Seeking Untapped Market, Nearly 100 Investment Funds Emerge In Middle East Tech Scene

In the past five years, the tech ecosystem in the Middle East has swelled to more than 100 funds investing in the region and more than 75 accelerators. There have been nearly 30 sizeable exits in the past 10 years, based on stats provided by Dubai-based Wamda Capital and a new initiative, Menascapes.

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Why Are All The Holograms In The Star Wars Universe So Crappy?


Why Are All The Holograms In The Star Wars Universe So Crappy?
Of all the technological achievements of the “Star Wars” universe — faster-than-light space travel, antigravity, blue milk — the one that seems most ubiquitous is probably holography. Holographic projectors are all over the place. So why are they so crappy?

January 18, 2016 at 09:41AM
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Sony has something up its sleeve for Mobile World Congress

Sony's coming to Barcelona again. Photo: Killian Bell/Cult of AndroidSony is attending Mobile World Congress again this year, and it has invited attendees to a press event on Monday, February 22. The announcement all but confirm the Japanese company has something up its sleeve, but what? Sony traditionally announces a whole host of new devices at MWC in Barcelona, but its latest offerings — the Xperia Z5

The post Sony has something up its sleeve for Mobile World Congress appeared first on Cult of Android.

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Samsung fixes Galaxy Note5, a wrongly inserted S-Pen no longer breaks it

The Galaxy Note5 launch was followed by some peculiar complaints, about the iconic S-Pen. In case you’ve already forgotten the whole fiasco, we shall give you the quick tour.

The S-Pen of the Galaxy Note5 could be inserted backwards in its slot, which may not be something many people will do on purpose, but as it turned out eventually lots of people did. Either by accident, or caught up by the wide media coverage – thousands of people got their S-Pen stuck in the slot backwards. This led Samsung to send some special tools to the service center for safely removing the stuck pens.

Unfortunately, those who tried to get it out by themselves, often broke the S-Pen detection mechanism and thus rendered their S-Pen a pointless stick.

If you broke your Galaxy Note5, or already own it, we are sorry, but an official Samsung support center is your only solution.

But if you are about to buy a Note5 right now, we have some good news. Apparently Samsung has pre-installed a failsafe mechanism, which will allow you to extract the S-Pen safely if inserted backwards.

The company has upgraded the mechanism without an official announcement. Previously the company said that this wasn’t really an issue and urged customers to read the manual, while denying the device a fix.

We are glad to see Samsung has addressed the issue and the new adopters won’t be threatened with the possibility of breaking their Note5. As for the earlier buyers – well if your Note5 lasted until now, you are probably safe, but still watch how you insert that…

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WhatsApp scraps $0.99 annual subscription fee

Popular mobile messaging service WhatsApp has announced that it is doing away with the $0.99 annual subscription fee which was applicable to some of those using the service after their first year. The announcement was made by WhatsApp in an official blog post.

WhatsApp admitted that the approach of charging an annual subscription fee hasn’t worked well for the company primarily because many of the service’s users don’t have a debit or credit card, which is required to pay the fee.

So, what would be the company’s revenue model now? Third party ads? Well, WhatsApp says NO. The company is instead planning to earn money by offering services aimed at connecting businesses with individuals. “Starting this year, we will test tools that allow you to use WhatsApp to communicate with businesses and organizations that you want to hear from,” WhatsApp said.

“That could mean communicating with your bank about whether a recent transaction was fraudulent, or with an airline about a delayed flight. We all get these messages elsewhere today – through text messages and phone calls – so we want to test new tools to make this easier to do on WhatsApp, while still giving you an experience without third-party ads and…

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Spotify: cómo instalar en Linux paso a paso

Spotify logo y Tux rockero

Spotify es una pionera en cuanto a la música gratuita vía steraming, sin duda algo que se venía pidiendo desde el lado del usuario y que pocos han querido escuchar. Los que están en contra de la piratería solo proponen ideas cuanto menos absurdas, a veces rozando la estupidez y en otras ocasiones dando evidencia de la estupidez humana. Pero Spotify ha sabido satisfacer a los que quieren música gratis y sin ser ilegal.

Spotify es una aplicación que nace en Estocolmo, Suecia. Lo que ha hecho la empresa sueca es firmar acuerdos con discográficas de la talla de Universal Music, Sony BMG, EMI Music, Hollywood Records, Interscope Records y Warner Music, entre otras, para poder ofrecer su música gratis. Al ofrecer lo que quieren los usuarios, desde junio de 2015, ha tenido un crecimiento exponencial, con más de 75 millones de usuarios activos.

Como bien indican desde la web, trabajan para no dejar atrás la app para Linux con respecto a los lanzamientos dirigidos a Windows, Mac OS X y otros sistemas operativos. No obstante, Spotify se distribuye ahora en paquetes DEB para Debian y derivados, por supuesto para Ubuntu y derivados, al ser ésta también una distro derivada de Debian. Si tienes otra distro, desgraciadamente no ofrecen paquetes y debes optar por usar Wine para poder instalar la app nativa para Windows. Otra opción que se me ocurre, aunque menos recomendable, es transformar el DEB en un RPM u otro tipo de paquete con la herramienta alien.

Para su instalación en distribuciones que soportan paquetes DEB, puedes seguir los siguientes pasos:

  • Añade la key del repositorio para poder descargar el paquete, para eso desde el terminal, teclea:

sudo apt-key adv --keyserver hkp://keyserver.ubuntu.com:80 --recv-keys BBEBDCB318AD50EC6865090613B00F1FD2C19886

  • Luego vamos a añadir el repositorio de Spotify:
echo deb http://ift.tt/AgbvRm stable non-free | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/spotify.list

  • Ahora actualizamos la lista:
sudo apt-get update
  • Lo último es instalar el cliente Spotify y ya lo tendremos listo:
sudo apt-get install spotify-client

El artículo Spotify: cómo instalar en Linux paso a paso ha sido originalmente publicado en Linux Adictos.

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