Category Archives: Tech
Australia’s Hospitality Industry turns to Robots to solve labor shortages
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#Robot #Tech #Technology #WhisperEyeNews
A Sydney restaurant is using a Chinese-made, multi-lingual hospitality robot to address chronic staff shortages as Australia’s economy begins to recover from COVID-19 lockdowns and border closures.
The robot waiter is programmed to know the layout of the tables and delivers food from the kitchen. It is also multi-lingual, programmed to communicate in English and Mandarin. The so-called BellaBot is built by the Chinese firm PuduTech.
Facebook finally changes company name to Meta
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KEY POINTS
- Facebook on Thursday announced that it has changed its company name to Meta. #Facebook #Meta @facebook @Meta #WhisperEyeNews
- The name change, which was announced at the Facebook Connect augmented and virtual reality conference, reflects the company’s growing ambitions beyond social media.
- The re-branding also comes after the company has dealt with a barrage of news reports over the past month stemming from whistleblower Frances Haugen’s trove of internal documents.
New innovation: Tycoon Hamis Kiggundu Launches “Hamz Campus” a learning Platform
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New innovation: Tycoon Hamis Kiggundu Launches “Hamz Campus” a learning Platform.
#News #UgandaNews #Tech #Africa #WhisperEyeNews
Businessman Hamis Kiggundu has set his hands in a plethora of ventures, and the latest on the catalog is an online learning platform named, Hamz Campus.
The new learning platform running on the website, www.hamzcampus.com, comes to address the challenges in the education sector that were occasioned by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Facebook set to rebrand the company with a new name
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Facebook is planning to change its company name next week to reflect its focus on building the metaverse, according to a source with direct knowledge of the matter.
#Facebook @facebook #News #WhisperEyeNews
The coming name change, which CEO Mark Zuckerberg plans to talk about at the company’s annual Connect conference on October 28th, but could unveil sooner, is meant to signal the tech giant’s ambition to be known for more than social media and all the ills that entail. The rebrand would likely position the blue Facebook app as one of many products under a parent company overseeing groups like Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus, and more. A spokesperson for Facebook declined to comment for this story.
Facebook already has more than 10,000 employees building consumer hardware like AR glasses that Zuckerberg believes will eventually be as ubiquitous as smartphones. In July, he told The Verge that, over the next several years, “we will effectively transition from people seeing us as primarily being a social media company to being a metaverse company.”
A rebrand could also serve to further separate the futuristic work Zuckerberg is focused on from the intense scrutiny Facebook is currently under for the way its social platform operates today. A former employee turned whistleblower, Frances Haugen, recently leaked a trove of damning internal documents to The Wall Street Journal and testified about them before Congress. Antitrust regulators in the US and elsewhere are trying to break the company up, and public trust in how Facebook does business is falling.
Facebook isn’t the first well-known tech company to change its company name as its ambitions expand. In 2015, Google reorganized entirely under a holding company called Alphabet, partly to signal that it was no longer just a search engine, but a sprawling conglomerate with companies making driverless cars and health tech. And Snapchat rebranded to Snap Inc. in 2016, the same year it started calling itself a “camera company” and debuted its first pair of Spectacles camera glasses.
I’m told that the new Facebook company name is a closely-guarded secret within its walls and not known widely, even among its full senior leadership. A possible name could have something to do with Horizon, the name of the still-unreleased VR version of Facebook-meets-Roblox that the company has been developing for the past few years. The name of that app was recently tweaked to Horizon Worlds shortly after Facebook demoed a version for workplace collaboration called Horizon Workrooms.
Aside from Zuckerberg’s comments, Facebook has been steadily laying the groundwork for a greater focus on the next generation of technology. This past summer it set up a dedicated metaverse team. More recently, it announced that the head of AR and VR, Andrew Bosworth, will be promoted to chief technology officer. And just a couple of days ago Facebook announced plans to hire 10,000 more employees to work on the metaverse in Europe.
The metaverse is “going to be a big focus, and I think that this is just going to be a big part of the next chapter for the way that the internet evolves after the mobile internet,” Zuckerberg told The Verge’s Casey Newtonthis summer. “And I think it’s going to be the next big chapter for our company too, really doubling down in this area.”
Complicating matters is that, while Facebook has been heavily promoting the idea of the metaverse in recent weeks, it’s still not a concept that’s widely understood. The term was coined originally by sci-fi novelist Neal Stephenson to describe a virtual world people escape to from a dystopian, real world. Now it’s being adopted by one of the world’s largest and most controversial companies — and it’ll have to explain why its own virtual world is worth diving into.
Story: Theverge
TECH: Windows 11: A new era for the PC begins today
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Today marks an exciting milestone in the history of Windows. #Windows11 #Tech #Uganda #WhisperEyeNews As the day becomes October 5 in each time zone around the world, availability of Windows 11 begins through a free upgrade on eligible Windows 10 PCs and on new PCs pre-installed with Windows 11 that can be purchased beginning today.
Windows is a driving force for innovation. It’s an enduring platform for each one of us to create. And its home for over a billion people to do their jobs, live their dreams and connect with the people they love.
Breaking News: Facebook, Whatsapp & Instagram reconnected after 7 hours offline
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Facebook family, we’ve missed you! Here’s the latest on the outage that affected social media platforms for about six hours on Tuesday.
#WhisperEyeNews #FacebookBack #Facebook #News #Whatsapp #Instagram
Social media giant Facebook’s stock has closed down almost 5% after an outage meant its platforms have gone down for several hours.
BREAKING NEWS: Mark Zuckerberg Loses $7 Billion in Net Worth as Facebook Stock Falls
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#Facebook #Zuckerberg #Instagram #stock
Mark Zuckerberg’s personal wealth has fallen by nearly $7 billion in a few hours, knocking him down a notch on the list of the world’s richest people, after a whistleblower came forward and outages took Facebook’s flagship products offline.
A selloff sent the social-media giant’s stock plummeting around 5% on Monday, adding to a drop of about 15% since mid-September.
Offline: Facebook is totally down, along with Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger
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Offline: Facebook is totally down, along with Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger.
#Facebook #Whatsapp #Instagram #News #WhisperEyeNews
The websites and apps for all of the services were responding with server errors. Reports on DownDetector.com showed the outages appear to be widespread, but it’s unclear if it impacts all users or just some locations. It’s not currently known what’s causing the outage.
All three platforms stopped working shortly before noon ET.
“We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products,” a spokesperson said. “We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience.”
In 2019, a similar outage lasted about an hour. Facebook said that outage was caused by a technical issue. Major websites can also sometimes go down if content delivery networks, or CDNs, go offline. That happened in June, when one such CDN, Fastly, was down due to technical issues. That caused major websites including Amazon, Reddit and The New York Times to go down.
This news is developing. Please check back for updates.
UCC warns Ugandans on fake news, online video advice, vows to prosecute many
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UCC warns Ugandans on fake news, online video advice, vows to prosecute many. Whisper Eye News
The Uganda communication industry regulatory body, Uganda Communications Commission (UCC) has warned Ugandans over circulation and publishing unauthentic information.
The commission strictly bans publication of what it termed as fake news, videos, and advice through digital platforms by any individual.
Scientists Identify Data As Vital Tool For Innovations
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Data scientists have indicated that data is one of the potential tools for innovation that can be tapped into by the young innovators to help in solving the pending challenges in communities.
Data scientists, analysts, developers and civic technology organizations believe that Africa and Uganda in particular have the potential to use the data at their disposal to come up meaningful solutions to the challenges faced by communities.
According the deputy chief of party Resilient Africa Network (RAN) Makerere University School of Public Health, Dr. Roy Mayega, Uganda is struggling with several resilience challenges yet it has an internal potential as a country to harness available resources including data to solve some of the biggest challenges affecting communities.
Lira registers 15 % reduction in Malaria prevalence by IRS
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Lira district has registered a 15 per cent reduction in Malaria prevalence, thanks to the Indoor- Residual Spray (IRS) program. IRS is the application of long-lasting insecticides in residences to either kill or repel the mosquitoes.
It is believed to be suitable for Uganda because mosquitoes that spread malaria parasites feed and rest indoors. The government introduced IRS in Lira district in 2014 following an upsurge in malaria prevalence in the district. In 2012, malaria prevalence stood at 38% in the district. It reduced to 13.6% in the 2016/2017 financial year and 8.4% in the 2017/2018 financial year.
Unwanted witness urges govt to tax online advertisers, content promoters but not Internet
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The government has been advised to explore the possibility of taxing online advertising and content promoters instead of imposing a tax on internet data bundles.
Early this month, Finance Minister Matia Kasaija announced twelve new measures through which the government intends to increase its revenue collections in the financial year 2012/22. One of the measures is the introduction of a 12 per cent tax on the internet.
However, Unwanted Witness Uganda, a civil society organization that advocates for internet freedoms, cautions that the proposal will instead raise the cost of the internet, and limit its usage amongst Ugandans.
Simi Registers Good Phone Sales on Local Market
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simi phoneSimi Technologies, the manufacturer of Uganda’s first mobile phones, says it has recorded high sales during the first year of its operations compared to their project. Simi technologies has been in business for 13 months following its launch late in 2019.
David Beecham Okwere, the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Simi Technologies, says that the company has managed to sell 400, 000 pieces of mobile phones since it started operations in November 2019. The company makes both feature and smartphones models, sold locally and internationally.
