Sonos Welcomes Devs With Open APIs

Getting Sonos' top-shelf speakers to play nice with other connected devices in the home has been challenging in the past, but that's about to change. The company has announced the Sonos Sound Platform, which includes new APIs, developer tools and documentation to make it easier for Sonos products to operate with third-party hardware and software. Sonos also announced integration with IFTTT. "IFTTT support adds a way for Sonos to tie its offerings into wider smart home integrations," noted Jonathan Collins, research director at ABI Research.

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Livestreaming is big business in China, with the top live streamers making more than $100,000 per month broadcasting regular shows through a multitude of apps. Could livestream fever take hold in the United States?

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To Resist Manipulation, Ask One Question

The level of effort devoted to manipulating our opinions is unprecedented. Granted, a lot of this has to do with the fact that most of the "free" online services we use aren't free at all. They are trading our ability to make measured opinions for advertisers' money, and some of these "advertisers" are foreign governments. With all of these attempts to manipulate us into doing things we otherwise don't want to do -- many of which are surprisingly successful -- there is one question we should be asking of any inflammatory story: Why?

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Cinnamon Mint for Debian Just as Tasty

The official release of version 3 of Linux Mint Debian Edition hit the download servers at summer's end, offering a subtle alternative to the distro's Ubuntu-based counterpart. Codenamed "Cindy," the new version of LMDE is based on Debian 9 Stretch and features the Cinnamon desktop environment. Its release creates an unusual situation in the world of Linux distro competition. Linux Mint developers seem to be in competition with themselves. LMDE is an experimental release. The Linux Mint community offers its flagship distro based on Ubuntu Linux in three desktop versions: Cinnamon, Mate and Xfce.

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E-Scooters: On a Road to Nowhere

As summer winds die down here's hoping one of the season's most ridiculous and unnecessary fads goes with them. Bird and Lime e-scooters are just the latest twist on the foot-powered Razor Scooters that took America by storm in 2000. Unlike Razor, which introduced electric-power models back in 2003, Bird and Lime utilize a subscription model instead of ownership. Bird, Lime and another competitor, Spin, have similar business strategies -- namely to provide simple, cheap transportation for the "last mile."

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Senators Bash Google at Russian Election Meddling Hearing

An empty chair reserved for Google became the focal point for harsh criticism Wednesday at the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee's hearing on Russian meddling in the 2016 elections. After thanking Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey for agreeing to testify at the forum, Chairman Richard Burr, R-N.C., added, "I'm disappointed Google decided against sending the right senior level executive to participate in what I truly expect to be a productive discussion."

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Silicon Valley execs face Capitol Hill grilling

Executives from Facebook and Twitter will appear on Capitol Hill today for Congressional hearings. See live updates.

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'Five Eyes' Nations Push for Encryption Backdoors

Strong encryption can be a threat to law enforcement and national security, the governments of the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand said in a statement issued Sunday. "The increasing use and sophistication of certain encryption designs present challenges for nations in combating serious crimes and threats to national and global security," maintained the countries, which are known as the "Five Eyes" based on an agreement they entered to cooperate on signal intelligence.

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UberMedia CEO Gladys Kong: Success Is Data-Driven

"Mobile advertising and location-based marketing are getting more and more data-driven, both in targeting and analyzing results," said UberMedia CEO Gladys Kong. "Advertisers are trying to understand more about the consumer's journey. They want any insights they can get their hands on in order to understand the consumer. Location measurement is becoming a much more important part of advertising, so a lot of our focus at UberMedia is to make data actionable, in order to help businesses measure the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns."

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Of Course Google Is Biased

Bias is a nasty beast. A market research class I took in graduate school focused on the identification and elimination of bias. My final paper was on an intentionally biased piece of research. It was far easier to introduce bias and then talk about the bias than it would have been to attempt to do unbiased work and defend it as unbiased. For that reason alone, the Trump administration's recent complaints that Google's search engine is biased are almost certainly true. The nature of the bias, however, has not been determined.

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