Here’s a round-up of the big news in the tech world last week to get you up-to-speed for the week ahead:
1. Avegant Glyph
The Avegant Glyph is an audio-video headset device. You can use it as earphones, or fold it over in front of the eyes for a fully immersed audio-video experience. With 2 million mirrors working together to provide a refined, high-definition, audio-visual experience, Avegant Glyph should provide for a great virtual reality experience.
The Avegant Glyph blew past its KickStarter offering, and appears to be on its way to mass adoption. The Avegant Glyph project currently has a little over 2,400 backers with most of them pledging $499; that sum will allow for the backers to receive the “beta special KickStarter edition,” when it becomes available.
2. Flappy Bird
Flappy Bird is a game that climbed its way to number one last week on both Android and iOS, and surprised the creator at how quickly the game had become so popular.
The game was inspired by Super Mario Brothers, as is evident with all green pipes you have to navigate Flappy Bird between.
When asked the reason for its popularity, designer and developer Dong Nguyen stated that it is really simple to learn a good game for head-to-head competition.
3. Facebook’s Paper Application
Currently only available in the United States (though Tech Crunch gives instructions on how to get around that; click here to see how). Facebook’s Paper is a new way for its users to interact and find things they are interested in on Facebook and beyond.
Facebook Paper is a way for Facebook to increase user engagement, and provide users with stories that they might be interested in by adding sections to their paper.
It is easy to navigate, and has a voice-enabled tutorial that walks you through getting started. Many are also comparing Facebook’s Paper to Flipboard.
4. Microsoft’s New CEO
Microsoft has a new CEO, Indian-born Satya Nadella, a 22-year Microsoft veteran. He takes the helm at Microsoft while the company seeks to transform itself into a hardware, software, and services company.
With Nadella having a engineering background, and having had lead positions and roles in making decisions related to Microsoft Cloud, Microsoft server, X-Box and more, he seems to be fit a good fit for the CEO position.
Bill Gates has stepped down from the Chairman position to become a technical adviser, which will see him spend more time at Microsoft to help with the transition.
Nadella is seen here in his first interview after becoming CEO:
5. Programming Language Satisfies Foreign-Language School Requirements
Kentucky has passed a law that would allow for computer programming language courses to “satisfy foreign-language requirements.”
This law is meant to help meet the demand for the computer science jobs market, which has a relatively high starting salary of around $60,000.
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