Users of Western Digital’s HMB-equipped SSD lineups have been facing a BSOD issue (or Blue Screen of Death) following the Windows 11 24H2 update. The affected users are advised to update their SSD firmware, however, with the risk of complete data loss.

Read more about what caused the issue and how to resolve it below.

Windows 11 24H2 BSOD Fix Released by Western Digital

On the Western Digital community forum, users have been posting their worries and concerns following the Window 11 24H2 update and the company has now released the fix for the BSOD issue. As per identified by the company, the problem was due to a misconfigured host memory buffer (HMB) allocation, and this was easily able to be solved with just a minor registry edit.

WD_BLACK SN770 NVMe SSD 2TB, WD_BLACK SN770M NVMe SSD 2TB, WD Blue SN580 NVMe SSD 2TB, WD Blue SN5000 NVMe SSD 2TB, and SanDisk Extreme M.2 NVMe SSD 2TB are the affected NVMe models. As mentioned, Western Digital has advised all the users of the mentioned NVMes to update the SSD firmware version, and if not done, users may not be able to receive the latest versions of Windows 11. Also, in order to overcome the chance of data loss, users may copy their files to another drive.

Regarding the update process, install the Western Digital dashboard on affected devices and then open it and navigate to ‘Tools’ where one can find the firmware update. Click on ‘Update Firmware’. After the update, users will have to restart their devices to complete the process. Once rebooted, the device will have the updated SSD firmware.

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Apple has announced changes to its Business Connect service, now allowing businesses of all sizes and types to use the platform, including those without physical locations. The service lets verified businesses manage their appearance across Apple’s apps, which are used by over a billion people.

David Dorn, Apple’s senior director of Internet Software and Services Product, stated, “We designed Business Connect to enable businesses to present accurate information to Apple users. With today’s updates, we’re extending this capability to more businesses.”

New features in the expanded service include:

1. Branded Mail: Businesses can display their name and logo in emails sent to customers through Apple’s Mail app. This feature is available for sign-up now, with logo display expected later this year.
2. Tap to Pay on iPhone Logo Display: Companies can show their logo instead of a category icon when accepting payments via Tap to Pay on iPhone.
3. Business Caller ID: Planned for next year, this will show a business’s name, logo, and department on incoming call screens.

These additions build on existing features introduced last year, which allowed businesses to customize their place cards in apps like Apple Maps and Wallet with photos, logos, action links, and promotions.

The expansion of Business Connect to include service providers and online-only businesses represents a change in Apple’s approach to business integration within its ecosystem. This move may affect how businesses interact with customers through Apple’s platforms and could influence digital brand management strategies.

As per Apple’s support page currently, two types of entities can use Apple Business Connect

• Company/Organization: Your company or organization. You directly manage how your brand appears to customers.
• Third-Party Partner/Agency: A data provider or data manager who works on your behalf on how your brand appears to customers.

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Previously WhatsApp introduced its Video Note feature for the users that enabled them to instantly record and share up to 60-second video notes directly in the chat. These video notes are protected with end-to-end encryption to keep your messages secure.

How To Send A Video Note?

• Open the chat you like to send a video note to
• Press and hold the camera icon next to the text field. The timer will count down to start recording
• You can switch between the front and back cameras before or during the recording
• When finished remove your finer from the camera icon. The video not will automatically be sent

Users can also use lock mode to record hands-free video notes. While in lock mode you can flip the camera though the recording will start from the selfie camera only, tap the stop icon to stop your recording, Tap the bin icon to cancel the recording, or tap the send icon to send it to the chat.

To set up lock mode-

• Open the chat you would like to send a video note to
• Press and hold the camera icon next to the text field, then slide the lock icon upwards to lock hands free recording
• Tap the send icon to send the note

How To Reply To A Video Note?

• Open the chat and view the video note you want to respond to
• Press and hold the camera icon next to the text field to start recording.

The post Whatsapp Video Notes Features Allows To Share Short Videos Directly In Chats: Here ‘s How You Can Send Video Note And Reply To It appeared first on The Tech Outlook.

Are you someone who does not have a bank account or still relies financially on your family due to which you are not able to make payments digitally? Well, the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) has introduced a new way- UPI Circle that simplifies financial transactions for individuals who may not have a bank account or are hesitant to use digital payment methods.

UPI Circle feature is currently available on BHIM UPI and Google Pay (GPay). This feature allows primary users who have a UPI account to delegate digital payment tasks to trusted contacts such as family or friends. It is useful for individuals who either do not have a bank account or find it difficult to manage digital payments on their own. UPI Circle allows payments to be made through the primary user’s account.

A primary user can add up to 5 secondary users in the UPI circle while each secondary user can only be a part of one UPI Circle at a time. Primary users will be offered two options:

• Partial Delegation– You retain full control, approving each payment request initiated by your secondary user.
• Full Delegation– Set a monthly limit, of up to Rs.15,000, allowing your secondary users to make payments independently within that limit.

This feature is expected to be particularly beneficial for parents providing allowances to children, senior citizens who are cautious about conducting digital transactions, and business owners who need to manage petty cash for their staff. The primary user will have the option to monitor the activity of the secondary users on the app.

The post NPCI Introduces UPI Circle For Users Without Bank Account Or Are Hesitant To Use Digital Payment Methods appeared first on The Tech Outlook.

Jio Financial Services Ltd (JFSL) has released an updated version of its JioFinance App. The app is now available on the Google Play Store, Apple App Store, and MyJio, offering a range of financial products and services.

The release follows a beta phase that began on May 30, 2024, during which six million users tested the platform. JFSL states that user feedback from this period has been incorporated into the current version.

The JioFinance App now includes additional features such as Loans on Mutual Funds, Home Loans (including Balance Transfer), and Loan Against Property. These loans are available at market-competitive terms.

A digital savings account from Jio Payments Bank Ltd. (JPBL) is also part of the offering. JPBL reports that 1.5 million customers are using their accounts for routine expenses. The app includes features for UPI payments, mobile recharge, and credit card bill payments.

One of the app’s functions is to provide users with a view of their holdings across different bank accounts and mutual fund investments. The app also offers access to 24 insurance plans covering life, health, two-wheeler, and motor insurance.

JFSL has partnered with BlackRock to develop investment solutions, which they plan to introduce through the app in the future.

Hitesh Sethia, Managing Director and CEO of JFSL provided a statement: “At JFSL, we aim to provide access to financial services through technology. The JioFinance app, developed in India, is part of our effort to offer financial products to consumers.”

The post JioFinance App Launches with Expanded Features and Services appeared first on The Tech Outlook.

In May, Google introduced some new and improved AI features at its Google I/O event. Among these features the company unveiled its most capable image generation image model Imagen 3. This image generation model was said to be soon made available for users around the world.

Imagen 3 has now been officially made available for all Gemini users worldwide, including users who are not Gemini subscribers.

Image generation with Imagen 3 is now available to all Gemini users around the world.

Imagen 3 is our highest quality image generation model yet and brings an even higher degree of photorealism, better instruction following, and fewer distracting artifacts than ever before. pic.twitter.com/E8CrcyFcz5

— Google Gemini App (@GeminiApp) October 9, 2024

About Imagen 3

Google considers Imagen 3 as its highest-quality text-to-image model capable of generating images with even better detail, richer lighting, and fewer distracting artifacts. It comes with an ability to understand prompts, which helps the models generate a wide range of visual styles and capture small details from loner prompts.

Imagen 3 generates high-quality images in a wide range of formats and styles, from photorealistic landscapes to richly textured oil paintings or whimsical claymation scenes. It understands prompts written in natural, everyday language making it easier to get the output. It then generates visually rich, high-quality images with good lighting and composition and can also render small details and complex textures. It can be used to make stylized birthday cards, presentations, and more.

Imagen 3 is deployed with the latest privacy, security, and safety technologies including the SynthID watermarking tool, which embeds a digital watermark directly into the pixels of the image, making it detectable for identification but imperceptible to the human eye.

When I tried to check this feature out on Gemini by giving a prompt on the website, in less than 2 seconds I got the output in the form of an image based on my prompt.

The post Imagen 3 Now Available For All Gemini Users Around The World appeared first on The Tech Outlook.

When it comes to finding important documents on our device, we always have to go through the hustle of opening emails and apps which sometimes can be a very hectic task, Google introduced summary cards in Gmail that provided a snippet of helpful information but as the email habits evolved this also became a tedious task for users.

Google seems to acknowledge this issue and has today announced some changes to summary cards and new features so that users can reach out to the right information when needed.

New summary cards in @gmail will help you tackle all the important pieces of information that fill your inbox. Learn more ↓ https://t.co/57LRpt3wwz

— Google (@Google) October 4, 2024

Updates To Summary Cards

The updated summary cards in Gmail will show up across four common email categories-

• Purchases- Track packages, view order details and easily find what you bought for real-time updates
• Events- See or add upcoming events to your calendar, invite others, or find directions with ease
• Bills- View and pay bills, or Get reminded to pay later and add a due date in Google tasks
• Travel- Manage reservations, check-in for flights, and view important travel details like the hotel’s check-out time

Gmail will organize key information from across all related emails so the users can-

• Get details quickly- Glanceable summaries highlight the essential information, eliminating the need to hunt through multiple emails
• Take action easily- Relevant actions like Get directions, Invite others, Track package, Check-in, Remind me or Mark as paid are readily available now
• See the latest status- Cards are dynamic, keeping you updated on upcoming events, deliveries, and deadlines even as they change

Other than these updates Google has also announced an all-new Happening Soon section

This new section will be at the top of the inboxes. It will help users easily see the most timely updates without even needing to open individual emails. For start, purchase summary cards will appear here and this section will only show up when it’s relevant (two days before the delivery date).

For example- once the estimated delivery date of a purchase is two days away, the Happening Soon section will show the purchase summary card, allowing you to see when your package is arriving at a lance. If you have multiple deliveries arriving in the same time frame, the summary cards are stacked and you can expand, dismiss, or click to go directly to the related email.

Availability Of These Changes And Features

The updated purchase summary cards are rolling out for individual emails on Android and iOS today, while event, bill, and travel summary cards with the Happening Soon section will be rolled out in the coming months. In the future, all four categories will show across individual emails in the Happening Soon section and in Gmail search.

The post Google Announces Changes For Summary Cards And New Features In Gmail appeared first on The Tech Outlook.

Meta has announced Movie Gen, a new generative AI research for media, including image, video, and audio. This technology represents Meta’s third wave of generative AI work and offers four main capabilities: video generation from text inputs, personalized video creation, precise video editing, and audio generation.

The core of Movie Gen is a 30B parameter transformer model for video generation, capable of creating 16-second videos at 16 frames per second. For audio, a separate 13B parameter model can generate up to 45 seconds of synchronized audio for videos. These models can create videos from text prompts, combine a user’s image with a text prompt for personalized videos, allow precise edits based on text inputs, and generate synchronized audio including ambient sound, sound effects, and instrumental background music.

According to Meta, Movie Gen outperforms similar models in human evaluations and achieves state-of-the-art results in personalized video creation and audio generation. The development of these models required innovations in architecture, training objectives, data recipes, evaluation protocols, and inference optimizations. They were trained on a combination of licensed and publicly available datasets.

 

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Meta acknowledges that the current models have limitations. The company plans to work on decreasing inference time and improving quality in future iterations. They also intend to collaborate with filmmakers and creators to gather feedback and refine the technology.

Potential applications for Movie Gen include animating “day in the life” videos for Reels and creating customized animated greetings. However, Meta emphasizes that this technology is not meant to replace artists and animators. Instead, it’s designed to provide new creative tools and opportunities for a wide range of users, from aspiring filmmakers to casual content creators.

Meta views Movie Gen as a step towards making advanced video and audio creation tools more accessible, potentially enabling users to bring their artistic visions to life in new ways. However, they also recognize the need for continued development and refinement of the technology.

The post Meta’s new Movie Gen AI Tool will help you generate videos from Text Inputs appeared first on The Tech Outlook.

GitHub has launched GitHub Models in its GitHub Marketplace enabling every developer a chance to become an AI developer, with both training and the opportunity to experiment on some of the most widely used and handpicked top AI models.

Dive down to know more about it.

GitHub Models – Enabling You to be the Next AI Developer

Believing that the right tools and AI training can make any developer into an AI developer, the newly introduced GitHub Models offers users a collection of AI models in the GitHub Marketplace, with entitlements only to their GitHub accounts.

Visiting the GitHub Marketplace, a long list of new and widely used AI models can be seen and users may pick any of their choice to experiment and learn. By dropping an initial user prompt, users can start interacting with the AI model, and the system prompt/playground and temperature will let them adjust the parameters and select the level of randomness. Following this, users will be able to send user prompts as per their needs and simulate it for their application.

For a user who would want to know more about the AI model that they have selected, they can tap on ‘Details’ and then navigate through ‘README’, ‘Evaluation’, and ‘Transparency’ to know more.

Users can start coding by selecting the ‘Code’ button and by hitting the ‘Run codespace’ icon, users will be brought to a well-setup coding environment that is ready with SDKs and sample options. They may continue their experiments here and bring out the desired output.

Explore more about how to use the GitHub Models by visiting GitHub Marketspace and start your journey in creating your own AI-powered application.

The post GitHub Models Introduced: Now Experiment with Top AI Models with Just Your GitHub Account appeared first on The Tech Outlook.

Whether it’s introducing a new feature or improving a previous one for more audience engagement and fun creation, YouTube has always tried to provide what’s best for the creators as well as the audience. Today via a blog post, YouTube has officially announced a few updates to Shorts for the creators as well as fans

Let’s dive in to learn about these updates

YouTube Shorts Updates

Storytelling Becomes More Immersive

• From 15^th October onwards, creators can upload shorts up to 3 minutes long. This feature was requested by the creators itself. This change will apply to videos that are square or taller in aspect ratio and will not affect any videos uploaded before the 15^th.
• Recent updates to the player streamline look, allow the content-made creators to take center stage and viewers to focus on the content they love.

Creation Made More Easy And Fun

• You can easily recreate a Short with templates. Catch on the latest trends, match your clips to the hottest sounds, and add your unique flair. You can try templates by tapping Remix on a Short that inspires you and select Use this template to give your spin.
• In the coming months, you will be able to tap into the vast universe of YouTube content right from your short camera making it easier to remix clips from your favorite videos, music videos, and more. You will even be able to pull from multiple clips across YouTube.
• A few days back it was revealed that Veo, Google DeepMind’s capable model for generating video will be coming to Shorts. With the help of this, creators will be able to use extraordinary video backgrounds and standalone video clips.

Community Engagement

• There will be a new Shorts trends page on mobile that will help you discover what is the current trend going on.
• You will soon be able to get a preview of what people are saying in comments right from the Shorts feed, even before you open the comment section.

More Customization Options

• A new Show Fewer Shorts option will be introduced so that you can customize your YouTube experience based on your preference. This option can be selected by clicking on the three-dot menu in the upper right of any Shorts grid in your home feed and you will be temporarily shown fewer shorts in your feed.

The post YouTube Officially Announces Some New Updates To Shorts appeared first on The Tech Outlook.