Google to launch subscription-based VPN services; rollout in the US soon

 

(Reuters) - Alphabet Inc's Google said on Thursday it intends to dispatch a VPN administration for buyers, which would be accessible with certain membership plans for its Google One distributed storage administrations.

Intended for secure web utilization, virtual private organizations (VPNs) are utilized by people in nations where admittance to specific destinations and administrations have been banned by governments.

Google said the VPN administration will turn out in the U.S. in the coming a long time through the Google One application for Android clients, with plans to grow to more nations and to iOS, Windows and Mac working frameworks in the coming months.

(Announcing by Munsif Vengattil; Editing by Shounak Dasgupta)

(Just the feature and image of this report may have been adjusted by the Business Standard staff; the remainder of the substance is auto-produced from a partnered feed.)

Uber braces for fight as California wants it to treat drivers as employees

International News

Uber Technologies Inc. has generated billions of dollars from the labor of its drivers without the expense of treating them as employees. California is poised to disrupt that business model, and the ride-hailing behemoth is gearing up for a legal fight.
Lawmakers in the state want to reclassify workers treated as independent contractors, which may dramatically boost costs for Uber and other companies built around the gig economy. Under Assembly Bill 5, which has cleared both houses of the California Legislature, many workers would be entitled to a minimum wage, mileage reimbursement and workers compensation.
Proponents say the bill, which has the support of Governor Gavin Newsom, will bring a groundbreaking shift to finally give workers their due. Uber and its allies say that if the bill becomes law, it may not meaningfully change the business model because there are still questions about which workers qualify.
“AB 5 doesn’t all of a sudden -- magic wand -- change everybody’s status to employee,” said Tony West, Uber’s general counsel. Instead, new criteria would be used to determine whether workers are employees or contractors, he said. “Now, whether or not we win under that test in California remains to be seen,” West said.

 Skeptics say Uber may be too optimistic. While it’s used arbitration, litigation and settlements to thwart drivers’ attempts so far to be classified as employees, AB 5 could pose a significant risk to the company, especially if similar measures are adopted in other parts of the US, legal experts, academics and financial analysts say.Uber is “whistling past the graveyard” if it underestimates how much AB 5 would favor drivers, said Jason Lohr, an employment lawyer in Uber’s hometown of San Francisco...Read More

Apple launches iPhone 11 with first triple camera system for Rs 64900

International News
Technology giant Apple today unveiled the iPhone 11, a new version of the Apple Watch and iPad, announced the first all-original video subscription service and a new gaming service at its flagship fall event in California.
The Tim Cook-led company launched the iPhone 11 Pro and iPhone 11 Pro Max, a new pro line for iPhone at the widely-watched event in Cupertino.
The phones come in four finishes including a new midnight green, and will be available for pre-order beginning September 13 and in stores beginning September 20.
The iPhone 11 Pro and iPhone 11 Pro Max will be available in 64GB, 256GB and 512GB models starting at USD 999 and USD 1,099, respectively.
"iPhone 11 Pro and iPhone 11 Pro Max are the most powerful and advanced smartphones we have ever made. They are packed with sophisticated technology that pros can count on to get their work done, and for anyone who wants the very best device made, even if they are not a pro," said Phil Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing.
"iPhone 11 Pro has the first triple-camera system in iPhone and is far and away the best camera we've ever made, it provides our customers with great range of creative control and advanced photo and video editing features in iOS 13. The Super Retina XDR is the brightest and most advanced display in iPhone and the A13 Bionic chip sets a new bar for smartphone performance and power efficiency," Schiller said.

 iOS 13 will be available on September 19 as a free software update for iPhone 6s and later.Additional software features will be available on September 30 with iOS 13.1, announced Apple...Read More

Tesla's Elon Musk promises driverless 'robo taxis' by the end of next year

Company News

Elon Musk, Tesla’s chief executive, has made plenty of bold predictions. They don’t always come true.

On Monday, Musk said the company was on the cusp of making cars that could drive themselves safely on any road. He also promised that the company would begin operating a fleet of driverless “robo taxis” by the end of next year.

“I’m very convinced,” Musk said in a presentation to analysts at the company’s headquarters in Palo Alto, Calif. “In the future, people will want to outlaw people driving their own cars because they’ll be unsafe” compared with autonomous vehicles. Many auto executives and analysts think Musk is being wildly optimistic and say cars that can drive themselves at all times are at least several years away. “The idea that you can have a vehicle that can make complex decisions for full self-driving is just not plausible at this point,” said Mike Ramsey, a Gartner analyst.

If Ramsey is correct, it wouldn’t be the first time Musk has gotten ahead of himself. The chief executive once forecast that Tesla would make 500,000 cars in 2018, but it produced half that many. Last summer, he said Tesla would make 10,000 Model 3 sedans a week — about twice the number currently coming off the assembly line. Musk had also promised a Model 3 for $35,000, which spurred tens of thousands of people to put down $1,000 deposits long before production had started. Tesla recently began making that car, but customers can order it only on the telephone or by visiting a store, not online, the way most customers prefer to buy its cars.


 In the presentation on Monday, Musk and other executives described the technologies that the company is developing to allow cars to drive themselves, building on the Autopilot system that it has offered for several years. He said Tesla had developed “the world’s fastest computer” for use in self-driving cars, able to conduct 144 trillion operations per second.

$7-a-month Disney streaming service to take on Netflix, launch on Nov 12

Company News

Walt Disney Co priced its highly anticipated streaming video service below Netflix in an aggressive move to challenge the dominant streaming service and entice families to buy yet another monthly subscription.

Disney said on Thursday its new family-friendly streaming service will cost $7 monthly or $70 annually with a slate of new and classic TV shows and movies from some of the world's most popular entertainment franchises in a bid to challenge the digital dominance of Netflix.

The ad-free monthly subscription called Disney+ is set to launch on Nov. 12 and in every major global market over time, the company said. In addition to Disney films and TV shows, it will feature programming from the Marvel superhero universe, the "Star Wars" galaxy, "Toy Story" creator Pixar animation the National Geographic channel and the entire library of "The Simpsons."

"What we are putting forward is an aggressive strategy," Disney Chief Executive Bob Iger told analysts at the presentation. "We've got to be very serious and all in on it."

The company set a target of luring between 60 million to 90 million subscribers and achieving profitability in fiscal year 2024. It plans to plow a little over $1 billion in cash to finance original programming in fiscal 2020 and about $2 billion by 2024.


 The cost of the service was lower than the $7.50 per month that Wall Street analysts expected on average, according to a Reuters poll, and could likely be seen as a stronger bid to appeal to more customers.To get it in front of more people, Disney said it has struck deals with Roku Inc and Sony Corp to distribute Disney+ on streaming devices and console gaming systems and expects it to be widely available on smart televisions, tablets, and other outlets by launch...Read More

Apple has News: Launches $10 monthly magazine, subscription service

Technology News
Apple Inc. presented its long-anticipated magazine subscription service on Monday, bundling access to selected glossy titles, websites, and newspapers for $10 a month.

The new service, called Apple News+, will be incorporated into the existing Apple News app that comes pre-installed on iPhones, iPads, and Macs, Roger Rosner, vice president of applications, said Monday at an event at Apple’s Cupertino, California, headquarters.

More than 300 magazines will be part of the service, he said. It will also include The Wall Street Journal and Los Angeles Times, but not The Washington Post or The New York Times. Bloomberg Businessweek will be part of the magazine section. A demonstration showed that some magazines, like National Geographic, have dynamic, moving covers.

The service launches today for $9.99 a month, with the first month free. It will be available in the U.S. and Canada, with the U.K. and Australia coming later in the year.

The News+ service will be its own tab in the existing News app and won’t interrupt the free section, the demo showed. Magazines can be downloaded automatically for offline reading. The News+ tab features access to magazine cover stories, new issues, and individual articles. Magazine creators are tweaking their issues depending on whether the story is read on an iPhone or the bigger iPad screen.
The magazine bundle is part of a collection of new services Apple is rolling out as it seeks to boost revenue from sources other than the iPhone.


 The magazine service is based on an application called Texture, which Apple acquired about a year ago. Texture had agreements with more than 200 magazines...Read More