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OCAU News |
French electronic music superstars Daft Punk are launching their new album in Australia. In Wee Waa, to be specific. Which is a small town between Narrabri and Walgett. Righto then. Tickets are limited to 4000, but that’s not the only hurdle you’ll have to cross to get to the show: Wee Waa is about eight hours drive from Sydney and doesn’t have a commercial airport. You can apparently fly to Narrabri which isn't too far away, though. Anyway, discussion here.
One event not going ahead is the Australian Motor Show this year. Organisers have cancelled the Melbourne motor show, which was scheduled to be held in June, after lacklustre support from car manufacturers and dwindling attendance figures in recent years. The Australian International Motor Show is jointly hosted by Melbourne and Sydney, and alternates between the two cities under a year-by-year agreement that started in 2009.
I mentioned Bitcoin's growing popularity a few days ago, but now I'm mentioning it again for the wrong reasons. On Wednesday afternoon, the Bitcoin bubble appears to have burst. As of this writing, its current value is around $160—down from a high of $260. (It fell as low as $130 today.) There is no obvious explanation for why the digital currency has fallen so far and so fast, although the market correcting after such a huge rise might be a good explanation. Discussion continues here.
Meanwhile an Australian taxi-booking startup has raised $1.5M in investment funding. Ingogo is one of the independent taxi app developers that have taken fire from the taxi industry. After the NSW Taxi Council and Crime Stoppers launched an ad campaign against those apps, Ingogo said it would consider legal action. In a release today, Ingogo said it’s targeting a corporate taxi payment system under trial with several Sydney businesses “as a replacement” for the taxi industry’s Cabcharge.
If you prefer trains or buses (and you're in Sydney), you can now use a real-time trains app. State Minister for Transport Gladys Berejiklian unveiled six updated apps on Thursday that will have the real-time capability, which makes use of markers on stations that will receive information from trains, and then pass it on to the apps. The release of up-to-the-minute information about where trains are on the network follows the release late last year of real-time bus information.
IntelInside spotted a worrying story about aircraft hacking. To make things even more interesting - or easier - Teso showcased an Andorid application that uses SIMON's powers to remotely control airplanes on the move. The application, fittingly named PlaneSploit, sports a clean and simple interface, but is packed full with features.
IDG are blaming Windows 8 for a slump in PC sales. “Although IDC had not expected Windows 8 to be a significant driver to help stem the tide of PC volume decline, it now appears that without a course correction from Microsoft, the PC market is headed toward an even worse contraction for 2013 than previously thought,” Jay Chou, senior research analyst on IDC’s quarterly PC tracking service, said in the release.
NASA have announced plans to capture an asteroid. The mission to find, capture and redirect an asteroid robotically, and then visit it with astronauts to study it and return samples takes advantage of expertise across all of NASA in an integrated approach to exploration. Along with the scientific research and technology demonstrations happening around the clock on the International Space Station that are teaching us how humans can live and work in space, this mission will give us valuable experience we need in deep space operations to send humans to more distant destinations in the solar system, including Mars. Discussion here.
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All original content copyright James Rolfe.
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