Gartner just released figures on total global smartphone sales that show decreased sales in Q4 2019 despite small year-on-year increases for Apple and Xiaomi. In that quarter, consumers purchased 406.6 million new phones compared to 408.5 million in the same quarter the previous year. Samsung, the long-time leader in smartphone sales, retained the same 17.3 percent market share although it sold fewer units year-on-year. In comparison to Q4 2018, Apple sold 5 million more mobile devices in that quarter in 2019. Read more

Facebook debuted a powerful tool against spammers that uses Deep Entity Classification (DEC), a machine-learning technology. The company’s data science manager Bochra Gharbaoui reported the tool has already taken down 6.6 billion fake accounts last year and blocked millions of attempts to create new ones. DEC analyzes “deep features” of each individual profile, which refers to its behavioral patterns rather than its direct characteristics and includes the profile’s properties and groups/pages the user has contacted. Read more

The stage appearance of a Tupac Shakur hologram at the 2012 Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival marked the beginning of the music industry’s fascination with the new tech. Now, augmented reality startup 1RIC convinced five artists to dance and pose, surrounded by 106 cameras. The resulting 3D images of these performers reside on Jadu, 1RIC’s app, which consumers can use to create their own videos of themselves dancing with the stars. Chief executive Asad Malik said Jadu is an effort to make 3D holograms more accessible. Read more

In three months, Honeywell International will roll out an “early stage” quantum computer for “commercial experiments,” with JPMorgan Chase as its first public user. Honeywell Quantum Solutions president Tony Uttley stated it will speed up calculations and develop new materials and trading strategies for financial services firms, but it could also be used to power machine learning calculations by aerospace, oil and gas companies. IBM, Google and Microsoft are also at work on quantum computing solutions. Read more

Ampere introduced the industry’s first-ever 80-core ARM-based 64-bit server processor — the Ampere Altra processor — for use in cloud and edge computing data centers. The move puts the company in direct competition with Intel and Advanced Micro Devices. Intel currently has 95.5 percent of the server chip market, with AMD taking the rest. The Ampere Altra, which runs on 210 watts, is aimed at artificial intelligence, cloud-native applications, data analytics, database, edge computing, storage, telco stacks and web hosting. Read more