The addition of standalone cell-network connectivity onto the wrist-worn device could bring some benefits to users, particularly those who are frustrated with the current generation's heavy reliance on a tethered iPhone to provide basic iMessage and phone call functionality. Although such a feature would undoubtedly require an additional data plan, on top of one they might already have for both the iPhone and iPad, benefits like using GPS, making phone calls, and streaming Apple Music without an iPhone nearby could outweigh the cons for some users.
The new hints given for the next-generation Apple Watch come on the heels of a collection of rumors that point to the upcoming version of Apple's wearable gaining much-requested independence from the iPhone. Apple began implementing a third-party push for iPhone independency by announcing that all watchOS apps submitted to the App Store after June 1, 2016 will be required to be native applications.
Such updates to watchOS, which Apple introduced in watchOS 2, allow the wearable device to open apps more quickly and provide a smoother experience to users, instead of having to transmit data back and forth between a Bluetooth-connected iPhone. The mention of "a faster processor" in today's report is something largely expected from a product update cycle by Apple, but it should compound the company's efforts to introduce an all-around faster UI for the Apple Watch 2.
Using speculative analyst analysis, The Wall Street Journal also compared the first year of the Apple Watch to the first year sales run of the iPhone, from 2007 to 2008. The analyst estimate puts Apple Watch sales at 12 million units from its launch on April 24, 2015 to the same day in 2016. That number is double the original iPhone's sales of 6 million units in its first year.
The latest rumors for the Apple Watch 2 conflict somewhat in regards to upgrade stats and release dates. One report has suggested that the new wearable will be 40 percent thinner and launch as soon as June, while a more recent research note from KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo points to only minor form factor changes and a heavier focus on -- For more information read the original article here.
In the tech industry, one day a skill is hot, the next it's not. IT professionals spend a lot of their career learning, training, and trying to keep up.
Job hunting site Dice prides itself on helping IT pros navigate which skills to pursue. It just concluded an analysis of its database of 80,000+ tech jobs from April 2015 through April 2016 to determine the fastest-growing skills based on job openings.
We then cross-checked those skills against Dice's annual salary survey, published in February, which offered the average salary for jobs using those particular skills in 2015.
The good news? All of them are part of jobs that command average salaries of over $110,000.
SEE ALSO: 40 tech skills that will land you a $120,000-plus salary
No. 8: Cassandra, job openings up 32%, worth $147,811Cassandra is a special kind of database called a noSQL database, which is part of the big data trend. NoSQL databases can handle massive amounts of data, spread across cheaper, low-end servers.
Cassandra was born at Facebook, but Facebook released it as a free and open source project and today it is used at companies including Apple, Comcast, Instagram, Spotify, eBay, Rackspace, and Netflix.
No. 7: Hive, up 32%, worth $129,400
Hive is another skill in high demand as part of the big data phenom, particularly a big data tech called Hadoop.
Hadoop is software to store all kinds of data across many low-cost computer servers. Hive provides a way to extract information from Hadoop using the same kind of traditional methods used by regular databases. (In geek speak: it gives Hadoop a database query interface).
No. 6: Cloud computing, up 33%, worth $112,972
Enterprises are increasingly using shared, rented computer servers, software, and storage accessed over the internet from companies like Amazon, Microsoft and Google.
That's a concept called cloud computing named because once upon a time, diagram drawing tools used a picture of a "cloud" as the icon to represent the 'internet.'
People who have skills working with cloud computing are in high demand these days.
See the rest of the story at Business Insider -- For more information read the original article here.
Trying to hurriedly stuff a backpack with everything you need before heading out the door is made difficult when you don't have a free hand to hold the thing open. So The North Face has ...
-- For more information read the original article here.Even before it was the title of a movie, the phrase “the social network” was synonymous with Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg's startup snatched the title from MySpace in 2008, and its pre-eminence among social networks has gone unquestioned ever since.
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