YouTube won’t block music videos from Indie labels, but it won’t pay them either
There’s been some brouhaha about YouTube blocking a huge swathe of music videos before launching its paid Spotify rival. The truth, however, is a little more nuanced. Labels who haven’t signed up to the website’s new terms, the majority of which are independents like XL Recordings, will have their artist channels blocked in the next few days. It’s not a blanket ban, however, since clips released through Vevo will remain, as well as fan-uploaded copies of tracks from artists like Radiohead, Adele and The xx. The kicker here, unfortunately, is that labels who won’t sign up to the paid tier are also kicked out of YouTube’s ad-supported monetization scheme. So while we may still be able to find Lotus Flower on a Radiohead fan’s channel, the band itself won’t get a single penny.
Another downside of the ban is that YouTube won’t use its copyright algorithms to blacklist infringing content, leaving independent labels to hunt through the site and issue takedown requests on their own. According to a lobbyist operating on behalf of the indies, YouTube isn’t even playing fair, offering “highly unfavorable and non-negotiable terms” which undercut the fees paid to Spotify, Rdio and Deezer, as well as being less generous than the money paid to the major labels like Warner, Sony and Universal. Now, some of this is probably just the hardball tactics that accompany any big new service, but we wonder what the movie studios will do if YouTube does go ahead with its mooted Netflix rival at some point in the future.
Filed under: Home Entertainment, Internet, Google
These are the biggest third-party games at E3 2014
Sure, Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft all have their own internally-developed games but there’s so much more to E3 than what The Big Three show off for their respective platforms. Even better, almost every game from the likes of Activision and Electronic Arts will appear on PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One so there’s almost no need to choose which platform to buy if you want to play a specific title, either. Let’s get down to business, shall we?
THE WITCHER 3: WILD HUNT
Polish developer CD Projekt Red does one thing and one thing only: role-playing games. This year was The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt‘s second E3 and it still faces the same problems that it did in 2013. Namely, the game looks like a ton of fun when it’s condensed to short snippets onstage at Microsoft’s media briefing, but otherwise what makes the game special like story-affecting choices and scouring the map’s nooks and crannies just doesn’t demo well. I saw an uninterrupted 45 minutes of game-play during a private demo and witnessed monster-hunter-for-hire Geralt exterminate harpies, undead swamp people, werewolves and demonic tree roots (seriously), and while that was cool, he was mostly an errand boy in between battles. To me, this robbed him of any narrative weight or importance.
Tracking a gigantic, bleeding griffin through the forest using supernatural forensics, however, and then delivering a killing blow and carrying its head into town on the side of your horse looks unbelievably bad-ass. You’ll be able to check the game out for yourself come next February 24th.
METAL GEAR SOLID V: THE PHANTOM PAIN
“Let the legend come back to life.” At some point in the extended gameplay demo for Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, those words are uttered in Big Boss’ direction… and then a horse shits. That’s just a partial taste of how Hideo Kojima has colored this new, open world of MGS.
MGS V: The Phantom Pain picks up nine years after Big Boss has fallen into a coma and shows the character severely scarred and brandishing a curious bit of horn-shaped shrapnel sticking out of his head. The gameplay doesn’t vary from the series’ typical blend of action and stealth, but thanks to Kojima’s Fox Engine, the environments (said to be roughly “200x the size of Ground Zeroes“) and character models are much more detailed. In fact, Konami reps said that a key game dynamic — the ability to fast forward time with a Phantom Cigar (e-cig) — is entirely possible because of this new engine. The resulting effect is not unlike that of hi-speed cinematography, where a static landscape is shown passing from day into night and back again. MGS V also throws in an entirely new element for long-time fans: the ability to visit a dynamically expanding Mother Base populated with all the characters, materials and artillery you’ve Fulton’d back. And yes, that even includes livestock.
DESTINY
I’ve gone on record saying that I was very much disinterested in Destiny, but that was until I actually got to play developer Bungie’s latest. Going hands-on with the former Halo studio’s game felt like a welcome trip home; damn near everything about the game just feels right for me as a Halo fan. Gunplay is tight and strikes a solid balance between the heft of a Killzone or Battlefield versus Titanfall‘s or, say, Call of Duty‘s feather-light locomotion. The environments I’ve seen are gorgeous, feeling lived-in and appropriately desolate and even in the early state I’ve played, the game feels incredibly polished.
Everywhere I turned, it seemed like I was seeing an idea that Bungie had wanted to put in its next game for the past 10 or so years. Whether the studio couldn’t due to hardware limitations or because its next game was always Halo-related, though, isn’t clear. Things like summoning vehicles on-demand to help get across the game’s vast expanses of geography, for instance are more than welcome. Or, even better, the way voice-chat audio subtly reflects your current environment (in a metallic tunnel, it sounded like my co-op buddy’s voice was echoing off the steel walls) was super neat. Tricks like this make me keep wanting to go back. I’m just worried that I’m not the only one who initially wrote it off as Just Another Shooter.
BATTLEFIELD: HARDLINE
It’s surreal to play a first-person shooter that’s based in the same city I’m currently visiting. In Battlefield: Hardline, I played cops-and-robbers on the battle-scarred streets of downtown Los Angeles. Since it was a war zone, no civilians were around to get in the way. I was one of the robbers wandering around parking structures, stairwells, hotels and office buildings, searching for loot and evading law enforcement with the rest of my team. Saying that the round was chaotic would be a gross understatement; cars and helicopters alike flew around corners, and thanks to the tech running the game, rubble, shrapnel and destroyed buildings were everywhere. If being a bad guy isn’t your style, you can also play as a cop that’s trying to prevent the opposition from snatching the booty.
While the game’s extreme levels of action are pretty awesome, this is a Battlefield game by name only. Seemingly, the sole aspect that ties the title to its namesake are the tools developer Visceral Games used to make the game and what you use to wreak havoc on the ground. Hardline is essentially a re-skinned Battlefield 4: cops kill the robbers, and robbers, well, they kill cops. Each side is essentially the same, despite their respective vocations, and are soldiers fighting a virtual war. And you’d be justified to remain cautious about whether the game will work as advertised at launch based on series history. There’s a beta test happening right now, well ahead of the fall release, should you be (morbidly) curious about how the game plays.
ALIEN: ISOLATION
Let me get this out of the way up front: Alien: Isolation is difficult. The developers at Creative Assembly not only nailed the atmosphere of director Ridley Scott’s sci-fi masterpiece, but they ensured that I respected just how fragile life in deep space is when the hulking monstrosity pictured above is out to murder you every chance it gets. My demo tasked me with few objectives, but most related directly to me making it toward the next area in one piece. That didn’t happen. However, with each successive go at it, I made considerably more progress toward my goal. On my first attempt, I tried sprinting down a desolate corridor with the intent to make it through the doors I imagined were at the other side. No dice; the xenomorph noticed me before I even knew it was there and the next thing I knew, its double mouth punched another hole in my face.
The next attempt I made it a little further, grabbing a flame-thrower before I exited the first room and figuring out how to use my motion tracker — the latter of which caused me to fail an optional objective. When I rounded the first corner and the alien spotted me, I darted back and jumped into a storage locker, figuring I’d be safe. Nope. The alien ripped me from my haven and murdered me. On my third try, I noticed a series of air vents big enough to crawl through. Huddling down, I crouched and made my way into the first one that I’d spotted. Hooray! Progress! That was short-lived. I got cocky and thought that I could traverse to the next one without paying attention to where the xeno was. I’d heard the thundering footsteps behind me but figured I’d be safe as the vent closed behind me. Not so much: the alien reached through and ripped me out of there, making my face a see-through in the process. I loved it.
BLOODBORNE
You’re a fan of the tough-as-nails Dark Souls series, yeah? Then you’ll likely feel right at home in its mastermind’s latest, the PlayStation 4 exclusive Bloodborne. Atmosphere and mood aren’t the only things the game is dripping with. As the title implies, there’s also a lot of blood. Buckets of it. Set in a 19th century gothic city, your task is to eliminate the blight plaguing it by any means necessary, be it with a giant straight razor or a hand cannon, and well, trying to not die too much in the process. As combat proceeds, the player character becomes covered in progressively more blood, and it never faded away during my hands-off demo. Getting a sense for how difficult the game is wasn’t particularly easy since the presentation had an invincibility mode turned on (staring at loading screens and repeatedly falling at the hands of nightmare creatures and undead townspeople isn’t exactly exciting), but I was assured that the game doesn’t stray far form its roots in terms of just how hard it is. This supposedly makes each victory that much more satisfying. You know, if you’re into that sort of thing.
HOMEFRONT: THE REVOLUTION
What would America feel like under North Korean occupation? That’s the question Homefront: The Revolution wants to answer. You might remember Homefront from a few years back as a hokey, underwhelming shooter from the now-defunct publisher THQ. From what I saw during a presentation, new developer Crytek London took what was good about that game (the concept of an invaded United States), married it with a sense of dread and hopelessness, and added a dash of fancy graphics. The brief demo I caught followed a citizen making his way through the streets of an open-world Philadelphia, passing brothers and sisters in arms who were figuring out how to ration off enough necessities to survive planning an uprising. The sequence reminded me an awful lot of the intro to Half-life 2, Metro 2033 and Resistance 3; the sense of despondency was palpable, thanks in large part to solid voice acting and environmental design. Once the combat started toward the end, Crytek’s other strength showed through: gunplay and weapon design, with the latter sporting an upgrade system with part-by-part modifications akin to the Crysis series. We’re still a year or more off from this game releasing, but it already looks and feels killer.
MORTAL KOMBAT X
I’ve got bad news for you: I don’t play fighting games. The last Mortal Kombat game I played with any sincerity was for PlayStation 2/Xbox, and even then I wasn’t that good at it. So what can I tell you about Mortal Kombat X, Mortal Kombat fan? This game focuses on a gaggle of new characters — somewhat expected given the fatality-laden ending of the last MK game — and Netherrealm Studios had three such new characters available to play at E3 2014. We got a look at all three, as well as returning favorites Scorpion and Sub-zero.
Here’s the good news: Mortal Kombat is still hella fun. Even with my vast ignorance of fighting games, it was a blast leaping around in that world once more, trying my best to avoid Cassie Cage’s utterly revolting “X-ray” move. Like the last MK, “X-ray moves” are back in Mortal Kombat X; one such move has Cassie pulling an homage to her father’s iconic split attack. Not clear enough? She does a split and punches her opponent in the genitals, which I watched explode in X-ray mode. It was the only demo at E3 where I turned to the demo assistant and said, “Really?” Even he, a Netherrealm Studios employee, was a bit bashful about it. Anyway, the other new characters I tried were neat as well, with Ferra/Torr standing out as a highlight (dude throws a person at you to attack — pretty serious!). The game is way early at this point, but it looks to be shaping up really well already.
Ben Gilbert, Brad Molen and Joseph Volpe contributed to this report
[Image credit: AFP/Getty Images]
Filed under: Gaming, Home Entertainment, HD
BlackBerry steadies the ship but smartphone sales continue to evaporate
BlackBerry’s plan to cut costs and shift to services is starting to pay dividends. While the company’s latest financial earnings report shows it’s still suffering losses, they aren’t as bad as expected. It certainly wasn’t thanks to its smartphones, which were once BlackBerry’s main source of revenue, as they fell to just 2.6 million units in the last quarter from 3.4 million in Q4. This time around, the Canadian smartphone maker didn’t divulge how many BB7 and BB10 handsets it sold, suggesting the newer OS just isn’t tempting consumers and businesses to part with their iPhones and Android devices. For reference: BB7 smartphone sales more than doubled those of BlackBerry 10 last quarter.
Again, BlackBerry saw the majority of its revenue (54 percent) come from its services, which CEO Jon Chen believes will help the company become profitable by 2016. But that all hinges on whether it can succeed in providing secure communications for large companies and government agencies. Right now, BlackBerry’s cost-cutting measures (and the sale of its Canadian offices) are helping to balance out this quarter’s mobile losses. But if it can’t boost income from the most profitable part of its business, BlackBerry could fit itself back at square one with no room to cut any more costs.
Filed under: Cellphones, Blackberry
Source: BlackBerry (MarketWatch)
X-Doria’s KidFit is a low-cost fitness wearable for five-year-olds
X-Doria is a company we normally associate with smartphone accessories, but now it’s decided to branch out into wearables. While the jury is still out on whether children should be introduced to the concept of the quantified self, X-Doria wants to help get kids moving with its new KidFit activity tracker. Targeted at children between 5 and 13, the multi-colored slappable wristband scores activities to reach a daily goal of 100 points. Parents are encouraged to set goals using the iOS or Android app, which connects to a smartphone or tablet using low-power Bluetooth and provides feedback on a child’s progress via its vivid “Results Cards.” The wearable is also splash-proof, holds a charge for up to seven days and like the FitBit or Jawbone Up, can be set to track sleep patterns with the push of a button. While it won’t track your kids in the literal sense (there are plenty of GPS-enabled wearables targeted at kids that can do that), it does offer a 24/7 overview of their activities. It’ll be available on August 15th for $50 in black, aqua, hot pink, yellow, and red variants. If you get in now (and are one of the first 1,000 buyers), you can pre-order the tracker for $40.
Filed under: Wearables, Mobile
Source: X-Doria KidFit
Lego Fusion lets you build virtual playgrounds with real-world bricks
If your child is constantly glued to a tablet swiping away at birds or fruit, you’re probably wistfully wishing for the days when kids liked playing with actual toys. Well, Lego just might have the perfect solution for you and your offspring. Today, the maker of the beloved construction bricks announced Lego Fusion, a system that combines the flexibility and fun of app-based games with the good ol’ fashioned activity of creative Lego building.
Developed by Lego’s Future Lab, Fusion was invented as a way to marry digital and analog play. Ditte Bruun Pedersen, a senior design manager of the Lab, tells us that during its research, the Lego team discovered that children don’t really differentiate physical play from digital. “To them, it’s not two separate worlds. It’s one world that blends together. It’s all just play.” However, games on tablets and phones remain popular with kids because of how immersive they are, so the trick is to put the two worlds together.
The Lego folks identified three sorts of games that kids typically like: Tycooning, which involves building and managing, tower defense style games and racing. And so they’ve come up with four different Lego Fusion games to fit those categories. Lego Fusion Town Master lets you create a miniature Lego city, Lego Fusion Battle Towers puts you in a medieval battle where you’ll need the best castle and fighters, and Lego Fusion Create & Race has you creating a customized car for either a time-based race or a demolition derby. The fourth game, Lego Fusion Resort Designer, is very similar to Town Master except that it lets you decorate the interior of buildings as well.
Each Lego Fusion set consists of 200 bricks along with a special “capture” brick building plate that’s meant to be paired with a corresponding app. To play the Town Master game, for example, you would build a two-dimensional facade on the base plate, say the front of a house with a door, two windows and a roof (buildings can be up to 16 bricks high and 16 bricks wide). You’d then launch the app’s camera function to focus on the printed pattern, which is used as an identification tag. This essentially lets the app figure out exactly the size and colors of the Lego bricks you’ve built on the plate, enabling it to import and translate that physical creation into the digital realm. The app is then intelligent enough to transform the two-dimensional front of a house into a three-dimensional virtual building to be placed in the game. Lego tells us it uses Qualcomm’s Vuforia mobile vision platform for this process.
“For most kids, if you simply give them a pile of bricks and tell them to build something, they go blank,” says Pedersen. By pairing a game objective with the bricks, it gives them a prompt to actually get something started. “The games are used to facilitate creativity,” she says.
All the apps are free to download and experience for free so kids (and their parents, of course) can familiarize themselves with the game’s mechanics and requirements before committing to it. However, all of these apps do actually require the physical Lego set to progress. You can’t build a building in the game without those physical bricks.
Additionally, the Lego Fusion games are designed to encourage kids to keep on building beyond the initial steps. With Town Master, you’re constantly given missions to appease the townspeople and run the city. In Battle Towers, you’ll have to upgrade your castle with defenses depending on the kinds of enemies the game pits against you. As for the racing game, well, you can’t beat your last time or destroy your competition without making your car sleeker and meaner. “It drives kids back and forth from the tablet to brick building,” explains Pedersen.
Further, since all the creations are stored digitally in the Lego world — you can save them to the cloud with a Lego ID — children are able to carry on with the game even after they’ve put their bricks away for the day. If the parents allow it, kids can connect with their friends using their Lego credentials too. They can visit each other’s towns, see how the other person’s tower looks like and even race those cars against each other. It also presents the opportunity for the child to learn from what their friends have made, and perhaps improve upon their creations.
Each of the Lego Fusion sets cost $34.99 and will be available at Toys R Us, Lego stores and Legoland locations in the US and online. The Town Master, Battle Towers and Create & Race kits will be ready in August, while the Resort Designer game will be in stores in September. The age range for these Lego Fusion games are 7 and up. Though the system doesn’t look quite as cool as Mindstorms, at least it encourages kids to build something real rather than poking at pixels all day.
Filed under: Misc
iOS 7’s Activation Lock Feature Helping Reduce iPhone Theft in Three Major Cities
New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman announced today that Apple’s Activation Lock feature in iOS 7 has led to a “significant” reduction of iPhone-related theft in New York, London, and San Francisco, reports The New York Times.
Measuring crime after Apple introduced Activation Lock alongside iOS 7 last Fall, police officers in San Francisco said that iPhone robberies in the city fell 38 percent, with London experiencing a 24 percent drop. Meanwhile, the New York Police Department said that iPhone robberies dropped 19 percent, while grand larcenies including the device dropped 29 percent in the first five months of 2014 compared to the same time period last year.
“The introduction of kill switches has clearly had an effect on the conduct of smartphone thieves,” Mr. Schneiderman said in an interview. “If these can be canceled like the equivalent of canceling a credit card, these are going to be the equivalent of stealing a paperweight.”
Apple’s Activation Lock feature, which prevents stolen phones from being reactivated without an iCloud password, has received praise from various groups since its inclusion in iOS 7. Schneiderman, along with San Francisco attorney George Gascón, spearheaded smartphone anti-theft efforts last year and called Apple’s Activation Lock the “world’s first attempt to implement a technological solution to the global smartphone theft epidemic.”
Apple also entered a voluntary agreement with a number of other smartphone makers in April to include anti-theft technology on all smartphones going on sale after July 2015. Under that agreement, every phone sold would have capabilities allowing users to remotely wipe data and to prevent reactivation without the owner’s permission. It is likely that Apple’s Activation Lock and Find My iPhone features already satisfy the requirements of the agreement.
Ambient glasses put smartphone notifications right in front of your eyes
Still not sold on smartwatches, but want to know what’s going on with your phone without taking it out of your pocket? Maybe Matilde’s Fun-iki glasses, spotted at CNET Japan’s Live 2014 event, will do the trick. Connecting to smartphones through WiFi, a trio of LEDs above each lens will glow (or pulse) when there’s a notification, or simply to add a little, er, color to your complexion. The lights cycle through various shades of red, green and blue, and you’re able to assign specific colors to specific notifications: these frames aren’t limited to just phone calls and email pings and adding further third-party apps’ notifications is apparently easy.
There’s speakers within the arms, while it charges through the micro-USB port on the left side — we’re told it’ll typically blink and glow for around two days. It’s a pretty simple pair of glasses: notifications are pretty much it — there’s no interactive component or camera within the hardware itself, but you can setup the notifications, color cycles and pulse rates through a companion app. There’s also three different light-up modes: ‘disco’ and ‘party’ make the LEDs go a little crazy (just think of the Tinder applications), while ‘relax’ mode takes gentler hues and fades them in and out. Oh and there’s a morse code mode, where you can flash out a specified message. Because anachronisms.
The company says that it expects them to go on sale later this year, for a pricey 15,000 yen (around $147). Interestingly, the initial product could open up different styles: there’s not much stopping Matilde adding prescription lenses, or even adding some water protection. (It’s working with Paris Miki, an established Japanese glasses-maker, on the project). The company said that work is already underway on sports activity apps for the hardware. Given the squash goggle styling of the hardware, we reckon there’s some potential there.
Filed under: Wearables
Source: Fun-iki glasses
Sony Action Cams are ready to stream live internet video
Sony Action Cam owners: if you’re eager to share your sporting adventures with the world, your moment has come. The company has just rolled out a firmware update for the AS100V (installable on Macs or Windows) that lets you broadcast live video on Ustream, complete with social network alerts when you’re on the air. The higher-end camera also gets a new Motion Shot Mode that composites several photos into one, while burst shooting and self-timer modes are useful for both action-packed images and self-portraits.
You won’t get live streaming or high-speed photography if you’re using the more modest AS30V cam, but you’re not out of luck. It’s getting its own upgrade (available on Macs and Windows) that delivers multi-camera control through an optional remote, better automatic exposure and the use of WiFi without a memory card. Hit the source links if you’re ready to expand your cinematic repertoire.
Source: AS100V update (Mac), (Windows)
Future phones will have security measures built into the glass
The glass on your smartphone screen doesn’t do a lot right now: it lets pictures and touch input get through, and that’s about it. It may pick up a few extra talents in the future, though. Researchers at Polytechnique Montreal have developed sensors that can sit under the surface of the scratch-resistant Gorilla Glass used in many mobile devices. Their approach etches optical waveguides into the display, letting it track changes in light. As a result, the screen can do things that would normally require either wiring or dedicated sensors. Your phone could check its temperature using light, and the manufacturer could even embed a unique optical pattern into the glass that lets the phone identify itself; it might get much harder to clone a device (and, presumably, its information).
There are some subtler advantages, too. Since there’s nothing but photons passing through the waveguides, they’d be invisible. You could even stack multiple guides (and potentially multiple sensors) without obscuring the picture. In the long run, this could be key to transparent electronics that need many functions hidden from sight.
Despite the involvement of a Corning scientist, there aren’t any official plans to include these light sensors into Gorilla Glass. However, Polytechnique Montreal is fully bent on getting its technology into real, shipping gadgets. The invention should be production-ready within about a year, and the team is seeking out companies that could put the sensors into finished hardware. Provided the group finds some takers, you could soon see phones whose displays are as smart as the electronics underneath.
Filed under: Cellphones, Science, Mobile
Via: PCWorld
Source: Optics InfoBase
Stock Email Android App Makes its Way into the Play Store [APK Download]
Google continues to place their stock apps into the Play Store, and we can now add the stock email app to the list. Some of the features added to the app include, extra security for Gmail accounts, printing to the app, improved account setup, and of course, bug fixes.
Sadly the app can’t be placed on all devices out there. As of now, Nexus devices are compatible with the update and that is about it. This is just one more app to add to the list that Google has pulled from the base Android OS to better support consumers without having to mass release a device update to solve an Email issue. We have the apk download for you below, so like everything you download and place on your device, install at your own risk. Let us know how it runs.
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