Triple Beam: The Sonos Beam review

By Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla

We live in a time where smart speakers are as common as TVs and smartphones. Powering these smart speakers are intelligent assistants which can respond to queries, set timers, run searches and play back an incredible range of streaming music, news and online content.

Behind each intelligent assistant is a tech company and its ecosystem of products. Amazon has millions of items for sale, Google has a massive advertising model, and Apple wants to shoehorn users into its Neverland of apps, services and devices.

Many of the existing $500 smart speaker releases of late seem to be solutions in search of problems. Apple’s HomePod is a circular single speaker that claims to be able to generate stereo sound. The Google Home Max is a heavy and oversized boombox for the streaming age. Both are expensive and serve one purpose, to play back streaming music and serve as the link for expanded smart home functionality.

The Sonos Beam, now that’s a different story. The second smart speaker from Sonos is also their third soundbar product and it is the hat trick of smart speakers capable of solving many problems at once.

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BC Cancer partners with Microsoft to answer cancer’s most complex questions and bring hope to patients

Microsoft Canada and BC Cancer have established a game-changing partnership that is answering cancer’s most complex questions at a rate never thought possible. Fuelled by advances in molecular biology, genomics and computer science, BC Cancer researchers are applying a radically investigative approach known as single cell genomics to analyze the millions of individual cells that make up cancer, made possible by cloud computing.

Together, BC Cancer’s single cell genomics expertise and Microsoft’s innovative computing resources will accelerate the pace of research to understand cancer at a granular level, and bring hope to British Columbians facing cancer. 

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First impressions of the BlackBerry KEY2

By Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla

We now know that the BlackBerry is aiming for the KEY series of smartphone to be a line. The KEYOne was well received by keyboard fans and was an outstanding opening salvo for TCL's BlackBerry Mobile which resulted in various variants and some spec upgrades.

The BlackBerry KEY2 looks and feels like a more refined KEYOne, with marked improvements in the QWERTY keyboard department as well as a spanking new dual-camera now enabling 2X zoom and portrait mode.

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Shopify Ping is a new one-stop work chat app for businesses

Shopify recently announced Ping, its onestop work chat app for businesses. 

With almost half of Shopify’s 600K merchants running their stores on mobile, we are always developing ways for them to work on-the-go. Shopify Ping is a free iOS app available to all Shopify merchants that brings customer conversations, marketing workflows, and more together in a single app powered by a messaging-style interface like the ones merchants already use to stay in touch with friends and family.

“Shopify merchants are conducting many business conversations across multiple apps every day, not only to run their day-to-day operations, but also to manage customer inquiries. Shopify Ping was created to make all of this easier to manage,” said Michael Perry, Director of Product at Shopify. “It’s a one-stop messaging app that lets them spend more time on what matters most - running their businesses seamlessly and deepening customer relationships.”

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