Welcome to Tech Brief, your weekly wrap-up on all that’s happened in the tech and startup industries this week!
It’s been an exciting week for geeks the Tech world, with a breakthrough in the search for gravitational waves, a major Instagram update (the one everyone’s been waiting for), and a new form of Wi-Fi that works through… the lightbulb in your home.
Gravity Is Real, You Guys…
Okay so it’s not that simple. The headline that Tech Insider used was more along the lines of “Scientists just detected gravitational waves for the first time ever”.
100 years after Einstein predicted their existence, we finally have proof that these tiny waves don’t just exist, but are travelling across the universe like they’re on a sightseeing tour. Einstein was not confident that we would be able to measure these minuscule waves.
The news came on Thursday, 11 February in an announcement by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), a $1 billion experiment that has searched for signs of the phenomenon since 2002. So close to calling themselves LEGO, huh?
Here’s a very helpful official video that explains everything. SCIENCE.
Instagram Gives The People What They Want (Finally)
After many, many requests from its users, Instagram has finally offered up a serious update: Multiple account switching. Gone are the Middle Ages of logging out and logging in whenever you’re posting from another account. Journalists and social media managers around the world breathed a collective sigh of relief on Monday (just in time for CNY!) when the new feature arrived.
The real winners here? Pet owners who can now manage two accounts at the same time: their own, and their pet’s. Biddy The Hedgehog forever.
Riding on that triumph, the photo-sharing site quickly delivered a slick one-two combo by announcing yesterday (Feb 11) that it would start rolling out view counts for users’ video content. This comes as Instagram makes an obvious push towards non-static content, such as the GIF-like video clips created through Boomerang, the standalone app launched by Instagram last October. This also comes at a time when Instagram is pushing for more ads and ad dollars.
And let’s not forget who the Facebook-Instagram alliance are fighting against. Twitter-Vine, anyone?
Remember Ultron? Here’s Why New Supervillains Are So Tech.
Ahead of the mounting hype for “X-Men: Apocalypse”, Inverse has written a piece about “technopaths” (see: Ultron, Apocalypse, that girl in “Sky High” who turned out to be evil) and why we’ll see even more of them in the years to come. Think “Die Hard 4.0” but instead of a team of hackers, it’s just one supernatural cyberterrorist.
Wi-Fi Will Be Beamed Through Your Lightbulb. Yes.
It’s called Li-Fi for “light fidelity”, and it can reportedly transmit data at speeds of up to 1GB per SECOND. That’s about 100 times faster than Wi-Fi.
Obviously, limitations include sunlight interference, but the developer claims that the receiver (yes, there’s a receiver) is able to filter out “ambient light”, that’s your low-tech bulbs that Thomas Edison slaved over.
How quickly do you want your cat videos to load?
Counting Sheep With This? Good Luck.
The only link this video has with tech is… aerial photography?
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