Monthly Archives: August 2022

Best portable music player 2022

While smartphones offer convenience by being able to do it all, they’re also compromised in that they can’t do everything to high levels. If you listen and appreciate high quality music, this is a problem. But that isn’t an issue for the portable music player. These devices are dedicated to playing music at their highest…

Counterpoint: India’s smartwatch market saw record shipments in Q2

The smartwatch market in India saw a record-breaking Q2 with a fourfold increase in shipments compared to the same time last year as per the latest Counterpoint Research report. The increasing demand for smartwatches is driven by strong consumer demand and multiple high-profile launches with brands continuing to grow their online and offline presence. A…

The fight for “Instagram face”

In October 2021, Facebook announced a massive pivot, changing its name to Meta and going all in on augmented and virtual reality through a futuristic vision of the internet called the metaverse. In fact, the strategy had been taking shape gradually for years, with help from a seemingly frivolous product feature on Instagram. Face filters…

A Chicago city sensor project goes global

At a table in the Berghoff German restaurant in downtown Chicago in 2012, Charlie Catlett feverishly drew software architecture on a napkin. A senior computer scientist at Argonne National Laboratory at the time, Catlett had been working with scientists from the US Environmental Protection Agency to understand the effects of air pollution on residents’ health….

Nigerian B2B e-commerce platform Omnibiz raises millions to gain and retain retail customers

Africa’s informal retailers supply most of the continent’s population with a broad range of consumer goods and generate over $1 trillion in sales annually. However, troubles with outward inefficiencies and inward challenges have led to the prominence of B2B e-commerce startups across the region, which provide various tech-enabled solutions to address access to products and…

Otter.ai slashes free monthly transcription minutes to 300, but opens recorder bot to all

There’s good news and bad news for users of the Otter.ai transcription service. The good news is that Otter Assistant — a bot that can be configured to record meetings automatically — will now be available to everyone, regardless of whether they’re a free or paid user. The bad news, however, is that Otter.ai is…