IntellectBeat

Tag Heuer, a premium Swiss-based watchmaker, has finally announced the launch date of its first Android Wear smartwatch. Named Tag Heuer Connected, the smartwatch would be launched at the LVMH Tower in New York City on November 9 as per company invites. While details are scarce for the device as of now, Tag Heuer Connected is said to be based on the company's popular Tag Carrera watch. The company also published a teaser image showing the crown of the watch on its social media handles, but the overall design still remains a mystery. Tag Heuer Connected also has a dedicated website for the watch that says, "Tag Heuer is pushing the Swiss avant-garde limits even further with the Tag Heuer Connected. Tradition meets innovation, craftsmanship meets savoir-faire, and bold style meets breakthrough technology. The clock is ticking to the major breakthrough." By launching its first Android Wear smartwatch, Tag Heuer aims to compete head-to-head against the Apple Watch, which a...

India has drafted guidelines to regulate ride-hailing companies, including US-based Uber and its domestic rival Ola, for the first time laying down federal rules that could end months of uncertainty on how they operate in the country. The federal transportation ministry has asked states to ensure companies operate with call centres and their taxis follow emission norms, according to a six-page advisory issued last week and reviewed by Reuters on Tuesday. The guidelines also call for extensive background checks of drivers to ensure passenger safety. Any person who has in the past been convicted of any "cognizable offence" under India's criminal laws should not be allowed to become a driver. Although it is not yet clear whether the guidelines will be binding on the states and much uncertainty still remains, Uber and Ola both welcomed the move as a step in the right direction. Ola, backed by Japan's Softbank, called the advisory a "progressive directive" th...

The government on Tuesday notified the much-awaited spectrum trading norms, more than a month after the cabinet nod, thus allowing telecom service providers to start to trade airwaves that in turn will help in service quality improvement. According to the guidelines, spectrum trading will be allowed only between two access service providers, holding Cellular Mobile Telephone Service (CMTS) License, Unified Access Service License (UASL), Unified License (Access Services)(UL(AS)) and Unified License (UL) with authorization of access service in a licensed service area. Spectrum trading will also not alter the original validity period of spectrum assignment as applicable to the traded block. Both the licensees trading the spectrum will jointly give a prior intimation for trading the right to use the spectrum at least 45 days before the proposed effective date of the trading as per prescribed format to wireless adviser, wireless planning and coordination wing in the department of telecom...

Twitter said Tuesday it was slashing eight percent of its workforce as newly returned chief executive Jack Dorsey outlined his "roadmap" to boost users and revenues at the money-losing messaging platform. The cuts which amount to 336 jobs come less than a week after Dorsey, one of the founders of Twitter, returned to the job of CEO on a permanent basis as part of an effort to revive growth at the San Francisco-based social network. "Made some tough but necessary decisions that enable Twitter to move with greater focus and reinvest in our growth," Dorsey said in a tweet announcing the plan. In a letter to employees, Dorsey said his team is working "to produce a streamlined roadmap" for Twitter and its other services including video-sharing platforms Vine and Periscope. "The roadmap is focused on the experiences which will have the greatest impact," he said in the letter. "The roadmap is also a plan to change how we work, and what we need...

Google has topped the list of world's best company to work for, grabbing the top position for the third straight year, while software developer SAS Institute and manufacturing firm W L Gore were ranked second and third respectively. The annual 'World's Best Multinational Workplaces List' ranks the top 25 global companies to work for. Rounding out the top five on the list are data storage specialist NetApp and mobile communications provider Telefonica. EMC Corporation has been ranked sixth, followed by software giant Microsoft at seventh position in the list compiled by research and consulting firm 'Great Place to Work Institute'. No Indian company however, made it to the coveted list. Others in the top ten include, BBVA (8th), Monsanto (9th) and American Express (10th) place. The list also include, Marriott (11th), Belcorp (12th), Scotiabank (13th), Autodesk (14th), Cisco (15th), Atento (16th), Diageo (17th), Accor (18th), Hyatt (19th), Mars (20th), Cadence (...

Google on Monday detailed its virtual reality expansion plans and announced that its Cardboard app is now available in 39 languages and over 100 countries on both Android and iOS platforms. It added that the Cardboard developer documents are now also available in 10 languages and that the app until now has seen over 15 million installs from Google Play. The firm separately announced that the Google Street View is now available for Cardboard as well. Giving details on the Cardboard SDKs, the company blog post mentioned that the Cardboard SDKs for Android and Unity have now been updated to "address your top two requests: drift correction and Unity performance." Google says that this update includes a "major overhaul" of the sensor fusion algorithms that integrate the signals from the gyroscope and accelerometer. Furthermore, these improvements are supposed to decrease drift, especially on phones with lower-quality sensors. The Cardboard SDK for Unity now supports a ...

EMC Corp said it would pay Dell Inc up to $2.5 billion in termination fees if the data-storage company accepts a "superior proposal". The company will have to pay about $2 billion (roughly Rs. 13,026 crores) before the expiry of the 60-day 'go-shop' period, during which EMC can solicit other bids, and $2.5 billion after the expiry on December 12. EMC said Dell had secured financing of up to $49.5 billion (roughly Rs. 3,22,404 crores) from banks to fund the roughly $67 billion deal announced on Monday. While IBM Corp, Cisco Systems Inc, Oracle Corp and Hewlett-Packard Co could be potential suitors for EMC, the chances of them challenging Dell with a rival offer are slim, people familiar with the matter told Reuters on Monday. Dell's offer is structured in a way that will also give EMC shareholders a special stock that tracks the share price in cloud-based virtualization software maker VMware Inc, which is majority-owned by EMC. Upon closure of the deal, EMC sh...

Intel Corp cut revenue growth forecast for its highly profitable business of making chips for data centres as businesses reduce spending due to weak macroeconomic growth. The world's biggest chipmaker's shares reversed course to trade down as much as 3.8 percent after the bell on Tuesday following the forecast. Intel has been counting on the data centre business to help offset declining demand for its chips used in personal computers, its biggest revenue generator. The company agreed in June to acquire Altera for $16.7 billion to expand its line-up of the higher-margin chips used in data centres. Intel said on Tuesday it expected the data centre business to grow in "low double digits" in 2015, compared with its earlier forecast of about 15 percent growth. The business, the company's second biggest, had grown 19.2 percent in the first quarter, 9.7 percent in the second and 12 percent in the latest quarter. The company was not "rethinking the long-term gr...

Apple Inc could be facing up to $862 million (roughly Rs. 5,611 crores) in damages after a US jury on Tuesday found the iPhone maker used technology owned by the University of Wisconsin-Madison's licensing arm without permission in chips found in many of its most popular devices. The jury in Madison, Wisconsin also said the patent, which improves processor efficiency, was valid. The trial will now move on to determine how much Apple owes in damages. Representatives for the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF) and Apple could not immediately be reached for comment. WARF sued Apple in January 2014 alleging infringement of its 1998 patent for improving chip efficiency. The jury was considering whether Apple's A7, A8 and A8X processors, found in the iPhone 5s, iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus, as well as several versions of the iPad, violate the patent. Cupertino, California-based Apple denied any infringement and argued the patent is invalid, according to court papers. Apple...

Apple has quietly launched a new 21.5-inch iMac with a 4K screen and a refreshed 27-inch iMac model along with a new range of input devices. The smaller iMac seems like an inevitable update to the product line, following leaks earlier this month and the discovery of code in Apple's recently launched OS X El Capitan update. The new 21.5-inch iMac's screen has a resolution of 4096x2304 pixels, which is slightly larger than the conventional 3840x2160 standard also used for UHD TVs. That gives it the same pixel density as the 27-inch 5K iMac. Apple is also touting a wider P3 colour gamut than the previous sRGB offering. The CPU is listed as a quad-core 3.1GHz Intel Core i5 with integrated Iris Pro 6200 graphics, which reveals it to be a fifth-generation Broadwell model. The Iris Pro designation indicates that the integrated graphics logic has a dedicated 128MB eDRAM cache which perhaps gives it enough muscle that a dedicated GPU is not required. There's also 8GB of DDR3 RAM a...