The ground is being set for the market-leading mobile operating system developers to compete on Augmented Reality applications.
While the potential applications for AR are encouraging the development of other devices such as smart glasses, the market dominance of mobile devices has seen Apple and Google commit to developing apps which would be usable on phones.
Both companies have this week showcased new AR tools available for Android and iOS devices which allow users to digitally superimpose objects onto the world around them through their phones.
Google has said its AR technology will be released with the new Samsung Galaxy S8 and its own Pixel phone, while Apple is making its technology generally available on all devices running its new operating system iOS 11.
As such, Apple’s AR offerings will be available across a broad range of devices – and although iOS 11 hasn’t been released yet, demonstration apps have already been presented to potential consumers.
Most of these have been proofs of concept and unlikely themselves to revolutionise the market, but a number of more marketable apps have been developed with companies such as IKEA.
The furniture retailer worked with Apple to develop an app which allows phone users to measure the space in their homes and digitally « place » an item from its catalogue in that space on their phone.
« AR is big and profound,  » said Apple’s chief executive, Tim Cook, when talking to investors earlier this month. « And this is one of those huge things that we’ll look back at and marvel on the start of it. »
Google meanwhile is attempting to develop a system which would equally be capable of being installed on the 100 million devices that currently run the Android operating system, but is behind Apple on creating something lightweight that could be run on older devices.
Neither Apple nor Google could expect the marketability of AR apps to meet that of Pokemon Go, which was released last year and helps to increase Apple’s App Store sales 40% to $20bn (£16bn) .
The benefit for Google through its Play Store is not known, but is likely to be similar to Apple’s. The search giant’s pre-existing investment in the company behind Pokemon Go, Niantic, will have additionally encouraged its investment in AR.

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© Source: http://news.sky.com/story/apple-and-google-prepare-for-augmented-reality-clash-11012560
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Some expired payment details included.
Second-hand electronics and entertainment giant CeX, also known as WeBuy and WeSell, has warned customers of a data breach which has resulted in up to two million account details – including, in some cases, hashed passwords and encrypted credit card details – being swiped by persons unknown.
Founded in 1992 by Robert Dudani and Paul Farrington, CeX started as a single store known as the ‘ Computer eXchange ‘ situated near London’s Tottenham Court Road and offering the ability for people to trade in unwanted computer hardware in exchange for store credit or a lesser amount of cash. Since then the company has branched out into general consumer electronics and entertainment products and boasts 350 UK highstreet stores, 100 international stores, and websites offering post-free trade-ins and online fulfilment.
It’s the company’s website customers, however, that it is currently in the process of contacting following the discovery of a data breach which has resulted in up to two million account holders’ personal information falling into the wrong hands.
‘ We have recently been subject to an online security breach. We are taking this extremely seriously and wanted to provide you with details of the situation and how it might affect you, ‘ the company told users in an email published to its website. ‘ We also wanted to reassure you that we are investigating this as a priority and are taking a number of measures to prevent this from happening again. ‘
According to CeX, data stolen in the breach includes full names, addresses, email addresses, hashed account passwords, and telephone numbers for up to two million customer accounts. In ‘ a small number of instances, ‘ it further warns, encrypted data from expired credit and debit cards registered with its site up to 2009 may have been included. Cards used after that date are not affected, as the company stopped storing card information locally in 2009.
As always, the advice offered in the wake of the breach is simple: Change your CeX password as well as on any service where you reused the same password and keep an eye out for suspicious emails, telephone calls, or dead-tree letters claiming to be from or to represent CeX. For its part, CeX claims to have ‘ implemented additional advanced measures of security to prevent this from happening again, ‘ though the company has not provided details.

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LinkedIn is a model for producing open source code that really matters to a community—and highlights why developers would want to work for you
If you want to know how to do open source the smart way, pay attention to LinkedIn. It has delivered some of the industry’s most impressive open source software, most recently its Cruise Control load-balancing tool for Apache Kafka, a distributed streaming platform also developed by LinkedIn that is used to build real-time data pipelines and streaming apps in big data applications.
Cruise Control exemplifies the serious open source savvy on LinkedIn’s part, with its extensibility and generality.
Although meant for general consumption, Cruise Control didn’ t have a real community around it; it had been developed by and for LinkedIn. But LinkedIn built Cruise Control in a way that would translate beyond LinkedIn’s needs. Many such projects make the rookie mistake of solving only their creators’ needs; LinkedIn didn’ t make that mistake.
LinkedIn engineer Jiangjie Qin says that he and his team deliberately built Cruise Control outside Kafka core, choosing not to bind it tightly. This let the team make Cruise Control both extensible and generalizable.
By “extensible, ” Qin means that developers outside LinkedIn can improve it to satisfy other requirements. But even more important is the principle of generality, he says:
So, if you want to use Cruise Control with rival streaming platforms like Apache Spark, you can.
It takes a lot of effort to effectively open-source code like Cruise Control. Writing the software is easy compared to code cleanup, documentation, and other work that prepares code for maximum impact as an open source project.
This mentality—opening everything that could be useful within and beyond LinkedIn, and of doing the “dirt work” necessary to make it useful to external developers—is what makes LinkedIn such an impressive organization to watch. Not only does this result in better software for LinkedIn and everyone else, it also helps LinkedIn recruit the best engineers. As Qin says, “Many companies claim to build great software, but the best way to prove it is to open-source it. If you open-source something, that means you’ re proud of it, and it’s useful not just for you but for others as well.”
Decades after open source launched in earnest, too many corporations mistakenly view open source as a way to source software for zero dollars, rather than as a way to change how they build software and do business. But such companies will be left behind by LinkedIn, Facebook, and others that take an open-source-first approach to code, and are willing to invest the labor to make it pay off.

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© Source: https://www.infoworld.com/article/3220667/open-source-tools/how-to-do-open-source-right-linkedin-shows-the-way.html
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