Canadian Reviewer Weekly Roundup 4/9-4/15

First look at the Microsoft Surface Studio and Surface Dial

Japanese creatives get the spotlight in web documentary series

Overview of the Canadian Gaming Industry

Google Home could be getting multi-user support soon

Here’s our first look at ‘Thor: Ragnarok’

SickKids Hospital highlights strength in Moms in latest campaign

Contest! Win an ASUS ZenFone 3 smartphone!

Windows 10 Creators Update is now available

Ford's new project helps put babies to sleep by replicating physics of a moving car

Evernote releases Touch Bar specific functionality on MacBook Pros

Review: Linksys VELOP Whole Home Mesh Network

We give this Netflix spring cleaning a "thumbs up!"

Samsung Galaxy S8 to launch without Bixby voice assistant feature

D-Link launches first HomeKit-enabled camera

Study shows music streaming services are shortening musical intros

Ubisoft gamifies your stress management with O.zen

Here’s your first look at ‘Star Wars: The Last Jedi’

Nintendo discontinues the NES Classic

An Alphabet company develops health-centric smartwatch

David Bowie’s musical gets VR treatment

David Bowie’s Lazarus musical had a very short run in both New York and London. Now, if you find yourself in London at the end of the month, you’ll get to experience the show albeit in virtual reality. Lazarus will be part of the V&A Museum’s “From VHS to VR” exhibit in London. It’ll be part of the museum’s Performance Festival happening on April 30^th. The VR experience will place you right into the recording of Lazarus during its King’s Cross Theatre run. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like the Lazarus VR experience will extend beyond that. But who knows? We’re keeping our fingers crossed.

Source: Engadget

An Alphabet company develops health-centric smartwatch

Google and Android Wear might be the public face of wearables for Alphabet. But there’s another Alphabet division working in the wearables space. The company called Verily announced its new smartwatch called Study Watch. It’ll serve as a regular watch to users but it has more functions beyond that. Verily’s main business is developing tools for doctors to collect patient data and that’s what the Study Watch does.

There are a number of sensors in the wearable that collects information such as a person’s heart rate, inertial movements, and electrodermal activity. This data will be collected and encrypted in the device itself for security purposes and will then be uploaded to Verily’s cloud servers for processing via machine learning. This watch can help identify patterns in things like the progression of Parkinson’s disease or give doctors a baseline level of health to see how a person goes from healthy to sick. Verily didn’t too much release information but they did say it could last a week on a single charge. But don’t expect this to come out and be sold to the general public.

Source: Android Authority

Airbnb introduces new security measures to help stop account takeovers

Airbnb is hoping to prevent accounts being illegally taken over by hackers and scammers with the new security measures it’s introducing into its app. One of them is multi-factor authentication. So whether you’re a gust or host, Airbnb will now require you to verify your login via a second account either through SMS or email. Airbnb is also introducing SMS alerts so you’ll see if there are changes made to your account with or without your knowledge.

According to the company, one of the most common security breaches on the service is when a scammer takes control of an account by obtaining the password. This, of course, poses a greater threat for Airbnb as this gives strangers access to private details about homes and the ability to rent this out to others. Airbnb says they are already using predictive models that are trained with machine learning techniques to flag uncharacteristic behavior. But that doesn’t seem to be enough. Hopefully, these new measures will help keep both hosts and guests safe.