Zac Hall

Roku, makers of the popular streaming set-top box for watching online content on your TV, announced today support for enabling screen mirroring from select Android devices to your HDTV with a new beta rolling out to customers today. Support for screen mirroring to Roku devices will also extend to select Windows 8.1 devices, the company says. Screen mirroring allows users to view content like apps, photos, games, and the web from mobile devices to the big screen screen in the living room.
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Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation James Comey expressed his concern today over Apple and Google’s decision to encrypt information stored on smartphones, the Huffington Post reports, adding that FBI officials are pushing both companies to change their policies in order to allow law enforcement officials to access data in certain instances.
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The Wall Street Journal reports that Google’s ultrafast Internet service Fiber has a new leader running the show, and not just any new leader. Dennis Kish, a former executive at semiconductor company Qualcomm, is replacing Milo Medin to head Google Fiber going forward. The Journal reports that Medlin will remain “an adviser to the Google Fiber team,” but the Google vice president will begin work on other unspecified projects.

Kish was brought in for his operational expertise and will lead Google Fiber as the high-speed Internet and television service expands to new cities.

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Telecommunications site LightRead reports that AT&T is committing to supporting WiFi Calling for its subscribers beginning sometime in 2015. The feature allows subscribers to carry voice calls over their home or office WiFi connection, for instance, when the cellular network may be poor in strength.

Speaking Friday at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia Conference, he said the carrier would use WiFi calling in 2015, but only as a complement to voice-over-LTE and 3G voice. […]

“We’re very focused on making sure it’s a great experience for customers, but we see it as a complement, not a replacement,” he said. “We feel good about a great nationwide network with unlimited talk and text.”

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Google has acquired the polling service Polar for the Google+ team, Re/code first reported and Polar announced today. The value of the acquisition was not disclosed, but the polling service will be shut down at the end of the year, the company says. Polar’s full statement sharing the announcement follows:
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Is the Amazon Fire Phone simmering out? Recent estimates reached by The Guardian pegged the device at having sold less than 35,000 units and today Amazon and AT&T are bringing down the price to 99¢ on a two year contract less than two months after launch. The device was previously priced at $199 for 32GB with a two year commitment, which many observed was a rather high price point for a not-so-remarkable handset mostly differentiated by its 3D effect and Amazon Prime services…
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U.S. national carrier Sprint announced today that it has signed 15 additional agreements with rural and regional carriers to cover 4G LTE roaming on its network. Rural and regional carriers participating with Sprint in the new agreements including New York and Pennsylvania’s Blue Wireless, Kentucky’s Bluegrass Wireless, Alabama’s Pine Belt Wireless, Idaho’s Syringa Wireless, and more including members and partners of the Rural independent Network Alliance.

With the 15 additional regional and rural partners announced today, Sprint says it not has 27 regional carrier partners across the United States. The announcement comes just one month after Sprint abandoned plans to acquire wireless carrier competitor T-Mobile and appointed a new CEO to lead the company. You can view a full list of Sprint’s newly announced additional 4G LTE roaming partners below and Sprint’s list of supported LTE locations here.

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Shortly after Google acquired Nest, Tony Fadell’s company behind the smart thermostat and smart smoke/carbon monoxide detector, the company ran into a patch of unrelated issues with its Nest Protect product launched months earlier with reports of false alarms from many users and an issue with the ‘wave to dismiss’ feature touted as a key benefit of the product. A soft recall later followed remotely disabling the dismiss feature after a safety bug was discovered followed by a reduced price once it went back on sale.

While the ability to motion to dismiss an alarm is still disabled as the company works toward better implementing it reliably, current and future Nest Protect owners will benefit from new features delivered through a software update for the product. Steam Check, a feature that takes advantage of the device’s humidity sensor and an advanced algorithm, now allows the Nest Protect to distinguish smoke from steam by determining the presence of moisture. Steam from hot water shouldn’t be a reason to panic, and the Nest Protect says this feature will reduce the number of false alarms for users.
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Taking stage at IFA 2014, Sony is showing off its latest Xperia gadgets with the new Z3, Z3 Compact, and E3 smartphones. The flagship Z3 is a 5.2-inch “dust-tight and waterproof” aluminum framed device that ships in black, copper, silver green, and white. Included is a feature called PS4 Remote Play allowing you to game on the device with the PS4 controller.

Next up is the Compact Z3, a 4.6-inch device (compact, huh?) that’s also dust-tight and water proof with options in black, green, orange, and white. The Xperia Compacy Z3 also enjoys PS4 Remote Play support (as does the tablet version). Last is the Xperia E3, a 4.5-inch device with a 5 megapixel camera available in black, copper, lime, and white. (Oh, and there were also wearables, of course.) Press releases for each follows…

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Rounding out its IFA announcements in Berlin today, Samsung demoed its new Gear VR headset powered by Oculus technology (with a plug from Oculus’s John Carmack). Similar to Google’s Cardboard, the Samsung Gear VR is a virtual reality headset made for the new Galaxy Note 4 also introduced today to create an “immersive new dimension of mobile life” through virtual reality. Pricing and availability seem scarce at this point and it doesn’t seem to be compatible with the curved display Note Edge shown off today, but the Note 4 is launching sometime next month. Full press release below:

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Pandora Internet Radio is the latest service to bring its product over to the Google Glass world. The music streaming service’s Glassware app came out of their Hack-a-thon from earlier in the spring, Pandora says, and was good enough to share with Google and ship.

The Pandora Radio app for Google Glass gives users access to stations with the ability to control them with voice commands or the touchpad. Pandora says the voice commands allow you to select existing stations or even create new stations. Actions including music controls like play and pause require using the touchpad; favoriting and dismissing a track also requires using the touchpad for now.

Users can find the Pandora Internet Radio app on the Google’s Glassware section, and Pandora has more instructions below:
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Just under a month ago Google shared a list of cities where it would host public meetings for the Advisory Council to Google on the Right to be Forgotten following the European Union Court of Justice decision in May that individuals have the right to request Google remove information from its search results. With the first of those public meetings scheduled for September 9th in Madrid, Google is today starting free online registration to attend the meeting.

A limited number of seats will be available for members of the public at each Council meeting. We’re opening up the online registration process today — and you can sign up for the Madrid meeting and the Rome meeting. Registration will remain open until five days before the event. There is no charge to attend.

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T-Mobile announced a new initiative in June to offer unlimited streaming of variety of music streaming services on its mobile network without counting against customer data caps. The program, dubbed Music Freedom, supports streaming iHeartRadio, iTunesRadio, Pandora, Rhapsody, Samsung Milk, Slacker, and Spotify over T-Mobile’s network without counting towards a data cap, and today the carrier is doubling the number of supported services.

Today T-Mobile is announcing the addition of AccuRadio, Black Planet, Grooveshark, Radio Paradise, Rdio and Songza to its Music Freedom program. You may recall Google purchased Songza (for what is believed to be $15 million) in July. In addition to introducing the six new music services to the program, T-Mobile has also shared that it will be adding Google Play Music later this year after the service was voted on the most to be included. Full press release follows…

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“Know your competition, but don’t copy it.” Those words of wisdom come from the image above accompanying a message put on the entirely original – not a copy of Facebook – Google+ by Google executive chairman and former CEO Eric Schmidt. Schmidt is promoting his new book with Jonathan Rosenberg called How Google Works due out next month where the billionaire lays out the principles that made Google what it is today.

Included with the lemonade stand image and ‘don’t copy’ caption is another Schmidt line on originality and competition. “Playing catch-up with the competition will never help you get ahead by creating something new,” Schmidt says. Google would be the “hard” boozy lemonade to the competitions’ fresh lemonade. In the case of Google Plus, the booze could be the hangouts or perhaps the photo editing features or integration with other Google products.

Now picture this tidbit from Walter Isaacson’s biography of the late Apple CEO and co-founder Steve Jobs:

“I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple’s $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong,” Jobs said. “I’m going to destroy Android, because it’s a stolen product. I’m willing to go thermonuclear war on this.”

It’s hard to deny that Android started looking a lot more like iOS after the iPhone’s introduction, and iOS has clearly borrowed its fair share of features from Google’s mobile operating system, but there’s no denying that Schmidt’s message could be challenged. File this one with the rest under Talking Schmidt.

It’s been just over a month since the last big update to Google Play Music for iPhone, and today the Google Play Music team is rolling out another update with new features and improvements. The latest release brings the version number to 1.3.2.2559 for those keeping track at home, and adds a handful of new functionality like the ability to remove music from your library via the iPhone app. The update also boasts additional accessibility features which will surely be appreciated as well as fixes for issues with skipping during track playback and eliminating duplicate listings in the music library. You can see the full change log below.
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The popular transportation service Uber has quickly been growing this year with new features like adding your destination right on the smartphone app when requesting a ride and poaching long time Apple engineering manager Chris Blumenberg who managed the Maps team. The service is even integrated into the Google Maps app on iPhone and Android, and check out the Uber care package the company sends new employees.

Today Uber is taking a major step toward integrating its service into even more apps and services as it introduces an API for developers to use in their own apps and a list of partners already planning to take advantage of it.

As of today, we officially open—to all developers—access to many of the primitives that power Uber’s magical experience. Apps can pass a destination address to the Uber app, display pickup times, provide fare estimates, access trip history and more.

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