James Howells' life changed when he threw out a hard drive about the size of an iPhone 6. Howells, from the city of Newport in southern Wales, had two identical laptop hard drives squirreled away in a drawer in 2013. One was blank; he says the other contained 8,000 bitcoins -- now worth about $181 million, even after the recent crypto crash. He'd meant to throw out the blank one, but instead the drive containing the cryptocurrency ended up going to the local dump in a garbage bag. Nine years later, he's determined to get back his stash, which he mined in 2009. Howells, 36, is hoping local authorities will let him stage a high-tech treasure hunt for the buried bitcoins.

The company announced today that it's making the Echo Show 10 devices in the US compatible with the popular video calling software. Users who have their calendars linked up to the Alexa will have their meetings started automatically while people who haven't done that can say, "Alexa, join my meeting" or "Alexa, join my Zoom meeting" to join one. This is the second Echo Show to gain Zoom access; the Echo Show 8 started supporting the videoconferencing platform in the US in December. The Echo Show 10's camera tracks users as they move throughout a room, meaning callers can see the screen no matter where they sit or stand. Presumably, this functionality will work with Zoom, putting it on par with other competitor devices like the Facebook Portal and Google Nest.

Ziotag's AI-driven video application automates the tagging and classification of Zoom recorded meetings, interviews, webinars, and training sessions. Ziotag Inc., a New York-based technology company that uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) to make searching and navigating video and audio content a seamless experience--announces the availability of its product in the Zoom App Marketplace. Zoom customers will now have the ability to automatically classify and tag recorded Zoom meetings and presentations, giving them instant access to a detailed, AI-driven index and table of contents for each session. This enables viewers to automatically discover, search, share, and manage the content of their Zoom meetings and events--providing a win-win scenario through yielding unprecedented accessibility for Zoom publishers and users. With 71% of employed adults reporting that they now work remotely, recent events have created a crucial need for distance-enabled solutions in the workplace.

After frustrating stay-at-home workers and parents looking for an easy way to connect their kids to Zoom because it wasn't available, the world's most popular video meeting application is finally coming to Amazon, Google and Facebook video display units. The Echo Show, Google Nest Hub Max and Facebook Portal were originally released as a way for folks to engage in video chatting and home entertainment without the bother of turning on the computer, phone or TV. That there would be a coronavirus that sent Zoom usage up 10x in less than a year wasn't foreseen, nor the need to have a dedicated video display that could handle one-touch setup for the meetings and classes, without the bother of phones and computers. Fun:How to make video meetings more like in-person experience? But now, Zoom is finally coming to the devices, first to Portal, in September, the latest version of the Amazon Echo Show (version 8) and Google's Nest Hub Max, but not until later this year.

Conferencing solution company Zoom announced a slew of new features this week at its Zoomtopia 2019 conference in San Jose, California -- 300 in total, to be exact. Among the highlights are AI-powered transcripts and meeting notes in Zoom Meetings, in addition to a Zoom Rooms people counter informed by facial recognition. On the Zoom Meetings side, live transcripts tap startup Otter.ai's Now, attendees can take notes directly in the Zoom interface or use live transcription for voice note taking, the latter of which is parsed by algorithms to derive action items automatically in the Meeting Timelines interface. Furthermore, meeting hosts can now bring their own interpreter with a mutli-channel audio experience that mixes the original and interpreter audio, enabling listeners to understand the interpreter while hearing the original speaker's tone.