Welcome to Tech Brief, your weekly wrap-up on all that’s happened in the tech and startup industries this week!
This week we saw the final nail in the coffin for Picasa, Tumblr freed from the evil clutches of Yahoo, Nissan dabbling with the paranormal, and Samsung giving the first peek at the Galaxy S7 to a… llama. We’ve got some great stories for you in this edition of Tech Brief.
R.I.P. Picasa (2002 – 2016)
After shaping the early days of online photo services, Google‘s image organising program Picasa will no longer be supported from 15 March 2016. In an update on the official Google Photos/Picasa blog, the reason for the closure was obvious, given how it was overlapping with Google Photos. Picasa just seemed like a relic of the past that everyone was too kind to discard.
Google Acquires Its First Southeast Asian Company
Congrats to the guys at Pie, a Singapore-based work chat app. The news was broken by Tech In Asia Thursday evening, based on a private Facebook post from Grace Chng, senior reporter at Straits Times.
This is the tech giant’s first acquisition in Southeast Asia!
Tumblr is (Somewhat) Free of Yahoo’s Madness For Now…
Ctrl + Z, Ctrl + Z! Slowly morphing into the joke of the 2010s, Yahoo has revealed plans to undo a “sales integration effort” that began a year ago.
Failing to understand that Tumblr users are a completely unique breed, a plan to merge marketing and ad efforts between Tumblr and the main Yahoo team will now be axed, having lost the head of sales at Tumblr. Lee Brown left in February 2015, a month after the disastrous plan was launched, to become the Chief Revenue Officer at the land of milk and honey Buzzfeed.
So stop being so mean to Staff. They probably don’t like their jobs very much either.
The “official” reason (a.k.a. the one they present when they’re asking for funding) is to demonstrate the technology involved in Nissan‘s self-parking feature for automobiles. Yeah right.
“Congrats on your promotion, Steve.” /staff clapping/ “OH SHI-”
Samsung Got A Llama To Unbox The Galaxy S7… Also Because They Can
The llama can paint pretty well, huh? Meanwhile, Samsung Indonesia (accidentally?) posted a YouTube video that shows wireless charging and waterproof features. The video is still up, by the way.
And a few more interesting stories…
- Remember “Time Crisis”? Here’s why the arcade is about to make a comeback, all thanks to virtual reality (VR).
- Floppy Disc, CD, Thumbdrive, Flashdrive; the next big storage medium could just be this glass disc that’s just 1 inch across. Did we mention it stores 360TB of data for 13.8 billion years?
- Why San Fran is San Fran: Here’s what one writer/venture capitalist discovered on his trip to Silicon Valley and San Francisco, and what startups in Singapore could take note of.
- Learn about the world’s efforts at bringing the next billion people to the Web with these fun infographics.
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Go back in time and read last week’s edition here.
