Former Samsung head Jay Y. Lee has been released from jail, five months after being convicted of bribery charges. Intel has designed new smart eyewear that projects images onto your retina and looks like regular glasses. And led by Amazon and Netflix, tech companies were front and centre at the Super Bowl.
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From Twitter: Former Samsung vice chair Jay Y. Lee has been released from jail five months after being convicted of corruption charges. According to Reuters and Bloomberg, Lee became a free man on Monday after South Korea’s High Court reduced his sentence from five years to two and put him on four years’ probation – which means he is unlikely to serve any additional jail time. Lee had been imprisoned since last February, when he was arrested and charged with perjury and embezzlement for his role in a graft scandal that led to former South Korean president Park Geun-hye’s impeachment, and was officially convicted last August.
From Reddit: Verge reporter Dieter Bohn was treated to an exclusive look at Intel’s new Vaunt smart glasses, which use an extremely low-powered laser mounted near the right lens to project a heads-up display directly onto the wearer’s retina. According to Bohn, this projection is always in focus, but can be ignored just as easily. More importantly, the Vaunt smart glasses look like everyday prescription glasses, and weigh less than 30 grams. The device’s electronic components are built into the eyeglass stems, and Intel is aiming for 18 hours of battery life – though should the batteries die, they’ll still work as regular glasses. No software, price, or release date has been revealed, though Bohn compares the Vaunt’s capabilities to a smartwatch, and says that developers will get to tinker with the device sometime this year.
Finally, as of this writing YouTube has uploaded 121 commercials from this year’s Super Bowl, and as usual tech is front and centre. This year’s trending ads include: An Amazon commercial starring Jeff Bezos himself that depicts Alexa losing her voice and a long list of celebrities filling in…
A commercial for U.S. telecom Sprint starring a chess-playing android named Evelyn…
And a trailer for Netflix’s newest original, The Cloverfield Paradox, which premiered on the streaming site immediately after the game.
Netflix also had an indirect hand in this year’s most popular ad, a Tide commercial starring Stranger Things’ David Harbour.
That’s what’s trending today. Hashtag Trending is produced by IT World Canada. Today’s episode is brought to you by SAS, the world leader in advanced analytics and the Official Analytics Partner of the Canadian Olympic Team.
