Sale of Nest Protect smoke alarms halted while flaw is resolved

Nest CEO Tony Fadell released a letter announcing that due to a discovered flaw in a feature that allows consumers to wave their hands to turn off the alarm. This "Nest Wave'  feature could be turned on unintentionally which would compromise the device's effectivity.

"We feel that the best and safest thing to do is to immediately disable the Nest Wave feature to resolve the issue and remove any safety concerns.," Fadell notes. "While we fix Nest Wave, we have also halted sales of all new Nest Protect alarms to ensure no one buys an alarm that needs an immediate update." To this end, sales of Nest Protect smoke alarms have been halted until a solution is found.

"Once we have a solution that ensures Nest Wave works as intended, we will update our software to turn this feature back on. This will only happen after extensive testing and once we have received approval from safety agencies in the US, Canada and UK. We expect this to take at least two or three months and we’ll continue to update you as we have more information."

Apple looks to boost Siri's speech recognition with Novauris acquisition

With the competition scrambling to get in on the intelligent personal assistant game, Apple is looking to add some speech recognition props to Siri's already expansive skillset. Apple purchased eminent automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology company Novauris Technologies which was a subsidiary of Dragon Systems, a well known voice and dictation technology pioneer behind DragonDictate and Dragon NaturallySpeaking.

According to Techcrunch, the acquisition, "apparently took place last year, but had not been announced. At Apple as of last fall, the team is now working on improving Siri, the speech-based virtual assistant technology that comes pre-installed on Apple’s mobile devices."

Novauris's technology spans both device and server-side as well as cloud solutions for automatic speech recognition and it will be interesting to see how this technology matures and makes it to Apple's products.

Source: TechCrunch

NHL fans to benefit from 700MHz spectrum auction

Rogers is the only company to secure two 12MHz blocks of contiguous, paired 700MHz lower band spectrum in virtually every major market across Canada, securing twice as much contiguous spectrum as the competition. This is an advantage because the two contiguous blocks can be combined to deliver consistently fast downloads and uninterrupted video streaming in more places than ever before. Which is apparently great news for hockey fans watching their favourite players and teams on mobile devices.

"We went into this auction with a clear plan to win the best spectrum for our customers. There is clear demand for the ultimate video experience and it will be a big part of how we bring the NHL to hockey fans," said Guy Laurence, President and Chief Executive Officer.

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Nokia MixRadio reaches 30 millionth track milestone

Nokia's MixRadio streaming service just added the 30 millionth track, to its international catalogue. The track, ‘Ma Tegi Hena’ is by Lebanese artist Nancy Ajram and is from the forthcoming album Nancy8. The thirty million tracks available on Nokia MixRadio, puts it ahead of all other radio based streaming services.

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