Daily Roundup: Samsung Gear 2 review, allure of the anonymous internet and more!
You might say the day is never really done in consumer technology news. Your workday, however, hopefully draws to a close at some point. This is the Daily Roundup on Engadget, a quick peek back at the top headlines for the past 24 hours — all handpicked by the editors here at the site. Click on through the break, and enjoy.
Shh, it’s a Secret: The allure of the anonymous internet
You can say almost anything you want on the internet, often without consequence. But are there advantages to being truly anonymous? Our own Nicole Lee spent some time with an app called Secret to find out.
Samsung Gear 2 review: much improved, but that doesn’t mean you should buy it
Samsung’s next gen smartwatch, the Gear 2, is indeed an improvement over its predecessor. It sports a slimmer design and a much longer battery life, though it’s $50 more than the original. Add in a skimpy app selection, and it still might not be worth investing in Samsung’s wrist-worn platform.
Google’s new camera app brings Photo Sphere and Lens Blur to Android devices
Google’s new standalone camera app is now available in the Play Store. Android-powered handsets are getitng a new “Lens Blur” feature to compliment the Photo Sphere we all know, love and never use.
Halo, Destiny composer Martin O’Donnell fired by Bungie
If you’ve been looking forward to Marin O’Donnell’s musical composition on the upcoming game Destiny, you’ll be saddened to know that he’s no longer involved in the project. According to his personal twitter account, he was “terminated without cause.”
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Filed under: Misc
College kids gave Siri new powers and now you can too
We already know Apple is working on improving Siri, but gosh dangit, the folks in Cupertino just aren’t moving as fast as some would like. That’s why a quartet of freshmen at the University of Pennsylvania decided to try making Siri do more on their own… at a hackathon, no less. They wound up taking third prize for the hack — called GoogolPlex — and after some fine-tuning, Alex Sands, Ajay Patel, Ben Hsu and Gagan Gupta are ready to help you make your virtual assistant do more. The setup process is trivial: you just have to change your Wi-Fi connection’s proxy settings (seriously, it’ll take five seconds). Once that’s done though, you can invoke Siri and ask GoogolPlex to play tunes in Spotify, crank up the heat on your Nest thermostat or even start your Tesla.
Fiddling with proxy settings may not be your cup of tea, but it’s actually crucial to how GoogolPlex works. You see, Siri parses these voice commands and sends them along to Google as search terms, but Googolplex intercepts that text and chews on it so it knows what service’s API to interact with (don’t worry, Gupta says none of your commands are ever stored). Hell, if you happen to be conversant in code, you can cobble together your own GoogolPlex commands for other apps too. Case in point: the team was originally going to reveal GoogolPlex with a Venmo command to initiate payments by voice. The full, more technical explanation can be found here.
Is it neat? You bet, especially since older projects that tried to do the same were a hassle to set up. Is it a totally polished way to expand Siri’s mind? Erm, not quite. You can bark commands at Googolplex all you like, but actually getting a response takes a little time since you’re always routed to Safari. Still, not a huge deal considering you can coax Googolplex into doing things Siri just can’t. It’s only a matter of time before Apple pushes out a shiny new build of iOS that makes some (or most) of what this hack does redundant, but for now, it’s time to get a-tinkerin’.
Source: GoogolPlex
Imogen Heap’s high-tech gloves could make the rest of your band obsolete
If you thought Michael Jackson was the only musician to believe in the magical power of a glove, think again. Imogen Heap has “joined forces with the nerd underworld” to create a new high-tech glove called Mi.Mu that allows you to control sound with your hands. It’s a concept she first talked about at TED in 2011. Using lights and motion sensors, the gloves can map a variety of hand gestures to different instruments and sounds, with each pair able to store literally thousands of combinations.
Right now the gestural music system is being built specifically for Imogen Heap, who has already come up with some crazy combinations. One of them, for example, is as follows: “If I am making a fist with my right hand, and pointing downwards with my left hand, map the ‘roll’ of my right wrist to MIDI control change message 60 on channel 2.” Say what? The goal is to make the project open-source so anyone can get in on the action. Pricing on the Mi.Mu’s Kickstarter page, however, represents a product that’s more for pop stars than your average garage band. To get a glove and the necessary electronics you’ll need to shell out 750 pounds ($1260!). If you do decide to invest, the system could certainly add a little flair to your stage presence — as long as you don’t have to sneeze.
Image source: Imogen Heap
Filed under: Alt
Source: Kickstarter, Imogen Heap
[Download] YouTube version 5.6.31 available now, allows streaming of live videos to Chromecast
Every Wednesday is now a magical time of fairies, unicorns, and of course, Google app updates. YouTube version 5.6.31 has been pushed out today which brings in the expected ability to send live streams from the mobile app to Chromecast as well as a few tweaks to the ‘Watch Later’ UI which has previously been a bit of a mess.
The roll out seems to be staggered as some regions (like Australia) have yet to see the update, however if you’re the type of person to want the newest of everything, we’ve got the .apk file available for download down below:
YouTube version 5.6.31 apk download
If you notice anything different about the app that we haven’t already mentioned, please feel free to let us know in the comments.
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document.write('’);
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DoggCatcher now casting in latest release
DoggCatcher, one of the first, and still among the best, podcast apps for Android, just got a little bit cooler this week. Those who download and run the latest release will find the ability to cast playback to a Chromecast-connected device. It’s not a fully-baked option that’s promised to be bug free; however, you can enable the beta feature through Settings>Miscellaneous.
Read the rest at ChromeWatching.
Read the rest at the source, ChromeWatching.com
The post DoggCatcher now casting in latest release appeared first on AndroidGuys.
Steam sales data shows that you don’t play the games you buy
I am not ashamed to admit that I have taken advantage of Steam sales and Humble Bundles to amass a library of roughly 150 games for a fraction of the retail price. I am, however, ashamed to admit that I’ve only actually played about one-third of them (and that’s probably being generous). Apparently, I’m far from alone. According to Ars Technica, just shy of 37 percent of registered titles have never been played. The site figured out a way to measure both the sales and number of hours a game is played through Valve’s digital store. That’s a huge deal when you’re talking about an industry that avoids giving out concrete numbers at all costs. While the method used for collecting the data is Steam-specific and won’t work for the entire industry, it still provides valuable insight into one of the largest game retailers in the world.
Basically for the last two months, Ars has been running a random, semi-anonymous rolling poll of publicly available information from people’s Steam profiles. With some fancy math, they’ve been able to figure how many copies a game has sold and just how many hours people are putting into each title. Now, the methodology is not perfect, but the outlet has compared its results with both public and private numbers provided by companies and its estimates match up quite well.
What the results seem to suggest is that the Steam (and likely the broader video game market) is very reliant on big blockbuster titles. The top 20 percent of titles account for 83 percent of all sales and 98 percent of total play time. If you want to break it down even further, the top 110 selling games (roughly 4 percent of titles) account for about half of all sales. It’s not quite enough of a disparity to inspire the gaming industry’s own version of Occupy Wall Street, but it serves to highlight the stark divide between the big boys and the indies.
Source: Ars Technica
Sony sold seven million PS4s already, beating its own predictions
Sony was quick to pat itself on the back for passing five million PlayStation 4s sold more than a month earlier than it predicted, and now that the fiscal year is over there’s more to celebrate. As of April 6th, Sony says it has sold more than seven million PS4s worldwide, covering more than 72 countries/regions. Games are moving too, with 20.5 million sold in stores or as downloads since launch, while players have already punched that Share button over 135 million times. We’ve had multiple updates on Sony’s stats since the last time we heard specific worldwide numbers from Microsoft, which seems to still trail in the hardware sales race — we should know more about the situation in North America after the NPD reports for March come out tomorrow. Despite relative radio silence on sales, updates on the Xbox One have added a number of features to its software recently, and Sony has revealed the PS4 will get a big update with external drive support, HDCP off and more soon. A post on the PlayStation Blog claims information on that is close by, but for now gaming fans (bored of Infamous: Second Son / Titanfall) can focus on what’s really important: which system moved more units.
Thanks to you, PS4 hardware sales have surpassed 7 million units worldwide: http://t.co/QoMlbo7VOe pic.twitter.com/w4xqhDBejf
– PlayStation (@PlayStation) April 16, 2014
Source: Sony (PRNewswire), PlayStation Blog
Amazon makes Kindle documents available via Cloud Drive
If you have any documents (or e-books acquired in a “non-standard” way) stored on your Kindle, now you can access them anywhere via Amazon Cloud Drive. Starting today, documents uploaded to your e-reader via your browser, mobile device or email will automatically be stored in a new “My Send-to-Kindle Docs” folder within Cloud Drive. Unlike previous document uploads that were automatically converted to Kindle format, new additions will be saved in the cloud in their original format. That means you’ll be able to edit the Word doc for your book on show ponies (might we suggest a working title of Pageant Ponies: America’s Real Beauty Queens?) from your desktop seconds after catching a typo. With the move, Kindle owners can combine their existing 5GB of free cloud storage with the 5GB offered to Cloud Drive users for a total of 10GB of space. You know what that means: plenty of room to store sequels to your equine masterpiece once you hit it big.
Image source: Flickr/Zhao!
Filed under: Wireless, Mobile, Amazon
Via: TechCrunch
Source: Amazon Cloud Drive
Here’s how to chat with Windows Phone’s new assistant outside of the US
Don’t despair that Windows Phone 8.1′s signature virtual assistant, Cortana, doesn’t officially work outside of the US — as it turns out, there’s a fairly easy way to try it in other countries. Pocket-lint notes that early adopters can chat with Cortana by choosing US language, region and speech in their phone settings. Provided you can live with American spelling across the interface, everything works as expected — you can find local shops, call friends and set reminders using only your voice. You’ll still have to wait until later in the year to get a truly localized version of Microsoft’s digital companion, but you can at least see what all the fuss is about right now.
Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile, Microsoft
Source: Pocket-lint
Yahoo Wants to Be Apple’s Default iOS Search Engine
Yahoo is working on two internal projects to optimize its mobile search and monetization in order to convince Apple to make Yahoo the default search engine on iOS reports Re/code.
The WSJ reported last year that Apple and Yahoo had been in discussions of how to integrate Yahoo’s services more prominently in iOS, beyond powering the Weather and Stocks apps.
The report says Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer is preparing detailed presentations to present to Apple executives showing what its new mobile search product could look like. There are a pair of internal projects, code-named “Fast Break” and “Curveball”, that are part of Yahoo’s redesign of its mobile search engine.
That has not happened as yet officially — it’s just the big honking goal of the Yahoo effort, said sources. Still, several said Mayer has already buttonholed a few Apple executives on the topic, including its powerful SVP of design Jony Ive, who knows the former Google exec well.
“This is the aim of the whole effort here, to grab the pole position in iOS search,” said one person working on the effort. “It will take more than pretty pictures though to convince Apple to give up Google, given its focus on consumer experience being top-notch. But Marissa wants it very badly.”
Currently, Yahoo and Microsoft are in the midst of a 10-year search and advertising partnership, something Mayer is trying to get out of. At the same time, Microsoft’s Bing provides the backend for Apple’s Siri web search feature. Google is the default search engine in the Safari iOS browser, with Yahoo and Bing available as user-selectable options. Apple already replaced Google’s Maps app with its own mapping application as default.
According to the Re/code report, a new and expanded agreement between Apple and Yahoo is not imminent — Apple has yet to be pitched on the new products. Instead, it’s part of a longer term play to bring the two companies closer together.
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