GoPro Awards launched to reward user contributed content

One of the key pieces of GoPro’s marketing throughout the years has been user generated content. The variety of ways that people use GoPros to capture action and the world around them serves not only as inspiration for others to be creative, but it helps entice people to invest in the hardware. To help continue this tradition, GoPro has announced the launch of a new program called GoPro Awards that will start paying out monetary awards for compelling content.

GoPro says they are looking for photos, raw video clips and edited video shot with GoPros that “emotionally engages, amazes or excites.” Content can be extreme or it can be mainstream and GoPro encourage consumer to professionals to submit their materials.

To participate in the program, all users have to do is capture moments with a GoPro and submit them to gopro.com/awards. GoPro will pay $500 for selected photos, $1,000 for raw video and $5,000 for edited video. GoPro will sort submissions into a variety of genres and share them with the world. GoPro founder and CEO Nicholas Woodman says,

“GoPro enables a global movement of self-expression that’s resulting in some of the most compelling user-generated content ever created. The positive impact on our brand and business has been immeasurable. Now we’re excited to start rewarding our customers for their content contributions with GoPro Awards.”

You can check out the GoPro video announcing the program below. If you have a GoPro, be sure to get out there and start capturing some content to submit.

Click here to view the embedded video.

source: GoPro (PR)

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The BBC’s live ‘League of Legends’ Championship coverage starts today

Even the BBC has recognised the enormous popularity of eSports. As promised, the broadcaster is covering the quarterfinals of the League of Legends World Championship, which kicks off today at London’s Wembley Arena. The four-day online coverage is scheduled to start at 5pm BST and while it won’t be aired on terrestrial TV, it still represents another leap forward in eSports’ journey to mainstream legitimacy. The BBC’s live programming will be hosted by Radio 1 DJ Dev Griffin, with casters Leign ‘Deman’ Smith and James ‘Stress’ O’Leary handling the game commentary. Going beyond the type of livestream normally found on YouTube or Twitch, the BBC will be using its own site to offer live and pre-recorded video, text and audio commentary simultaneously. Who knows, if the live show does well, maybe the BBC will consider putting it on BBC Two next time.

Source: BBC

NBC launches SeeSo, a comedy streaming service for $4 a month

We’ve been hearing for a while that NBC was prepping some sort of streaming comedy service — today it finally took the wraps off. The new service is called SeeSo, and it’ll deliver ad-free comedy content to you for just $4 a month. Naturally, NBC will be reaching into its rich library of content, including Saturday Night Live and sitcoms like 30 Rock. But what’s more interesting is that it’ll also be producing original content for SeeSo, including new shows from Dan Harmon, the insane genius behind Community, and the Upright Citizens Brigade. The service will also house some exclusive content, like Monty Python’s Flying Circus and The Kids in the Hall. SeeSo will kick off with a private invite-only beta in December, and it’ll be widely available in January.

[Photo credit: Justin Lubin/NBC/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images]

Source: SeeSo, Peter Kafka

Relive your childhood Transformers obsession with these headphones

In the section of New York Comic Con’s exhibit hall known as “The Block” you’ll find goodies galore for collectors and hobbyists with money to burn, ranging from Gundam model kits to cutesy, big-headed figurines of Mario and Luigi. But, at the Good Smile booth, the company was showcasing a different kind of toy to play with: a pair of headphones that you don’t just adjust to fit your head, but can actually transform like a robot into the right shape. Slideshow-329347

The THP-01 headphones are the first release for Good Smile under its “Toon Workshop” brand, a collaboration between the company and Joseph Hahn of Linkin Park. Good Smile’s toy pedigree is immediately apparent in the build of the THP-01, with styling reminiscent of an anime mech or power armor. However, the plastic construction means the headphones were a lot lighter than they looked. Despite the lack of heft the headphones didn’t feel chinzy, probably due to the metal joints undergirding each component. And though it’s made up of 256 sculpted parts meant to be pulled and pushed around, the pieces of the THP-01 fit together well enough that the transforming nature of the headphones is not immediately apparent.

However, the THP-01 can’t be arranged into any decidedly unheadphone-like shape. It’s really limited to two basic positions: fully open and a compact form for travel. But the process of tugging on pieces and moving them around is certainly a fun and showy activity, especially for anyone who relished playing with Transformers as a kid (or even as an adult). The parts require a bit of strength to get them to move, but the metal bits glide pretty smoothly once loose and at no point did I feel like I was going to accidentally break a part off. It’s a pretty intuitive, satisfying process.

Once I got these things open and on my head, how did they actually work as headphones? Pretty well, actually. There’s a few nice nods to comfort in the design, including plenty of well-ventilated padding and ruler marks printed on the band to make it easier to refind your perfect fit after a transformation. Soundwise it did fine, with songs like The Runaways’s “Cherry Bomb” coming out fairly balanced and clear. However, I did find the volume a bit softer than I like.

The THP-01 headphones are available now from Good Smile for ¥45,000 (about $349). If black isn’t your style, next month will see the debut of Knights of Cydonia-inspired patterns in white and gray. However, that branding will cost you, with the price marked up to ¥55,000 (about $463).

Source: Good Smile, Toon Workshop

Hightail’s new Spaces make it easy to annotate any kind of file

Remember YouSendIt? Late in the last decade, you probably send or received some big files through the service, perhaps of questionable legality. Regardless of how pirates may have used it, the company found success with businesses — but as online storage became more and more of a commodity, the company rebranded as Hightail and started focusing on collaboration around those shared files. Today, the company is officially unveiling its new vision for collaborating on work projects, called Spaces. It’s been available in Beta, but now everyone can give it a shot.

Spaces is meant to be a visual representation of projects you’re working on — rather than a list of folders, each space is represented by large graphics made up from the files contained inside. You can add whatever you want to a space and share it with anyone, and Hightail’s web interface ably handles previews of just about any file type you dump into it, including audio and video files. You can also pull in files from your Dropbox account — Hightail doesn’t really care where things are saved. Once you’ve shared your files, other users can comment on them, and that’s where Hightail’s Spaces start to get interesting.

Dropbox has had file commenting for a long time, but the differentiator for Spaces is that you can drag over any portion of a document or file and “highlight” it, and then attach your comments specifically to that point. It’s kind of a way of footnoting a file and it could make the comments that follow along with it a lot more useful — instead of just leaving a comment referring to the document at large, you can easily refer to specific parts of the file.

This useful commenting extends to video and audio files, as well — you can drop a comment at a specific point in a video or audio file, so the people you’re collaborating with know exactly what part you’re referring to. It’s a smart feature, and it’s not just limited to the desktop; it’ll be available in the Hightail mobile app as well. If you want to give it a shot, Spaces is now available for all Hightail users starting today. You can use the service for free, but you’ll only be able to have two active projects open at a time — a $15 a month subscription will open up unlimited spaces, storage, and file sizes.

Paper is Dropbox’s new vision for how teams can work together

Six months ago, Dropbox quietly announced a collaborative note-taking tool called Notes and launched it in an invite-only beta test. But starting today, the product is being officially branded as Dropbox Paper and the beta test is expanding significantly. You’ll still need an invite, but the company gave us a preview of what’s probably the biggest addition to Dropbox in years. It’s far too early to tell if Paper will be able to keep up with entrenched tools from Google, Microsoft and many others — but there are definitely some interesting features here that make it worth keeping an eye on.

For now, Paper is web-only app that you can access through your Dropbox account, though the company says it’ll have a mobile app ready to go when the product comes out of beta. At first glance, Paper’s UI is reminiscent of the scores of minimalist, lightweight text editing apps that have come out in the past few years, such as IA Writer. But while IA Writer and its ilk are designed for solo composition, Paper is all about working together. As in Google Docs, multiple users can edit a document at the same time. Each will be designated by a colored cursor, and the user’s full name is displayed in the margins, crediting their contributions to the file.

From a text perspective, Paper is quite basic; there’s only one font and three sizes available. You can do your basic bold, italics, underline and strikethrough formatting and format text into a block quote, but that’s about it. Dropbox specifically said that the purpose of Paper was to keep the focus on sharing ideas rather than formatting. In particular, Dropbox made it so that you can use its app to share pretty much anything, regardless of what tools you might be using.

“Work today is really fragmented,” says product manager Matteus Pan. “It happens across multiple content types be it images, code, tables, even tasks.” And that clutter extends to the tools being used. “I might be working on PowerPoint, someone else may be writing code, another in Google Docs — teams have really wanted a single surface to bring all of those ideas into a single place.” At first glance, Paper does a pretty good job of bringing a bunch of different content and tools together.

Project managers can add to-do lists, complete with checkboxes and @ mentions to the member of your team who needs to take care of the associated task. If coding is more your game, you can start typing lines of code right into Paper and it’ll automatically format it appropriately. Beyond text, any file you store in your Dropbox can quickly be added to Paper — if you grab the sharing URL of the file and paste it into Paper, the program automatically formats a preview for you. That way, you can peek at an Excel or Powerpoint file right in line with the rest of your Paper document, or click to see it in full or save to your Dropbox. Google Docs files are even supported here — It’s the first time Dropbox has really integrated with Docs and Drive, itself a competitor to Dropbox’s main business.

Paper can display just about any kind of file you throw at it.

Single photos can be dragged and dropped right into Paper, and you can create some mini-galleries, with two or three smaller images lined up. Everything is draggable, so you can reorder things quickly; you can also left or right align images and type text around them. For extra drama, you can blow an image up to a full-bleed, widescreen photo that takes up the entire browser window. If you need to add some multimedia, just dropping a YouTube link into the document will convert it to the full video player, and you can embed audio files and playlists from Spotify or SoundCloud as well. Naturally, you can comment on everything added to a Paper document,and Dropbox even jumped on the stickers bandwagon — so if a giant skeleton thumbs-up is the only way you can properly express your approval, you’re covered here.

There are a few ways to keep track of the various documents you create in Paper. There’s a quick shortcut to save documents that you want to access easily into a favorites sidebar, and when you create a new document, you’ll be prompted to put it in a folder. Since Paper is primarily a collaboration tool, new folders (and the documents in them) will be shared with your work team by default, though you can also create private ones for documents that you want to keep to yourself. There’s a pretty robust search feature that lets you both peer into the content of your documents or search names to find all the documents that a particular person in your organization shared with you. Lastly, there’s a “following” feed that lets you see chronological activity on documents you own and are shared on.

There’s no doubt that Paper is one of the more fully-realized and useful new products Dropbox has introduced in a while, particularly since Mailbox and Carousel have received few updates over the past year or so. But Paper is also entering a field crowded with big names like Google and Microsoft (and Dropbox has even spent lots of time partnering with Microsoft as of late). When asked what differentiated it from the rest of the field, Pan pointed to Paper’s focus on building documents that let users work and share multiple content types regardless of what’s used to create them.

He cited Paper as a way to collaborate that keeps things from getting overly “messy” in terms of both clean design and organization. The last differentiator is organization and helping teams find their work quicker. “Creation and collaboration are only half the problem,” he said, “the other half is how information is organized and retrieved across an entire company.”

Simply having a good product philosophy doesn’t mean people will adopt it, which is why Dropbox is being slow and deliberate with Paper’s rollout. The team has been gathering feedback from its customers for months and intends to keep doing so as the beta expands. Indeed, Dropbox’s focus on its business customers gives it a large base of people to test the product with and get feedback. And organizations that are already paying for Dropbox may be more likely to give Paper a try, either in beta or when the product is fully finished.

Dropbox’s next big product, or another project that falls by the wayside?

The timing of that launch is still up in the air — right now the focus is on getting Paper from “thousands of users to thousands of businesses and teams,” Pan says. With all that feedback, Paper will likely continue to change before its official release, but the lack of a concrete timeline has to be at least somewhat concerning when you look at what has happened with some other major Dropbox initiatives — the Mailbox for Mac app was introduced with fanfare over a year and a half ago, and it still remains in beta.

But Paper plays a lot more to the company’s strengths than anything it has introduced in a long time. Collaboration, sharing and organization are all things the company has worked hard at with its core product for a long time. In that regard, Paper seems like a natural outgrowth of what it has done so far. Dropbox used to be all about organizing files — but the move to mobile and the increasing power of web apps means that traditional file icons in Windows Explorer or the Mac Finder are less relevant than they used to be. Instead of organizing your company’s data in files stored in your Dropbox, the company just wants you to do it all in Paper instead.

Ultimate Hacking Keyboard splits in half, is fully programmable

If you want to go a step beyond mechanical keyboards, you’ll inevitably end up looking at the wild variety of ergonomic options. Now we have a new challenger: The Ultimate Hacking Keyboard by the Hungarian startup Ultimate Gadget Laboratories. It’s a mechanical keyboard that can be split apart for better ergonomic placement on your desk, and, true to its name, it also lets you completely remap the keys as you see fit. The company even included mouse support within the keyboard (which also lets you mimic touch gestures on smartphones and tablets). The Ultimate Hacking Keyboard is launching today on Crowd Supply with a funding goal of $200,000, and it’ll start at around $200. It’s slated to begin shipping in the second half of 2016. Slideshow-330012

Laszlo Monda, the founder and lead developer of the Ultimate Hacking Keyboard project, says he focused on making the device portable when it’s in one piece. In a brief hands on time with a prototype unit, it didn’t feel as heavy as most mechanical keyboards, and it’s also compact enough to fit into most bags. The actual keys felt pretty great too, with just the amount of feedback you’d expect from a solid mechanical keyboard. Monda notes that the keys will be durable enough to last 50 million presses. You’ll also be able to choose from a variety of different mechanical switch options once the keyboard starts shipping.

The Ultimate Hacking Keyboard feels just as sturdy split apart, as it does when it’s joined together. Its metallic connectors give it a particularly satisfying click when it comes together. Both halves are connected by a standard telephone cord along the top of the keyboard — you can also switch that out with a longer cable if you need any more room.

While I didn’t get to spend any time with the Ultimate Hacking Keyboard’s configuration application, Monda describes it as something that will let you create application-specific key layouts, complete with fully customizable layouts. For the most part, the keyboard is targeted at people who just want to be more productive. It’s not exactly something meant for gamers, since it doesn’t have a dedicated row of function keys (they’re alternate options for the top number keys). That could make it tough to play games that rely heavily on function keys (though it’ll be just fine for most shooters).

https://player.vimeo.com/video/142388086

Source: Ultimate Hacking Keyboard