Using servers to heat homes

In this episode of WRLWND Radio, Marcello Sukhdeo talks about Google ad blocker, Samsung discontinuing My Knox and a startup company that wants to take the excess heat from servers to heat homes.

Google Ad Blocker

Google says that good ad experiences help the web thrive by funding the sites and services. But, people often encounter bad and disruptive ads on the web — ads that blare music unexpectedly, or force the user to wait 10 seconds before moving onto the next page. These types of frustrating experiences, Google says can lead someone to block all ads indiscriminately, and once they do, every publisher on the web pays the price.

From the data collected, there is some good news - people don’t hate all ads, just annoying ones — so websites have to move from a more annoying experience to a more acceptable experience and that can make a huge difference.

For example, 85 per cent of mobile users said they found anchor ads only just a little annoying or not annoying at all. 

The ads that annoy people the most are: 

1. Ads that Interrupt 

1. Ads that Distract

1. Ads that Clutter

One survey shows that 50 per cent of users said they would not revisit or recommend a page that had a pop up ad.

Google acknowledges that this kind of ad blocker will hurt publishers and even Google itself who makes the vast majority of its revenue from ads. Yet, this is not stopping Google from implementing the Chrome ad blocker.

My Knox

Samsung is discontinuing My Knox in favor of the newer Secure Folder app.

The company is now urging My Knox users to switch to Secure Folder, which can be download from Galaxy Apps. The app is compatible with all Samsung smartphones with Android 7.0 Nougat or higher.

Servers to heat homes

By just using a laptop you know that computers give off a lot of excess heat. For data centers, this is a big problem, wasting energy and money. To mitigate this, companies have experimented with moving facilities to near the Arctic Circle and even submerging servers underwater. But Dutch startup Nerdalize has a different approach - it wants to harness it and then use it to heat people’s homes instead.

The setup is simple enough: you pay Nerdalize to install a server in your home; it heats your house for free; and Nerdalize makes money by selling the server space to other companies.

But with this there are some questions: Will companies be happy about having their data sitting in people’s houses? How will customers feel when they need to let an engineer in to fix their malfunctioning servers? But for Nerdalize I think they have a big task ahead to convince companies to store their data in residential homes.

Techbites

Google Home is finally available for pre-order in Canada at $179.99 at the Google Store and Best Buy Canada, and if you'd rather wait for it to hit store shelves, you'll be able to walk into Google Store, Bell, Best Buy, Indigo, London Drugs, Rogers, Staples, The Source, Telus, Visions, and Walmart on June 26th to buy one.

Google is promising that when the Google Home launches in Canada, Google Assistant will work in both French and English. If you're keen on dropping $179.99 to pre-order a Google Home, check out Best Buy Canada, which is offering a free Chromecast with your purchase.

Apple announced recently that app developers have earned over $70 billion through the App Store since its launch in 2008. The revenue split between Apple and its app developers is 70/30 for most purchases, meaning users have spent over $100 billion in the App Store since 2008.

The company also announced that app downloads have increased over 70 percent just in the past year, with photo and video apps nearing a 90 percent growth rate.

Talking about the App Store, Google Play, the app service for Android users, is not the same moneymaker for app makers as its Apple App Store. Android users are downloading more apps from Google Play, but less inclined to spend.

Market researcher Sensor Tower released a report Thursday that shows on average Android users in the US are spending 33 percent less on Google Play than iPhone users are on the App Store. On the other hand, Android users download more apps per device, an average of 42 from Google Play last year, while last year iPhone users downloaded an average of 33 per device from the App Store.

And finally, Adobe's new mobile scanning app called Scan, is a free app for iOS and Android that converts printed text into a PDF simply by snapping a picture of it. That's not unusual for scanning apps, but Adobe's including optical character recognition (OCR) for free.

That means once your image is converted to digital text, you'll have a document you can search, edit, highlight, comment on, sign and share. Adobe says it can do multipage documents too, and there are no limitations or watermarks to get in your way.