If your company produced a product that burned people, caught fire without warning, was banned from every airline in the world and forced other companies to brick it into uselessness, you probably wouldn’t start banging a drum for a sequel, would you? Probably not, but don’t tell that to Samsung, because they’re making plans for a Galaxy Note 8, a follow-up to the infamous smartphone that embarrassed them last year.
A Samsung mobile division leader told CNET that they are indeed working on a Note 8, and it may debut this year. Why, again? According to the interview, Samsung found there was a lot of customer loyalty to the Note line of phones – heck, some Note 7 owners flat refused to return it, fire danger be damned. Also, Samsung just posted their best quarterly financials in years, which may have bolstered their courage to try and give the Note a do-over.
There’s a reason Ford doesn’t make a car called the Pinto any more, and maybe Samsung should take the hint that sometimes a fresh start is better than trying to polish up a badly tarnished brand.
It’s like some sort of tech work Matrix or something…
Hey kids, thinking about what you’re going to do when you’re a fancy-free adult and you can do whatever want, once you get off work… which you’ll go to every day, just like school? Well according to USA Today, the best job opportunities in the, at least, near future, are in tech, tech and also in tech.
Be sure to add these scintillating job titles to your dream career list: DevOps engineer, data engineer, analytics manager, and “solutions architect” – which starts at $125,000 a year, FYI. Tech jobs are also invading other economic segments, like healthcare, finance, government and retail. Because, hey, if the wifi is down, so is business. So, those “STEM” classes you keep hearing about? Take ‘em. All of them. You’ll thank us later.
Zuck can be so Meta (sorry)
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s big philanthropy, known as the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative has made an important first purchase: an AI startup known as Meta. No, it’s not a new AI brain for Facebook, Meta is a research tool for scientists and is essentially a powerful search bot tuned to scour scientific journals, dissertations, research papers and more. Meta used to cost users money to use; CZI says it will now be free of charge.
It’s another piece of the big puzzle for CZI, which has pledged $3 billion in a quest to cure all disease – it’s primary long-term goal, according to Zuck. How much it cost CZI to reel in Meta wasn’t announced; suffice to say it probably didn’t put much of a dent in the organization’s $45 billion bottom line. If you’re interested in using Meta, go here.
