News – Page 11 – Zoom News

Zoom buys contact center software company

16May

By Alan LorenzNo Comments

Business, News, Technology

Zoom buys contact center software company

Video conferencing company Zoom has completed a new acquisition. With Solvvy, it adds customer support AI to its portfolio. The move appears to be part of a broader plan to expand Zoom from its familiar voice and video chats to a platform for large businesses. With the lockdowns that made Zoom so popular in much of the world gone, the company has been expanding its portfolio for a while now. With Solvvy, it has acquired an automation platform for contact centres containing the necessary AI. Zoom already introduced Zoom Contact Center last year, allowing companies to provide their customers with the well-known video chat, but with voice, SMS and live chat. Solvvy's software fits neatly into this. The aim is to build the AI software into the Zoom Contact Center Platform. The acqui...

12May

By Alan LorenzNo Comments

News, Technology

Google Launches Its Own Smartwatch

Tech group Google is competing with the Apple Watch by launching its smartwatch. The smartwatches should be available this fall, Google announced at its annual developer I/O conference. The search giant has been trying to strengthen its market position with hardware, such as smartphones. For example, the Google Pixel Watch was developed for the most part by Fitbit, the smartwatch company that came into the hands of Google in early 2021. The watch can be used for digital payments, navigation via Google Maps and notifications for incoming messages. In addition, the smartwatch works with, among other things, a voice-controlled assistant that is also on many Android phones. The acquisition of Fitbit by Google was already seen by many as a step to answering the Apple Watch. Apple con...

Sony Unveils New Flagship Smartphone With First True Optical Zoom

11May

By Alan LorenzNo Comments

News, Technology

Sony Unveils New Flagship Smartphone With First True Optical Zoom

With the Xperia 1 IV, Sony today introduced its latest top smartphone. According to Sony, the biggest eye-catcher is the triple camera, which includes a unique optical telephoto zoom lens. In addition, the device strongly focuses on gaming and audio functions. The Xperia 1 IV features an ultra-wide 16mm lens, a 24mm wide lens and an optical zoom. That periscopic lens, placed across the phone's width, works in the same seamless way as a classic zoom. According to the Japanese electronics giant, that, in combination with the range of 85-125 mm, is a first on a smartphone. All lenses also have a 12MP Exmor RS for a mobile image sensor with 120fps. This allows the phone to capture 4K footage with 5x slow motion with any lens. There's also a 3D iToF sensor for depth information and AI...

Nintendo Expects to Sell Fewer Switch Consoles This Year

10May

By Alan LorenzNo Comments

Business, News, Technology

Nintendo Expects to Sell Fewer Switch Consoles This Year

Nintendo expects to sell a lot fewer Switch consoles this year than last year. The Japanese game console company reported this when it presented its annual figures. Nintendo made fewer game consoles last year due to the persistent chip shortage. Turnover was slightly lower than a year earlier due to lower sales than during the global lockdowns. However, many people were at home more than, and gaming became a welcome form of entertainment for many in the gloomy corona. In the current year, Nintendo expects to sell 21 million Switch consoles. Last year there were more than 23 million. Nintendo posted a turnover of 1.7 trillion yen in the past broken financial year, which ran until the end of March. That is almost 4 percent less than a year earlier. As a result, net profit fell by...

Ten-Year-Old Vulnerabilities in Virus Scanners Avast and AVG Discovered

9May

By Alan LorenzNo Comments

News, Technology

Ten-Year-Old Vulnerabilities in Virus Scanners Avast and AVG Discovered

SentinelLabs, SentinelOne's threat research team, has discovered two serious flaws in Avast and AVG. The vulnerabilities in the antivirus programs went undiscovered for a decade and could potentially affect tens of millions of users. So far, SentinelLabs has found no evidence of abuse. The vulnerabilities in Avast and AVG (acquired by Avast in 2016) allow attackers to modify privileges so they can disable security products, compromise the operating system, or perform malicious operations unimpeded. According to Avast, the security risk has crept into Avast 12.1, the software version released in January 2012. Given the longevity of this flaw by over a decade, SentinelOne estimates that tens of millions of users may have been affected by it. SentinelLabs' findings were proactivel...

Facebook Blocked Thousands of Pages to Exert Political Pressure

6May

By Alan LorenzNo Comments

News, Technology

Facebook Blocked Thousands of Pages to Exert Political Pressure

Last year, Facebook wrongly blocked some 17,000 pages in Australia, saying it accidentally when wanted to block news channels. Documents now show that this was a deliberate blunder to avoid stricter regulations. When Australian lawmakers worked on law in 2020 that would require players like Google and Facebook to pay for the news shared on their platforms, Facebook went off the rails. The proposal would cost the company money and could set a precedent for other countries. After a first draft of the law was passed, Facebook decided to preemptively shut down all Facebook news pages, formally saying it would otherwise violate the law. But that's where it went wrong. Not only news pages were shut down, but thousands of other pages. Including Facebook pages of hospitals and NGOs, just...

User Accounts of Salesforce Subsidiary Heroku Appear to Have Been Leaked a Month Ago

5May

By Alan LorenzNo Comments

News, Technology

User Accounts of Salesforce Subsidiary Heroku Appear to Have Been Leaked a Month Ago

Heroku has had the passwords of all of its user accounts changed. The move comes about a month after the company's OAuth tokens were stolen. Cloud platform Heroku has asked its users to change their passwords before the company resets them itself. API tokens will also expire, so apps running on the platform may no longer work until a new token is created. According to Heroku itself, it is a response from the PaaS vendor to a "security incident" in which some of the user accounts were compromised. However, that incident happened almost a month ago. In April, OAuth tokens from Heroku and another company, Travis CI, were stolen, GitHub said in a security report. Those authentication tokens allowed attackers to download data from GitHub from various organizations. GitHub reported th...

Kremlin Denies Storming Mariupol Steel Factory

4May

By Alan LorenzNo Comments

News, Russia, Ukraine

Kremlin Denies Storming Mariupol Steel Factory

The Kremlin denies that Russian troops are storming the Azovstal factory in Mariupol, which Ukrainian sources previously reported. The steel mill is the last Ukrainian stronghold of resistance in the southern Ukrainian city. "The order to call off the attack was given publicly," a Kremlin spokesman said. Russian President Vladimir Putin said on April 21 that he ordered the siege of the steel plant and a halt to the attack. According to the mayor of Mariupol, about 200 civilians are still trapped in the underground facilities of Azovstal. There are also reportedly several thousand Ukrainian soldiers there. The first civilians were evacuated last weekend.

Streaming and Vinyl on the Rise, Spotify Attracts More Users

28Apr

By Alan LorenzNo Comments

News, Technology

Streaming and Vinyl on the Rise, Spotify Attracts More Users

Spotify gained more users in the first quarter, despite the outcry about comedian Joe Rogan's podcasts earlier this year. The originally Swedish company now has 422 million monthly active users, an increase of 19 percent compared to a year earlier. There are now 182 million paid subscribers of all users. However, Spotify came into disrepute early this year after several major artists, such as singer Neil Young decided to remove their music from the service. According to the musicians and other critics, comedian Joe Rogan would spread disinformation about the coronavirus in his Spotify podcast. Spotify has also withdrawn from Russia because of the war in Ukraine. As a result, the company lost 1.5 million paying subscribers in the country. In addition, Spotify still had to deal wi...

No Plans Yet for Zelensky and Putin’s Meeting

27Apr

By Alan LorenzNo Comments

News, Russia, Ukraine

No Plans Yet for Zelensky and Putin’s Meeting

A meeting between the leaders of Ukraine and Russia still seems out of sight. Ukrainian presidential adviser Michailo Podoljak, chief negotiator at the peace talks, says the countries have not yet reached an agreement. In Kyiv, there has been a desire to enter into direct talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin for some time. Ukrainian President Volodimir Zelensky called on Saturday to meet with Putin to "end the war". Turkey is trying to arrange this meeting as a mediator. Zelensky also wanted to meet Putin before the Russian invasion, but his efforts were in vain. The Russian president demanded that Zelensky resolve the conflict with pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine. Despite pressure from Russia, Ukrainian authorities refused to engage in talks with the militias wi...