This week on Between the Bytes, we’ve got lots of local news about some acquisitions and some new companies coming to Silicon Slopes. We’ve also got news on the iPhone X and Waymo. Stay tuned. Welcome to Between the Bytes where we are not as smart as your average nerd. I’m Gary Arnold and I’m Arash Bakhshandehpour.
Tech News
The first headline we’d like to get into today is something from Silicon Slopes, actually out here in Lehi, Utah. DigiCert, a local company, (a digital certificate and encryption company) partly acquired Symantec; the part of Symantec that deals with website security and PKI solutions. Once again, it’s out here in Lehi and as we’ve mentioned in the past, we are Pro all the Silicon Slopes growth and development. This is exciting news for us. Silicon Slopes, eating up part of Silicon Valley.
Our next bit of news is about a company called Waymo. They are owned by Alphabet, Google’s parent company. Waymo specializes in self-driving and vehicle technology. It has made huge progress over the past few years and you’ve probably seen them in the news before. They recently announced that over the past month they have had their self-driving cars out in Arizona without any sort of copilot or employee in the drivers or even passenger seat. They have just been hanging out in the back while the car’s been driving completely solo. Truly autonomous vehicles are here. Waymo is in a lot of cities across the United States and Arizona, in particular, will have a hundred square mile radius that the car can go into, so it’s not driving cross-country yet but the time will come.
Next, is news about Apple’s tenth installment of the iPhone-iPhone X. Its flagship phone ($1,000 phone) has been released and users are loving it for the most part. One of the big criticisms is the notch at the top of the screen gets in the way of using the actual screen. But outside of that, the face recognition technology on it, the camera and the display have been pretty groundbreaking. Fans are loving it, their users are loving it. Some pretty cool stuff, the face recognition actually takes thousands and thousands of pictures of infrared that you can’t see with your eyes. We’ll have some videos of how that looks upon the video. It’s a bloody expensive phone, 1 thousand dollars. The camera is a great camera but it’s not necessarily the best camera on the market. Anyway, if you happen to get one and you like it, let us know and maybe we’ll we’ll feature it here.
Our next bit of news is a local piece from the University of Utah. Computer researchers there have used (and I’m not making this up) minerals discovered in Russia in the 1830s together with the silicon chips used in computers to make an even faster processor. The mineral is part organic-part inorganic and it’s allowing them to use the terahertz spectrum of processing which is no longer using electricity to pass data. It uses light which is obviously much faster than current technology. It is expected to be the next wave of computing technology and things will get incredibly fast in the years to come as that technology becomes more widespread.
Level three, the internet routing service behind many companies like Comcast and Verizon went down yesterday for 90 minutes. It was due to human error, there was a routing error that was there and it was resolved quickly after but from the majority of the country yesterday there was no internet for about 90 minutes. It’s pretty scary, fortunately, it didn’t hit us in Utah.
Our last bit of news comes from a local startup that has begun and centralized around Park City and the other ski area is called Cloud Vale. It was started by a guy who had leased out over 700,000 acres of land in the mountains for hunters and he wanted to find a use for it during the winter so he is now offering helicopter rides to go up and helicopters ski into some of the lodges that he owns. Obviously some incredible views and incredible things. If a high adventure of skiing is your adrenaline rush of choice then this is for you. It also, of course, comes with a price. It is definitely catering to the higher end business owners of our silicon slopes community.
Tech History
This week in tech history, several years ago, seventeen to be exact pets.com officially flopped. It was one of the famous sock puppets and the IPO went bust. It was part of the dot-com bust of the early 2000s and the company went belly-up and now it’s a part of PetSmart. Another thing that happened several years ago and on the 5th actually, ten years ago Android the operating system was released to users for the first time.
That’ll do it for this week’s Between the Bytes. Be sure to LIKE and subscribe to our YouTube page, follow us on social media, and we’ll see you next week.
