Technology News

2023’s graveyard: The tech we bid farewell to | Technology News

2023 was an especially significant year for the world of tech, with new AI innovations dropping left, right, and center. But life is not without death – the year also saw the demise of a bunch of tech products that faced insurmountable challenges or simply failed to catch on.

From Google’s visionary but doomed Glass to Lenovo shuttering its Legion gaming phone line, we look back at the innovative yet ill-fated tech that met its end this year. Although full of promise, these pieces of technology could not escape their fate in an unforgiving market.

Read on for the tech that expires in 2023.

Google Glass Enterprise Edition

(Image: Google)

Among the tech products laid to rest in 2023 was Google’s augmented reality headset Google Glass Enterprise Edition, marking the final nail in the coffin for Google’s visionary but ill-fated foray into AR glasses. First publicly announced in 2012, Google Glass was intended to usher in a new era of wearable computing, giving people working in agricultural, medical, and factory settings a heads-up display that would provide them with information while keeping their hands free. But the $1,500 price tag, lack of clear functionality, and privacy concerns doomed the Explorer Edition among consumers.

Google tried to revive Glass for businesses in 2017 with the Enterprise Edition, sold for $999. The headset found niche adoption in fields such as manufacturing and medicine, where hands-free computing was useful. But ultimately, Google Glass failed to achieve mainstream success or change how we interact with technology day-to-day.

Lenovo’s Legion Gaming Phone Business

(Image: Lenovo)

Rumors about Lenovo shutting down its phone business started flying in at the start of the year. Then in March, a Lenovo spokesperson confirmed to Android Authority that it had indeed been shut down. The spokesperson stated that the decision stemmed from “a wider business transformation and gaming portfolio consolidation.”

It seems gaming phones have struggled to carve out a distinct niche as regular flagship phones have gotten better and better at providing great gaming experiences even during long play sessions. Companies tried to attract buyers through gimmicks like cooling fans, RGB lighting and massive amounts of RAM, but to no avail. Lenovo’s Legion gaming phones were well-reviewed devices with top-tier specs, but ultimately couldn’t compete with more mainstream options. The company seems to be shifting focus to handheld gaming devices instead and unveiled the Lenovo Legion Go in September.

The gaming phone market in general seems to be on shaky ground – Xiaomi’s Black Shark division has gone quiet after layoffs in January this year, although brands like ASUS continue to see some success with their ROG Phone series. While they arguably pushed the boundaries of mobile gaming, Lenovo’s Legion gaming phones are yet another piece of tech that won’t pan out in 2023.

Amazon Hello Brand

(Image: Amazon)

Did you know that Amazon has a line of fitness trackers? Probably not. So it didn’t come as a surprise when Amazon decided to pull the plug on its Halo line of health and fitness trackers in July 2023, marking the end of the company’s attempt to break into the wearables market. Launched in 2020, Halo was Amazon’s play into the competitive fitness tracking space dominated by Apple, Fitbit and others. However, it failed to gain significant traction against entrenched rivals.

Halo has three products: the Band, the View, and the Rise. The Band was a basic fitness tracker that was launched in 2020. It has some controversial features, such as measuring body fat with a 3D scan and analyzing voice tone. The View was a smartwatch that came out in 2021. And the Rise was a sleep tracker and alarm clock that was launched recently. The company announced that it would refund customers who bought a Halo device or accessory in the last year, stop charging for the Halo subscription, and delete all the data it had gathered.

Cortana on Windows

(Image: Microsoft)

After years of gradually scaling back support, Microsoft discontinued the standalone Cortana app in August 2023, redirecting users to its new Bing Chatbot and AI Copilot features instead. Cortana’s shutdown marks the end of Microsoft’s attempt to compete with Siri and Google Assistant in the voice assistant space.

Originally launched in 2014, Cortana was designed to provide hands-free voice control and predictive information on Windows devices, similar to the capabilities of Apple and Google’s assistants. It expanded to Android, iOS, and Xbox over the next few years. However, Microsoft struggled to get consumers excited about Cortana. Usage remains niche compared to the competition. By 2021, Microsoft had already ended support for the iOS and Android apps, removed Cortana from the Windows taskbar and stripped out most third-party integrations. Its focus shifted to productivity features rather than general assistance.

With new AI chatbots like Bing Chatbot and Copilot taking center stage, Microsoft no longer sees a need for the standalone Cortana app. Its removal streamlines the Windows experience while freeing up resources for Microsoft’s new AI priorities. For now, the original Cortana lives on solely as an AI companion in Microsoft’s Halo videogame franchise.

Microsoft WordPad

(Express image)

The humble text editor WordPad is finally meeting its demise with Microsoft announcing it will no longer update the app and deprecate it with a future version of Windows. It was included for free on Windows PCs for over 25 years. While never as feature-rich as Word, the no-frills WordPad allowed users to compose documents, edit fonts and formats, and save files as .doc, .rtf or .txt. For students, office workers, and home users alike, WordPad strikes a nice balance between capable and uncomplicated.

But with Word and Notepad improving over the years, Microsoft has decided WordPad’s time has passed. The app was already optional starting in 2020 before its looming removal from Windows was confirmed this September. Though it never had a large user base compared to Word, the soon-to-happen discontinuation of WordPad closes the book on an unassuming yet capable writing tool many grew up using. For those wanting more formatting options, Microsoft suggests its Office suite, while Notepad remains for basic text needs.

Omegle

(Image: Omegle)

The once-popular online chat platform Omegle announced in November that it would be shutting down operations after over a decade of connecting strangers for random conversations. Omegle founder Leif K-Brooks cited financial and psychological unsustainability as reasons for closing the anonymous chat site. Since its launch in 2009, Omegle has become a go-to destination for those seeking random connections online. However, the platform has increasingly become a target for grooming and online abuse despite its original innocent intentions. Short-form video app TikTok even banned sharing Omegle links due to concerns over child safety on the platform.

While Omegle’s anonymous nature allowed for positive cultural exchanges and advice-seeking for some users, the lack of oversight made it difficult to control misuse. After years of fighting uphill battles, Omegle founder K-Brooks decided the platform could no longer bear the attacks and shut it down.

Hyperloop One

(Image: Virgin)

Hyperloop One, the ambitious transportation startup aiming to develop a network of tunnels for levitating pods traveling at speeds up to 760 mph, has ceased operations after nearly a decade of work. Despite raising over $400 million in funding and demonstrating a working prototype, the company was ultimately unable to secure any customers for its futuristic vision of transportation. After layoffs in 2022 and the withdrawal of investment from Sir Richard Branson, Hyperloop One was simply unable to sustain itself financially. The company’s assets, including its test track in Las Vegas, will be liquidated as its story comes to an end on December 31, 2023.

Technology News

How the Media Industry Keeps Losing the Future

If the career of Roger Fidler has any meaning, it is this: Sometimes, you can see the future coming but get trampled by it anyway.

Thirty years ago, Mr. Fidler was a media executive pushing a reassuring vision of the future of newspapers. The digital revolution would liberate news from printing presses, giving people portable devices that kept them informed all day long. Some stories would be enhanced by video, others by sound and animation. Readers can share articles, driving engagement across diverse communities.

All that has come to pass, more or less. Everyone is online all the time, and just about everyone seems interested in, if not obsessed by, national and world happenings. But the traditional media that Mr. Fidler was champion and didn’t receive much benefit. After decades of decline, their collapse seems to be accelerating.

Every day brings bad news. Sometimes it is about recently formed digital enterprises, sometimes venerable publications whose history stretches back more than a century.

Cutbacks were just announced at Law360, The Intercept and the youth-oriented video site NowThis, which laid off half its staff. The tech news site Engadget, which comprehensively tracks tech layoffs, laid off its top editors and other staff members. Condé Nast and Time are shedding employees. The continued existence of Vice Media, once valued at $5.7 billion, and Sports Illustrated, in another era the most influential sports publication, is uncertain. The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post eliminated hundreds of journalists between them. One out of four newspapers that existed in 2005 no longer does.

The slow crash of newspapers and magazines would be of limited interest save for one thing: Traditional media had at its core the exalted and difficult mission of communicating information about the world. From investigative reports on government to coverage of local politicians, the news served to make all the institutions and individuals covered a bit more transparent and, possibly, more honest.

The advice columns, movie reviews, recipes, stock data, weather reports and just about everything else in newspapers moved easily online — except the news itself. Local and regional coverage has a hard time establishing itself as a paying proposition.

Now there are signs that the whole concept of “news” is fading. Asked where they get their local news, nearly as many respondents to a Gallup poll said social media as mentioned newspapers and magazines. A recent attempt to give people free subscriptions to their local papers in Pennsylvania as part of an academic study drew almost no takers.

“Soon after the printing press emerged in the 15th century, the scriptoriums for copying manuscripts in monasteries rapidly began shutting down,” said Mr. Fidler, now 81 and living in retirement in Santa Fe, NM “I’m not very optimistic about the survival of the majority of newspapers in the United States.”

The decline of the news media has been paralleled by the fracturing of American society, which is now as angry and divided as it’s been since the height of the Vietnam War and civil rights protests more than a half-century ago. As the media fell, the noise level rose.

Perhaps it could have been different. Contrary to the myth that all the newspaper magnates of the 1980s and 1990s thought the good times would last forever, quite a few saw trouble lurking in the far distance.

Mr Fidler spent 21 years at Knight Ridder, a newspaper chain that had important metro dailies in cities like Miami and San Jose, Calif. One early project was Viewtron, an effort to put terminals into people’s homes that would deliver news, shopping and chat. It delivered too little and cost too much. In 1986, Viewtron was shut down.

What Mr. Fidler took away from Viewtron’s failure was that newspaper readers needed something that looked like a newspaper and that didn’t pinch them in the wallet. He helped develop technology for lightweight tablets that would use flat-panel displays that were low cost but clear and bright with a relatively long battery life.

Such displays did not exist in the early 1990s but were promised by the end of the decade. The newspaper would be transmitted via high-speed digital telephone networks or direct broadcast satellite transmissions. “I think this will be the salvation for the traditional serious newspapers,” Thomas Winship, a longtime editor of The Boston Globe, told The New York Times in a 1992 profile of Mr. Fiddler.

While at least some publishers were convinced, the tablets never came to save newspapers. One problem was there was no consensus on a software standard. Tablets didn’t really become viable until Apple introduced the iPad in 2010. But the real problem for the news business was the emergence of a devastating and unexpected competitor: the internet.

“I was too narrowly focused,” Mr. Fidler conceded.

The internet would first create an alternative to printed newspapers and magazines, then become a competitor, and finally annihilate many of them. “I didn’t consider all the possible cross impacts of emerging technologies that would lead to Craigslist, alternative news sites, social media and other products that would greatly diminish newspaper circulation and advertising revenue,” Mr. Fidler said.

Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web in 1989 as a tool for collaborating and for sharing information. Being amorphous and infinitely flexible, it allowed for slow adapters and fast adapters at the same time, which circumvented the kind of hand-holding for readers that Mr. Fidler believed necessary. Newspapers lost their classified ads to the internet almost immediately. The display ads lingered, but Google and Facebook, and later Amazon, took over that market.

The web, by essentially allowing every voice to be heard at the same volume, encouraged publishers to join the party. Newspapers and magazines simply gave away what they had been charged for in physical form. They were pushed by Silicon Valley, which needed quality content to keep people online and use its technology.

“Publishers got this mistaken belief that content is like a commodity and should be available everywhere for free,” Mr. Fidler said. It took years to institute paywalls, by which point many publications were fatally weakened.

For all the gloom that the media is wallowing in about the media, the situation is contradictory.

Reliable local reporting in many places is sparse or nonexistent. But there is also a much wider variety of foreign, national and cultural news available online than previous generations could get in print. For all the celebration of the old days, if you were in a city with a mediocre newspaper — and there were many — access to quality journalism was difficult.

“Basically, the world has opened up to us. There’s so much good journalism out there,” said David Mindich, a journalism professor at the Klein College of Media and Communication at Temple University. “If you had said to me 20 years ago, ‘I see a generation listening to long-form audio shows,’ I would have said: ‘Attention spans are getting shorter. I don’t think that’s going to happen.’ But it did.”

Most long-form audio shows, even at their best, are not news in the way, say, a zoning commission report is news. The erosion of the idea of ​​news can be seen even more vividly in the magazine field. Where the goal was to inform, now it is to entertain.

“Time magazine just selected Taylor Swift as the person of the year,” said Samir Husni, a longtime magazine analyst. “It never selected Elvis or the Beatles. She was the first entertainer. We’re becoming more about marketing in journalism than truth in journalism because we’re depending on the customer to pay the price rather than advertising.”

This is how digital has changed journalism, he said: “The thing now is to make everybody happy. But that was never the role of journalism, making people happy.”

Marc Benioff, the Silicon Valley entrepreneur who bought the struggling Time in 2018 with his wife, Lynne, viewed the selection of Ms. Swift differently: “Best selling issue of all time!” (In recent years, at least.) A few weeks after the Swift issue appeared, Time’s union said 15 percent of the magazine’s unionized editorial staff got the ax.

That was more of a strategic move than a sign of distress, Mr. Benioff said.

“If you’re going to make these media businesses work, you have to shift the product mix, which also means you have to shift the employee mix,” he texted. The paywall, put in place in 2011, was dropped last year. As a brand, Time needs the widest exposure possible.

Two years ago, Mr. Benioff told Axios that Time’s revenue would be up 30 percent in 2022 to $200 million. That might have been aspirational. “Revenue in 2024 should hit $200 million, a new high,” he says now. “We’re even going to make money.”

Other publications are trying to take the profit motive out of journalism.

Nonprofit news ventures tend to be small, low profile and unevenly distributed across regions. But there are many signs of growth. The number of outfits serving communities of color — never very well served by traditional publications — has doubled in the past five years, according to the Institute for Nonprofit News.

Readers generally respond, too.

“People talk about nonprofit reporting in their communities like it’s a normal part of the news ecosystem, not like it’s some outside force,” said Magda Konieczna, author of “Journalism Without Profit: Making News When the Market Fails.” In some places, the effect is striking. “Philadelphia is now a news jungle rather than a news desert.”

Ms. Konieczna teaches at Concordia University in Montreal. A few weeks ago, a Canadian news giant, Bell Media, announced that it was cutting hundreds of jobs and ending many of its television newscasts. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said the decision was “eroding our very democracy.”

“My neighbors read The New Yorker but don’t know where to find local news, or why they would want to, in large part because it doesn’t really exist,” Ms. Konieczna said. “This is the dystopian future.”

The New Yorker, as it happened, employed AJ Liebling, the greatest press critic of the postwar years. He called himself an optimist despite seeing a downhill march ever since he became a reporter in 1925.

“The function of the press in society is to inform, but its role is to make money,” he wrote. The more it did the latter, he argued, the less it bothered with the former.

There was no golden age, but Roger Fidler is still inconsolable. He long ago outlasted Knight Ridder, which was sold to McClatchy, another chain, in 2006. McClatchy declared bankruptcy in 2020. He spends a couple of hours each day reading the news in the printed edition of a community newspaper and the digital editions of national and regional newspapers. It’s a lot, and yet not enough.

“Social media and its comments overwhelmed us,” he said. “We’re flooded with information because everybody’s a journalist. Everyone thinks they have the truth. Everyone certainly has an opinion. It’s discouraging to see how it’s gone.”

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ISRO to test Gaganyaan parachutes by dropping module from chopper | Technology News

The Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) is likely to undertake an important test under the Gaganyaan mission to check the parachute system of the crew module in the next few days, according to officials in the know of the matter. The Integrated Air Drop Test (IADT) will see a Chinook helicopter dropping the crew module from a height of approximately 4-5 km.

“The test is likely to be conducted in the next two or three days. “The first IADT will test the parachute system under nominal conditions, meaning it will mimic the process of splashdown of the crew module when both parachutes open in a timely manner,” the official said.

This will be the first in a series of IADT to test the parachute system under off-nominal conditions such as one parachute not opening, both parachutes not opening, or delayed deployment of the parachutes.

After the splashdown of the crew module—the module that will seat the three Indian astronauts—another helicopter will locate the crew module. The Navy will then recover the crew module and bring it to the Chennai coast, according to officials.

The splashdown and recovery of the crew module is also an important step, especially since the crew module was turned upside down during the first test vehicle mission last October. The space agency will also undertake test vehicle missions—where a single stage rocket carries the modules several kilometers in space to test all systems—before the first unmanned mission. “This is unchartered territory. We do not know how many such tests will be needed. “It will depend on findings from these tests,” said the official.

The crew module will be the pressurized cabin which will carry the three astronauts to space and back.

While the current tests are only with the crew module, for the actual flight, the crew module will be attached with a service module that will house all support systems such as the propulsion system.

Technology News

Technology can detect wildfires. Do humans still have to?

After seven seasons working as a fire lookout — someone who watches for wildfires from a tower — near Peace River, Alta., Trina Moyles has witnessed some of the worst wildfire seasons Canada has seen.

“It’s especially stressful when communities are threatened by fires and you can visibly see the wall of fire advancing,” said Moyles. She’s a journalist, photographer and creative producer who has published a memoir about her experience there, titled Lookout.

“It’s a very helpless feeling, but all you can do is watch the fire and the wind conditions and do your job.”

Last year was Canada’s worst wildfire season on record. Last December, fire chiefs from across the country went to Ottawa to ask for more financial assistance after 9,500 volunteer firefighters quit in 2023. The federal government announced $800,000 in additional funding this month to train and hire firefighters, in regular firefighting crews and for combating wildfires .

Meanwhile, new technologies to combat the blazes earned renewed, widespread coverage. Alberta and New Brunswick’s work with AI and the Canadian Space Agency’s dedicated fire-monitoring satellite were just a few of the newsworthy plans.

Technological developments have been on Moyles’s mind throughout his career.

If it takes humans out of towers, advanced technology like drones could eliminate the risk and cost of the job. But Moyles argues that technology can’t entirely replace human lookouts like her, and the focus on the “sexy” tech means they aren’t getting the support they need.

“There is a fear [among lookouts] that these jobs are not being invested in or upheld in the way that they should,” she said.

A woman in a fire tower overlooking a vast green forest. She is looking at something out of frame with binoculars.
Kimberly Jackson gazes through binoculars in this undated photo. She is one of six wildfire lookouts featured in Fire Tower, Tova Krentzman’s upcoming documentary. (Submitted by Tova Krentzman)

Tova Krentzman is the director of Fire Tower, a documentary premiering at HotDocs on April 29. It follows six lookouts’ experiences in this unique line of work. She’s been getting to know lookouts since she worked as a cook at a “wildfire fighting camp” in 2020, and she could also see their concerns.

Krentzman pointed out that most of Canada doesn’t use human lookouts anymore, and “in the world today, AI and technology, that’s a big topic in general. I think it’s on everyone’s mind, right?”

Why do we still hire humans to watch for wildfires?

Fire lookouts are responsible for observing the first inklings of a wildfire and reporting it. They spend four to six months (the length of the wildfire season) living alone in remote places and watching the horizon.

According to Krentzman, Alberta has 100 fire towers manned with lookouts. Yukon has five, the Northwest Territories has three and British Columbia has one.

Between 2006 and 2021, lookouts such as Moyles detected about 30 per cent of the wildfires in Alberta. Ground patrols detected 17 per cent and air patrols detected 11 per cent. The only type that beat lookouts was “unplanned” detection (phone calls from the public, for example), with 42 per cent.

The key to the job is sharp eyes. Moyles said lookouts can detect wildfires when they’re only 0.01 hectares in size, and catch them early is “critical” to wildfire response.

The lookout’s job doesn’t stop once they’ve reported a fire; they’re also instrumental in helping to coordinate the response. Lookouts can communicate with other towers to triangulate a location or keep in touch with the fire manager about the weather conditions or fire growth, for example.

A poster for a film called Fire Tower, where a wildfire lookout stands in a fire tower as it is struck by lightning. The title and other details are written in text.
The poster for Fire Tower, Krentzman’s documentary, which is premiering at HotDocs on April 29. (Submitted by Tova Krentzman.)

After a whole season watching the horizon, you’re bound to pick up things that other people wouldn’t notice, Moyles explained. Those who come back to the program year after year are known as “lifers.”

Krentzman, the director, recalled how one lookout in Yukon was “so serious and diligent about looking for smoke.”

“Everyone knows in Dawson City [that] he’s out there, and they feel safer because of it,” she said.

How drones and sensors compare to humans

Alberta has the most remaining lookouts of any province — about 100 altogether, according to Kretzman.

But Alberta’s most recent Wildfire Review (2019) recommended searching for alternatives to the lookout network due to cost and safety concerns.

Drones and sensors detect a wildfire “basically, just like a human,” said Youmin Zhang, an engineering professor at Concordia University researching how to use drones for wildfire management.

According to Zhang, drones are an appealing solution because they’re mobile, low cost, respond quickly and require no pilot. A human doesn’t even need to control them, Zhang said, because AI can be trained to do it automatically.

Moyles appreciates the way that new technology complements a lookout’s job. But he said many people make the “assumption that [lookouts] will be out of work” as new technologies come out.

In some cases, even if we want to replace all lookouts, the technology isn’t good enough yet.

Last year, Alberta tested six systems that used a combination of cameras, sensors, AI and machine learning, to detect wildfires. The human lookout beats all the technology for the highest detection rate.

A woman in a fire tower overlooking a vast green forest. She is looking at something out of frame with binoculars.
Jackson gazes through binoculars in this undated photo. (Submitted by Tova Krentzman)

Zhang said there are still some challenges with drones, too. Their battery life is limited, they need better night detection, enough sensors and the AI ​​isn’t advanced to make them as smart as a person.

However, he said it’s developing at a fast pace because people are feeling pressured by the onset of climate change. If that continues, he suspects it will eventually be much better than humans.

Researchers in a different part of the wildfire response system found AI could already compare to the people.

Alberta has been using AI to predict where wildfires may begin and Graham Erickson, the senior lead machine learning developer at AltaML, a private AI development firm, said experienced officers found the AI ​​”just agreed with their intuitions.”

Still, Erickson always anticipated it would operate alongside humans, “not replace humans.”

“Human intuition goes into understanding context,” Erickson said. “[The AI] lacks a lot of context, but that’s partially on purpose. We don’t want the programs making all of the decisions.”

To Moyles, that’s for the best.

“Technology has a role to play, but technology is a tool and, at the end of the day, it’s a person who’s making the decision how to use that technology,” she said. “So we really do need to invest in personnel and people.”

A woman wearing protective gear climbs a metal ladder. She is surrounded by a boreal forest.
Jackson climbs a fire tower in this unrated photo. According to Krentzman, lookouts could spend 10 to 12 hours at the top each day, depending on the day’s fire risk. (Submitted by Tova Krentzman)
Technology News

Oracle updates database technology for AI chatbots, Telecom News, ET Telecom

By Stephen Nellis

Oracle on Thursday released an update to its database technology intended to make it more useful with artificial intelligence technology.

The update, which is called Oracle Database 23ai, introduces technology that will make it easier for chatbots and other new AI systems to find data stored in corporate systems. Using what is called “vector search” technology, the new Oracle database can be searched by concepts or ideas expressed in natural human language, instead of simply matching up keywords or phrases.

Juan Loaiza, executive vice president of mission-critical database technologies at Oracle, said the vector search technology can be useful for asking complicated questions with a lot of requirements or contingencies. For example, if a person is searching a database of used cars and wants a sport utility vehicle with a certain mileage and color, and would prefer heated seats but is willing to trade that feature for lower mileage, a traditional database technology might struggle to understand what the user is looking for.

“It can get quite complicated to figure out what’s in a document, figure out what matters,” Loaiza told Reuters in an interview. “It’s been difficult to do in databases because they match one thing, and they’ll filter stuff out, but then you might have nothing.”

Oracle is making the database technology available on its own cloud computing service as well as through its cloud database partners such as Microsoft. Loaiza said Oracle was not ready to disclose when it would be available to companies to run in their own private data centers.

Loaiza said the technology will be made available to existing Oracle Database customers at no additional charge.

  • Published On May 3, 2024 at 07:56 AM IST

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