The most intriguing tech news stories this week

It’s been another crazy week in the technology industry, with plenty of interesting stories and developments. If you’re new to our website or our blog, we’re big believers in the importance of staying up to date on the latest news and technology in your industry.

It’s all well and good knowing about your own business, but staying up to date on your peers and your competitors – as well as the latest emerging technology and startups – is a vital part of success. In order to really stand out as thought leaders and important figures in your industry, your team needs to keep ahead of the curve with the most recent news and updates in the sector.

Thus, we aim to bring you weekly updates on the most important news stories and intriguing updates that we think your business needs to know about in the working week- and that’s what this blog post is here for.  There’s been some great stories and pieces of news this week, with plenty to read and get talking about.

The beauty and the beep

This is arguably my worst pun for this series yet, but it was the best I could come up with for this amazing story about how augmented reality is going to start being used in a new context for businesses.

Starting this summer, YouTube will be using augmented reality advertising, to show off makeup to the huge beauty community online. These new adverts will allow you to try on virtual makeup alongside the people in the adverts, so that you can see the product in use; instead of on somebody else, or just in a pretty packet. This is a fantastic way to blend AR with regular digital marketing techniques, and I’m sure it’ll see many more uses like this in the future.

There is debate over whether this will be actually successful as a marketing tool, though. This is simply due to how novel and fun the idea is- will people actually be engaging with the product or just playing around with AR? Only time will tell, of course, so it’ll be interesting to see where this idea goes in the coming years.

The Microsoft micro-manager

In an intriguing move for artificial intelligence in the business consumer world, Microsoft has announced that PowerPoint will be implementing a new AI feature this summer.

This helpful tool is called ‘Presenter Coach’, and it aims to help you make the best impression with your PowerPoint presentations. It uses AI software to ‘listen’ to your presentations, and give you feedback on where you need to improve. It points out stuttering, filler words and even swearing- all of which are shown during practice runs, not live presentations. Overall, it looks to be an incredibly useful tool, and a great use of AI for the working environment.

The Facebook finance feature

If you haven’t heard already, Facebook is going to be joining the cryptocurrency game. They’ll be launching ‘Libra‘ in 2020, to make their mark in the ever-growing and developing world of new currencies and transactional styles. Libra is supported already by a huge number of partners, like Visa and MasterCard. This alone sets it apart from many popular cryptocurrencies that are currently out on the market right now.

It’s now coming out that Facebook has a secret weapon of sorts to help ensure the success of Libra in the marketplace- namely, ‘Calibra‘. This technology has a digital wallet, and is said to be the way that Facebook is looking to make money off of Libra itself. It’ll be fascinating to see how the market responds to Libra, and where cryptocurrencies in general go in the future.

The first 5G week

As I’m sure you may have heard already, we’ve had 5G in the UK now for a little over a month- with EE turning on it’s 5G network late last month in six cities (more to followmore to follow). Many people are coming out to speak about their experiences so far with it; obviously, not every network has 5G right now and not every 5G network has a full set of features yet, so it’s important to take all of the feedback so far with a grain of salt.

Generally speaking, 5G seems to be a great improvement in terms of speed versus 4G’s speed, but as we’ve mentoined before, 5G is much more than speed, and coverage is likely to be more limited than 4G for the foreseeable future.

Overall, it looks to be heading along very positive tracks, but with lots of room for exciting improvement. It’ll be great to see how 5G develops in coming years.

if you want to know how 4G and 5G could help drive new business opportunities, get in touch with us today.

The game game

No, that’s not a typo- Google has released a video game that allows people to build their own video games. This intriguing piece of design allows users to create simple yet effective video games of their own, in a similar style to the popular video game Minecraft. This game has been around for a while already, but it has really skyrocketed in popularity as of late.

It’s worth noting, as it highlights the great ways that companies are trying to get younger people involved in coding and design lessons. Coding is arguably one of the most important skills that a young person can learn to prepare themselves for the future, alongside design and logic, so seeing companies like Google get involved here is really great.

Other stories

Of course, there’s always a plethora of other intriguing stories that don’t quite make it into the main section of our blog series, so we like to present them here in the summary. Here’s some of the other pieces of news that caught our eye this week;

• Driverless Domino’s pizza delivery is coming to Houston, thanks to Nuro.
• YouTube is deliberating over whether to remove every single bit of children’s content from the site entirely, due to the mass amount of child protection and safety issues over the last few years.
• In the ultimate ‘fashionably late’ scenario, NASA’s moon rocket is probably going to be very delayed and also over it’s budget as it has been before.
• Genius.com has, intriguingly, accused Google of plagiarising their song lyric content.