Patch may no longer be part of the AOL group, having been sold to Hale Global earlier this year, but it seems old habits die hard as more employees were given their cards via conference call.
ConferenceCall.co.uk blog Posts
While much of the UK might still be struggling its way out of recession, the nation’s tech industry is booming – not only are UK technological firms posting the fastest level of growth in a decade, jobs in this sector have now continued to grow for four years running.
What’s going on at Google? First they buy up a load of robotics companies for a series of undisclosed fees, and now they’ve gone splurged a reported £400million on buying an artificial intelligence firm.
For a company whose motto is “Don’t be evil”, Google appears to doing its utmost to place itself in the Skynet role in our increasingly inevitable dystopian future.
As unlikely as it may sound, it appears the humble conference call is taking the arts and entertainment world by storm.
Way back in September we told you how AOL chief executive, Tim Armstrong, sacked an employee during a company-wide conference call.
The conference call in question was to update employees on the latest developments concerning Patch, AOL’s idea for a worldwide local news hub, but, shortly after that employee was sacked by Armstrong, AOL shed a quarter of its Patch sites and laid off half the unit’s workforce, about 500 staff.
Well now AOL has sold Patch.
First there was Siri, Apple’s artificial intelligence (AI) app that would answer anything you asked it, from weather reports to what it was wearing (to which it would often respond “Why do people keep asking me that?”)
Then came Google Now, which moved things on a level by offering you information on things you might be interested in, subject to you letting it know things about you and your habits – which Google will then harvest and put into a big computer along with everything else it knows about everyone before it eventually takes over the world with its army of robot dogs (OK, that’s maybe going a bit far, but really, what’s with Google buying up all these robotics companies?)
And now Intel has thrown the distinctly Iron-Man sounding ‘Jarvis’ into the mix – a smart earpiece designed to rival Apple and Google’s AI.
If reports from the Consumer Electronics show in Las Vegas are anything to go by then the gadget industry has decided that 2014 is going to be the year of wearable tech.
As we reported at the turn of the year in our Tech Trends for 2014, wearable tech is going to really hit the mainstream this year, bringing the world of science fiction into the world of science fact.
A futureologist at BT (yes, such a position actually exists, crystal ball skills a bonus) believes the office-based nine-to-five will soon become a thing of the past as we have now reached the point whereby those in “knowledge-based” professions can effectively do their jobs with little more than a computer, phone and internet connection.
2013 was a great year for tech as some jaw-dropping innovations – such as Google Glass and 3D Printing – landed, while apps like Vine and Instagram exploded onto the social media scene.
So, what does 2014 have in store for us? Here are our predictions for this year’s tech trends…
It sometimes feels like the future has arrived and we’re living it right now – what with self-driving cars, smartwatches, fingerprint and retina recognition technology – but why do so many of us still seem to have such a fondness for old, outdated ‘retro’ tech?
If this is something of an alien concept to you, let me try to explain…