Apple sends out media invites as speculation ramps up on launch of iPhone 8“spaceship” campus in Silicon Valley

         Apple sent out invitations on Thursday to a first-ever media event in the Steve Jobs Theatre at its new “spaceship” campus in Silicon Valley.

            Clearly, Apple wants to do something different for the 10th anniversary” of the iPhone, NPD Group analyst Stephen Baker said.

Some reports said a new iPhone will include a high-quality, edge-to-edge screen with a notch in the top for an extra camera supporting 3D facial recognition.

             Some speculate that the new handset will have a glass backing that offers wireless charging.

“We are expecting a major design refresh on Apple,” GlobalData analyst Avi Greengart said. “That has been a sore point, especially in China. People are looking to show off a status symbol, so it needs to look different than Huawei or Xiaomi, and I think it will.”

Warren Buffett says why I haven't been criticizing Donald Trump

 At a time when corporate leaders have been highly critical of President Donald Trump over his response to deadly violence at a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, Berkshire Hathaway Chairman and CEO Warren Buffett has remained quiet, telling CNBC on Wednesday he tries not to mix business and politics.
"I'm not in the business of attacking any president, nor do I think I should be," Buffett said in a "Squawk Alley" interview.
                  Earlier this month, a deluge of CEOs distanced themselves from Trump in the wake of Charlottesville by leaving White House business advisory councils, which were later dissolved.
The tipping point for corporate America seemed to come Aug. 15 when the president angrily doubled down on his original comments about the deadly rally, and again blamed both the white nationalists and the counterprotesters for the mayhem.
                Trump's critics felt he put neo-Nazis on the same moral footing as the demonstrators who gathered to denounce their racist views.As a supporter of Democrat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential race, Buffett said he was disappointed by the election result. "I worked for Hillary. I raised money for Hillary. I voted for Hillary. I was disappointed when she lost."
But Buffett argued, as he has in the past, that "this country will move forward [under Trump.] It is important that government functions well."
               "I won't say if my candidate doesn't win, and probably half the time they haven't, I'm going to take my ball and go home," he said.

LG's V30 launched as it looks to challenge the Samsung Galaxy Note 8

                         LG Electronics launched a phone with a huge 6-inch screen as the South Korean firm tries to take users away from Samsung's Note series of devices.
The LG V30 is the company's "phablet" device as it looks to take advantage of the trend towards bigger screens.
Key specs include:

• A dual rear camera with 16 megapixel and 13 megapixel sensors
• 6-inch OLED display that supports High Dynamic Range (HDR) content. This is content with boosted contrast
• Fingerprint sensor, face scanning technology, and voice recognition to unlock the phone
• Water and dust resistant
• Runs Google's Android and has the company's voice assistant known as Google Assistant

Consumers are moving towards bigger screens and most major smartphone manufacturers are attempting to capitalize on the trend. But users are also doing more with their devices from watching movies and TV to working.
                       The LG V30 is aimed at users who want a mixture of productivity and entertainment, similar to Samsung's Galaxy Note 8 which was released last week.

 LG V30 certainly ticks all the boxes when it comes to specs and the company has clearly listened to consumers in an effort to understand what they want," Ben Wood, chief of research at CCS Insight, told CNBC in an interview.

Apple to remove home button in upcoming high-end iPhone..

 

The home button is headed to the trash bin, if a report by Bloomberg is to be believed. According to the report, Apple is ditching the button to make room for a larger screen in one version of the next iPhone. Instead of a home button, users will perform actions using on-screen gesture controls involving a sort of dock of icons.

• If true this would be the biggest change in iPhone design since the launch of the device in 2007.

• The home button has been a staple in iPhone design since the beginning. It’s used to wake a device, return to the app grid, and, more recently, for Touch ID fingerprint recognition. All those tasks would be performed differently if removed. However, the Bloomberg report carefully states only the high-end version onstead of pressing a home button, users would interact with a thin software bar that can be moved around for different actions. Drag it to the middle of the screen to open the phone, or if in an app, activate the multitasking menu. Users can change apps or go back to the home screen, Bloomberg says. And it shouldn’t end there. If this report is true, Apple likely has cooked up all sorts of logical interactions for this software bar.
• Apple has been foreshadowing the removal of the home button for some time. For the iPhone 7, it replaced the button with a non-moving version that simulated a click through with tactile response. The iPad also recently gained an app menu reminiscent of OS X’s dock. Bloomberg uses this as an illustration of the upcoming iPhone changes.f the upcoming iPhone is losing the home button, which jibes with other rumors from the past few months.

Blockchain technology expands beyond Bitcoin and into car-sharing

• Accounting and consulting firm EY, part of Ernst & Young Global, said on Wednesday it was launching a blockchain based system that will enable companies or groups of individuals to more easily share ownership of vehicles and access to cars and trucks. EY could deploy the system, called Tesseract, in a test with an unnamed partner within the next quarter, EY partner John Simlett told Reuters in an interview .
• Blockchain technology allows shared access to data that is maintained by a network of computers, instead of a trusted third party.
  • A group of 10 large food and retail companies earlier this month said they had joined an IBM effort to study how blockchain systems could be applied to food supply chains.
  Microsoft also recently said it was developing what it called the CoCo framework to reduce the complexity of adapting blockchain technology to commercial transactions.

Google launches ARCore augmented reality SDK 

Google has launched a preview of ARCore, a software development kit that brings augmented reality capabilities to Android mobile devices, including those without high-end hardware like depth sensing cameras.

•  If that sounds familiar, it’s because Google already has an AR platform called Tango. But that earlier effort only works on a handful of powerful phones specially tricked out with the necessary sensors to allow you to place virtual 3D objects in a physical space and interact with them through your phone as if they were really there.

YouTube’s big makeover continues with redesigned mobile app & new logo and more..

Google says this new logo – a cleaned up version of the YouTube wordmark and icon – was designed to be more flexible across devices of varying screen sizes. On smaller screens, YouTube can use just the icon alone to abbreviate its logo, while still making it easy to spot. The updated logo and icon are rolling out across desktop and mobile starting today .

• The desktop update also includes a great “dark mode” for nighttime viewing, giving YouTube a more cinematic feel. Unfortunately, this feature is not making its way over to YouTube’s mobile app today .