistant that helps eliminate the back-and-forth email exchange that comes with arranging meetings, is launching an enterprise edition. To use the virtual PA - which also comes in an "Andrew Ingram" version and has been available to individuals since 2015 - users link their calendars to the service and then CC [email protected] or [email protected] whenever they are setting up a meeting. Amy or Andrew then take over and chat to the contact like a real PA in order to organize the most convenient rendezvous. As Business Insider has previously reported, many people on the receiving end of emails from the Ingrams have been fooled into thinking they were speaking to a real PA - so much so that "Amy" has even been sent gifts. X.ai now has three tiers: A free edition that allows you to set up five meetings per month, a professional edition that allows individuals to set up unlimited meetings for $39 per month, and now the enterprise edition which will charge a fee of $59 "per seat" per month for every monthly active user. Dennis Mortensen, X.ai founder and CEO, told Business Insider: "We initially started out with the idea that we would be doing traditional Salesforce-like per seat billing where if a company takes 11 seats, I will bill them 11-times the price of the seat per month. But we moved over to a fair billing model, very much like Slack - if anything, they should take credit for it. Conceptually, I don't think we will make more or less by putting that in place but the ease at which we have been able to speak to some of these companies changed. They can add users willy nilly and if they don't use it, they don't pay for it." The enterprise edition also offers some extra features, including a dashboard for admins that gives an overview of how many meetings their team has set up that week. Admins can also add Amy on Andrew to their own domains - [email protected], for example - so their email address appears to look like a real member of staff.Â
Mortensen declined to comment on how many users X.ai has so far but said the company is setting up hundreds of thousands of meetings a year. In 2017 he hopes to expand X.ai's technology to work with all calendars - it doesn't currently support Microsoft Exchange or iCloud, for example - and the company is setting itself some aggressive revenue targets. Mortensen said: "There are two interesting milestones for most SaaS (software as a service) startups: You need to get to $1 million annual recurring revenue because that suggests there is a product there and there is market. Whether we can scale it is a different question. We almost immediately got there with [our professional edition]. The next milestone is to get this to $10 million. There could be a $100 million business in this. We are trying to run towards that as quick as we can in 2017. Once we add $10 million in recurring revenue, it's hard to imagine we can't get to a much larger model." X.ai has raised $34 million in funding to date. The company is based in New York and currently has around 90 members of staff. SEE ALSO: I hired a virtual PA for a week and it's made me a far more organized person than I ever was before Join the conversation about this story » NOW WATCH: Watch Budweiser's Super Bowl ad - it makes a strong statement on immigration Amazon Web Services, the remote data centers that power some of the world's most popular websites, is experiencing a big disruption that's making numerous apps and websites - including Business Insider - difficult to access for many users. On its status page on Tuesday, Amazon places the blame with its S3 storage service, which it says is seeing "high error rates" for websites and apps hosted from its flagship US East (Northern Virginia) Region data center. Among the sites and services that appear to be affected are Slack, Quora, Lonely Planet, Snapchat's Bitmoji, and even the US Securities and Exchange Commission website. Let's hope Snapchat parent company Snap doesn't file an update to its IPO prospectus. Amazon S3 is a very common service that sites use to store files, and the US East data center is one of its biggest facilities, meaning that this is wreaking havoc all over the web. Sites like Imgur use S3 to store their photo files, for instance, making those sites slow to load, if they load at all. "We continue to experience high error rates with S3 in US-EAST-1, which is impacting various AWS services. We are working hard at repairing S3, believe we understand root cause, and are working on implementing what we believe will remediate the issue," an Amazon spokesperson said on Tuesday afternoon about 1 p.m. PST. Notably, this isn't technically an "outage," since Amazon's S3 is not entirely out of commission and some services are only partially affected. In an ironic twist, Amazon Web Services tweeted that the "dashboard" that allows users to see the status of its own services was not able to update itself because of the S3 technical problem. Given Amazon's massive reach, cut your favorite sites a little slack if they're acting funny today - it might not be their fault. Join the conversation about this story » NOW WATCH: 'It's a lie': Jake Tapper calls out Trump during a fiery interview with Kellyanne Conway Google hasn't been very successful when it comes to "wearables," but that's not stopping the company's engineers from dreaming up creative ways to incorporate computing devices into various accessories. The latest example: A baseball cap with a video camera mounted on the brim. Google was granted a patent for the headwear on Tuesday. According to the patent, Google's removable hat-mounted camera would be used for capturing photos and videos, which you can upload and stream directly to social media platforms. To do so, the camera would connect to a wearer's mobile device via an app.  Audio often accompanies video, and Google thought of that by vibrating the sound directly into your skull. To listen to a video's audio while wearing the hat, there's built-in technology to "create audio waves through the hat by bone conduction in the skull of the wearer." (Google has used similar technology in Google Glass, its earlier effort creating a wearable gadget). In the patent, Google also describes that the wearer would be able to record audio for videos with a built-in microphone. Google's hat-camera is a similar concept to Snap's Spectacles, which can take photos and videos that are specifically tailored to the Snapchat app, like 10-second videos. Content from Spectacles is similarly transmitted directly to a user's mobile device through the Snapchat app. It's not clear from the patent if Google envisions creating its own Snapchat-like app to be used with the hat-camera, or if it would connect to other apps. The camera-hat design is also a similar concept to action cameras and wearable mounts, like GoPro products. However, most action cameras with live streaming capabilities can only stream live to YouTube. Few, if any, can stream directly to social media networks like Facebook. That said, Facebook began testing ways to let app developers to build Facebook Live streaming capabilities into their apps. Google's hat-camera could take advantage of such a development. This isn't Google's first foray into video and photographic wearables. Google's own Google Glasses also had a camera that could connect to mobile devices. Google Glass, however, was a failed project largely due to its high $1,500 price tag and their overly gadget-y design. Snap's spectacles, on the other hand, are much cheaper at $130, and have a more stylish design. The images in the patent don't paint Google's hat-camera as a very stylish device. It looks like a somewhat clunky camera attachment on the brim of a baseball cap. Still, it's only a patent for now, so there's no guarantee Google will ever move forward and build such a product. If Google was to go through with its development, we'd hope the hat-camera's design would be more attractive. Another interesting use for the hat-camera described in the patent by Google is that it can be used in emergency situations. In an emergency, the hat-camera would activate the video camera and audio, and send the "geographic location and the video feed to the emergency situation server system."  SEE ALSO: Everything you need to know about Snapchat's Spectacles glasses, including how to buy them Join the conversation about this story » NOW WATCH: Here's how to get hired by an elite think tank created by Google These ads will make you think about the world at large.
A top Silicon Valley engineer has stepped down from his role at Uber after it was discovered there were sexual-harassment allegations against him at his previous job at Google that he did not disclose when he was hired. The engineer, Amit Singhal, is leaving Uber after Recode's Kara Swisher notified the company of the allegations through her reporting. Singhal was senior vice president of engineering at Uber. Uber CEO Travis Kalanick asked Singhal to resign after learning about the allegations, according to a person familiar with the situation. The person also said that Singhal went through the standard background checks before his employment at Uber and that the sexual-harassment allegations during Singhal's time at Google never came up. Singhal oversaw Google's search engine for years and was considered one of the company's most powerful executives. According to Swisher's report, a female employee filed a sexual-harassment complaint against Singhal while they were at Google in 2015. Google later allowed Singhal to leave his job before the company could take further action against him, Swisher reported. Singhal is said to have denied the allegations. In a statement to Business Insider through a representative, Singhal again denied them. "Harassment is unacceptable in any setting," the statement says. "I certainly want everyone to know that I do not condone and have not committed such behavior. In my 20-year career, I've never been accused of anything like this before and the decision to leave Google was my own." Singhal's representative said Singhal is not denying that there were allegations, but denying they're true. Singhal announced his retirement from Google in February 2016 after nearly 15 years at the company. "I am eager to see what kind of impact I can make philanthropically, and of course, to spend more time with my family - especially with my wife who I miss spending time with given our incredibly busy lives, and our son who will go to college soon, leaving an empty nest behind," he wrote at the time. Singhal's departure comes after a rough several days for Uber. The company is undergoing an internal investigation led by former Attorney General Eric Holder into allegations of sexual harassment within the company after a bombshell blog post by a former engineer, Susan Fowler, was published. A New York Times article highlighted even more seedy parts of Uber's culture, alleging drug use and groping. And Waymo, Google's new name for its self-driving-car company, is suing Uber, accusing one of its employees of stealing key self-driving technology. Uber declined to comment. Google also declined to comment. SEE ALSO: Uber denies Google's claims of stolen self-driving tech Join the conversation about this story » NOW WATCH: Here's all the futuristic technology Uber's self-driving cars use to get around The Definitive Conference on Software Quality and Testing
Stephen Curry's critical response to comments by the Under Armour chief executive about President Trump shows how the balance of commercial power has changed.
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