Light Start – Tag Heuer Android, Dell purchases, skipping Black Ops III, NASA patents, and SA’s Apple Watch
Brett Venter
Tag Heuer teases their Android Wear wristwear for a full reveal on 9 November
What on Earth could the Tag Heuer Connected be? Just kidding, we know exactly what it is – It’s an Android Wear device from Formula One sponsor and watch-maker Tag Heuer. What we don’t know is what the whole thing looks like. Part of it, yes, as the outline is right there (look up on the website, left on the newsletter) but not the whole thing. We like what we’ve seen so far though and there’s more to come. Right about 9 November, actually, which is when the countdown on the Tag Heuer Connected website terminates. We do have a rough price idea (see the Apple Watch pricing snippet below) though. It’ll cost around $1,800 (About R24,000). Not that much more than an Apple Watch.
Dell is buying EMC and they’re paying large for the privilege. No, not the company that releases The Walking Dead, that would be AMC. EMC is a data storage outfit and Dell is reportedly going to be dropping $67 billion for the company. The move, which has yet to be made final, will make Dell a powerhouse in the enterprise world but it’ll also be the largest tech deal… ever. We can totally see Dell pulling this one off too, as they’re planning expansion in all sorts of (not quite as costly) places in the near future (hint: Alienware, people. Look out for it.)
Call of Duty: Black Ops III will launch with the whole campaign unlocked
Wow, there’s a thing. A thing so simple that we never thought of it. Why are we still locking gaming content away behind barriers? In some games it makes sense – you can’t hunt a level 30 dragon with a level 5 Witcher, after all, but when your games aren’t level-specific? As it happens, the game to take the plunge is Call of Duty: Black Ops III, according to an interview with Treyarch’s Jason Blundell. Since the Blops series also introduced branching storylines to Call of Duty single-player, we can see them pulling this one off as well. The single-player campaign is about the story and Blundell thinks that most players will opt to play through from the beginning. But they don’t have to, any more.
NASA releases over 1,200 patents out into the world – for tech startups
NASA owns a lot of patents. Technology patents. And the tech world these days runs on patents – who owns them, who will lend or share them, who is charging what for those patents. And the end-user pays for them at the end of the day. But NASA is making it cheaper for certain startups, by giving them access to the space agency’s more than 1,200 tech patents in order to develop new technologies based around them. Licensing them is free, amazingly, but NASA has a few terms and conditions. NASA will eventually get a royalty payment, if a product if forthcoming, and use of patents is non-exclusive unless otherwise negotiated (but then you’ll likely wind up paying for them). There are a few other Ts&Cs to be seen at the source.
Why does the Apple Watch cost what it does? Core knows
Americans are freaking weird. If you’ve never been to the States, anything that you purchase in a store (not the airport) will have a price on it. That price isn’t the full price though, there’s sales tax added at the till, which means that you’re meant to work it out yourself or receive a nasty shock when you pay. Anyway, that’s part of the reason why the Apple Watch costs more in SA than in the USA – that’s the Core Group’s explanation. There’s more to it than just that but it boils down to the same thing – Some models of the Apple Watch will cost about the same as a MacBook.
