Google’s new Accelerated Mobile Pages initiative aims to make the mobile web much faster
Google is well aware that browsing through the mobile web can be quite the hassle, especially when your favorite websites don’t load as fast as you’d like them to. This is why Google today announced a new initiative called Accelerated Mobile Pages, which aims to drastically improve the performance of the mobile web. If all goes well with the project, Google says webpages will be able to load rich content like video, animations and graphics alongside smart advertisements without a hitch.
And in a perfect world, the same code will be able to work across multiple platforms and devices so content will be able to appear everywhere in an instant. The project relies on AMP HTML, which is a new open framework built out of existing web technologies. This new framework will allow websites to build light-weight webpages.
Part of what makes this new project so big is all of the partners that are already on-board, including Twitter, Pinterest, WordPress, Chartbeat, Parse.ly, Adobe Analytics and LinkedIn, as well as about 20 others. These partners are already planning to integrate AMP HTML pages into their websites. Google says that it will work with these partners to bring more features and functionality to the project in a few key areas. Currently, those areas include:
- Content: Publishers increasingly rely on rich content like image carousels, maps, social plug-ins, data visualizations, and videos to make their stories more interactive and stand out. They also need to implement ads and analytics in order to monetize the content and to understand what their readers like and dislike. The Accelerated Mobile Pages Project provides an open source approach, allowing publishers to focus on producing great content, while relying on the shared components for high performance and great user experience. The initial technical specification—developed with input and code from our partners in the publishing and technology sectors—is being released today on GitHub.
- Distribution: Publishers want people to enjoy the great journalism they create anywhere and everywhere, so stories or content produced in Spain can be served in an instant across the globe in, say, Chile. That means distribution across all kinds of devices and platforms is crucial. So, as part of this effort, we’ve designed a new approach to caching that allows the publisher to continue to host their content while allowing for efficient distribution through Google’s high performance global cache. We intend to open our cache servers to be used by anyone free of charge.
- Advertising: Ads help fund free services and content on the web. With Accelerated Mobile Pages, we want to support a comprehensive range of ad formats, ad networks and technologies. Any sites using AMP HTML will retain their choice of ad networks, as well as any formats that don’t detract from the user experience. It’s also a core goal of the project to support subscriptions and paywalls. We’ll work with publishers and those in the industry to help define the parameters of an ad experience that still provides the speed we’re striving for with AMP.
Google hopes that the open nature of the project will help protect the free flow of information by ensuring the mobile web will work faster for everyone, no matter which platform or device they’re using. For more information on this big initiative, head to the Accelerated Mobile Pages Project website.
These 8K displays may end up on your next tablet
Most of us have barely touched 4K content, but the keen folks in Japan are already showing off some 8K displays, and we’re not just talking about those of conventional TV sizes. At CEATEC, NHK brought along three upcoming 8K panels that may end up on future tablets, laptops and monitors. These include JDI’s 17.3-inch LCD that was just announced last week, as well as Ortus’ insanely sharp 9.6-inch LCD (that’s a whopping 915 dpi!) from May, and Sharp/SEL’s 13.3-inch OLED display. Even though the OLED panel was unveiled back in June last year, it’s still by far the best 8K display out of the three; it’s as if you’re looking into another world, thanks to the combination of high contrast, strong vibrancy plus insanely sharp resolution. Alas, there’s no launch date for any of these just yet, but a spokesperson from NHK hopes to see these come out before the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games, which will be broadcast in 8K.
Google wants to make mobile web browsing faster
Let’s face it: a lot of those beautifully-designed websites, feature articles and media don’t translate well for those browsing on a mobile device. To improve the speed and efficiency of the mobile web, Google has announced the Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) Project. Through the initiative, Mountain View is looking to leverage existing HTML tech to help publishers build “light-weight” sites that load faster, even if they contain video, animations, slideshows and other items that typically require significant bandwidth. “We also want the same code to work across multiple platforms and devices so that content can appear everywhere in an instant,” a blog post announcing AMP explains. Google has already used AMP’s HTML open framework for Search and its other apps/services (like News) could see the tech as well. The company already has around 30 publishers on board, including Twitter, Pinterest, WordPress and LinkedIn. Of course, Google isn’t the only one improving mobile browsing as Facebook varies how your News Feed loads based on your connection.
Source: Official Google Blog
The first Freeview Play set-top box is now on sale
Freeview Play, the new service that marries live and catch-up TV in the same programming guide, launched earlier this month. Not that many people have been able to give it a whirl, since it’s only been accessible on Panasonic’s 2015 range of Viera TVs via a software update. You’ll see plenty of new goggleboxes supporting Freeview Play as standard in the near future, but today Humax has released the first set-top box that adds Play functionality to whatever currently takes pride of place in your living room. The WiFi-enabled Humax FVP-4000T boasts a compact design and “leather-look top,” available in “mocha” or “cappuccino” colour schemes and two storage configurations. The 500GB version, which should afford enough space for around 300 hours of recorded TV, is priced at £200, while the 1TB model is only a little more expensive at £230. You’ll find them on sale now through Humax’s online store, as well as at retailers including Argos, Tesco, Maplin, Currys/PC World and John Lewis.Slideshow-326682
Whenever you next decide to upgrade your TV, definitely keep an eye out for baked-in Freeview Play functionality. But, we’re not quite sure who Humax’s new set-top box is supposed to appeal to. After all, the feature that defines Freeview Play is the ability to scroll back through the past seven days of programming in the EPG, and launch seamlessly into catch-up services when you find something you’d like to replay. YouView set-top boxes have had this exact same functionality for some time, and you can pick up a BT-branded 500GB model (no subscription required) for as little as £140. YouView boxes also offer a greater selection of on-demand and streaming services, including Netflix, which won’t be available on the Freeview platform until early next year.
Source: Humax
The Google XPrize moonshot is a step closer to reality
An Israeli team competing in the Google Lunar XPrize has secured a launch contract to send its rover to the Moon. Xprize is offering $20 million to the first team to land a rover on the moon, travel 500 meters, and transmit HD video and images back to earth. SpaceIL, the Israeli team in question, has signed with Spaceflight Industries, a company which specializes in space “rideshares.” The deal means that SpaceIL’s rover will likely be hitching a lift aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket alongside commercial satellites — and possibly even other XPrize contestants — in 2017.
SpaceIL’s launch contract is by no means the end of the game for other competitors. In fact, it actually aids other teams aiming for the same prize. The deadline date for a single team to sign launch contracts was December 2015, but with that milestone reached, the others now have until December 2016 to secure the same agreement. One team, Moon Express, says it’s already signed an agreement, but XPrize explained to Engadget that it hasn’t seen any paperwork to verify that claim.
As part of the terms of the competition, teams must be able to prove that at least 90 percent of the mission costs were covered by non-public sources. This stipulation means that, should one of the teams be successful in its endeavor, it will be the first privately-funded lunar mission. Previously, only the US, Soviet Union, and China have successfully landed objects on the moon. Others, including the European Space Agency, Japan and India, have intentionally or unintentionally crashed probes and satellites onto its surface.
All teams will need to reach the moon and complete the exploratory tasks by the end of 2017 to have a hope of gaining a prize. The largest sum by far goes to first place, but the second team to complete the challenge will be given a considerable $5 million purse.
Have your say on the FCC’s plan to lock down WiFi routers
You may know that you can replace your WiFi router’s software with an open source version like DD-WRT or Tomato to make it more secure or powerful. However, the US wireless regulator (FCC) only seems to have figured that out recently, and is not happy with your ability to boost the signal power on such devices. As such, it proposed changes to regulations, with one document suggesting it may ban or restrict third-party software altogether. That caught the eye of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which created an online petition asking the FCC to make changes.
The EFF petition says that “router manufacturers are notoriously slow about updating their software — even with critical security fixes on the way. Under the FCC’s proposal, you could have no alternative to running out-of-date and vulnerable firmware.” It’s referring, in part, to an FCC demand that manufacturer’s “describe in detail how the device is protected from ‘flashing’ and the installation of third-party firmware such as DD-WRT.”
The FCC is proposing rules that could wipe out free software on wireless devices. https://t.co/Darkq5rUyQ pic.twitter.com/BggiK4YF5Y
— EFF (@EFF) October 6, 2015
For its part, the FCC gave a statement to Ars Technica that “versions of this (open-source) software can be used as long as they do not add the functionality to modify the underlying operating characteristics of the RF [radio frequency] parameters.” In addition, it told TechDirt that it clamped down in the first place because “we had problems with illegally modified equipment interfering with terrestrial doppler weather radar at airports. Naturally, the FAA freaked out, and the FCC responded to this actual real-world problem.”
Many folks are concerned that the overly broad wording will force manufacturers to just lock out DD-WRT and other open-source programs and be done with it. Others believe that with recent net-neutrality decisions, the FCC is on a pro-consumer tear and won’t take any draconian actions. If you’ve got concerns, why not express them on the EFF’s petition, where they’ll be “viewable online one day after being submitted to the FCC public docket?” “This is, of course, why the FCC does notices of proposed rulemaking and seeks comment from the parties and affected stakeholders,” as the FCC itself put it.
Via: EFF (Twitter)
Dear Veronica: Breaching the ‘Great Firewall’ of China
Happy Wednesday once again! This week, we kick things off with a great question from Daryl, who wants to stay in touch with his wife who will be staying in China for the next few months. Fortunately, my own spouse (who you may recognize from the Engadget of yore) has done tons of research into this very subject from our own trip to China!
I also cover questions on how to get into the gadget reviewing world, and the benefits of audiobooks! In fact, we have a poll this week for you on that subject below: if you think the experience is better listening to a story, select the megaphone-looking emoji. If you think reading words is the one true way to get thoughts into your brain, select the book! If you hate both, choose the ghost emoji because you can’t be for real.
Keep those questions coming for future episodes by emailing me or sending me a tweet with #DearVeronica in it! See you next time!
Dyson’s latest bladeless fan keeps the air pure and your toes warm
When Dyson isn’t turning its R&D-heavy hand to new interests, it likes to go about improving upon existing products. Case in point: the new “Pure Hot + Cool,” which combines Dyson’s bladeless fan, heater and air purification technologies into the one device. Like Dyson’s “Pure Cool” bladeless fan, this shorter model can filter even the tiniest of particles (as small as 0.1 microns), including bacteria, mould and pollen, with a 99.95 percent success rate. Furthermore, the glass HEPA filter hidden in the base of the tower should last over a year, even with daily use. Apart from the size of the thing, the new product only differs in that it can also heat up a room, and not just keep it cool using Dyson’s fancy “Air Multiplier” tech.Slideshow-326505
Like Dyson’s other products in this category, the Pure Hot + Cool has various fan spread and oscillation modes, as well as a sleep timer. All of these can be set using the included remote, which clings to the top of the device when it isn’t needed using the magic of magnetism. The Pure Hot + Cool is yet another premium Dyson product, and it comes with a price tag to match. Both the white/silver and more adventurous iron/blue models are now available in Japan for ¥74,304, the equivalent of roughly $620. Come early November, the device will also launch in China — another Asian market where air quality awareness is high — before making it to the rest of the world sometime next year.
Source: Dyson
Barclays won’t enable Apple Pay support until early 2016
When Apple Pay launched in the UK back in July, Barclays was a notable absentee. It didn’t take long for the bank to change course, however, as took only a couple of hours for it to confirm that it would enable support for the NFC payment technology in the future. In the months that have passed, the bank hasn’t offered any clues as to when it will launch — until today. Disgruntled customer Mike Jobson took it upon himself to email the CEO of Barclays Retail Banking, Ashok Vaswani, to ask how long the wait might be. Vaswani swiftly replied, confirming that the bank would enable Apple Pay functionality “very early in the New Year.”
“We have signed up for ApplePay and will launch it very early in the New Year,” said Vaswani. “We truly value your custom and hope that you continue to bank with us particularly since we are launching this shortly.” The CEO’s definition of “shortly” might not gel with the hundreds of unhappy customers who have taken to Twitter to voice their displeasure at the company’s lack of movement over Apple’s payment platform. We’ve contacted Barclays numerous times, via both phone and email, and have received the same stock response: “We are really excited about the launch of Apple Pay and will bring Barclays debit cards and Barclaycard credit cards to Apple Pay in future.”
Other customers have voted with their wallets by cancelling their accounts and moving to banks that already back Apple Pay. With what looks like another three month wait, there could be an even bigger exodus, especially while the company rolls out NFC payments on rival platforms.
Via: Macrumors
Source: Mike Jobson
Everything Twitch does is for its community
Twitch would be nothing without its broadcasters and viewers, and the livestreaming service is fiercely protective of both. So much so that to prevent its first-ever TwitchCon conference from transforming into a promotional event for exhibitors, rather than a meet-up for its community, the company was willing to turn down exhibitor support. The goal, as Matt DiPietro, Twitch’s VP of marketing, explained it, was to keep the show laser focused on community so it doesn’t turn into something like Penny Arcade Expo (PAX) and the Game Developers Conference (GDC) have: huge but at the expense of their initial focus. “What TwitchCon has to be about is the broadcasters and their fans,” he said in an interview from the show. “Everything we do, we think about the broadcasters first because that’s what brings the fans and creates the content.”
To see just how far that ethos goes, I chatted with DiPietro about how and why Twitch introduces new features, where he sees the convention going next year and how the company plans to keep the conference’s relaxed vibe while expanding its footprint.
Every broadcaster I’ve talked to says that they work a ton because they feel they have to, otherwise they lose subscribers. They’re working sometimes seven days and over a hundred hours per week. Have you guys thought about that?
Burnout? Sure. I think, for the most part, the successful broadcasters find a natural equilibrium with their life. They really are pioneers in creating a career that didn’t exist before, and they’re figuring out how to do it.
For the very Twitch-specific class of partner who does Twitch full time, and sometimes that’s four, six, eight hours of broadcasting a day, the interesting thing is soon you’re going to have features like playlists and VOD uploads. So hopefully, you’ll have an arsenal and quiver of tools for making content that will allow you to have a weekend. Because it’s absolutely true and we hear it from partners all the time; particularly when we started doing events like PAX and E3 where we would start bringing our partners out to the event. They were like, “I love you guys and I really want to do that stuff, but if I take two days off, I might lose X percentage of subscribers.”
We heard that loud and clear and that’s actually why we’re building those kinds of tools: to give you more options for creating different kinds of content however you want to.
TwitchCon feels kind of self-serving — much like “Here’s how to become a better Twitch streamer.” Which is fine. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with it. It’s just that TwitchCon feels like an investment in Twitch.
It’s an investment in the Twitch community, absolutely. We started talking about doing an event two years ago … a year and a half ago and, at first, the parameters were very hazy. We didn’t know quite what it would look like. What are we gonna do? When we started asking these questions very seriously, Emmett Shear, our CEO — his very clear directive from the very beginning was: “As cool as they are, I don’t want another E3, [or] another PAX.” This isn’t about PlayStation or Xbox, Blizzard or whatever.
I’m used to the madness of E3. This feels so totally different. It’s relaxed, low pressure, casual.
That’s what we wanted: a comfortable place that’s native to the community experience. The content we’re doing here is community content. We didn’t do any of it ourselves because we don’t do content. One of our larger variety broadcasts is Dropped Frames with some of our top partners. We just gave them the main stage. Do it here, do it live. Bring the fans in. And that was wildly successful. If there’s a way to see a cross section, that’s the spirit of what we try to do: Bring Twitch here.
You’d hope TwitchCon is going to grow. At what point do you push back? Let’s say Microsoft and Sony come to you and say they want you to announce new products and turn it into a trade show. PAX started as a community thing; now it’s becoming a promo event. GDC too, whereas before it was all about education. Are you going to take a heavy hand in curating the experience so that doesn’t happen?
Yes. No doubt. There’s essentially three pillars to the community: [The] broadcaster is number one. Everything we do, we think about the broadcasters first because that’s what brings the fans and creates the content; the experts that have the most passion for the games. Fans, number two. And of course, there is [the] developers and publishers, hardware and platforms. That is a very good question: how we work with the industry going forward because of course they all understand keenly now in a way that they didn’t before how influential Twitch broadcasters are.
Blizzard announced some new content on the main stage. We have a couple of games being released [here]. And that’s all fine and good and wonderful. We want that kind of thing. But the spirit should always be: If you’re coming to TwitchCon as a game developer — indie, AAA or otherwise — what are you doing for the community? How are you adding value to the community? If you don’t understand that dynamic, not only do we really not want you here, but you’re not going to get a lot of value out of being here either if you’re not engaging with the community in a native/organic way. It’s not for you.
Throughout the weekend, Twitch hosted educational panels for broadcasters.
What does TwitchCon look like next year then?
I think it’s going to look a lot like this year. It’s going to be bigger, better, more people. Probably a more defined track for developers and publishers. You can think of the attendees at this conference, 2015, as early adopters. We didn’t know what the content was, really, until a month ago. Two months ago. Most of the folks that came here came on a prayer and a blind leap of faith that “I know that Twitch is going to do something cool and I want to be there year one.” Year two, I’m expecting the 15,000 people [official counts are over 20,000] here this weekend are going to tell all their friends and say, “You gotta be there; it was awesome. Twitch did it right and did it right by the community. You’ve gotta be there next year.”
This interview has been condensed and edited
[Image credits: Twitch (Top image)]
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