Gadgetory

hi i'm molly wood and welcome to the buzz report the show about the tech news that everyone is talking about this week fun with high level math at press conferences good old-fashioned mob style evil for Microsoft and Spotify for real but first it's the gadget of the week the gadget of the week is the HP touchpad which I personally predicted could be a dark horse to run away with the tablet market thanks to the user friendly webOS interface the little cards and HP's good industrial design well turns out it's still kind of a dark horse reviews have been lukewarm our own Donald Bell probably put it best actually he said it was a great competitor to the original iPad but now it's a little big heavy and kind of greasy and it needs more and better apps letdown HP webos boss jon rubinstein sent out an internal memo urging staff not to be discouraged by the negative reviews and saying basically it's a marathon not a sprint plus you said over-the-air updates are coming soon to address its issues all that is good I got to say a hundred dollar price cut probably wouldn't hurt either I want to believe and now for the news facebook held a press event this week to announce something awesome and here it is a short tutorial on the meaning of exponential growth and we've seen this trend for the last really since the site began where I'm if you plot it out the amount of stuff that people are sharing it's growing at this exponential rate you know one of our investors always tells me that humans are really bad at understanding exponential growth so you don't tend to look at them like this because they just go off the chart too quickly so you tend to look at them in what we call log normalized graph right so that way if you look at the y axis here it's on it's skewed right so it's not going out the way nearly this is kind of how people tend to look at these exponential graphs to plot out how progress is being made over time oh okay after regaling us with normalized graphs and whatnot facebook CEO mark zuckerberg got to the awesome part no not integration with Spotify or an iPad app or the rumored project Spartan mobile development initiative that will bring iOS to its knees nope it was group chat and video chat using skypes technology nano that was it but look at the demo all I have to do is good call and right now we negotiate the call connections between the two machines you see the video window getting ready and launching on good and then we connect right through to Jerry wherever he is right now we see a self image of ourselves and then his video loads so that I can see him how are the launch numbers looking Jerry they're looking really good we've already launched some millions of users awesome so thanks a lot guys I know you guys are working hard I just wanted to call it how to fill great great awesome thanks guys yep awesome facebook you keep saying that word awesome I don't think it means what you think it means now don't get me wrong group chat and video chat are perfectly useful features that would have made for a perfectly nice blog post maybe not a press conference and it might not have been such a letdown if it weren't for the other big buzz of the week google+ invite started trickling out last week and to hear the tech press tell it google+ is the new prom king baby the new social network lets you drag and drop friends into your own special circles like friends or acquaintances or work friends and you can make your own circles and then decide who you want to post to and you can do public or private posts so it's like a combination of Twitter and Facebook and it integrates with your gmail and your Android and it's so new and shiny plus it's hangout feature lets you do group video chat with up to nine people even using your phone so yeah facebook you might want to scamper on back to the awesome lab and get to work because you got competition oh and by the way Facebook is blocking all attempts to import your facebook contacts to Google+ whether it's Chrome extensions or workarounds all of it you can try facebook you can try speaking of the wrong way to win Microsoft is reportedly demanding that Samsung pay licensing fees of fifteen dollars for every Android smartphone it sells fifteen dollars per phone now Microsoft has used copyright infringement threats to get licensing fees from HTC and some smaller android phone makers and it's currently battling with motorola and barnes a noble over their android devices microsoft also reportedly hinted that it might take less licensing money from samsung in exchange for a partnership where Samsung makes more windows phone phones so that's evil also microsoft announced a partnership with chinese search engine giant Baidu and it will use Bing to deliver all the totally censored english-language web searches in China so that's a morally questionable land grab yes yes compared to Google which actually left China rather than sensor at search results Google's having a pretty good week PR Weis but don't worry I'm sure they'll scare the bejesus out of us soon and finally Spotify everyone's favorite music service that they've never used is coming to the US officially I know is that the last of the tech unicorns it might be Spotify has signed its last American label deal and it's headed here sometime soon for a price we don't yet know and with features that have yet to be announced I guess that unicorns not totally dead yet this is getting kind of twisted all right that's the buzz report for this week everyone I'm Mollywood and thank you for watching fifteen dollars for every Android smartphone it sells yeah man out what up man out when I'm and I went out when I'm gonna thank you err yes manamana is like the ultimate virus well that's awesome all right