By this Christmas, there may be another juggernaut smartwatch on the market that will tempt you away from buying an Apple Watch 3, Samsung Gear Sport or something we haven’t even heard of yet.

Rumors suggest Google is preparing three new smartwatches under the Pixel moniker set to run the latest Wear OS software and show off wearable operating system’s true potential.

It’ll likely have to compete with the Apple Watch 4 (that we expect to launch in September) and perhaps the Samsung Gear S4 (that could arrive in August) so it’ll be a tough market for Pixel to succeed in.

That may be some difficult competition, but I have high hopes for what Google can achieve with this watch. Below are three reasons I believe the Google Pixel Watch will be a suitable alternative to anything else on your wrist.

It will be top end tech

So far we know very little about the spec inside the Google Pixel Watch. A Qualcomm representative has confirmed it is working on a new chipset to power top-end smartwatches, so it’ll be the first new processor inside a wearable since early 2016’s Qualcomm Snapdragon Wear 2100 was announced.

He confirmed it’ll be in a device before the end of the year, so there’s no reason this won’t be powering the Google Pixel Watch.

Google has to create a device here that can be the flagship and reference design for all other third-party manufacturers who are experimenting with the Wear OS platform, so we can expect the best of the best

The Pixel Watch needs to be a fitness powerhouse with a top of the range heart rate tracker, GPS and workouts built-in as well as tracking for swimming, cycling and a variety of other sports.

The design will need to be on point, plus the display will have to be bright and easy to read. It’ll need to have NFC for mobile payments, LTE for listening to music and getting notifications on the go plus and great battery life to top it all off.

I believe for the Google Pixel Watch to succeed, it needs to have a similar or better spec level than the Samsung Gear Sport, LG Watch Sport and, especially, the Apple Watch 3. But there’s a reason I believe Google can do that…

The Pixel shows what Google can achieve

Before 2016, Google used the Nexus brand to show off what Android should look like bringing in manufacturers like LG, Huawei and Motorola to manufacturer devices designed purely to show off the top features of the latest version of Android.

Now that honor goes to the Google Pixel brand, and while we’ve only seen two generations of that phone it’s a device that’s lauded as one of the best on the market, especially when it comes to photography.

Bringing that expertise in mobile tech to the smartwatch space, it should be able to make a top-end device.

This will be Wear OS as it’s intended to look like without any extra bloatware like you can get on watches from third-party manufacturers or an annoying overlay that slows down or complicates how you navigate around the watch.

Wear OS is now ready for iPhone

More and more people are beginning to understand you can use a Wear OS watch with an iPhone. That’s a big part of the reason Google rebranded its wearable platform by dropping the Android Wear title and opting for Wear OS instead.

If you didn’t already know, you can connect and wear a Wear OS watch with your iPhone and get almost all of the same features as anyone running an Android device.

Most features are seamless on iPhone, too. For example, you can use Google Pay with a Wear OS watch that’s connected to an iPhone as an alternative to Apple Pay.

Google is continuing to update Wear OS so it’ll play even better with Wear OS, but the experience is already very similar to what you’d get on an Android phone. You won’t get iMessage notifications, but it can control Apple Music and much more that we never thought you’d be able to do from a Google made product.

For that reason, the Pixel Watch will likely be a good alternative for your wrist. All of this said, we don’t know what the Samsung Gear S4, Apple Watch 4 or other smartwatches released in the rest of the year will bring so it could be a different story at the end of the year.

http://www.techradar.com/news/3-reasons-googles-pixel-watch-may-tempt-you-away-from-an-apple-watch

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s first KubeCon + CloudNativeCon of the year took place in the Bella Center, Copenhagen. A giant greenhouse of a building with snaking industrial pipework and connecting concrete bridges; it’s a vast container made of glass letting in light. A suitable setting for an industry that’s evolved rapidly from the release of Docker’s  superstar container technology back in 2013.

Attendance has rocketed to 4,300, according to Dan Kohn, executive director of the CNCF, which almost triples attendance from a year ago in Berlin, but that’s not surprising as cloud native computing industry is meeting the business world’s demand for more scalable, agile applications and services that can be run across multiple geographical locations in distributed environments.

What’s impressive about the native cloud industry is that from a standing start roughly four years ago, it’s close to building an open cloud platform that it wants to share with the whole business world. It’s not quite there yet and needs a few more layers, but thanks to the foresight of the Linux Foundation to establish the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), the industry’s tottering steps were shepherded well.

The industry’s health wasn’t always such a given, Google’s David Aronchick recalls standing on a little stage presenting Kubernetes at the first CNCF event to just 50 to 100 developers. 

Aronchick was the product manager on Kubernetes, which is an open source container orchestration system which has become a key component in native computing’s growth. 

At the Copenhagen event, Aronchick is presenting again but in a vast hall of thousands of engineers and developers and this time he’s updating everyone on Kubeflow, the hot toolkit for deploying open-source systems for Machine Learning at scale. Kubeflow is an example of open technology that is being built on top of Kubernetes and that was a key message at the event.

As chair of the CNCF’s Technical Oversight Committee, Alexis Richardson’s keynote was focused on the future. He thinks it will be packed full of developers. In his presentation he estimates that there will be 100 million developers by 2027 up from today’s 24 million.

The expectation is that we’ll see them all creating ubiquitous services on the cloud and devices. The vision then for the CNCF, and the community around it, is to build all the foundational layers to create an open cloud platform for developers to simply run their code at scale.

In a sense, it’s a future where everyone has the potential to have their own Tony Stark Iron Man lab, albeit from a software perspective, where code can be written and run on top of an agile infrastructure that abstracts away all the complexity and allows you to present your application to the world at large. The developer focuses on making the best application while the infrastructure deals securely with the demands.  

The CNCF was set up and tasked with incubating the ‘building blocks’ required to make an open source native cloud ecosystem successful. You can see all the current incubated projects in the CNCF’s new ‘interactive landscape’. 

A perusal of the site’s interactive catalogue also gives an idea of the problems facing engineers and developers having to deciding what products to use as there’s been an explosion of third-party technologies.

Kubernetes was the first project to be incubated by the CNCF. Donated by Google, it’s an open-source system for automating the deployment, scaling and management of containerised applications. The CNCF has many projects in early sandbox or incubation stage for many critical areas, such as monitoring (Prometheus), logging (fluentd) and tracing for diagnosing problems (openTracing). 

At the Copenhagen event, the CNCF highlighted Vitess and NATS as two of its recent incubation additions. Vitess was originally an internal project at YouTube and is a database clustering system that scales MySQL using Kubernetes. For example, it’s being used at Slack for a major MySQL infrastructure migration project. NATS is a more mature project that fills the gap for a cloud native open source messaging technology. 

To understand the importance of Kubernetes we need to return to containers briefly. Containers, by design, use less resources than virtual machines (VMs) as they share an OS and run ‘closer to the metal’. For developers, the technology has enabled them to package, ship and run their applications in isolated containers that run virtually anywhere. When continuous integration/continuous delivery software (e.g. Jenkins) and practices are added into the mix, this enables companies to benefit from nimble and responsive automation and it significantly speeds up development. For example, any changes that developers make to the source code will automatically trigger the creation, testing and deployment of a new container to staging and then into production.

The idea of a container allowing one process only to run inside it has also led on to microservices. This is where applications are broken down into their processes and placed inside a container, which makes a lot of sense in the enterprise world where greater efficiencies are constantly being sought.

However, this explosion of containerised apps has created the need for a way to manage or ‘orchestrate’ thousands of containers. 

A number of container orchestration products have appeared. Some have been adapted for containers, such as Apache Mesos, or created specifically for containers, such as Docker’s Swarm, or specifically for certain cloud providers, such as Amazon’s EC2. But just over a year after Docker sprinted out of the blocks, Kubernetes popped up. This offered a less complicated and more efficient way to manage clusters (groups of hosts running containers) that spanned hosts across public, private, or hybrid clouds – and most importantly it was open source.

Kubernetes is essentially the culmination of the lessons learned by the Google engineers who developed Borg, an internal platform that used containers to run everything at the company. It’s also the technology behind its Google Cloud service.

“Three years ago Kubernetes was just getting started,”  says Sheng Liang, CEO of Platform as a Service company, Rancher Labs: ”It wasn’t even clear what technology was going to take over. There was [Docker] Swarm, [Apache] Mesos, and Mesos was very mature back then, was very popular, so we built a container management product that back then was only one that was agnostic to the orchestration frameworks […] the end users were confused and to be honest so were we knowing what was going to be the standard.”

David Aronchick, who product-managed Kubernetes for Google would probably agree: “Thinking back to those days of the original Kubernetes and Kubecon,” says Aronchick in his keynote. “It’s crazy to think about how many ways there were to run containers. Crontab, orchestrator, Bash (looking at you OpenShift on Bash), everything was bespoke. You ran it yourself and had to deal with everything yourself. But Kubernetes brought a transformation, because it gave everyone a common platform that they could trust, they knew what the APIs are and they could focus on the next level up and that really transformed the entire industry that we’re operating in.”

http://www.techradar.com/news/bigger-than-linux-the-rise-of-cloud-native

The 2018 NBA Playoffs have reached the Conference Finals stage where four teams will go up against one another to see which two teams will proceed to the Finals starting at the end of the month. 

This will be the second consecutive year that the Boston Celtics will go up against the Cleveland Cavaliers in the Eastern Conference Finals. The two teams will play a best of seven series to decide who will face off against the winner of the Western Conference Finals in the 2018 NBA Playoffs Finals. And if you want to live stream the Celtics vs the Cavs, you’ve come to the right place.

The Celtics are entering the series with a higher seed though the Cavaliers are being led by LeBron James who is hoping to take the team along for his eight straight trip to the NBA Finals. The first game of the series will take place on Sunday afternoon at TD Garden in Boston and the match is set to start at 3:30pm ET (8:30pm BST, 12:30pm PST). Will the LeBron James be able to lead the Cavaliers to victory or will the Celtics go to the Finals?

Whether you’re rooting for the Celtics or the Cavaliers will show you how to tune into all the action either on your TV or online. If there is no local option to watch the 2018 NBA Conference Finals in your country, don’t worry as we’ll walk you through the steps needed to watch the event from anywhere in the world.

Keep reading to see how you can stream the 2018 NBA Eastern Conference Finals online.

How to watch the Celtics vs. the Cavaliers in the US 

If you happen to live in the US and have a television, then you’re in luck as ABC will be showing the first game of the seven game series between the Celtics and the Cavaliers for free over-the-air. The network’s coverage starts at 3:30pm EST (12:30pm PST) on Sunday May 13. 

After the first game though, you’ll need a cable subscription with ESPN to watch the rest of the games in the series on TV. However, if you want to stream the Eastern Conference Finals online without signing up for a cable package then you’re best bet is to use NBA League Pass with a VPN. 

Unfortunately the Eastern Conference Final won’t be shown in the US until three hours after it’s finished due to an NBA blackout but if you use a VPN to change your IP address to one in another country you’ll be able to stream the game online. Keep reading and we’ll show you how.

How to watch the Celtics vs Cavs online 

If there is no local option to watch the NBA Eastern Conference Finals in your country then your best bet to catch the Celtics vs. the Cavaliers is with a VPN. By using a VPN, you can change the IP address to one in a different country which does have a stream so that you can watch the NBA Conference Finals from anywhere in the world.   

How to watch the Celtics vs. the Cavaliers in the UK 

Basketball fans in the UK will be able to tune into the first game of the Eastern Conference Finals on BT Sport 2. The network will air the Boston Celtics vs the Cleveland Cavaliers at 8:30pm BST on Sunday May 13. Alternatively if you’re not a BT Sport subscriber, you could sign up for NBA League Pass to watch all of the action online.

When it comes to streaming basketball online our first choice is NBA.com.  With the NBA League Pass you you can watch hundreds of Live and On-Demand games on all of your favorite streaming devices including Apple TV, Chromecast, Roku, Amazon Fire TV, Xbox, Playstation and even on mobile.  

With NBA League Pass you’ll be able to watch every game during the regular season (all 1,230 of them) and the playoffs, including all the finals games. The service costs £24.99 a month or £6.99 for a single day pass.    

Other ways to watch the NBA Eastern Conference online 

SlingTV $20 per month

With SlingTV’s $20-per-month Sling Orange package you get 30-plus channels, including ESPN and ESPN2 which will show 19 games throughout the first round and semifinals. You’ll also be able to watch the Eastern Conference Finals as ESPN holds the exclusive rights to those games. SlingTV will also give you access to TNT which will be broadcasting the NBA playoffs as well.

Sling TV is compatible with Apple TV, Roku, Xbox One, Chromecast as well as lots of other devices and its easy to get started with a 7-day free trial.

DIRECTV NOW $50 per month

DirectTV Now offers many of the same channels as SlingTV and Playstation Vue including ABC, TNT, ESPN and ESPN2 but it’s Just Right package also includes ESPNews as well as access to 80 other channels. If you want a lot of content to choose from and don’t mind watching the games live as the service doesn’t include cloud DVR, then DIRECTV NOW’s 7-day trial will let you test out the platform.

Playstation Vue $44.99 per month

Playstation Vue is another option to watch the MLB playoffs and its basic Access package offers over 45 channels including ABC, TNT, ESPN and ESPN2. The service provides top-notch streaming quality as well as unlimited cloud DVR storage so you’ll never miss a game. A 5-day trial to Playstation Vue is also available to help you get started and most of the popular streaming devices like Apple TV, Roku and Chromecast are supported.

YouTube TV $40 per month

YouTube TV is a great option for NBA fans as it includes NBATV along with TNT, ABC and the three ESPN networks you need to follow all the playoff action. The service also comes with a 7-day free trial so you can test it out for yourself. 

http://www.techradar.com/news/how-to-stream-celtics-vs-cavs-live-watch-nba-eastern-conference-finals-online