Techlife News #166

HOST OF CELEBRITY NAMES JOIN IN WITH THE CAMPAIGN What do Phil Schiller, Tim Cook, Dr Dre, Mark Zuckerberg and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella have in common? The answer is that they're all celebrities who have thrown themselves head-first into a seemingly unassuming 'challenge' that has turned into a true viral phenomenon in recent weeks: The ALS Association's Ice Bucket Challenge. The premise is simple enough: you're a prominent public figure who agrees to have a bucket of ice water poured over your head, having the event recorded so that it can be witnessed by YouTube viewers around the globe. In the process, you also nominate three of your friends to be subjected to the same treatment. But of course, as tends to be the way with these things, this isn't just about…

In the more than two decades since world leaders first got together to try to solve global warming, life on Earth has changed, not just the climate. It's gotten hotter, more polluted with heat-trapping gases, more crowded and just downright wilder. The numbers are stark. Carbon dioxide emissions: up 60 percent. Global temperature: up six-tenths of a degree. Population: up 1.7 billion people. Sea level: up 3 inches. U.S. extreme weather: up 30 percent. Ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica: down 4.9 trillion tons of ice. "Simply put, we are rapidly remaking the planet and beginning to suffer the consequences," says Michael Oppenheimer, professor of geosciences and international affairs at Princeton University. Diplomats from more than 190 nations opened talks Monday at a United Nations global warming conference in Lima, Peru, to pave…

WHY IT REALLY DOES TRANSFORM MOBILE PAYMENTS We're so used to hearing that the latest Apple product or service launch "transforms" its category, and we aren't necessarily referring to the language used in the Cupertino firm's own press releases - the wider media are more than good enough themselves at that particular hyperbole. It would be easy to think that Apple's latest innovation - Apple Pay - surely can't live up to the hype of doing the same for mobile payments. However, if you did, you'd be wrong. Sure, a lot of bold claims have been made for a solution that is supposed to make mobile payments easier and quicker than ever. Apple itself has described the service as "anew category of service that will transformmobile payments with an easy, secure andprivate…

SURPRISE NEWS ALSO SEES JOHN LASSETER'S DIRECTORIAL RETURN Do you remember Toy Story, that staggering 1995 box office success that firmly installed the name of the Pixar animation studio in the minds of movie-goers everywhere? Or what about either of its sequels, particularly 2010's Toy Story 3, which saw the boy at the centreof the saga - Andy - mark his transition fromchildhood to adulthood by handing his oldtoys to a young girl, Bonnie? Well, we're now set to get a fourth addition to the franchise. So seemingly perfect was the ending of Toy Story 3, that few people ever contemplated that the series would make a big screen return. Fair enough, so Woody and Buzz haven't exactly faded into obscurity, having continued to appear in various short films and television specials,…

WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT THE LONG-AWAITED CUPERTINO WEARABLE You knew full well that it wasn't going to be 'just' a new iPhone, didn't you? We're talking about that keynote, which if you're like so many Apple fans, you probably watched live, perhaps from the feed on Apple's website. Sure, the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus formally broke cover first, and all very impressive they were, too. However... for once, the latest iteration of the Cupertino giant's long-iconic handset actually wasn't the big story. When current CEO Tim Cook finally uttered the words that Steve Jobs had long made his own at Apple keynotes, "One more thing...", you knew that it wasn't going to be confirmation of a minor iOS feature that followed. It was going to be something genuinely massive, and…

MAIN SLATE SELECTION NOW CHOSEN Who doesn't appreciate a film festival? If you're a cinema fanatic, you've always had a good choice of such events here in America, with the Sundance and Toronto festivals being the perfect place to discover what you'll be chomping on popcorn to for the year ahead. However, let's not forget another of the must-see events in this vein, the New York Film Festival. It's back on the streets of the Big Apple from September 26 to October 12, for its 52nd running - so what better time to reflect on the delights of an event that has been described by Indiewire as "the granddaddy of American festivals"? Indeed, it's been running since 1963, with the showcased films being selected by the city's Film Society of Lincoln Center. The…