Tag: Business For Sale

Amazon’s new Echo Buds take on AirPods Pro at less than half the price

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Amazon isn’t reinventing the wireless earbud with its latest Echo Buds, but it is undercutting some rivals on price while tacking on more features. The new Echo Buds officially cost $100 with a USB-C charging case or $120 with a case that supports wireless charging, and Amazon’s discounting both by $20 at launch. Compared to the first-gen Echo Buds, which sold for $130, the new buds are 20% smaller, have better sound quality, and include vents to make them a bit comfier. Amazon has also improved the buds’ active noise cancellation, claiming that it eliminates twice as much outside sound, and there’s a new option to get them in white instead of black. [Photo: courtesy of Amazon] On the software side, Amazon has added a “Find My Earbuds” feature, which you can activate via the Alexa app or an Echo speaker, along with a “VIP Filter” that only plays notification alerts for your favorite contacts. (The latter feature debuted on Amazon’s Echo Frames smart glasses.) None of which adds up to anything revolutionary in the field of wireless earbuds, but if Alexa is your preferred voice assistant, maybe those incremental changes are enough. Read More …

Plex wants to go mainstream by fixing streaming TV’s biggest annoyance

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Slowly and steadily, Plex is working to place itself at the center of the streaming wars. The 13-year-old company may still be best-known for its media server software, beloved by people who want to maintain their own entertainment collections on their own hard drives. Lately, however, it’s been chasing a broader mission to bring all the world’s media into one app. Instead of making you bounce between a dozen or more different apps to find what you want, Plex thinks it can make sense of the mess through a combination of subscriptions, rentals, free videos, and deep links into other apps—all delivered through a single menu. Read More …

How Microsoft’s new $16B acquisition could bring AI to your doctor’s office

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On Tuesday, Microsoft announced it had acquired Nuance Communications for $16 billion. Nuance is a pioneer in the field of advanced medical transcription, but the technology is still young. The battle to reduce the administrative burden for doctors using artificial intelligence is intensifying, and the acquisition could position Microsoft well to compete against other tech giants as they jostle for dominance within healthcare. Nuance has a long history as a medical transcription service and has invested heavily in voice recognition technology. The hope is that its technology could potentially reduce the number of hours that doctors spend inputting medical information into patients’ electronic health records (EHR). Read More …

Qualcomm’s next CEO has seen the future of wireless, and (shocker) it’s called 6G

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On June 30, Cristiano Amon will become Qualcomm’s fourth CEO, succeeding Steve Mollenkopf. Amon, who currently is president of the wireless technology giant, first joined Qualcomm in 1995 as an engineer. After stints at Vésper, a mobile carrier in Brazil; Ericsson; and Velocom, Amon returned in 2004 to run the San Diego-based company’s semiconductor business. He spoke with Fast Company editor in chief Stephanie Mehta about the future of wireless and the next problems his technologists will tackle. Edited excerpts follow. Fast Company: What do you see as the biggest differences between the Qualcomm you joined in 1995 and the company today? Cristiano Amon: When I started there were about 3,000 employees, and we didn’t even have half a billion in revenue, but we had this incredible CDMA (code-division multiple access) technology. I was fortunate enough to join before it was ever launched. It was very disruptive for digital communications. It was such an incredible company. I fell in love with it. Fast forward to where we were now. Qualcomm has been defining innovation in the world of communication, from 3G to 4G to 5G. We’re now we’re in an incredible position that there’s demand for technology, and we can make a difference in every single industry. It’s an incredible journey, and while we are now a very large company, we haven’t lost that entrepreneurial spirit. I think of founding CEO Irwin Jacobs as the builder, and his successor, Paul Jacobs, as presiding over the massive explosion of smartphones Read More …

Coinbase’s $100 billion lPO provides an alternate investment to bitcoin

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Coinbase , the San Francisco-based cryptocurrency exchange, is going public on April 14. The company will trade under the ticker COIN and list 114,850,769 shares on the NASDAQ with an initial valuation of $100 billion. Instead of following the traditional initial public offering (IPO) route, Coinbase plans to post its shares straight on the NASDAQ exchange via a direct listing, a technique pioneered by big names like Spotify and Palantir in recent years. Whereas an IPO involves a company creating new shares and having an underwriter that buys them for a set price and then sells them to the market, in a direct listing a company sells existing shares and has no underwriter. But what is Coinbase and why is this such as important development in the cryptocurrency market? The Coinbase business model Coinbase was founded in 2012 by Brian Armstrong, a former engineer at Airbnb, and Fred Ehrsam, who was a trader at Goldman Sachs. Their mission was to make investing and transacting in cryptocurrencies easier, more efficient, and fairer. The company has since risen to become the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the U.S. Even though there are numerous other exchanges around the world with considerably larger trading volumes, including Binance, Huobi, and OKEx, Coinbase’s growth has been incredible lately. Read More …