News written by Matti Robinson (August, 2017)

Samsung's yesterday's press conference at IFA Berlin included a lot of new products. From vacuum cleaners to washing machines and from Gear wearables to premium TVs.

The biggest news in TVs wasn't the new model, even though we'll get to that too, but instead Samsung exec's confirmation that Samsung is battling the onslaught of OLED TVs from competitors with their own QLED technology.

Samsung is confident that the Quantum LED technology is superior especially because it's easier and cheaper to produce in the large sizes of 2017 TVs. To express the commitment the company introduced the new Q8F model which is a flat version of the curved Q8C. You'll be able to buy it in two sizes: 55 inches at 2599 euros ($3095) and 65 inches at 3599 euros ($4285).

That brings the Q series to a total of 14 different models, six of which are curved.

Samsung also unveiled a new addition to its artistic TV lineup called The Frame. The new 43 inch version in the smallest of the bunch and costs 1499 euros ($1785).

The consumer electronics show in Berlin, Germany is officially open to public starting tomorrow but the press has been roaming the trade show for two days now. Yesterday Samsung held their press conference and unveiled new smart products.

Among the newly introduced electronics were three new Gear devices that are for people on the move, Gear Sport, Gear Fit2 Pro and Gear IconX (2018). Gear Sport is Samsung's new smartwatch that is, like the same suggests, aimed at people who are into exercising and sports. Likewise the Gear Fit2 Pro activity tracker is for the people on the move.

Both of them feature GPS, heart rate monitoring, and path and calorie tracking. However, they are aimed specifically towards swimmers, since both of them are waterproof up to 50 meters and feature Speedo swim tracking. They also support Spotify Offline if you have a Premium account.

We are seeing some major changes in the world of cryptocurrency as the most popular currency amongst them was divided into two entities. The split has been in the works for a while but it is still considered highly controversial action.

Current Bitcoin will remain as it is and the new cryptocurrency Bitcoin Cash will be created alongside. They use the same transaction history but currently Cash is much less supported.

Behind the split, or "hard fork" as it's called, is the fact that Bitcoin has become very popular and many believe that it has become too overcrowded and may not function much longer given the increases in transaction frequency.

Bitcoin Cash has been designed to tackle the problems with high transaction fees as well as bitcoin size limit that doesn't allow mining larger blocks and thus slowes down the transaction process.

The Bitcoin transaction process is rather limited as the maximum amount of block data per 10 minutes is one megabyte. That means that only seven transactions can be completed every second, which obviously is not enough as the platform gets more and more popular.

Bitcoin Cash on the other hand is said to have up to eight times faster transaction speeds.

Home Box Office, more familiarly known as HBO, a cable TV network owned by Time Warner Cable was hacked earlier this week. The hackers apparently got their hands on 1.5 terabytes of data which included, as one might imagine, information about future shows.

According to EW hackers have already leaked some of the acquired material to the internet. Included in the published things are "upcoming episodes of a couple series and at least one alleged script or treatment," says EW.

The leaked episodes are from TV shows Ballers and Room 104. However, there's also been leaks from HBO's most valued franchise Game of Thrones. While there hasn't been entire episodes leaked, at least yet, the hackers have revealed some details about an upcoming fourth episode of Game of Thrones' currently running season seven.

The leakers have said that more releases will be coming later on.

HBO has not commented on what kind of material might have been stolen but acknowledges that hacking took place and has started an investigation into the affair.

In April, the streaming giant Netflix was hacked, and the hackers leaked since released episodes from the fifth season of Orange is the New Black. The largest hack perhaps ever in entertainment and especially in Hollywood history happened in late 2014 when hackers hit Sony bringing down their computer systems and stealing data.

Spotify has been steadily gaining ground for years but many expected that Apple's unveiling of the new Apple Music two years back would change the dynamic radically. Nevertheless Spotify has been gaining momentum even with the world's largest tech company on its heels.

The Swedish streaming company might not be very profitable but it is definitely the biggest. Spotify boasts now over 60 million paying customers while the closest competitor, now Apple Music, is at mere 27 million.

In addition to paying customers Spotify has over 80 million free tier users that it tries to, and obviously succeeds to en extent, turn into monthly Premium subscribers meanwhile collecting ad revenue, albeit at less than adequate rate.

Even though there's a lot to be done to eliminate the free tier altogether, if it's in the plans or even a possibility, Spotify has managed to decrease the free-to-paying ratio. A year ago twice as many Spotify's users were using free tier compared to Premium, with less that 30 percent of users paying for a subscription. Ratio has decreased from more than 2:1 to 1.33:1.

One can estimate that soon the number of paying subscribers will be overtaking that of free tier users. In fact, if the same rate continues it'll happen around this time next year, and some would consider that a pessimistic evaluation, especially in the wake of news about expansion to new type of content.