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Today’s topics include Microsoft prepares Office for the iPad Pro, Qualcomm is taking aim at the consumer drone market, Google Wallet is playing a new role, and Dell will be investing $125 billion in the China Market.
On Sept. 9, Apple unveiled the iPad Pro, along with the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus, all running iOS 9, during a media event in San Francisco.
Kirk Koenigsbauer, corporate vice president of Microsoft Office, then took the stage to show off the Office experience on the iPad Pro and with Apple’s new stylus, the Pencil.
What followed was a live demonstration of Word’s new inking support, multitasking with Word and Excel, and PowerPoint’s shape recognition technology, which converts scribbles into polished graphical objects like arrows, circles and roughly 20 other object types.
Qualcomm officials want to bring their company’s expertise in mobile chips to the burgeoning consumer drone market.
The company last week unveiled the Qualcomm Snapdragon Flight, which brings together all the mobile functionality needed by the unmanned flying vehicles—not only the processing power, but also technologies for everything from navigation and 4K video to cameras and various sensors—onto a single 58mm-by-40mm board.
With the launch of its Android Pay mobile payment technology last week, Google has assigned its Google Wallet app a new role. Originally launched as a mobile payment application in 2011, Wallet will now be used exclusively to enable users to send and receive money using their smartphones.
Owners of Android and iOS smartphones can use Wallet to send money to anyone in the United States with an email address—even if that person does not have a Wallet app. Consumers will be able to cash it out to a linked debit card or bank account.
Or they can cash it out to Google’s new Wallet Card, which is a physical debit card that works wherever MasterCard debit is accepted.
Dell is planning to invest $125 billion in the China market over the next five years, the latest announcement by a top-tier U.S. tech vendor expanding their efforts in the lucrative market.
CEO Michael Dell, in a visit to the country Sept. 10, said his company’s investment will contribute as much as $175 billion to exports and imports in China and support more than a million jobs.
In addition to the financial investment, Dell’s “In China, for China” 4.0 strategy will include its venture capital arm—Dell Ventures—which will help to fuel entrepreneurship in the country and drive innovation in Chinese enterprises.