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Today’s topics include a survey finding that many IT professionals will seek new jobs in 2018; Intel rolling out its latest Pentium and Celeron chips for low-cost PCs; Skype for Windows 10 gaining a new gallery feature and notification panel; and Google releasing three new mobile apps using experimental technology.
Nearly one-third of IT workers plan to search for a new job in 2018, according to the findings of a new Spiceworks survey. The Spiceworks 2018 IT Career Outlook survey of 2,163 workers in Europe and North America also found that three-quarters of probable job seekers are seeking higher salaries, while 70 percent want to improve their skill sets.
Spiceworks senior tech analyst Peter Tsai told eWEEK that companies unable to offer higher salaries may want to dedicate more resources to training their IT professionals, which “would be a big draw for workers of all generations, but especially younger IT pros.”
As a group, millennial IT professionals showed more desire to switch companies to gain better pay and training opportunities, with 36 percent of millennials expecting to leave their job in 2018. The middle generation, GenX-ers, are more likely to move based on work-life balance.
Intel is rolling out new Pentium and Celeron processors based on its new “Gemini Lake” architecture and aimed at such devices as two-in-one and all-in-one laptops and desktops. The low-cost, low-power chips, which will begin appearing in systems in the first quarter of next year, give users a balance of performance and connectivity, as well as long battery life.
Intel is offering Gigabit WiFi with the new chips, which officials said will drive systems that are 12 times faster than systems using 802.11b/g/n or a wired Gigabit Ethernet connection. This will improve the performance of collaboration apps as well as content streaming, downloading large files and web browsing.
With the new chips, Intel is looking to give a jolt to the low end of the struggling global PC market. In the third quarter, worldwide PC shipments declined 3.6 percent, driven in part by weak back-to-school sales in the United States.
Microsoft has updated the Skype desktop app for Windows 10 with new features that help users quickly access their shared content and inform them when someone chimes in on a conversation.
Skype’s chat interface now includes an option that displays a gallery pane containing shared images, videos, files and links when clicked, allowing users to find a specific piece of content without digging through their chat history. Skype also now alerts users when others are carrying on discussions that involve them.
The new Skype client is currently being rolled out to users who have configured Windows Update to deliver updates automatically. Alternately, users can check for updates manually, triggering a download.
Google on Dec. 11 released the first three of a new series of planned mobile photo apps based on experimental technology under development in its labs. One app is designed purely for Android devices, another is for both Android and iOS devices, while the third is solely for iOS.
The Android app, dubbed Storyboard, automatically transforms any video clip into a single-page comic layout. The iOS and Android app is called Selfissimo and helps users take selfies in an automated fashion. The third app, for iOS devices, is dubbed Scrubbies. It lets users play with the speed and direction of video clips so they can create video loops, mix them with other videos and carry out various other manipulations.
Google researcher Alex Kauffmann said the apps, and any future ones, are designed to make better use of emerging hardware and computer vision capabilities that are becoming available in modern smartphone cameras.