Friday, November 14, 2014

Software : Microsoft hints Cortana may come to other platforms

Software : Microsoft hints Cortana may come to other platforms

Microsoft hints Cortana may come to other platforms

Posted:

Microsoft hints Cortana may come to other platforms

Microsoft's Siri rival Cortana is currently exclusive to Windows Phone, despite plenty of speculation that she should have moved beyond her home base by now.

But that will happen soon enough, judging by comments Microsoft made during a briefing with analysts and journalists recently.

Microsoft Chief Experience Officer Julie Larson-Green took the opportunity to touch on some of the many things Cortana might do beyond her basic smartphone functions.

When asked if that means Cortana is on her way to other platforms, she responded, "the short answer is yeah."

She wouldn't reveal any more details, but that's pretty unambiguous. It won't be surprising at all to see Cortana in Windows 10, but where she might venture beyond that is a mystery we're eager to see solved.

Simband, Samsung's health-focused wearable blueprint, has arrived

Posted:

Simband, Samsung's health-focused wearable blueprint, has arrived

Samsung debuted its Simband wearable and SAMI platform back in May, but things finally got rolling this week at the company's 2014 developer conference.

The Samsung Simband is a wearable loaded with health sensors that collect data like your temperature, blood flow and EKG levels. While Samsung just introduced a slightly improved second generation of the device it's not actually intended for sale.

Rather the Simband is meant as a blueprint for other device makers who want to incorporate Samsung's tech and designs into their wearables, and to that end the company has just released its APIs and development kit into the wild.

That's the real news, and it means developers can finally get started making their own health apps for Simband devices.

Send it to the cloud

Samsung says Simband is "our concept of what a smart health device should be."

"Now, for the first time you will be able to ask specific wellness questions and get clear, insightful answers direct from the source: you," reads a Samsung site describing Simband and some other initiatives.

One of those is SAMI, or Samsung Architecture Multimodal Interactions, a cloud platform that will receive data from Simband devices and allow developers to leverage it with apps.

Here's a video describing some of what Simband's many sensors can do. With these tools now available to devs it could be only a matter of time before Simband really takes off. Of course, it already has plenty of competition.

BlackBerry lends Samsung a hand with Android security, launches BBM Meetings

Posted:

BlackBerry lends Samsung a hand with Android security, launches BBM Meetings

BlackBerry was once the sole emperor of the enterprise phone space, so it's nice to see the Canadian company isn't too bitter about its fall from grace to help out a friendly rival.

At a conference in San Francisco today BlackBerry announced it's going to be using its security expertise to give Samsung a boost in the enterprise market.

BlackBerry will help Samsung make more secure Android devices, BB CEO John Chen said during a presentation, by adding its own BES12 encryption to devices using Samsung's Knox software.

The partnership will bear fruit in early 2015, Chen promised.

BBM Meetings

At the same conference BlackBerry also introduced BBM Meetings, a version of its BlackBerry Messenger service aimed at conferencing for enterprise users.

BBM Meetings supports cross-platform video and voice conferences as well as text chats, screen-sharing and presentations, and it's compatible with BlackBerry 10, Android, Mac OS X and Windows PCs.

BBM Meetings costs businesses $12.50 (about £8, AU$14) a month per host after a 30-day free trial, though it will alternatively be available in December as part of an enterprise bundle that also includes BBM Protected and advanced technical support for slightly less per month.
Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)