In this issue of Recap in Tech News – ASUS Android Wear Smart Watch, Facebook Psychology Experiment, YouTube Crowd-funding for Channels and Panasonic Introduces Hybrid Tablet.
ASUS Android Wear Smart Watch
With the announcement of Google’s newest upcoming wearable technologies, you may start wondering which smart watch you want to invest in. There were two brands – LG and Samsung – featured at Google I/O conference this week. Both are priced $199 – 229. It looks like ASUS is going to enter the smart watch market, too. They are looking for their AMOLED-equipped Android Wear smart watch to be priced $99 – 149, which is quite a bit lower than the other brands in the market. When Motorola’s Moto 360 hits the market, it is slated to be priced around $249. With a target price of $99, the ASUS model smart watch might hit impulse buyers more than the other models.
Facebook Psychology Experiment
Social media giant, Facebook, has conducted a massive psychological experiment using users’ posts as its primary data. Nearly 700,000 users were apart of this study that focused on how users’ moods are affected by the posts they read. The study by the PNAS journal states that seeing more negative posts caused positive responses, but it also caused more negative posts. “These results indicate that emotions expressed by others on Facebook influence our own emotions, constituting experimental evidence for massive-scale contagion via social networks,” according to the study. Facebook researchers did this experiment without notifying users that it was bring done.
YouTube Crowd-funding for Channels
YouTube CEO, Susan Wojcicki, announced a unique function of the media sharing site that allows crowd funding campaigns to be easily connected with videos. The Fan Funding option on YouTube allows fans to contribute money to support a YouTube Channel at anytime for any reason.
Panasonic Introduces Hybrid Tablet
Panasonic has launched its 3E hybrid tablet at this weekend’s Society for Technology in Education Conference. The new tablet is built to be used for educational purposes ages kindergarten to high school. It’s tougher than regular tablets and runs on Windows 8.1 for Education 32-bit. It’s a ten-inch tablet with a 1366 x 768 display that supports five-point touch. Panasonic 3E comes equipped with a single USB 3.0 port on the tablet and a second USB 2.0 port on the dock/keyboard. For more information visit panasonic.com/business/3e/3e-connected-classroom.
