Daily Tech Snippet: Thursday, September 10

• Apple releases major updates to leading products and pushes into new arenas. Apple unveiled an array of major improvements to its iPhones, iPads and other leading products Wednesday, including a voice-activated television box that the company said would form “a new foundation for TV.” The updated Apple TV includes some hardware improvements, such as a remote control that allows users to easily navigate through entertainment options simply by speaking to Siri, Apple’s voice assistant. But perhaps the device’s more significant feature is its ability to function as a game console, which could set up the company to enter a new arena in living room entertainment. Apple said several major gaming software companies are making versions of popular titles for Apple TV. The new device will also come with its own app store, allowing third-party developers to shape how consumers get entertainment and videos on their televisions. Apple also showed how to use the best screen in the house to look at rooms for rent on Airbnb’s Web site or homes for sale on Zillow. That was one of several story lines during Apple’s presentation in San Francisco. The electronics giant also introduced a new tablet — a $799 iPad Pro — aimed at business clients, as well as new software on its watch and other mobile devices that Apple said would revolutionize how doctors and patients interact. At one point, the audience of several thousand reporters and Apple employees at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium was shown how a pregnant woman could record her fetus's heartbeat and send the sound in a live stream to her doctor. Apple also updated its most important product, the iPhone, which accounts for 56 percent of the company’s sales. The new iPhone 6S and its larger cousin, the 6S Plus, have 12-megapixel cameras, sharper screens and a feature called 3D Touch, which brings up different menus depending on how hard a user presses the screen.  Apple also introduced a new iPad Pro, which has a display area roughly twice that of the iPad Air and is largely aimed at businesses. The tablet can be bought with a keyboard and has a beefier processor that can run heavy programs such as Microsoft Office. And, indeed, to tout the device, Apple invited executives from Microsoft, its former rival, to show how the popular office suite would work on the iPad. Also on stage were executives from Adobe, another software company Apple in the past has criticized for lax security. And in another move that broke with the past, Apple displayed a new stylus for the iPad Pro that it called the Apple Pencil, a product that likely would have been blocked by the company’s late co-founder Steve Jobs, who in 2010 mocked companies that offered styluses to consumers

• Apple phone, tablet and TV fail to impress investors. Apple unveiled a new TV set top box that responds to voice commands and fresh iPhones that sense the pressure of a finger tap, changes which underwhelmed many social media commenters and investors. The new 6S and 6S Plus versions of the iPhone, Apple's biggest money maker, are the same size as the previous versions but come with a better camera, faster chips, new colors and the force-sensitive "3D Touch". Speaking before thousands of analysts, journalists and frequently cheering Apple employees, Chief Executive Tim Cook also brought on stage an executive from onetime archrival Microsoft  to illustrate the business-friendly credentials of a big new iPad, the Pro. Apple shares fell 1.9 percent to $110.15 by the close, replicating the recent history of such rollouts but also reflecting the lack of any transformative products that could jumpstart the company's sales ahead of the crucial holiday season. Apple shares have lost an average of 0.4 percent on the day of iPhone announcements over the past three years, according to BTIG Research data

• Google is chasing Amazon Web Services in a new area –- providing access to “on-demand” supercomputing resources. On Wednesday, Google announced the general availability of something called pre-emptible virtual machines, which amount to computing resources you can rent for very little. The service, first announced in May, enables people to buy computer processing that Google isn’t using at a steep discount, provided the customer is willing to yield the resources on short notice. A.W.S. has a similar short-term usage program, called Spot Instances. It lends itself to supercomputing exercises, particularly for universities and companies that don’t want to buy multimillion-dollar machines of their own, and has been used in areas like drug discovery and learning about new materials. The addition of Google as a competitor is likely to increase the number of ways these resources are used while lowering prices. Google also appears to be stressing its skills in machine learning, a powerful tool for finding new patterns in large data sets. Using Google, cancer researchers at the Broad Institute used 51,200 computing cores to look at the interrelationships between human genes, the billions of ways they are expressed, the cell lines from some 500 types of cancer, and molecules that perturb those cells. The idea was to sort through billions of data points quickly, looking for promising areas for researchers to seek drugs and treatments. The analysis, which on a single computer server would have run about 30 years, took a couple of hours, said Chris Dwan, the acting director of Information Technology at Broad. It cost about $4,000. “This isn’t like computing a few taxi trips,” said Mr. Dwan. “This is really heavy computing in complex biological systems, steering research.” He added, “the rules of how we work are being completely rewritten.”

• It's Like PayPal But Pays Interest, and India's Banks Are Afraid. That’s a concern for the nation’s largest banks, because 40 percent of the money they lend comes from millions of small depositors like Mungekar. If more like her start shifting to digital money, they risk draining those deposits. Last month, the Reserve Bank of India gave licenses to 11 entities to operate so-called payment banks that will function a lot like PayPal in the U.S, but with a distinction -- customers can get interest on the money they leave there. Payment banks can’t lend and can only invest the client’s money in the safest government securities. Their revenue comes from a small commission on each transaction. Their new licences are part of central bank Governor Raghuram Rajan’s mission to cut the nation’s addiction to cash and to increase efficiency at the banks. PayTM started off as a service for adding credit to burner phones, and has evolved into the country’s largest e-wallet repository, allowing customers to pay utility bills, buy bus tickets and pay for Uber rides. Now it plans to build on its base of urban middle-class clientele to become a pseudo bank -- accepting deposits, offering peer-to-peer money transfers, even providing a debit card for cash withdrawals. The payment banking license was the first step. E-Wallets may be attractive for people wary of sharing their bank or card details on the Internet. They also make it easier to reward customers with discounts and offers redeemable at online or brick-and-mortar outlets. Apart from One97, other payment bank licensees include three large telecom operators, industrial conglomerates, the state-owned postal service, and billionaire Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Industries, which plans to run its venture with State Bank of India.

• Mobile payments company Square may hold IPO in fourth quarter: Bloomberg. Mobile payments company Square may file for an initial public offering by the fourth quarter of this year, although the timing depends on market conditions, Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with the matter. Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter and its current chief executive, has assured investors and key employees that he will also remain Square's chief executive, Bloomberg said. At this point, the timing of Square's IPO is more contingent on market conditions than on whether Dorsey remains its CEO, Bloomberg said.