Los Angeles is hiring an advisor for ridesharing and robotic cars
Los Angeles might be opening up to next-generation transportation between its loosening stance on ridesharing and its deal with Waze, but it’s still looking for someone who can shed more light on the subject. Mayor Eric Garcetti has revealed that the city is hiring an advisor who’ll create a transportation strategy that factors in newer technology, including ridesharing services and self-driving cars. The hope is that this will modernize both road safety and traffic flow in a metropolis that’s notorious for its dependence on cars. The catch? This is a year-long fellowship, not a permanent position. LA may set off in the right direction, but it’s not certain that the local government will be prepared if future tech introduces new problems.
Filed under: Transportation
Source: Fast Company
NYT: Uber bids $3 billion for Nokia’s Here maps
Uber wants to buy another mapping technology: Nokia’s Here, and it’s bid $3 billion for it according to The New York Times. Who else wants in on the action? Apparently a handful of German car manufacturers including Audi, BMW and Mercedes Benz, and Chinese search engine Baidu’s lending some cash to the move as well. While Google Maps is probably the most popular service here in the States, that isn’t exactly the case abroad. NYT says that globally the Finnish electronics company’s navigation system commands an 80 percent market share for in-car GPS.
From the sounds of it, the reason Uber’s even interested is that Here could aid Uber Pool’s car-pooling to link passengers with drivers. The trio from Deutschland’s intentions are a little clearer: the idea is to aid in the development and guidance of autonomous vehicles because leaning heavily on Google isn’t particularly attractive given Mountain View’s own self-driving car efforts. That, and if those three own Here they can charge licensing fees should they choose to let other companies use it.
[Image credit: Associated Press]
Filed under: Transportation, Nokia
Source: New York Times, CNBC
Finally, Google is rolling out Android 5.1.1 to the Nexus 9
One of the biggest benefits of owning a pure stock Android device is you will be able to run the latest version of “pure” Android before those other customized software packages from the likes of LG, Samsung, HTC and others. While some devices like the Nexus 4 and Nexus 7 have been running Android 5.1.1 for a while now, the Nexus 9 will finally get the update according to Google. Android 5.1.1 should address some of the bugs associated with the earlier versions of Lollipop.
As for me, I had the Nexus 9 and Nexus 6 for over a month and I got tired of the bugs. I personally would rather stay a version behind until all of the bugs are fixed, like poor battery life or random restarts. This is not 2009 anymore. Regardless, I hope this update sorts out some of your Nexus 9 issues (if you have any), and lets hope the entire Nexus line improves going forward.
Source – Google
The post Finally, Google is rolling out Android 5.1.1 to the Nexus 9 appeared first on AndroidGuys.
Android Finally Poised to Overtake iOS in Revenue for Developers
Though Apple often owns the discussion, Google’s Android owns the market, accounting for a whopping 81.5% of market share as of the end of 2014. That’s huge, and yet, iOS has been a more reliable revenue generator than Android since time immemorial.
But all that appears to be changing. For the first time in history, Android generated 45.8 percent of ad revenue in Q1 of 2015 compared to 45.4 percent for iOS. That’s the first time Android has outperformed iOS.
However, take this with a grain of salt. We’re discussing ad revenue, not app store purchases. Only with the inclusion of China’s complex Android marketplace does Android eclipse iOS’ App Store. But what this means is that Google is poised, likely sometime this year, to overtake Apple on actual app store-related revenue.
Bear in mind this is due to a global onslaught of Android devices. iOS devices are – and for the foreseeable future will be – far more potent revenue generators on a per capita basis than their Android counterparts. Apple customers spend more on apps and are demographically more attractive to advertisers. Catering to such a level of exclusivity and caché isn’t really Google’s beat, so they’ll take their lumps and continue pushing Android and Chrome OS all over the world, from cheap devices aimed at lower-income consumers to high-end boutique products.
Accel Partners’ Rich Wong describes the situation:
“Considering the major volume advantage of Android, outside the US in particular, this milestone was inevitable… While Apple deserves enormous credit for some recent market share resurgence (in the US in particular), the longer-term trend hasn’t changed. Developers ultimately have to go where the eyeballs are, and for global mobile eyeballs, Android is way out in front.”
So raise your glasses and celebrate as we vanquish our greatest of foes, those fiends from Cupertino. Bwahaha.
Source: ReCode
Come comment on this article: Android Finally Poised to Overtake iOS in Revenue for Developers
Straight Talk is now giving customers 5GB of data each month instead of 3GB
If you’re a Straight Talk user that’s been struggling to stay below your 3GB data limit each month, we’ve got some good news for you. Starting now, if you’re planning on becoming a BYOP (bring your own phone) customer or have signed up for the carrier using your own phone in the past, you will now receive 5GB of high speed data each month instead of the normal 3GB limit. Current customers will receive their additional 2GB on their next refill date, and no further action is required to receive the additional data.
Considering this plan costs just $45 per month and gets you unlimited talk, text and 5GB of high speed data, this is a pretty great deal. Not many other prepaid carriers give you this much data for less than $50 per month, making Straight Talk a viable option for those looking for the most bang for their buck.
Are any of you on Straight Talk? Would you recommend the service to someone looking for a new prepaid carrier?
Truecaller and Cyanogen announce partnership to bring dial pad replacement app
Today, Truecaller, a search technology company from Stockholm, Sweden, announced a partnership with Cyanogen Inc. to make its Truecaller dial pad app the default on Cyanogen OS. The app features spam blocking and caller ID (even for unknown callers in live calls and call history).
Dave Herman, VP of Product Development at Cyanogen Inc., stated about Truecaller and its app,
“Truecaller shares our vision of enabling an open platform that gives users ultimate choice in their core app experiences. The new integrated dialer experience is a seamless, frictionless way for users to screen calls and block unwanted spam without ever leaving the native dialer.”
Newly shipped devices running Cyanogen OS will have Truecaller’s services already integrated. For other, existing devices, an over-the-air update will be released in a few months.
For those who are running Android or do not want to purchase a new Cyanogen OS-based device or wait for the update, you can check out the widget for Truecaller below.
The post Truecaller and Cyanogen announce partnership to bring dial pad replacement app appeared first on AndroidGuys.
Arms control and free speech go to court over 3D-printed guns
Cody Wilson fundamentally altered the way we produce and distribute firearms in 2013 when his company, Defense Distributed (DD), first published the plans for a 3D-printed pistol, dubbed The Liberator, on its website. The State Department didn’t take too kindly to this revelation and sent DD a letter demanding the instructions be removed as they violated a number of US Arms Export control laws. Now, two years later, Defense Distributed and the State Department are going to court over the matter in a lawsuit that potentially holds far-reaching implications for both the First and Second Amendments.
Specifically, DD is suing an agency within the State Department called the Directorate of Defense Trade Controls (DDTC). The DDTC asserts that Defense Distributed’s actions violated the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), which regulate how weapons are sold and exported from the US. The problem is, these laws were designed when guns had to be machined and shipped out of the country in crates, not simply accessed from a home computer and printed. As such, Defense Distributed is arguing that its plans are not weapons but rather “speech” and therefore outside ITAR jurisdiction.
“The internet is available worldwide, so posting something on the internet is deemed an export, and to [the State Department] this justifies imposing a prior restraint on internet speech,” Alan Gura, Defense Distributed’s lead counsel, said in a statement. “That’s a vast, unchecked seizure of power over speech that’s…not authorized by our constitution.”
On the other hand, intellectual property lawyer Ansel Halliburton previously argued in a TechCrunch article that while courts are typically very apprehensive towards “prior restraint” (a legal term for the act of censorship prior to publication), “the ability to download a file, press ‘Print,’ and have gun parts come out could also tip some judges toward calling gun CAD files functional things and allowing the government to regulate them.” However, just look at how futile the regulation of digital contraband has been since the days of Napster. Even if the Feds manage to yank DD’s plans from its site, that data is already in the wilds of the Internet and that’s one Pandora’s Box that will never be shut again.
[Image Credit: Getty/AFP]
Filed under: Internet
Source: Wired
‘SimCity’ creator Will Wright launches social networking app
Will Wright, creator of the incredibly popular SimCity, Sims and the slightly less popular Spore franchises, is back with something new and completely different, a social networking app. The Thred app for iOS is a slideshow builder with options to add stickers, filters, words and even external links to images. The finished “threds” can be shared in-app and to Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr. If you’re in need of additional images, you can search for images in-app to add to your visual story.
To build those stories, the app has a few nice touches to make the process simple. When you’re building your own thred you can either scour your photo roll for images or take the simpler route and use the in-app calendar to select images from a date. From there it’s just a matter of adding a sticker and maybe some text to each photo to help you tell a story. When manipulating your photos, the first couple of image filters are pretty much like every other image filter in every other photo app. But then the filters take a hard left turn onto Cheesy Filter Avenue with effects that attempt to make images resemble comics and sketches. They’re bad and you should do your best to avoid them at all cost.
Besides horrible filters, another weird issue is how difficult it is to add friends. Yes it’s a social app, but even though you can create an account with Facebook login, you have to manually search for friends. It doesn’t auto-populate the add friends section with your Facebook friends that use the app. You can invite friends via email. But who checks their email for app invites? And more importantly, what sort of monster invites friends to an app via email?
Friend-adding weirdness aside, building and sharing a thred is fun because the app doesn’t try to throw too many features at you like fine tuning an image or adjusting the kerning of a font. With a few taps you can share your trip to Hawaii or show everyone how to correctly cook a steak. Adding the ability to add links to images could be the feature that makes the app the darling of social media professionals and photographers. An image with a link is way better than a static image that offers zero calls to action. But mostly, people will probably use it to create comics of their cats.
Filed under: Cellphones, Internet, Software
Source: Thred
‘Matrix’ directors’ Netflix show ‘Sense8’ looks like a crazy head trip
If you’re all out of Daredevil, there’s another geeky show coming to Netflix soon: Sense8, a new sci-fi series from the Wachowskis and Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski. We’ve been excited about the project since it was announced, but now we’ve finally got a clear idea of what it’s about with a new trailer. And boy, does it look crazy. The series centers on eight strangers from all around the world who become mentally and emotionally linked. Basically, it looks as if they’re all able to experience what the others are feeling. And yes, that leads to plenty of drama. The trailer shows off some Matrix-like action, but this being a Wachowski joint, we also expect it to explore plenty of metaphysical questions as well. Netflix is debuting all 12 episodes of the show on June 5, so start clearing out your weekends already.
Filed under: HD
A close look at the new, yet familiar guitar in ‘Guitar Hero Live’
Tim Dunn and Nate Coppard are on a mission to rewire your brain. They’re respectively the senior producer and senior designer behind Guitar Hero Live‘s new six-button guitar, and while neurological change is not their direct goal, it’s a side effect they seem to relish. The new guitar has two rows of three buttons each, stacked on top of each other at the end of the neck — this not only adds an extra button to the series, but it allows for fresh challenges. “It’s not something people will be familiar with,” Dunn says, glancing down at the Guitar Hero Live guitar in his hands. He taps some of the buttons. “It’s a new thing.”
Seated next to Dunn, Coopard adds, “We’ve had a lot of people saying they can feel their brains kind of adjusting and kind of rewiring to the new way of playing it as they play through the songs, and then gradually getting to grips with how the difficulty ramps up as you jump around between the two layers.”
Guitar Hero Live‘s new guitar isn’t licensed and wasn’t inspired by any real-life model; it’s simply the Guitar Hero Live guitar. It’s sleeker than the original designs, black and tan with white trim and a faux-wood neck. There are no “candy-colored buttons” like on previous Guitar Hero controllers. Instead, the far end of the neck has a row of white-edged buttons directly below a row of black-edged buttons, their surfaces blending into the traditional design almost seamlessly.
On the guitar’s body, there’s a long Hero Power button at the base of the strings, serving as an update to the game’s previous “Star Power” bonus-points system, plus a whammy bar and a menu button. That last one is primarily used in Guitar Hero TV, a new mode for the series featuring a stream of playable music videos. A menu button may not be the sexiest aspect of the new guitar, but it’s an important part of the redesign, Coppard says: “I guess you can get the fact of how fundamental it is to the game by the fact that it’s influenced the design of the controller and it has an easy-access button.”
These are some of the changes to the guitar, but the similarities to previous editions are just as important to Dunn and Coppard: The new design needs to feel fresh to veteran players, but still familiar. The space between the buttons and the classic strumming bar is the same, Dunn says. Plus, the spacing between the buttons themselves is the same as in the old controllers. We noted a few other things that felt familiar when we tried out Guitar Hero Live in April, including the weight and shape of the guitar. “We didn’t want to change anything that we weren’t improving,” Dunn says. Basically: If it isn’t broken, don’t fix it.
“We didn’t want players who were experts at the old Guitar Hero games, we didn’t want them to just pick up Guitar Hero Live and just be brilliant at it straight-away,” Dunn adds. “We needed to supply veteran players with a new challenge, so as you step up through the difficulty levels, by layering in both rows of buttons, the complexity really ramps up and can give a real challenge even to people who’ve mastered the old Guitar Hero games.”
We didn’t want players who were experts at the old Guitar Hero games… to just pick up Guitar Hero Live and just be brilliant at it
Another similarity to previous Guitar Hero controllers is the power source — the new guitars run on two AA batteries — and the latency. Meaning, there is no latency, Dunn promises. “Only once did we ever really get a version that we felt had that latency and really wasn’t quite what we were looking for, and that was just a matter of tuning some new components in the guitar. Honestly, I don’t think we’ve ever really had issues where we thought, ‘Well, this is something we need to improve upon.’”
Plus, Coppard and Nate say the new guitar plays the same across Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and Wii U. It’s the same guitar, just a different wireless dongle for each platform. “We want everyone to get the same experience, regardless of the platform they’re playing on,” Coppard says.
Since Guitar Hero Live‘s reveal in April, Dunn says there’s been one surprising reaction from fans: Players wondering if the game is going to be hard enough. “The fact that people picked up on that as a concern, I kind of felt was weird,” Dunn says. They added an extra button, after all, so the game should be harder from the get-go. However, Coppard adds, “There was a small selection of people that didn’t notice there was actually six buttons.”
Overall, the Guitar Hero Live design team has a clear vision for the new game and the new guitar: “We want it to feel authentic,” Dunn says. The backgrounds in Guitar Hero Live are real crowds that react to how well each player performs, as if it’s all a big music festival — and for anyone wondering, players won’t be able to turn these backgrounds off. “To us, it wouldn’t make sense to turn that off any more than it would be to turn off the notes coming down,” Dunn says.
“It is only really when you step up, you plug it in and you start playing along to the music that you really get a groove for what we’ve done and why we’ve done it differently,” he adds. “Hopefully that’s when people really start to understand the extra layer of fun that’s added in with the button layout.”
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