This week, LG’s home brew machine, Sony’s cup-holder speaker, and Flickr’s account changes. But first, Apple’s Shot on iPhone Challenge.

GPS data from smartwatch used to convict British hitman

In Liverpool last week, Mark Fellows was convicted of the murders of two men and sentenced to life in prison.

The data that helped seal his fate, according to investigators, came from his Garmin Forerunner smartwatch, which had recorded movements in the area where one of the men was killed. This suggested a “reconnaissance run”.

Data from wearable tech is being allowed in courts more frequently. Last fall, biometric data from the Fitbit of a murder victim was used as evidence to charge her stepfather with murder.

Two CES products that prove a point about CES

LG wants to help you brew your own craft beer at home

There are home appliances that make use of pods to help you make coffee and even tortillas. LG wants to make it easy for you to make beer at home.

Two weeks after you put in a capsule containing malt, yeast, hop oil, and flavour, the LG HomeBrew will make you five litres of beer.

There are a number of different types to try, including IPA, pale ale, pilsner, and stout.

Sony’s new outdoor speaker has cup holders

The GTK-PG10 portable wireless speaker from Sony ($400) is designed for partying. When you open up the top panels. “the built-in tweeters face upward and outward, spreading the sound wider for outdoor parties”.

Plus, when open, the splash-proof top panels include four cup holders.

It can run a party for up to 13 hours without needing to be recharged.

Flickr changes account plans

Flickr is dialing back the service being offered to members with free accounts. Starting on February 5, anyone with more than 1,000 items in a free account run the risk of having their photos and videos deleted, beginning with the oldest.

Upgrading to a Flickr Pro account costs about $65 a year, and comes with unlimited storage and an experience free from advertising.

I’m not an active Flickr user, but I’ve been a member since 2007 and have some images in my account from back before we had kids, and there are some images I don’t know that I have elsewhere. Flickr has tried to make it easy for us to download our data from our account by having a one button interaction to trigger the download.

Less than a day later I received an email that everything, from my account data to the actual photos and videos, was ready to download.

Here’s where things got a bit frustrating. When I logged into my account to download the information, it was served up in 133 different links to discrete zipfiles. Granted, those files contained more than 100 GB of images, but there are better ways of sending that volume of information online. Torrent files are a good example.

This is all a big bummer because it’s only been a couple of years since Flickr gave all users 1 TB of space for photos and videos. But last spring, the service was acquired by SmugMug.

If you’re leaving Flickr because of this change, there are a couple of other options.

You can get 2 TB of storage at Google One for Cdn$140 a year, and Amazon Photos comes with every Prime membership and gives you unlimited photos (but not video).

For the pros there’s 500px, the Toronto-based company that was built by photographers for photographers. A pro account gives you unlimited storage and costs about $100.

Amazon Scout robot delivering packages to customers

Starting today, an autonomous delivery system, the Amazon Scout robot, started delivering packages to customers in Snohomish County, Washington, a suburb north of Seattle.

This week on The Shift with Drex, I talked about Apple and TV shows, the new Alexa Voice Remote for Amazon’s Fire TV sticks, Roku and Infowars, Amazon’s Neural Text-to-Speech, London Drugs’ packaging recycling amnesty, and Women in Games upcoming event.

This week, lots of things happening in the world of TV technology from all the big players, London Drugs expands its recycling offering, and the importance of character diversity in video games.

Apple makes a big splash at CES without even being there

Apple doesn’t officially participate in the annual consumer tech show, but the company always finds a way to have an impact. This year it was through surprising partnerships with other tech companies, including rival Samsung.

Samsung, LG, Sony, and Vizio all had TVs in Vegas that support AirPlay 2, Apple’s connectivity feature that enables users to push content from their Apple devices to other screens.

Samsung went even further. Its TVs will have an iTunes app, too.

This is all in advance of Apple launching its TV service, which is expected this year.

I expect partnerships with Roku and even Amazon are on the horizon.

Roku took heat for adding Infowars to its streaming platform so dropped it

Alex Jones’ streaming video show, Infowars, has been kicked off of nearly every major streaming service in the past year, including Apple, Facebook, and YouTube.

This week, Roku added it. In a statement to TechCrunch, the company said, “While open to many voices, we have policies that prohibit the publication of content that is unlawful, incites illegal activities or violates third-party rights, among other things. If we determine a channel violates these policies, it will be removed. To our knowledge, InfoWars is not currently in violation of these content policies.”

Jones and InfoWars have been instructed to turn over documents in a case brought by the families of Sandy Hook.

This is the same argument used last year after the Parkland, Florida school shooting when Roku took flak for including NRA TV on its platform.

The negative response in social media was swift and effective. By the end of the day, Roku had reversed course.

After the InfoWars channel became available, we heard from concerned parties and have determined that the channel should be removed from our platform. Deletion from the channel store and platform has begun and will be completed shortly.

— Roku (@Roku) January 16, 2019

Roku has had success recently with partnerships with TV manufacturers and new hardware, and is clearly looking to protect its brand.

New Alexa Voice Remote releases in Canada

Yesterday, Amazon started selling a new remote control for its Fire TV streaming stick. The new Alexa Voice Remote gives you voice control over your viewing. It can also control the power and volume on compatible receivers, sound bars, and television sets, something earlier remotes could not do.

The new remote is available for only $20, 50% off, for a limited time, and it will be included with all new Fire TV Sticks, including the standard ($50), the Fire TV Stick 4K ($70), and Fire TV Edition smart TVs from Toshiba.

London Drugs declares “packaging recycling amnesty” through January

If you’ve still got boxes and bubble wrap and styrofoam lying around the house from the holiday season and don’t know what to do with it, get thee to a local London Drugs.

The retailer has always offered to take recyclable packaging from things purchased at its stores. Through the month of January, and in an effort to help people who may have received more packages by mail and courier this year, London Drugs is willing to take recyclable packaging no matter what the origin.

It’s all in an effort to keep this stuff out of the landfill.

Amazon uses machine learning to teach Alexa how to read better

In the U.S., Alexa is going to sound more like a human when she reads to you. Amazon has developed what it calls neural text-to-speech technology (NTTS) that involves the software learning how to read text more naturally.

Well, natural for a human.

But because Alexa was designed to make us comfortable, it makes sense that it would work best if it sounded like us. Here’s how different Alexa will sound to users in the States.

Women in Gaming event to discuss importance of character diversity

Women in Gaming is a community of females working for Xbox, and the chapter based in Vancouver at Microsoft Game Studio, the Coalition, is hosting an event, When Art Imitates Reality — The Value of Diverse Characters in Games.

The free event will have panelists working in the games industry talking about “how expanding character diversity in the game development process contributes to increased creativity, audience authenticity, and player confidence.”

Participating panelists include Ann Lemay, from WB Games Montreal, Cherry Rae, an accessibility and inclusion consultant, Bonnie Jean Mah, from the Coalition, Katie De Souza, from Phoenix Labs, and Melissa Boone, from Microsoft.

Carolina Smith, also from the Coalition, will moderate the panel on Saturday, January 26.

This leads into the coming launch of Gears of War 5, in development at the Coalition, releasing this year.

While Gears games have always included female characters, this is the first time players will play as a female protagonist in the narrative campaign. The sequel to Gears of War 4 focuses on the adventure of Kait Diaz.

Last night on The Shift with Drex, I talked about the trends we’re seeing at CES 2019 in Las Vegas, including fancy new TV technology, folding smartphones, and the rise of digital assistants in smart home technology.

If you’re interested in consumer technology, you’re interested in what’s going on in Las Vegas this week. After all, CES 2019 is upon us.

The trade show runs January until Friday this week, and there’s lots going on.

TVs and more TV

There’s always lots of television news at CES and this year is no exception.

• LG has a 4K OLED television that disappears when you’re not using it. It’s the Signature OLED TV R, and the screen rolls up into a box. You can also have a quarter of the screen exposed for smart home controls and notifications.

• Sony showed off 85- and 98-inch LED screens that have an 8K resolution (nearly 8,000 pixels horizontally; two times bigger than 4K) and can reportedly upscale 4K content to 8K; the company also has OLED screens in 55-, 65-, and 77-inch sizes.

• Samsung, meanwhile, is updating its line of excellent screens, and adding something nobody thought possible: iTunes. Yes, you’ll be able to access your iTunes movies and TV shows on your Samsung television. You’ll also be able to stream content from your Apple devices to Samsung screens with AirPlay 2.

Folding smartphones

• While Samsung briefly showed a folding smartphone last November, the company did not have anything to say about the device during a briefing at CES. It was showing the device to select media behind closed doors, however. While no name has been announced, Galaxy Fold and Galaxy X have both been rumoured as possible. According to media who saw the device in Vegas this week, the Samsung folding smartphone has an outside screen that is 4.5 inches. When unfolded, the display becomes 7.3 inches.

• Royole FlexPai is actually in the wild already, and the company is showing off the foldable smartphone in Vegas. Reports out of CES are that the foldable screen is very interesting, but that the device itself is far from being ready for primetime.

Smart homes and digital assistants

• Almost all new smart home technology at CES is supporting Amazon’s Alexa. From cleaning robots to mesh networking platforms, from smart plugs to LED arrays to speakers, every tech company wants to work with Alexa.

• Google, meanwhile, is pushing its Google Assistant hard by creating an entire ecosystem for it, in the same way Amazon has with Alexa. And tech companies are creating products for Assistant to work with. Case in point is the Lenovo alarm clock which works with Google Assistant (and doesn’t have a camera).

Samsung profit down, too

Just a few days after Apple revised its earning guidance, Samsung revealed an estimated 30 percent profit drop leading from “stagnant” smartphone sales and weak demand for its processing chips.