Game tech startup Skillz today launched a service that allows brands to easily sponsor and host mobile e-sports tournaments for any game titles that they like, as long as they are already part of the Skillz platform. As we’ve previously reported, Skillz enables developers to turn mobile games into tournament-playable titles, without writing a ton of new code. Its technology operates as… Read More
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Online anonymity can be a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it can give people a voice when they’d otherwise be afraid to speak up – whether that’s because of fear of government surveillance, discussing a topic that’s known to provoke cyberbullying, or because the topic itself is sensitive – like a personal confession or health issue. But anonymity also… Read More
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.
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.
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Earlier this fall, Twitter opened up access to its storytelling feature “Moments” to all Twitter users, allowing anyone to create their own stories using tweets and photos uploaded to the service. At the time, Moments creation was only available on the web, but the company promised that mobile support would arrive soon. Today, it has — Twitter has announced that the ability… Read More
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.
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.
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Email apps are a dime a dozen. There are the regular emails apps that come with our phones, there’s Gmail and Spark and there’s 50 others that all offer just about the same thing. Zero is trying something different. Think of Zero as an AI-enabled email system. It reads your messages as they come in and allows you to do all the regular stuff – move emails into trash, snooze… Read More http://ift.tt/2gGA7FL
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!
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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."
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.
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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.
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.
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Got a new NES Classic Edition but woefully disappointed at the official controller’s short, corded-only options? Third party alternatives are popping up, but the new NES30 Classic Edition Set and Retro Receiver are a good bet, and are up for pre-order now. The kit is from 8BItdo, which has been making wireless and wired retro versions of classic control controllers for a while now, and… Read More
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Dubsmash, the lip-syncing video app from Berlin that became a surprise social hit last year, has raised Series B funding. According to multiple sources — and now confirmed by the company — Sunstone Capital has led a €9 million (~$9.6m) round with participation from Index Ventures, Balderton Capital, Eniac Venture, and Lowercase Capital. Read More http://ift.tt/2fL4eYf
Style transfer startup Prisma added support to its iOS app for livestreaming its art filter effects in real-time via Facebook Live earlier this month — but almost immediately the startup’s access to the Live API was cut off by the social media platform giant. Read More http://ift.tt/2gUEAoP
Style transfer startup Prisma added support to its iOS app for livestreaming its art filter effects in real-time via Facebook Live earlier this month — but almost immediately the startup’s access to the Live API was cut off by the social media platform giant. Read More
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.
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
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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.
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.
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Starting today you can play games inside Facebook Messenger and News Feed, but which should you try? There are old classics like Pac-Man and Space Invaders, as well as modern titles like EverWing and Words With Friends you can play by tapping the game controller icon in a Messenger thread. Click or scroll through to see our quick reviews and scores out of 10 for all 17 of the launch titles,… Read More
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2016 has been a very good year to bury very bad news. And political distractions perhaps explain why a bill that has been described as the most extreme surveillance legislation every passed in a democracy has today passed into law in the UK never having faced substantial opposition. Read More http://ift.tt/2gSYG2S
I’m a gamer, you’re a gamer, she’s a gamer, we’re pretty much all gamers these days. But we probably aren’t the same kind of gamer. Here are a few ideas on what games you should get friends and loved ones whose playing preferences differ from your own. Read More
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Bored while you wait for friends to text back? Now you can challenge friends for high scores on Facebook Messenger’s new Instant Games, like Pac-Man, Space Invaders, and Words With Friends Frenzy. Available right from your message threads, they load in seconds since they’re built on the HTML5 mobile web standard, rather than having to be downloaded like clunky native apps. Read More
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In Ernestine Fu’s future, you shouldn’t have to wait more than a few seconds to launch a game or an app to connect with a friend. In fact, a few seconds might even be too long. That’s what prompted the birth of Blackstorm, a development platform that has the tools to build high-fidelity applications — the same you might get from an app in the App Store — in HTML5… Read More
Bored while you wait for friends to text back? Now you can challenge friends for high scores on Facebook Messenger’s new Instant Games, like Pac-Man, Space Invaders, and Words With Friends Frenzy. Available right from your message threads, they load in seconds since they’re built on the HTML5 mobile web standard, rather than having to be downloaded like clunky native apps.… Read More
If you’re anything like me you hate social media with a white hot passion yet you feel oddly compelled to put garbage into it on a regular basis, to your great shame. Thankfully there is now a service that can create a book about your year in social media, allowing you to seethe both offline and online, a boon to this plugged-in generation. The service is called MySocialBook and… Read More
If you’re anything like me you hate social media with a white hot passion yet you feel oddly compelled to put garbage into it on a regular basis, to your great shame. Thankfully there is now a service that can create a book about your year in social media, allowing you to seethe both offline and online, a boon to this plugged-in generation. The service is called MySocialBook and… Read More http://ift.tt/2gtfSZp
Mental health is one of the buzzwords of the moment, especially now Royalty like Prince William and Duchess Katherine have been championing it, along with Kid Cudi, Cara Delevingne and others saying that they would be open to sending their children to counselling. One in five people have suffered from depression, one in two will suffer of some other mental disturbance in their lifetimes. If… Read More http://ift.tt/2gt35Gf
Nintendo will provide fans a way to put themselves in the game at Universal Studios Japan, Universal Orlando and Universal Hollywood, and it won’t require use of a VR headset. The Mario-maker is teaming up with the theme park operator for a new set of attractions that Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto and Universal’s Mark Woodbury describe as “worlds” for fans to… Read More
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It’s a big decision to take a day or two to attend a startup tech conference. No doubt you would like a solid return on your investment of time and money, not a tumble in the mosh pit of a mega tech event. Sound right? Then consider TechCrunch’s Disrupt London for these reasons: Zero in on the right startups for you. Investors and founders benefit from CrunchMatch, the… Read More http://ift.tt/2fxNuZ5
Mojiworks, new startup from the founders of Wonderland, the UK gaming startup acqui-hired by Zynga back in 2011, is on a mission to turn Apple’s iMessage into a social gaming platform. Read More http://ift.tt/2gDVqUZ
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).
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.
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TechCrunch Disrupt in London is on December 5-6. That’s next week. Grab tickets here. We’re excited to have serial entrepreneur Jason Goldberg, Founder & CEO, Pepo, come to speak about his long experience. Prior to Pepo Jason founded Hem, Fab, Social Median, and Jobster. Pepo is the place for live conversations: “Create and join conversations that match your interests. Read More http://ift.tt/2gEvERr
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.”
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.
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Say you’re an app developer and you need to give your app users a way of uploading, storing and playing back video. Instead of having to build your own video content management system or licensing one of the existing ones, Synq offers developers a third option. The company is launching its “cloud video API for Developers,” service today, aiming to be a full video… Read More http://ift.tt/2gDlAHc
The future for one of the few remaining alternative mobile OS platforms, Jolla’s Sailfish OS, looks to be taking clearer shape. Today the Finnish company which develops and maintains the core code, with the aim of licensing it to others, announced Sailfish has achieved domestic certification in Russia for government and corporate use. Read More http://ift.tt/2fwCqLK
Make way for another startup that wants to shake up the world of music and audio technology. Devialet, the French developer of high-end speakers and the IP behind the sound systems that make them go boom, has raised €100 million ($106 million). This is a strategic growth round that is bringing in a number of high-profile new investors — and with them, a lot more audio… Read More http://ift.tt/2fuMvci
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.
And don’t forget to pick up a Google Home while it’s still on sale today for $99!
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