The Tech Boy's Blog

Bluetooth SIG (Bluetooth Special Interest Group), the governing body responsible for overseeing the development and implementation of Bluetooth standards, has finally provided details regarding Bluetooth version 5. The new standard is a significant update over the existing Bluetooth v4.2 iteration, available in majority of smartphones and other mobile devices these days. Bluetooth  5 features two times the bandwidth of Bluetooth v4.2. It also has four times the wireless range and eight times the capacity to broadcast messages. With the new version, the maximum transfer speed can reach to 2Mbps. It's also mentioned that the bandwidth can be decreased to get a four times longer range. Interestingly, those having smartphones with older Bluetooth versions need not worry. Version 5 is backward-compatible with v4.2 or even v4.0 (for Low Energy devices) and up to v1.1 (for others). Bluetooth version 5 is also more efficient and suitable for internet of things (IoT) devices. The ...

China's online video streaming is booming with the user base expanding to 514 million, creating unprecedented business opportunities, an industry report said today. As of June, the number of streaming service users reached 514 million, accounting for 72.4% of China's Internet population, according to the 2016 China Online Streaming Development Study Report, released by China Netcasting Services Association (CNSA). The association was set up in 2011 and published its first report in 2015. The 2016 report says watching video online has become the primary form of online entertainment in China, followed by online gaming and reading literature, state-run Xinhua news agency reported today. It also shows 35.5 percent of streaming users paid for content this year, rising 18.5 percentage points year-on-year. It is the fastest annual growth in recent years. Most of the paid users are monthly subscribers. Zhou Jie, deputy secretary of the CNSA, said the trend suggests good comme...

NEW DELHI: Amid cash crunch due to demonetization, a more user friendly and simple version of Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD) used on feature mobile phones for making cashless payments will be rolled out in next 15 days. "NCPI is already working to make USSD (*99#) very simple, convenient, robust and to link it with UPI. So in another 15-20 days, we will have a very new version of USSD with many strong and robust easy to handle features," NITI Aayog CEO Amitabh Kant told reporters in a press conference here. At present there are about 400 million feature mobile handset users in the country. The move will push the digital transaction in a big way particularly in rural areas where penetration of smart phone and Internet is skewed. Besides, the panel is also working out ways to achieve inter-operatibility of unified payment interface of various banks. This will enable account holders to use their banks' UPI with a subscribers of other banks' UPI for ma...

Apple seems to be working hard on its artificial intelligence goals behind the curtains. A set of slides from the company's AI conference in Barcelona has leaked online, suggesting some key research focus areas of Apple. As reported by The Quartz website, the conference is said to be presented by Russ Salakhutdinov, director of  AI  research at Apple. The Cupertino-based tech firm is said to be working on smaller neural networks that will operate independently instead of relying on several other server connections. The neural networks are said to be 4.5 times smaller than the regular ones and have twice the speed. For end users, this could help future iPhone and iPad models to recognize a person's face, location and more in an image more easily than is possible now. We may also see a glimpse of the company's AI progress it in the upcoming iPad models or the next year's iPhones. Besides this, the slides talk about 'LiDAR' or Light Detection and Ranging, which...