Latest news with #Maps
Arabian Post
14 hours ago
- Business
- Arabian Post
Google's AI Tools Boost UAE Economy by Dhs21.8bn
Arabian Post Staff -Dubai Google's array of AI‑powered services—Search, Ads, Play, Maps, YouTube and Gemini—delivered a Dhs21.8 billion uplift to the UAE's economy in 2024, fueling digital transformation, consumer value and job creation. Search and Ads alone generated Dhs20.2 billion by enabling thousands of local companies to reach new customers and expand operations. Gemini, Google's AI assistant, has seen 63 per cent of UAE adults using it, with nine in ten users reporting gains in productivity and 71 per cent praising its Arabic‑language ease of use. Other tools, including Maps, Waze and mobile wallets, further enhanced daily routines. ADVERTISEMENT The Google Maharat Min Google skilling initiative has equipped more than 430,000 people in the UAE with digital and AI competencies since 2018. Meanwhile, the Android and Google Play ecosystem supported around 30,000 jobs and generated approximately Dhs455 million in revenue for UAE‑based app developers in 2024. Survey data from March 2025, with responses from over 1,100 consumers and nearly 400 business leaders, indicates that Google's services offer an estimated average monthly benefit of Dhs683 per user. Half of adults describe Search as essential to their routine, 89 per cent rely on Maps or Waze for navigation, and 90 per cent use mobile payment platforms like GPay or GWallet to streamline transactions. Adoption of AI tools among UAE businesses is nearing ubiquity, with 91 per cent reporting use of at least one AI product in workflows, while 97 per cent of public‑sector respondents confirm boosted productivity from Google's AI solutions. Consumer engagement is likewise robust: 94 per cent use Search monthly to compare prices, 86 per cent check reviews before visiting venues, 80 per cent use mapping apps to locate businesses, and 73 per cent of 18–24‑year‑olds browse or shop via Search weekly. Google's platforms have also strengthened the creative and developer landscape: over 600 UAE‑based YouTube channels surpassed one million subscribers—a 15 per cent annual rise—and the Google News Initiative has trained more than 20,000 journalists and journalism students across the MENA region, including the UAE. Anthony Nakache, Google's Managing Director for the Middle East and North Africa, emphasised that the firm's 'investment in accelerating the country's ambitious journey towards a diversified, AI‑powered economy' is reflected in the findings. He highlighted how local partnerships, AI‑driven tools and continuous skilling programmes contribute to 'substantial economic value' and empower individuals, enterprises and communities within the UAE. Public First's Economic Impact Report, published mid‑June, is based on econometric modelling, consumer and business polling, case studies and secondary data. Survey responses were weighted to reflect the UAE's national demographics.
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Wait. The TikTokers don't love you like I love you - Yeah Yeah Yeahs thrill at Manchester Apollo
Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Manchester Apollo. Monday June 16, 2025. What do you do when your most famous song has been completely bastardised by a TikTok dance craze? If you're the Yeah Yeah Yeahs you strip it back entirely and add a string quartet. READ MORE: 45 of Parklife 2025's most fashionable festival-goers READ MORE: Chris Brown brings surprise star guest out at Co-op Live gig in Manchester It could easily have been business as usual for the New York trio - now 25 years into their journey as one of the most revered indie darlings of the 21st century. An electric live band, their pretentious, cerebral art-rock speaks for a generation. So when they announced a short tour to celebrate their many years together, it sold out in minutes. More recently, they have found fame with a new audience much younger than the Millennials who grew up hearing Y Control and Zero blasting out of the speakers at 5th Ave and 42s. That's because their glorious ballad Maps has become part of a viral dance trend that propelled the song to the top of the TikTop Billboard Top 50 chart - 21 years after its release. But it's the die hard fans rather than the TikTokers who fill the seats of Manchester Apollo tonight. After a test run in California, Manchester is the first stop on a tour of 'beautiful iconic theatres' and one of only two UK dates. The Hidden In Pieces tour is intended to display YYY's softer, more mature side with the band working alongside a string quartet to show off a selection of rarities and B-Sides. And from the opening chords of lovesong Blacktop, it's clear this is going to be something pretty special. Frontwoman Karen O's pure, delicate vocal rings out above a reverberating synth - setting the tone for a show filled with delicate and heartfelt moments of beauty. O is usually one of the most energetic performers around. But she spends much of this set gently pottering about the stage in a red jumpsuit, gold boots and a blue diamond encrusted cape. During some of it, she's even sitting down - unheard of at a normal YYY's gig. The last time they visited Manchester, O spat water into the air, growled, roared, rolled around and hurtled about the stage. That's her shtick. Tonight she is a different beast. Older, wiser, more relaxed - much like her audience (I can't have been the only one to delight in the prospect of a seated gig on a weeknight). 'Are you ready to get comfy and cosy with the Yeah Yeah Yeahs tonight?' she asks. 'This is new for us. It's just you and us tonight.' Promising some 'deep cuts' from their back catalogue, O launches into Mystery Girl - a very early song from their first EP. Then there's an acoustic guitar version of the anthemic Gold Lion which doesn't stray too far from the source, but slows the tempo down and adds a double bass. Let Me Know - a B-side O admits is only really for true fans, follows with a searing string quartet intro. A cover of Bjork's Hyperballad doesn't quite work and it takes me a little while to recognise the bonkers lyrics of that masterpiece above a busy arrangement and overly loud synth. And IsIs - a gloriously chaotic racket in its recorded form - honestly sounds a bit of a mess here. But overall the orchestral arrangements in this show throw new light and shade on YYY's raw, exposing lyrics. As O, guitarist Nick Zinner and drummer Brian Chase power into fan favourite Cheated Hearts, the energy ramps up and you can feel they are on safer ground. Warrior lends itself well to this more acoustic sound and really allows O to show off both the vulnerability and explosive power of her unique voice. A new arrangement of Runaway sounds lovely and achieves the Lynchian vibe the band may have hoped to display when they cited the late great director in their press for this tour. It sounds huge and dramatic with strings adding an ethereal, Mica Levi-like eeriness. O has always been an emotionally raw performer - you need only look at the famously heart-wrenching video for Maps to glean that. But this evening's performance is bolder still. 'I'm not really sure why we're doing this,' she admits 'We just really wanted to. 'We just wanted to sing these songs really vulnerable for you. It's really special to be here doing this with you.' This is a bold, experimental show which at times feels more akin to something you would find at Manchester International Festival rather than the Apollo on a Monday night. There are also moments of huge charm and emotion. The short pretty Mars - which O dedicates to her son Django - is an ode to childhood wonder and wisdom. While Maps - an already sorrowful song - is elevated with an utterly beautiful string quartet interlude. 'Those strings man,' gasps a visibly moved O. An acoustic, almost Country version of Spitting off the Edge of the World leads us into songs it would be impossible not to include - Modern Romance, Y Control. An encore in which O dons light-up trainers and blasts out Burning and Zero in her more usual energetic style brings the show to a thrilling end, and all before 10pm - something that disappoints the girls in front of me who have just returned to their seats with fresh pints. As a Millennial of a certain age, I admit that the nostalgia linked to YYYs might not make me the most impartial of reviewers. I love this band. I have a Stan Chow poster of Karen O on my living room wall. I am an early noughties cliché. But even I am not impervious to their mistakes. At some points tonight, the heady mix of strings, synth and fuzzy guitars sounds a mess. But mostly, it's a spectacular show. And unlike some of their peers from the New York indie sleaze era, Yeah Yeah Yeahs are always developing. This might be a gig for true fans, but the TikTokers are missing out on something truly beautiful.
Tom's Guide
4 days ago
- Tom's Guide
I can't wait to use this iOS 26 feature that helps me remember new discoveries — here's how it works
Something I pride myself on is my willingness to seek out new places, whether close to home or when I'm travelling. There's something exciting about discovering a new restaurant or finding out about a particular setting in a new town that locals hold near and dear. Less exciting is when I try to remember the name or location of that place some time later and draw a blank. So much for revisiting a place I enjoyed the first time or sharing that discovery with someone else. Fortunately, iOS 26 gains a feature that figures to help fill in the holes of my Swish cheese memory. The Maps app in this year's iPhone software adds a Visited Places feature designed to easily log where you've been. That way, you can refer to the your Visited Places list later on to help jog your memory about that restaurant you ate it, the store where you found that special item or the cafe that had a welcoming atmosphere and free Wi-Fi. As Apple describes it, your phone will be able to detect when you've gone into a shop or restaurant, with that information getting stored in the Visited Places section of Maps. Presumably, you'll find that in the Maps Library, which currently stores pinned locations, guides, and more. Based on the screenshots Apple's shared, your Visited Places will be organized by category — dining, travel, nature and so forth — as well as by city. More frequently visited cities will get more prominent placement in Visited Places. I could have used such a feature about six months ago, when I found myself on a quick trip to Los Angeles that brought me to a neighborhood I hadn't been to in about a decade. Way back then, I had visited a taqueria that served up some of the best Oaxacan food I've ever had. But because the name of the place had been lost to the sands of time and its location was pretty nondescript (which describes most of the best places to eat in LA in my experience), I had a devil of time tracking down the taqueria, even with the whole of the internet at my disposal. Visited Places would have solved that dilemma, at least in theory. I'd go to the restaurant and eat my delicious tacos, while the Maps app handled the difficult task of remembering where I've been. That way, when recounting tales of excellent tacos at a later date, I'd been able to look up the name and location easily within the Maps app. There would even be the ability to share that location with other people directly from Visited Places. From the sound of it, Visited Places should be able to work on any iPhone running iOS 26 — in other words, I don't think it's dependent on Apple Intelligence, though I'm trying to confirm that and will update this article once I find out. Apple has made it clear, though, that the feature won't work in every place initially. Besides the U.S., Visited Places will be supported in Australia, the U.K., Canada, Malaysia and Switzerland. If this sounds like it's still up in the air, that's because it is—and not just because iOS 26 is only available as a developer beta at this point. (The iOS 26 public beta comes out next month, and a full release follows in the fall.) I do have iOS 26 running on an iPhone 15, but Visited Places isn't yet visible in the version of Maps running on my test phone. It's my understanding that you'll be prompted to opt in to Visited Places when you launch Maps for the first time in iOS 26 and that there will be a setting for your to turn on or off as need be. In the WWDC 2025 keynote, Kathy Lin, manager of Services software engineering at Apple said that you can "choose to have your iPhone detect when you're somewhere like a restaurant or a shop." That I haven't seen this yet is can either be chalked up to the vagaries of betas or the setup of my test device. A feature like this will also raise privacy concerns about location tracking, though Lin's comment above does seem to suggest you'll have to opt in to Visited Places. Other reports note that the Visited Places data is encrypted and can't be accessed by Apple. You'll also be able to delete locations from the list, which is good not only from a privacy standpoint, but also because some places just aren't worth remembering. Visited Places may be the iOS 26 Maps addition I want to try the most, but it's not the extent of the changes Apple is introducing in this version of its phone software. Also joining the mix of features is a preferred routes capability, where Maps logs the routes you regularly take, whether it's your daily commute, school drop-off or frequent errands. By knowing the routes you prefer, Maps can alert you to traffic issues and suggest alternative routes. These alerts can appear as notifications or even in Map widgets that you've placed on your home screen. This sounds like a feature that will require Apple Intelligence, but we'll see as we spend more time testing iOS 26 on different iPhones. As someone whose commute is literally 20 feet from my bedroom to my home office, the favorite routes feature available in iOS 26 doesn't hold the same allure that Visited Places promises. But the presence of both features suggest that Apple is looking for ways to deliver more with its mapping tool, while expanding just what you should expect from a navigational app.
NDTV
13-06-2025
- NDTV
Major Internet Outage Hits Google, Spotify, Snapchat, And More Due To Google Cloud Issues
A widespread internet outage on Thursday disrupted several major platforms, including Google, Spotify, Snapchat, Discord, and more. The issue was traced to a technical glitch in Google Cloud, which supports many online services and apps. Google's own services like Gmail, Search, Maps, and Nest were also affected. Third-party apps relying on Google infrastructure, such as and the Pokemon Trading Card Game, also experienced downtime. As of 12:41 PM PT and again at 1:16 PM PT, Google updated its Cloud status page, stating that engineers had identified the root cause and taken steps to mitigate the issue. However, some regions continued to experience slower response times. "Our infrastructure has recovered in all regions except us-central1," the company confirmed. The last message on this Cloud status page reads, "As of 18:18 PDT, Vertex AI Online Prediction has fully recovered from the service issue. All affected services are now operating normally. Google has stated that a detailed analysis of the incident will be published after the internal investigation is completed. The team also thanked users for their patience during the disruption." The disruptions came as service provider Cloudflare and Google Cloud experienced service disruptions. A Cloudflare representative told CNN that a Google Cloud outage was behind the issue and that its core services were not impacted. "This is a Google Cloud outage," a Cloudflare representative said in an email to CNN."A limited number of services at Cloudflare use Google Cloud and were impacted. We expect them to come back shortly." Photo Credit: Downdetector According to Downdetector, over 11,00 users reported issues with Google Cloud in India and over 10000 in the US. Downdetector collects outage data by analyzing user-submitted reports from various sources. However, the actual number of affected users may be higher or lower than reported.
Yahoo
12-06-2025
- Yahoo
Google, Spotify and other major platforms down in massive internet outage
Much of the internet appears to have broken, with Spotify, Google, Snap and Discord all hit by major issues. The problem appears to be related to technical issues at Google Cloud, which provides the infrastructure that powers much of the internet. Many Google products – such as Search, Gmail, Maps, Meet, Nest and others – were hit by the problems, according to tracking website Down Detector. But it also affected third-party websites; which may rely on Google's tools. That includes Snapchat, Discord, Spotify, the Pokémon trading card game and artificial intelligence tool Etsy, Shopify, UPS, Roblox and others also seemed to be affected by problems. Other web infrastructure platforms such as Cloudflare were also hit by problems, though Cloudflare itself was not affected, a spokesperson said. The problems appeared widespread, affecting vast numbers of users across the world, according to Down Detector. Google indicated on a tracking page that all of its regions had been hit by the problems. Issues began around 7pm UK time, or 2pm eastern. Shortly after, Google said that it was aware of the problems — but it took hours before it was able to begin a full recovery. Google Cloud's status website showed a vast array of issues across the world. Many of the technologies that third-party companies rely on to provide services were broken, it said. It apologised to 'all who are affected by the disruption'. It did not give any information about what had caused the problems – only that it had 'identified the root cause' and had 'applied appropriate mitigations'. At around 9pm in the UK, or 4pm eastern, the company said that it had found the issue and applied a fix. But it noted that there could still be issues and that it did not know when a full recovery would happen. People on social media were not happy to find that their favorite platforms were down. 'How spotify gonna be down when i am at the gym what tf am i supposed to do now,' one X user wrote. Another posted: 'Is this the end of the internet? how is everything down… AWS, Google Firebase, Cloudflare.' 'GUYS INTERNET IS COOKED Wtf do i do without discord and spotify im extremely bored, i cant even work google drive is down,' a third wrote.
