There has been a lot of talk about how contact tracing apps could help keep people safe from COVID-19 as countries try to move out of lockdown. There’s a really useful piece on Bloomberg News outlining the issues between various proposed models, including that being developed by Apple and Google.

Apple and Google even renamed their framework Exposure Notification, signaling that it doesn’t do true contact tracing, the process of tracking a virus from person to person. Instead, it lets individual smartphones keep track of which other handsets they’ve come close to by using Bluetooth wireless signals. If a person notifies the network they have tested positive for Covid-19, everyone they could have infected is issued a warning, if they’ve opted in. The system does this matching anonymously on each device, rather than in a central database that governments could use to track the disease more broadly — a feature the companies say is more secure and helps quell user concerns about who sees their sensitive health data.

Zoom has become, it is fair to say, synonymous with video conferencing in this work from home era. Wired looked at how it beat Skype to become so dominant.

Not that people are using either as much as Zoom, which benefited both from being free to download and more reliable than its competitors. (Eric Yuan, Zoom’s founder, has been working on web conferencing software since he arrived in the US in 1997 from China to work for WebEx). An April 2020 survey of 1,110 US companies by Creative Strategies showed that 27 per cent of businesses primarily used Zoom for video calls and meetings, compared to 18 per cent that used Teams, and 15 per cent that used Skype. Many companies had quietly moved over from Skype to Zoom in the intervening years as Skype added more and more features that didn’t fit the core functionality of the service: producing decent quality video calls. And so when coronavirus hit, what in the first half of 2017 would have been a call to download Skype to keep in touch instead became a demand to download Zoom.

American Idol is the latest show to be filmed using iPhones. A kit including three iPhone 11 Pros is being sent to each of the judges, Techcrunch reported.

Apple’s among those tech companies working with production houses, getting some iPhone-powered rigs into the hands of producers and hosts. The list includes a Parks and Recreation reunion, Conan O’Brien and Jimmy Fallon’s late night shows and now longstanding prime-time talent contest, American Idol. The ABC show’s producers are sending home studio rigs to each of the contestants and judges to shoot the final few episodes of the season. It’s a three-camera setup, including three iPhone 11 Pros, a tripod and a ring light. The production team is helping out with camera setup and editing at a safe distance, from home.

A filmed version of Hamilton will be available on Disney+ from July 3, Deadline reported. It had previously been slated to go into cinemas in October next year.

Disney has just changed its plans to release a filmed version of the Lin-Manuel Miranda musical Hamilton. It will now be released July 3 on Disney+, accelerating an original October 15, 2021 theatrical release, followed by a Disney+ berth. Disney Executive Chairman Robert Iger and Lin-Manuel Miranda just announced on Good Morning America that Hamilton will brighten up the July 4 weekend with the seminal hip hop American history tale.