Rogers brings Roam Like Home to more wireless consumers

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Bringing smartphones or other mobile devices while on trips is almost a necessity. But having to pay so much for roaming fees is a bummer. Rogers hopes to help out its clients by expanding its Roam Like Home to more postpaid wireless consumers. This offer is meant to let Canadian subscribers use their wireless plan as they would at home when traveling to the U.S. and over 100 destinations worldwide.

Rogers says almost 800,000 more of its subscribers can avail of this data bucket along with talk and text included in the plan. This charges $5 per day in the US and $10 per day for the other destinations around the world. Customers will only be charged for a maximum of 10 days on each monthly bill or $50 in the U.S. and $100 in eligible international destination. Long distance charges won’t be applied to calls and texts made to local numbers in your destination or back home to Canada. You can find out more about this offering in this link.

Twitter tweaks search results to show ‘relevant’ tweets

Comparison of the old and new Twitter search results

Aside from doing it on its main timeline, Twitter is updating what results you see when you search for something on its service. Instead of going with reverse chronological order, Twitter is basing it off relevance to the user. According to Twitter’s early trials, this approach results in users engaging more with the service. In a blog post, Lisa Huang, senior software engineer for search quality, says the change was made because “the most recent results may not be what the searchers are looking for.” You might get a better grasp of a certain topic from popular tweets or other more relevant tweets than the most recent ones.

Twitter relies on its algorithm and your user behavior to collect this information. It seems to be using roughly the same programming it uses for your main timeline but perhaps with some adjustments since it has to pull information from the social network’s entire database. Now, when you pull up a search on Twitter the different categories (most popular ones, the latest, by people, photos, videos, etc.) will now be algorithmically controlled.

Source: VentureBeat

The Black Keys hesitantly brings latest albums to Spotify

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The Black Keys have caved and put two of its latest albums (2011’s El Camino and 2014’s Turn Blue) on Spotify. It wasn’t without any hesitation, though. As The Black Keys’s drummer Patrick Carney tweeted: “After five years of struggling with this we agreed to put the keys songs on Spotify. I’d rather people hear our music than not.” Carney, who has spoken out against the streaming service before, also tweeted: “No advance or money was exchanged. I’m still an advocate for artists to be paid fairly. I’m still apprehensive.”

In a 2014 interview with the Seattle Times, Carney has acknowledged that Spotify was the “way of the future” but he hopes artists were giving fair share of revenue. "My whole thing about music is: if somebody’s making money then the artist should be getting a fair cut of it," he said. "The owner of Spotify is worth something like 3 billion dollars… he’s richer than Paul McCartney and he’s 30 and he’s never written a song."

Source: Billboard

BlackBerry creates Innovation Centre for Connected and Autonomous Vehicles

BlackBerry just announced the QNX Autonomous Vehicle Innovation Centre (AVIC). Housed within the BlackBerry QNX facility in Ottawa, Ontario, the centre will accelerate the realization of connected and self-driving vehicles by developing production-ready software independently and in collaboration with partners in the private and public sector. 

As part of this initiative, BlackBerry QNX plans to recruit and hire local software engineers to work on ongoing and emerging engineering projects for connected and autonomous cars. The Ministry of Transportation of Ontario recently approved BlackBerry QNX to test autonomous vehicles on Ontario roads as part of a pilot program. One of the centre’s first projects will be supporting this pilot as well as BlackBerry QNX’s work with the University of Waterloo, PolySync, and Renesas Electronics to build an autonomous concept vehicle. 

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