Wednesday, 30 November 2016
Skillz wins two new patents, is now helping brands sponsor e-sports tournaments
Dusk’s new app lets you live stream anonymously
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Whoa! You can now watch 4K live streams on YouTube
In a world of smartphones and tablets, 4K monitors are far from the default means of watching YouTube, but the video service is making a big move to push the ultra high-def resolution.
Starting today, YouTube is bringing 4K support to its live streams and 360-degree videos - making it the first service to offer live video streaming at that resolution.
According to YouTube, the first demonstration of 4K live streaming on its site will be The Game Awards 2016, which airs tomorrow, December 1, at 9pm EST/6pm PST.
While YouTube has had a library of 4K resolution videos since 2010, what really grabs us is that if the company is successful, it will have captured a white whale of sorts.
4K-pable?
In short: even in 2016, 4K is still a high-cost format, live or not.
4K monitors aren't exactly, on-demand services like Netflix have a whole process just to set up 4K episodes of Luke Cage, and 4K-ready gaming consoles like the PS4 Pro are still in their relative infancy.
As it currently stands, it takes an immense amount of computing power (and bandwidth) to stream eight million pixels per frame consistently across the globe - and that goes for both the streamer and the viewer.
That, combined with the fact that only so many people have a 4K-supported monitor to begin with, have led many to believe it'd be another couple of years before live 4K streaming would be feasible.
A well-funded production of a video game awards show may be able to pull it off, but the average Overwatch streamer or vlogging enthusiast may not have the equipment to justify scaling up to 4K.
That said, if YouTube is able to pull off 4K live streaming without a hitch, it could usher in a new era of immersive live events - not to mention put other streaming services like Twitch in a tight spot - so we'll be tuning in for sure.
http://ift.tt/2fEEP7pTwitter now lets mobile users make their own Moments
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Microsoft Office 365 catches up a bit more with Google’s productivity apps
Microsoft has announced a bunch of new features for Office 365 users, including the extension of real-time co-authoring beyond just Word, with the company now bringing it to PowerPoint.
Yes, when you’re collaborating with someone over a slide, you’ll now be able to see their changes appear live in PowerPoint for Windows on desktop PCs (although note this is only for Office 365 subscribers who are Office Insiders – in other words, it’s still in testing).
The feature is also available in the PowerPoint Mobile app on Windows tablets.
Microsoft has also brought a welcome change to Outlook, giving users the ability to take a traditional attachment to a message, and change it into a shared cloud-based document directly within the email app. You can also specify permissions to view or edit within Outlook.
This feature is available in Outlook on Windows for Office 365 subscribers, and also for Outlook on the web.
Notifications across the nation
So what else is new? The Word, Excel and PowerPoint mobile apps will now give you notifications to let you know when shared cloud documents have been edited, or shared with others – so you can keep on top of things when on the move, and make sure nothing goes awry.
At the moment, notifications are only live for Office Insiders using the Android and Windows Mobile apps, with the functionality coming to iOS in December. These are only for consumers at the moment, mind, with commercial customers getting them in the ‘coming months’ according to Microsoft.
Other tweaks include the introduction of a Shared with Me tab in Word, Excel and PowerPoint, which is a handy list of all the files which have been recently shared with the user for quick access purposes. This is available for both Windows and Mac Office 365 subscribers – and it’s also on the iOS and Android apps, and will soon be gracing the Windows Mobile apps.
Zero is a mobile automation app for email addicts
Starting tomorrow – your free downloads advent calendar
The holidays are an expensive time, so we’re bringing you a special treat: a full, free, fun Windows program to download every day until Christmas.
Each day, we’ll open a door on our advent calendar to reveal a new free app, ready to download and enjoy. For our advent calendar we’ve picked only software that’s fun – whether it’s a drone sim, an app for making your own animations, or a cool way to find and enjoy new music from your favorite artists.
Check in tomorrow for your first free advent calendar download!
http://ift.tt/2gGq5o3Netflix's climbdown on downloads proves that the customer is always right
It’s less than a year since I spoke to Netflix execs at a plush show house in Barcelona to chat through the new UI and finished up by asking the question that they all sensed was coming: “What about downloadable content?”
Cue rolling eyes and predictable spin, repeating the sentiment that the public didn’t really seem to want offline viewing in a world where connectivity is, apparently, everywhere.
In September 2015, Chief Product Officer Neil Hunt went even further, explaining to TechRadar that people wanted to stream, not store, their video content.
"I think the download model is fairly complex. You have to plan ahead; if you're planning for a long flight you're going to need quite a lot of storage to hold maybe several titles and a lot of time to prep that download,” he said, “and I think that's challenging."
Connectivity woes
Of course, what we insisted at the time was that the public did want to be able to download content, and that connectivity for the overwhelming majority of people on the planet was not, in fact, ubiquitous.
Globally, it was clear that other major television providers were clocking the need for some kind of cached content: Amazon went very early with a system that allowed you to download their originals to your device to watch when you aren’t connected, the BBC’s trailblazing iPlayer added the functionality early on, and British TV giant Sky’s latest offering - Sky Q - is built heavily around portable content.
Ultimately, even for a service as dominant as Netflix, the customer is always right. However much it believed that streaming was better - cheaper for its licensing deals, more trackable, less chance of piracy - when the rivals are making a big deal of a feature you simply have to be looking into yourself.
The softening of the position took the best part of 2016, hints here and there about keeping an open mind and then finally, with a startling lack of fanfare, the arrival of the feature today.
There’s little point in being sniffy about Netflix being late to this particular party; the thing that shifted the dial was the well publicised inability to conquer the rest of the world in the way the company had hoped when it launched pretty much globally.
Rather, given the focus of Netflix on its own TV offerings, the news should be welcomed by its growing band of subscribers - who simply do not have the time to consume the sheer number of first-rate shows at home.
The likes of Better Call Saul, Narcos, House of Cards and Daredevil are brilliantly bingeworthy, but in this era of 'Peak TV' being given more opportunity to opt for them is delightful.
Downloading shows can be transformative; long commutes, underground train systems in cities and, of course, flights have been Netflix dead-zones, but are now great opportunities.
The truth is that, for Netflix, this makes a lot of sense - and in rolling out the feature, there’s a tacit admission that dismissing the download was not the best strategy.
- Looking for something to download? Check out our guide to the best shows on Netflix.
Netflix offline viewing is finally here
Tweets from Netflix US and UK appear to show that the streaming service is preparing to allow its users to download shows for offline viewing.
The announcement itself was accompanied by a screenshot from footage of The Crown, House of Cards, Sky Ladder: The Art of Cai Guo-Qiang, Stranger Things, Narcos, Orange is the New Black and Black Mirror.
The keen eyed Netflix fans amongst you will notice that all of these shows are Netflix original productions, but we've also seen that non-Netflix shows such as Community, Parks and Rec and The IT Crowd are also available to download.
Download functionality has been made available today via an update which is 41MB in size.
TechRadar has been able to verify that the update is available in both the UK and USA, on both iOS and Android.
Once the update has been installed, users can download applicable shows by selecting the download option from the episode list, as shown below.
Users can view every title that's available to download in a specific section of the app titled 'Available to Download' which sits alongside other program categories.
The long road to download
Netflix has been cagey about supporting offline viewing in the past. As recently as 2015, Netflix's Chief Product Officer Neil Hunt said, "I feel like what consumers want is not the download model."
He continued, "What they want is the ability to consume anywhere they happen to be. And that might be on a plane, on a train, in a car or outside."
"I think the download model is fairly complex. You have to plan ahead; if you're planning for a long flight you're going to need quite a lot of storage to hold maybe several titles and a lot of time to prep that download. And I think that's challenging."
However more recently rumors have begun to emerge about Netflix planning to support downloads and offline viewing.
During the company's Q1 earnings call in 2016, CEO Reed Hastings said, "We should keep an open mind on this," before continuing, "We've been so focused on click-and-watch and the beauty and simplicity of streaming. But as we expand around the world, where we see an uneven set of networks, it's something we should keep an open mind about."
More recently an analyst from Frost & Sullivan called Netflix's offline plans an 'open secret' within the industry.
- Check out our guide to the best shows on Netflix for our top picks from the service.
8Bitdo’s NES Classic Edition wireless controller kit adds retro gamepad options
Dubsmash syncs €9 million Series B
Facebook has cut off Prisma’s Live Video access
Facebook has cut off Prisma’s Live Video access
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Windows 10 Anniversary Update can now be installed by businesses
Windows 10’s Anniversary Update is now available to download and install for business users, after having been previously rolled out to consumers since the beginning of August.
In other words, companies running the Current Branch for Business (CBB) of Windows 10 can now deploy the update across their PCs.
The delay of almost four months is a typical timeframe for a big update, to ensure that it is thoroughly tested by consumers and major bugs are found before the upgrade is made available to business PCs.
In a blog post, Microsoft noted that the Anniversary Update is fully ready for firms to download, and that it had “addressed nearly a thousand items of feedback” across all manner of customers, including pilot deployments in enterprises.
Enterprise boost
Michael Niehaus, Director of Product Marketing for Windows 10 at Microsoft, further trumpeted some stats relating to the OS and businesses, saying that there had been a threefold increase in enterprise deployments of Windows 10 over the past six months.
He also pushed the security angle for Microsoft’s newest OS, noting that compared to Windows 7 users, those on Windows 10 were 58% less likely to encounter ransomware for one thing.
Niehaus also noted that Windows 10 makes upgrades far quicker and easier to deploy across fleets of devices, and added: “Windows 10 is also our most compatible release ever and with 99% of the top 3,000 apps shown to be compatible, customers are deploying at scale with confidence.”
All that said, some third-party stats have indicated a lukewarm reception for Windows 10 among businesses thus far, such as this study of US companies which was published back in August.
Via: Ghacks
http://ift.tt/2gJ1fQXIs your browsing history private? Not now the snooper’s charter has become law
The Investigatory Powers Act (informally known as the government’s snooper’s charter) has been passed into law in the UK having obtained royal assent, with ramifications for everyone who surfs the net.
Going forward, service providers will be required to store every individual’s web browsing history for a period of a year, with the police and other government agencies and organisations being able to access that data.
It’s not just about your browsing history, either, as the act brings forth new powers when it comes to surveillance of phones – allowing access to calls by the police which, in the case of reporters, has been described as a “death sentence” in terms of investigative journalism, as the Guardian puts it.
As you’d expect, opposition to the legislation has been fierce, and a petition to repeal the law has now reached 143,000 signatures at the time of writing.
EU to the rescue?
Privacy rights groups are also predictably deeply unhappy about the move, and while the above petition will see the legislation being debated again in Parliament – any petition which accrues more than 100,000 signatures has to be considered for debate – that’s unlikely to make any difference at this point, anyway.
There’s also the possibility that EU courts will rule that parts of the legislation are unlawful and may need to be changed. Only time will tell on that score, when the Court of Justice examines the act next year.
Executive Director of the Open Rights Group, Jim Killock, commented on the act calling it one of the most “extreme surveillance laws ever passed in a democracy”.
He noted: “Its impact will be felt beyond the UK as other countries, including authoritarian regimes with poor human rights records, will use this law to justify their own intrusive surveillance regimes.
“Although there are some improvements to oversight, the Bill will mean the police and intelligence agencies have unprecedented powers to surveil our private communications and internet activity, whether or not we are suspected of a crime.”
A number of tech firms have also railed against the legislation, including Apple at the end of last year.
http://ift.tt/2gUI6iYTuesday, 29 November 2016
The best Facebook Messenger games to play right now
Yes the UK now has a law to log web users’ browsing behavior, hack devices and limit encryption
Gifts for the many varieties of gamer in your life
Facebook Messenger launches Instant Games
Post-App Store developer platform Blackstorm’s first showcase instant games launch on Facebook
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Facebook Messenger launches Instant Games
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SocialBooks turns your social media into a lasting memento of your horrific year
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SocialBooks turns your social media into a lasting memento of your horrific year
How a former model decided to launch an app to tackle Mental Health
Nintendo “worlds” of attractions coming to Universal Studios parks
Five really good reasons to attend TC Disrupt London, Dec 5-6
Mojiworks is a new UK startup building games for iMessage
Google says it's taking down a billion pirate search results a year
Film and television studios don't want you finding dodgy downloads with a simple web search, which is why Google has been asked to take down a record one billion 'pirate' search results over the last 12 months.
Copyright holders can request that Google pulls links in its results that infringe copyright - so Game of Thrones torrents, for example - and those copyright holders have obviously been very busy throughout the course of 2016.
TorrentFreak took a look at the numbers in Google's Transparency Report and found that takedown requests had risen to a staggering 1,007,741,143. Of those, 908,237,861 were actually removed (that's 90.1 percent, math fans).
Copyrights and copy wrongs
The takedown requests that weren't acted on were found to be invalid, not linking to copyright infringing content, or duplicates of earlier requests. In total, Google has now removed more than two billion URLs across 945,000 different domains.
Google and other search engines are obliged to take responsibility for linking to content that infringes copyright, although government regulations vary from country to country, and the number of total requests has risen sharply in recent months.
Most requests (more than 50 million) were aimed at the site 4shared.com, which for its part says a lot of those were duplicates - so that's almost alright then. You can read the most recent Google Transparency Report for yourself here.
http://ift.tt/2fHiAsDThe startup school of hard knocks with Jason Goldberg at Disrupt London, Dec 5-6
Ofcom wants to split BT to make UK broadband better
Ofcom has made a bold move in terms of getting BT to step in line, with the organisation issuing a formal notification which requires the legal separation of BT and Openreach.
This has been a long-running saga since an Ofcom review in the summer of 2015 suggested that BT’s Openreach – the networking arm which owns all the broadband infrastructure – should be distinct from the rest of the company to ensure a fair and level playing field for all broadband providers, BT included.
The regulator’s fear is that as things are now, BT can too easily favour its own retail business when Openreach is making decisions.
This summer just gone, Ofcom made demands of BT for its broadband division to become a separate entity within the company – as opposed to being spun off completely – and now the watchdog is moving to enforce this, after what it notes is BT’s failure to offer voluntary proposals to address its concerns regarding fair competition in the broadband arena.
In a statement, Ofcom said: “We are disappointed that BT has not yet come forward with proposals that meet our competition concerns. Some progress has been made, but this has not been enough, and action is required now to deliver better outcomes for phone and broadband users.”
Notifying the EC
Thus Ofcom is notifying the European Commission of its intention to press ahead with plans to require Openreach to become a distinct company (within BT) that has its own board, and greater independence from BT when it comes to making decisions about broadband investments.
Ofcom did, however, also say that it would “remain open to BT bridging the gap between its proposal and what is required to address our strong competition concerns”.
Dan Howdle, consumer telecoms expert and director of communications at Cable.co.uk, commented: "It's tough to read whether BT's heel-dragging is as a result of a tactic with the intention to deliberately delay and undermine the process, or whether, rather like Brexit, the process of separating Openreach is simply too vast and complex to be fully planned out in such a short period of time.
"That Ofcom has had to speak out of its 'frustration' suggests to me there is more to this delay than bureaucracy and red tape – that unwillingness to comply is also playing some part."
Indeed, this would seem to be a major prod for BT to get its act together in terms of ‘bridging gaps’ and satisfying Ofcom.
Although doubtless this process will be a long road, it’ll be interesting to see what BT’s immediate response is to this upping of the stakes. At any rate, in the long run, this pressure on BT can only be a good thing when it comes to competitively priced broadband.
As Ofcom puts it, this separation will “serve all customers”, and hopefully not just in terms of pricing, but also broadband coverage and availability.
http://ift.tt/2grwh0eSynq launches a video API so you don’t have to build video delivery from scratch
Jolla’s Sailfish OS now certified as Russian government’s first ‘Android alternative’
Monday, 28 November 2016
High-end audio maker Devialet nabs €100M from Foxconn, Jay Z, Rubin’s Playground and more
Cyber Monday Chromecast deals: the best prices on Google’s pint-sized streamer
Want to hook your old TV up to the internet without paying a premium? We don't blame you! The good news is that’s exactly what the new Chromecast does and, trust us, it’s darn good at it.
It turns out Cyber Monday, the day where products fly off the shelf thanks to their amazing discounts, also applies to Google’s family of pint-sized streaming devices. Chromecast, Chromecast Ultra and Chromecast Audio are all on sale today for less than their already-low regular sticker price.
Here’s where to get the best deals on those devices – but, as soon as you’re done here, don’t forget to check out our round-ups of the best 4K TV Cyber Monday sales and best Cyber Monday headphone deals pages as well.
Best Chromecast Cyber Monday deals
Best Chromecast Audio Cyber Monday deals
Best Chromecast Ultra Cyber Monday deals
And don’t forget to pick up a Google Home while it’s still on sale today for $99!
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