The trial for Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes officially begins, Facebook offers to buy $100 million in invoices, and Samsung adds virtual memory to a smartphone in India.
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It’s all the tech news that’s trending right now, welcome to Hashtag Trending! It’s Monday, September 13, and I’m your host, Tom Li.
The trial for Theranos founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes began this week for defrauding investors, doctors and patients. When Theranos was founded, Holmes had promised a medical device that could run many medical lab tests with just a drop of blood. The device ultimately was never able to live up to the marketing. Still, Holmes had lulled investors into her invention and, at its peak, Theranos was valued at $9 billion, making Holmes one of the most successful entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley at the time. Her house of cards finally fell after the Wall Street Journal published an expose. Holmes has pleaded not guilty to the charges, and according to a report by NPR, she likely plans to defend herself at the trial.
Facebook has announced that it will buy $100 million worth of invoices from businesses owned by women and minorities. The program intends to return the wealth owed to these businesses immediately, without having to wait for long periods for their customers to pay. To apply, businesses can submit outstanding invoices of at least $1000. If accepted, Facebook promises to pay them within a matter of days. The company estimates that the new initiative will support up to 30,000 small businesses.
Samsung is adding a virtual memory feature to the Galaxy A52s 5G in India. RAM, or random access memory, is a really fast portion of temporary storage. Typically, the more the RAM, the snappier the multitasking experience, especially when opening a recently-accessed app. Samsung’s Virtual RAM feature carves out a portion of the flash storage as a page file, similar to a feature most modern operating systems use. Although it isn’t quite as fast as real RAM, the virtual RAM could still improve system performance. The feature is currently only available in India but it just may come to other countries as well.
That’s all the tech news that’s trending right now. Hashtag Trending is a part of the ITWC Podcast network. Add us to your Alexa Flash Briefing or your Google Home daily briefing. Make sure to sign up for our Daily IT Wire Newsletter to get all the news that matters directly in your inbox every day. Also, catch the next episode of Hashtag Tendances, our weekly Hashtag Trending episode in French, which drops every Friday at 3 pm. If you have a suggestion or tip, please drop us a line in the comments or via email. Thanks for listening, I’m Tom Li.
