Kozminski Techblog

Promosa Management Inc. is a Vancouver based company that normally runs big live events. They have the inventory of LED video walls in the Pacific Northwest. As many other companies it has shut down when the covid pandemic hit. They tried to move into other business endeavours first to do dive-in facilities, then to do graduations, but they all have been denied by the government. 

Left with nothing to do and with all their equipment left unused, they started thinking what their business can and cannot do. They decided to partner with a British company called Disguise, to launch “extended reality” in a studio space, being the first in Canada to adopt this technology. A local company Super Bonfire now works with Promosa on this new technology. Jason Kirby, the head of Super Bonfire said that this new technology creates a very immersive experience. It looks like a live green screen with the effects made before shooting. 

All of this requires a very powerful back-end, so the company’s brand-new servers able to handle such leading-edge technology will be arriving next year. The CEO of Promosa Baxter Wilson says, that having to shut dowwn for most of 2020 has become a blessing in disguise. It gave the company the time and manpower to enable them to work on developing this next step. 

Promosa Management inc. Says that this new technology will be ready to roll out somewhen in the new year. 

Sources: 

https://www.promosa.com/home 

https://bc.ctvnews.ca/vancouver-production-company-the-first-in-canada-to-use-extended-reality-technology-1.5239087 

https://www.technologytimes.pk/2020/12/20/promosa-management-first-in-canada-to-use-extended-reality/ 

Are you in the market for a new phone and have large amounts of disposable income? You might want to look into this new device by XOR coming to the market in the first quarter of 2021. It is called Xor Titanium. It is a luxury “dumb” phone, that will cost you a low price of just under $4,000.

XOR is a successor to Vertu, a Britain-based company handmaking luxury phones, that was forced to close down due to high prices of it’s phones and the growing market of smartphones. According to Hutch Hutchison, the co-founder and head of design, the company learned from the mistakes of its predecessor, namely trying to compete with the big names in the smartphone industry like Samsung or Apple. Hutchison says that Titanium is “something that aspires to be in that select group of objects that feel personal, say something about you and that you treasure.” That it is a “little wingman,” and will “look after you.”

So for that price tag the phone must have some of the most amazing hardware, right? Well… not really. As it is an old fashion cell phone it is technologically very simple. It has no touch screen, no app store and no time wasting games. What it does feature however is a 256-bit AES encryption. It provides end-to-end encryption of calls and messages, even over the  highly insecure GSM network. But the encryption only works when messaging or calling other XOR devices. It also features a battery said to last 5 days and an air-quality sensor, that checks the air quality every hour and notifies you if anything is wrong. What the sensor detects is not known as Hutchison himself is not sure, but he did mention air pollutants and strange chemicals. The phone itself is also quite good looking, made with high quality titanium and wrapped in leather.

With a high price tag, security features and the ability to wipe the phone remotely using a secure code, the device seems to be targeted at a very specific market including people like spies, high class criminals and other shady individuals. For a normal person this phone is likely going to be a pass as most of sane individuals expect a device of that price to be more akin to a small, portable personal computer and not an expensive WhatsApp machine.

sources:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/barrycollins/2020/11/28/rich-mans-whatsapp-the-4000-xor-phone-encrypts-calls-and-texts/?sh=1eb1b9192325

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/gadgets-news/vertus-successor-xor-to-launch-first-phone-in-2021-report/articleshow/79176513.cms

https://www.gsmarena.com/xor_is_the_spiritual_successor_of_vertu_launching_its_first_phone_in_q1_2021-news-46215.php

Have you ever had a song stuck in your head and no matter what you can’t recall it’s title? Well now you can just hum, sing or whistle to your phone and Google’s newest feature will identify it for you.  

The technology to identify songs through means other than lyrics alone already dates a decade, being present in 2009 in the app SoundHound, however it operated by matching the tonne to a database of already identified songs through humming, whistling and singing. Google launched it’s music identifying AI in 2017 with the Pixel 2 smartphone, and expanded it the following year to the SoundSearch feature in the Google app. This new feature takes it a step further “because now we can recognize songs without the lyrics or original song. All we need is a hum,” according to The Keyword. 

The technology works by turning the melody of the 10-15 second clip of humming into a numbers-based sequence. It is then used “to identify songs based on a variety of sources, including humans singing, whistling or humming, as well as studio recordings.” The algorithms also strip all unwanted details like background noise. Then it produces a list of most likely results based on the tune. 

The new feature is currently only available on mobile devices in the Google app, Google Search widget and Google Assistant. It works on Android in 20 different languages and in English only on IOS. How accurate the technology is and whether people will use it only time will tell. 

https://blog.google/products/search/hum-to-search 

https://www.businessinsider.com/google-hum-to-search-how-to-identify-song-without-lyrics-2020-10?IR=T 

https://www.cnet.com/how-to/google-has-a-new-humming-feature-for-your-phone-heres-how-it-works/