March 04, 2015

Byte Into IT - 4 March 2015

51 minutes

On this week's Byte:

Guests:

Rem Ramesh and Kris Maunder of Seamless Content Management join the team in studio to discuss their Hack to your Future recruitment Hackathon.

Simon Hettrick, Deputy Director of the Software Sustainability Institute based at Southampton University, and operating at Edinburgh, Manchester and Oxford Universities, was in Melbourne recently for the University of Melbourne's Research Bazaar, and found some time to have a chat with Vanessa.

News in Brief:

The world's first grid-connected wave power station has been switched on in Western Australia.

News has surfaced that Dutch-French tech company Gemalto (who manufacture the majority of the world's mobile SIM cards) was hacked by the NSA and Britain's GCHQ five years ago (and didn't know about it), potentially compromising the company's millions of customers. Gemalto's response was less than reassuring.

Netflix have announced their Australian launch date - March 24!

Federal Government politicians were available for a chat briefly this week, after it was discovered that a number of them use their publicly available parliamentary emails on the Apple messaging service.

The encrypted messaging service Wickr appears to be the app of choice for many who want to keep their comms private - not least Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull.

Mike's Games Wrap:

The Interactive Games and Entertainment Association have released the results of their study into games sales in 2014 - a total increase of 20 percent.

For developers, Epic have announced that the new Unreal Engine 4 will be free, and Unity have announced that Unity 5 will be too.

Surprise Attack have been releaseing some cool indie games lately. Some on the horizon include:

Space Sluggers

Oscura: Lost Light

A Druid's Duel

Fort Meow

With regard to the big titles, Mike's just playedThe Order: 1886 on PS4 - his verdict? A great looking game, but with lacklustre gameplay.

And in big toys, the new Holden interface far outstrips that of Mercedes-Benz.

Events and Opportunities:

Maker extraordinaire Rex Hazard is in Melbourne:

He'll be at the Footscray Maker Lab Thursday March 5 at 6:30pm

He'll also be at Media Lab Melbourne with Emme Orbach Sunday March 8 at 2pm.

Presented by Vanessa Toholka, Mike Bantick and Dan Salmon

Keep up with all things Byte on Twitter, Facebook, and G+ - see you next week!

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