Charlotte Henry

Teaching children how the value of money and budgets is hard. It is arguably getting even more difficult in our nearly cashless world. It can also be difficult for parents when their kids want some pocket money, but they do not have any cash on them. The AP had a good feature on this issue on Monday. It listed a variety of pre-paid debit cars and apps that can be downloaded and used as a virtual piggy bank.  They include apps such as gohenry, Nimbl and Osper in the UK, and Famzoo and Greenlight, which also works with Apple Pay, in the US. The aim is to offer both flexibility to kids and control for parents.

On Tuesday, Amazon announced that Crystal City in Virginia and New York City will house its second headquarters. You might imagine that the people in those areas would be excited by the prospect of new jobs and investment, not least the political leaders. Some, such as New York Governor Andrew Cuomo are. However, some serious concerns have been raised, not least Queens, where the New York City set up will be. The Financial Times took a look at what is causing this rather cold welcome for Amazon.

Yet while Andrew Cuomo, New York governor, and Mayor Bill de Blasio were toasting their success on Tuesday at luring the online retailer to the Long Island City section of Queens, Mr Gianaris could hardly have been less pleased. Along with a local member of the City Council, he issued a blistering statement accusing Amazon of “running a cynical game” in which it “duped” New York into offering $3bn in tax incentives and subsidies to woo one of the wealthiest companies on earth.

CNBC’s Jim Cramer is a well known Apple bull. Indeed, his charitable trust owns shares of Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Google’s parent company Alphabet. Last night he pursued this line – even encouraging investors to buy shares despite the difficulties faced by Apple stock in particular. A news report on the CNBC website focuses on the Mad Money presenter’s criticism of analysts who have been downgrading Apple since its earnings call on 1 November. He believes that they are overlooking the possibility that Apple may actually have anticipated some weakness in sales prior to the earnings. Cramer’s comments on what on what he refers to as the FANG stongs – Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google (Alphabet), might also be worth a read for anyone trying to work out what is going on with big tech stocks right now. Here’s some of what he had to say:

“What do you think of the possibility that Apple knew all about the weaknesses in unit sales that are now so revelatory?” he asked, pointing to reports that Apple may have tapered its orders from a key supplier. “CFO Luca Maestri even alluded to that weakness when he told us the guidance accounts for ‘uncertainty around the supply and demand balance’ of recently launched products.”

LONDON – UK telecoms provider EE announced that it is bringing super-fast 5G mobile connectivity to 16 UK cities in 2019. The launch will initially take place in London, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Belfast, Birmingham and Manchester. It will then be rolled out to Bristol, Coventry, Glasgow, Hull, Leeds, Leicester, Liverpool, Newcastle, Nottingham and Sheffield. While this is undoubtedly good news for UK consumers, ZDNet explains that we should not get too excited yet: “The first 1,500 sites that EE is upgrading to 5G amount to around 7% of its total sites, and cover 15% of the UK population. However, these sites use 25% of all data across the whole network.” Here are some more details on the rollout:

Coverage won’t be total: 5G will be offered in the busiest parts of the six launch cites — including Hyde Park in London, Manchester Arena, Belfast City Airport, the Welsh Assembly, Edinburgh Waverley train station and Birmingham’s Bullring. EE said it will also be offering some 5G services in the busiest parts of ten other UK cities — Glasgow, Newcastle, Liverpool, Leeds, Hull, Sheffield, Nottingham, Leicester, Coventry and Bristol.

It’s been just two months since iOS 12 was released, but people are already looking ahead to what Apple might do with the next iteration of its mobile operating system. MacWorld‘s Jason Cross has published his wishlist and I suspect there is much on there that TMO readers will agree with. It includes the introduction of dark mode as seen in macOS Mojave, an upgrade for Siri and a revamped camera. Cross would also like to see YouTube 4K and HDR video support, not to mention more flexibility and power in the iPad version. Here’s a bit of what he hopes comes next on  iOS:

Apple can do more, much more. The latest iPhones and iPad Pros sport processors, cameras, and sensors that are capable of incredible things, but iOS at times feels like its holding us back. In particular, the iPad Pro feels like it has everything it needs to be a complete laptop replacement—except an operating system that lets you do everything you need to do on a laptop.

A new patent reveals that Apple is trying to use microphone to solve the problem of people wearing headphones the wrong way round. Typically our headphones are marked either L and R or having some other kind of indication as to which side is which. Apple has a new patent, reported by AppleInsider,  for a “system and method for automatic right-left ear detection for headphones.” It would use the microphone in the headset to discover the headphone’s orientation and alter the left and right channels accordingly. The patent details a system of five microphones per ear cup, including one inside. Here’s a little insight into what might be on offer in the future:

By listening to the voice of the user, and monitoring the volume of the voice by each microphone, the headphones can determine which edge is closest to the user’s mouth, and therefore which orientation the headphones reside. The offsetting of the top-side microphones also allows for just those two microphones to be used, with the logic the microphone of the two that has the louder volume is closer to the mouth.

GitHub, the widely used code management and development tool, revealed Thursday that it hosts 100 million repositories. VentureBeat has a good breakdown of the news and the current state of the platform. It includes the fascinating bit of trivia that Algeria has the most repositories per capita, while Egypt boasts the highest number of open source repositories. GitHub is used by approximately 31 million developers around the globe. It was bought by Microsoft in June for $7.5 million.

Source code management and developer collaboration platform GitHub today announced users have now created 100 million repositories. For context, GitHub had 33 million repositories when the company was founded in 2008, and nearly one in three repositories were made within the past year.