Mozilla’s push to grow beyond browsers hit a major hurdle this week as the Firefox-maker dissolved its Connected Devices initiative, laying off what CNET reports as around 50 people in the process.
The nonprofit org confirmed the layoffs with TechCrunch, though won’t comment on specific numbers. The move is a further sign of struggle for Mozilla , whose Firefox browser has seen a significant dip in market share over the past several years, taking a backseat to Google’s immensely popular Chrome browser.
Part of the company’s bid to stay relevant has been an expansion into other key categories, with the launch of products like Firefox OS, a mobile operating system designed to bring low cost handsets to developing markets. The Connected Devices initiative was part of that push, with a stated mission to:
A spokesperson told TechCrunch that, while the organization is still committed to the emerging IoT space, the company is changing its focus from commercial products to emerging technologies.
The spokesperson adds that the organization is ultimately growing headcount and investment across Mozilla, including such categories as AR, VR and the aforementioned IoT. It’s tough, however, not to view the move as an extension of the company’s struggles in recent years.

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Elemeno Health started building something akin to a personal assistant for hospital staff while in Y Combinator last summer.
It helps hospitals gather best practices, checklists and videos doctors and nurses need to reference in a snap, all in one place. Often these materials are locked in binders and papers that staff must find and then make copies of if they want to share with colleagues. That can make it hard to send across teams who are trying for consistent best practices. It also sows the seeds for burnout or mistakes if reference materials aren’t readily available and properly adhered to.
The startup wasn’t ready then to go public with this project while in Y Combinator but now has launched its app and is working with teams at UCSF to get them to have fun in finding and implementing reference materials.
Elemeno Health makes that information easily available at the point of care and adds g amification to promote engagement and learning.
Founders Arup Roy Burman and Ed Nanale started the company after Arup’s many years handling teams as UCSF’s intensive care unit director. Burman noticed staff sharing binders and asking for copies of certain papers but thought there was a better way to share the information. Nanale, who comes from 20 years in the gaming industry and helped build Sim City, had an idea to make referencing materials more fun to access.
Staff use Elemeno’s app (which does not use patient data and therefore does not need to meet HIPAA-compliance) to read messages to the team, find reference material and congratulate co-workers for meeting compliance standards.
It’s not exactly as exciting as Pokemon Go, but the app does seem to have some merit. It helped UCSF cut central line infections in half, saving over $1.1 million for the hospital, according to Burman.
Burman and Nanale are working on expanding use of the app to other hospitals and think it could possibly create some healthy competition between staff in the future.

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I was excited by the promise of Xnor.ai and its technique that drastically reduces the computing power necessary to perform complex operations like computer vision. Seems I wasn’t the only one: the company, just officially spun off from the Allen Institute for AI (AI2), has attracted $2.6 million in seed funding from its parent company and Madrona Venture Group.
The specifics of the product and process you can learn about in detail in my previous post , but the gist is this: machine learning models for things like object and speech recognition are notoriously computation-heavy, making them difficult to implement on smaller, less powerful devices. Xnor.ai’s researchers use a bit of mathematical trickery to reduce that computing load by an order of magnitude or two — something it’s easy to see the benefit of.
McIlwain will join AI2 CEO Oren Etzioni on the board of Xnor.ai; Ali Farhadi, who led the original project, will be the company’s CEO, and Mohammad Rastegari is CTO.
The new company aims to facilitate commercial applications of its technology (it isn’t quite plug and play yet), but the research that led up to it is, like other AI2 work, open source.

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That’s kind of the thing about pilot programs – they don’t always result in a successful launch. Less than a year after beginning testing at select locations in the San Francisco Bay Area, Google is pulling the plug on its Hands Free payment system. The company notified users of the unceremonious wind down via email and a notification on its site.
A week from yesterday, the program will be shut down and all settings associated with it will be deleted. That doesn’t mean, however, that it was all for naught. The company is quick to point out that it has learned some valuable lessons from the testing.
“Based on all the positive feedback,” Google writes, “we’re now working to bring the best of the Hands Free technology to even more people and stores.” What that actually means has yet to be determined. The company is quick to add that it “can’t share any more details about what’s next just yet,” but encourages that users hop on board with Android Pay.
9to5Google , which first spotted the shut down, notes that the company may be shifting those lessons learned to the company’s primary payment system, though the jury’s out about whether the ability to pay without pulling out a phone will be implemented directly.
It’s also worth noting that the company is said to be looking at some Hands Free payment-style options for its Android Wear devices, with Pay becoming a key part of the smartwatch OS.

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Oracle is banking on REST and JSON to modernize Java EE for microservices and the cloud.
It may seem like ages since REST stole thunder from SOAP as a mechanism for providing web services communications. REST, in conjunction with JSON and HTTP, proved a far simpler means for delivering web services than SOAP, which has long been criticized for complexity.
Fast-forward to the present, and Oracle is now positioning REST and JSON as critical cogs in its Java EE upgrade plans. The company began retooling Java EE for microservices and cloud platforms last year , after community protests that Oracle had been neglecting the enterprise platform. The initial result of those plans, Java EE 8, is due this October.
“When people are building microservices nowadays, they do tend to be REST-based, so that tends to be focused around JAX-RS [Java API for RESTful Web Services], which is a key spec that is being upgraded,” Oracle’s Mike Lehman, vice president of product management, says.
This upgraded spec, JAX-RS 2.1, will focus on a range of capabilities, including Server-Sent Events (SSE) and integrations with JSON-B and Contexts and Dependency Injection (CDI). Java EE 8 will feature JAX-RS 2.1, thereby facilitating REST communications, which Lehman says is the typical method coarse-grained microservices communicate with one another, almost by default.
A former Oracle Java EE evangelist who has remained a pro-EE activist is on board with REST as an anchor for microservices.
“REST is indeed a key part of most microservices,” says Reza Rahman, who heads up Java Guardians, a Java EE interest group , and works as a senior architect at consultant CapTech. “As a result, JAX-RS 2.1 — the REST API in Java EE 8 — has a robust set of improvements.”
REST and microservices for Java EE have both been given a thumbs-up in recent surveys of Java developers. Oracle late last year surveyed 1,700 users and found REST and HTTP2 were the two most sought technologies for inclusion in Java EE. Oracle in December reported that most of the API work for these two technologies, including JAX-RS 2.1, was already complete. Also, there’s work underway on the Glassfish application server, providing an EE reference implementation, to update various Java Specification Requests.
In a jointly conducted survey, Java EE Guardians and DZone found that 44 percent of respondents are seeking standardized features such as uber-JARs (featuring a Java program and dependencies), discovery, metrics, circuit breakers, and bulkheads for help in architecting microservices. But 27 percent felt Java is already well-suited for building practical microservices. Only 4 percent saw microservices as “merely hype.”
Java users also place high priority on JSON-B, the Java API for JSON binding. The JSON data interchange format provides the mechanism for formatting data on the wire, Lehman notes. To that end, Java EE 8 will feature JSON-B 1.0, for binding a JSON object to the Java language, and JSON-P (JSON with Padding) 1.1, which provides a parsing API.
“These tend to be a way for the programmer who’s writing a microservice to invoke other microservices and then process and work with the payload that is in that REST call,” Lehman says.
Java EE 8 also makes accommodations for HTTP2; while this specification is not specifically oriented toward microservices, it does provide a standard HTTP2 API.
For the cloud, Java EE and Java itself are merely runtimes on a cloud platform, Lehman says. “They need to be able to interact with common cloud platform capabilities,” such as database access, he adds.
Java provides programming APIs to interact with these, such as REST and JSON.
“What we want to do in Java EE 8, and with any kind of microservices platform, is make sure they can easily interact with cloud services — storage, persistence management and monitoring, and so forth,” Lehman says.
Oracle also has its sights set on Java EE 9, due in 2018, which is slated to add capabilities for scalable, independent services and key-value store support. Rahman, though, wonders if perhaps Java EE 9 has the right focus.
“Personally, the focus of Java EE 9 makes me wonder if we are about to prematurely standardize a number of features that should not yet be standardized,” Rahman says. He cites features such as a new API to dynamically configure Java EE applications, native support for OAuth/OpenID Connect, health check services, and Java SE 9-based modularity.
While Lehman does agree with the programming concepts mentioned by Rahman for EE 9, he reiterates that Oracle is focused on Java EE 8 for the time being. “We’ve got to buckle down and get EE 8 out, so that is our primary focus right now,” he says.
Java EE 7, the current release, became available in June 2013 , adding HTML5 support. Java EE7 supports JAX-RS 2.0, for RESTful applications.
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European antitrust regulators have opened an investigation into the Steam games distribution platform operator, Valve, and five PC games publishers to determine whether geo-blocking agreements between them amount to a breach of the region’s competition rules.
The Commission is concerned agreements around how consumers can purchase digital content are reducing cross-border trade by preventing games players from buying cheaper games elsewhere in Europe. The five games publishers named in the probe are: Bandai Namco, Capcom, Focus Home, Koch Media and ZeniMax.
The investigation will focus on whether activation keys used to confirm a copy of a game is not pirated are (or have been) used for the purposes of geo-blocking — thereby limiting consumers’ access to a purchased game, based on where in the region they are located.
The EC says such a practice “may amount to a breach of EU competition rules by reducing cross-border competition as a result of restricting so-called ‘parallel trade’ within the Single Market and preventing consumers from buying cheaper games that may be available in other Member States”.
We’ve reached out to Valve for comment and will update this post with any response.
Also today, the EC has announced a separate antitrust investigation into four consumer electronics manufacturers — Asus, Denon & Marantz, Philips and Pioneer — over concerns they may have breached competition rules by restricting the ability of online retailers to set their own prices for products made by the four, including laptops, household appliances and hi-fis.
“The effect of these suspected price restrictions may be aggravated due to the use by many online retailers of pricing software that automatically adapts retail prices to those of leading competitors. As a result, the alleged behaviour may have had a broader impact on overall online prices for the respective consumer electronics products,” the EC further notes.

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Here’s one more app you can delete from your iPhone: that QR code and barcode scanner you only occasionally use. With an update rolling out today, Google’s Chrome mobile browser can do the job instead. The app now includes built-in scanning functionality, which you can access either via 3D Touch on the app’s icon, or you can do a search for “QR” in spotlight.
Though these shortcuts only refer to QR code scanning, Chrome can scan a traditional product barcode as well. Doing so will take you to a Google Search results page for the item in question, where you can check prices, read reviews, and more.
Despite rumors to the contrary, QR codes haven’t entirely died out – if anything, they’ve started to make a comeback thanks to adoption by popular apps like Snapchat , Kik, and Messenger , as well as in food labeling. Even Amazon is putting QR codes on some of its packaging now, as with its Elements brand of baby products.
Still, it’s not the kind of thing you have to do often enough to justify keeping a barcode scanning app on hand.
Because of QR codes’ limited adoption, smartphone makers have been hesitant to fully integrate QR code scanning functionality into their operating systems, even though it would be a simple add-on from the Camera or a search utility. The iPhone’s QR code reader is tucked away inside the Wallet app, for example, where it’s used to scan coupons, boarding passes, tickets and the like. This presumes these are main ways that QR codes are used, but, in reality, that’s a limited subset of what QR codes can do.
With scanning bundled into Chrome, you have a more functional barcode scanner without needing a separate app. The update is out now on iPhone.

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Microsoft’s. Net languages are getting improvements ranging from data flow to better tools for C#, Visual Basic, and F#.
For C# 7.0, Microsoft reiterated its previously announced plans for tuples and pattern-matching , to streamline the flow of data and control in code.
Visual Basic will target the. Net Standard library to aid cross-platform. Net Core development. In the upcoming Visual Studio 2017, Visual Basic will support producing and consuming tuples and consuming ref-returning methods defined in referenced libraries.
F#, Microsoft’s functional-first language , will have fewer roadblocks for contributions and have fewer operational differences in. Net with C# and Visual Basic. Also, a s new language features appear in C#, Microsoft will ensure that they interoperate well with F#.
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