TECH THAT...
A ROUND-UP OF THE LATEST NEWS IN THE DIGITAL WORLD
CALLS VIA GOOGLE HOME
GOOGLE has flicked the switch to allow owners of one of its Home series of smart speakers to make free phone calls.
Just ask your Home, pictured, to call someone from your address book and it’ll connect you without the need for a mobile phone – you can tie your mobile to your Google account if you want the number to tally.
You can also call a host of businesses from your Home as long as they are in Google’s data base.
The cool thing is the Google Assistant that powers this is able to recognise who is asking it to place the call, and so will hopefully call the right person, whoever in your home asks it to “call mum”.
FAKE NEWS TRAVELS FASTER
A NEW survey has revealed the depth of the problems of ‘fake news’ on Twitter – stories that are not true travel faster and reach more people than true stories.
The study, conducted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said that false stories are 70% more likely to be shared.
True stories apparently take six times longer than false stories to reach 1,500 people, and are rarely shared with more than 1,000 people. The most popular fake news reaches 100 times more people.
The report’s authors suggested they thought fake news tended to be more surprising, and more novel, and thus provoked a stronger reaction from readers.
DROPBOX IPO
FILE syncing service Dropbox has revealed details of its plans to go public.
In aiming to raise $500m, the company will price its shares at around the $17 mark – which values the company as being worth around $7.5bn. The sale should happen later this month.
Incredibly, Dropbox is still not profitable, more than 10 years after being founded and having raised around $600m in venture capital funding. The company had revenue of $1.1bn last year, and still managed to make a loss of more than $100m – but revenue is still going up and losses are coming down.