Our first techwatch of 2021. I can’t believe it’s already July, and we miss the opportunity to share with you so much great tech stuff we scouted all around. Sure, we worked a lot on tech4good projects and launched news soon-to-be-public events like “le club sourire,” but that’s not a reason to stop getting hungry for new ways to use tech in our life

This content was sent on July 27th in our Tech Watch Newsletter

💡Innovation

Masten Space Systems to develop a GPS-like network for the moon

Marten Space Systems is a startup that plans to land on the moon in 2023 and start developing a lunar navigation system, just like GPS, but for the moon 🤯

GitHub Copilot: Your AI pair programmer

Github released an AI pair programmer for vscode. And we are truly amazed by the tour de force, even if we can clearly see all the difficulties in terms of intellectual property that will result from this tool. And all the code repositories used for training the model.

Google’s Find My Device might soon work.

Google is working on an Apple AirTag discovery network alternative (of their own). But will it be usable on ALL Android devices when you know Samsung already has its own and lost the China market where the tech giant is developing its own OS now?

🔓 OpenSource

nocodb/nocodb: The Open Source Airtable alternative

NocoDB is a tool that transforms any MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server, SQLite, or MariaDB into an open-source Airtable alternative.

Open Source Insights

Google launched a project to let you easily understand the dependencies and their consequences on any open-source package. Security but also license-wise.

Google’s open sources low-bandwidth Lyra audio codec for data calls

Google is open-sourcing its low-bandwidth audio codec for data calls. The one testes in Google Duo for a while.

💰 Acquisition

Hyundai Acquires Boston Dynamics, Company Most Famous for Robot Police Dogs

Hyundai acquires Boston Dynamics for $1.1 billion (for 80% of the controlling stake, while Softbank retains a 20% stake). To celebrate, Hyundai released a bizarre video where they try to be inspirational while doing very poor visual overlays.

Prosus acquired stack Overflow for $1.8 billion.

Stack Overflow empire had been acquired for 1.8 billion USD by Prosus (primary shareholder of Chinese gaming mega co/WeChat developer, Tencent).

Amazon brings James Bond, Rocky to fight Netflix with $8.5 bln MGM buy

Amazon bought MGM (and James Bond & Rocky) for $8.5 billion to keep up with the franchise Mercato and compete with Netflix & Disney+.

🗽 Privacy & Freedom

Apple’s new encrypted browsing feature won’t be available in China, Saudi Arabia, and more.

Obviously, the Apple “encrypted browsing” features, which look like TOR, will NOT be available where it is needed most: China, Saudi Arabia, etc., will still be able to inspect 100% of the web traffic of their residents.

Huawei officially launches Android alternative HarmonyOS for smartphones

After years of being banned from working with any U.S.A. company, including Google, Huawei launched their Android alternative: HarmonyOS. More than 500 000 developers are building apps for this new OS, including Oppo, Vivo & Xiaomi.

European Parliament approves mass surveillance of private communications

EU Parliament approved the ePrivacy Derogation, allowing providers of e-mail and messaging services to automatically search all personal messages of each citizen for presumed suspect content and report to the Police.

🛠 Tools

Print a QR code for connecting to your WiFi

wifi-card is an open-source web app running 100% in your browser that lets you generate and print a QR code for joining your wifi.

Luxembourg publish their Accessibility framework for mobile application

Luxembourg publishes its first accessibility framework for mobile applications to meet the EU requirements regarding public services mobile applications. France is still working on their own version, but nothing official yet.

Stripe Identity — The easiest way to verify identities

Stripe is going after the automated identity verification with Stripe Identity, part of their Stripe OnBoarding platform (which automatically performs complicated KYC). Oh, and it’s free (for now).

That’s all folks!

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