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LATEST TECH NEWS: 5 things and a trivia you need to know today, April 6, 2020

Published

4 years ago

April 6, 2020

Ripples Nigeria

These 5 latest stories from the tech space will keep you updated with trends today.

1. Apple rolls out plans for 1m face shields per week for health workers

Apple has announced intent to commence the production of face shields for front-line health care workers fighting the life-threatening coronavirus pandemic. According to Apple, it will commit to the production of a million face shield a week. Speaking on the development, Apple CEO, Tim Cook, disclosed this on Sunday, April 5, in a video post on Twitter.

While the company remains one of a growing number of tech firms exploring different ways to help during the coronavirus crisis, Apple has not lost its branding sense even in the ugly face of the pandemic. The company has named its shield in line with its i-culture and housestyle -iShield. The CEO noted that the first shipment of face shields was recently delivered to Kaiser hospital facilities in the Santa Clara Valley, California.

2. Zoom apologises, shares recent improvement developments

Zoom has publicly apologised for the glitch that dented its image following a reported hack into its security. CEO Eric Yuan admitted his team made missteps with his company’s video-conferencing platform following the recent widespread criticism of its security protection and privacy policies.

The CEO made the apology on Sunday, April 6, during an interview, where he spoke on the incident. Since the coronavirus outbreak has pushed video-conferencing software forward as a resort to engage and keep in touch with colleagues and business partners, a pool of workers have taken their meetings online with many making Zoom their platform of choice. With this apology from the CEO, we can only continue to understudy trends to see if Zoom will get out of this privacy glitch any time soon or continue to lose its place in the market.

Tech Trivia:

Which of the following is the first search engine on the web.

A. Archie
B. Google
C. WAIS
D. Altavista

Answer: See end of post.

3. Open banking fintech Yapily raises $13M in Series A led by Lakestar

Yapily has announced raising $13 million in Series A funding. The fintech startup, which offers an opening banking API to let enterprises, such as financial service providers and merchants, connect to banks, said that the round was led by Lakestar, a financial backer of fintech unicorn Revolut.

According to Yapily, existing investors HV Holtzbrinck Ventures, and LocalGlobe also participated in the round. Before this, 3 year old Yapily had last disclosed $5.4 million in seed funding in May 2019, and counts the likes of Taavet Hinrikus (TransferWise chairman and co-founder), Ott Kaukver (Twilio’s CTO), Roberto Nicastro (UniCredit’s former deputy CEO) and Frank Strauss (Former CEO of Deutsche Postbank) as angel backers.

4. LeadTech Incubation Programme opens applications for female founders

The Africa Women Innovation and Entrepreneurship Forum (Awief) has partnered with Morocco’s Mohammed VI Polytechnic University (UM6P) to launch the LeadTech Incubation Programme. This six-month incubation programme is dedicated to early stage women-owned and women-led tech startups.

According to Awief programme manager, Beryl Visser, the goal of the initiative is to strengthen the presence of African women in the tech sector by supporting 15 promising and innovative tech startups. The LeadTech Incubation Programme will support 15 women-owned and women-led tech startups whose founders are 18 years of age or older and reside in any African country.

5. New York City bans Zoom in schools over security concerns

New York City officials have ruled out the use of Zoom in its schools. The government announced this citing security concerns with the video conferencing service. This development has therefore, prohibited the use of Zoom for remote teaching as legislated. Speaking on behalf of the Dept. Of Education, Danielle Filson has stated that alternatives be sought for to replace zoom while it further looks into the security breach.

“Providing a safe and secure remote learning experience for our students is essential, and upon further review of security concerns, schools should move away from using Zoom as soon as possible,” said Danielle Filson. Adding that, “There are many new components to remote learning, and we are making real-time decisions in the best interest of our staff and students.” According to stats., this ban will cover some 1.1 million students in more than 1,800 schools across the city’s five boroughs -a major market loss for Zoom.

Tech Trivia Answer: Archie.

The Internet’s first search engine appeared in 1989 and was invented by Alan Emtage, a computer science student from Barbados studying at McGill University. Emtage dubbed his invention Archie, a contraction of the word “archives” to fit the shortened naming conventions of the UNIX operating system.

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