Fido customers can now roam worry free in the U.S. and other international destinations

Fido has introduced Fido Roam to its Pulse plans, which allows customers to roam in the U.S. and other international destinations without worrying about the cost. For the U.S. it is a flat $5 per day, and other destinations are $10 per day. Previously, when you were roaming you were charged for whatever you used, and things could get really pricey when using your phone outside of Canada.

With this new plan, you know exactly how much the roaming will cost you, and you can stay relaxed knowing you won’t be hit with a huge surprise bill at the end of the month.

Press release:

Fido Pulse Plan Customers Can Now Roam Worry Free

Fido changes the game for customers by adding Fido RoamTM to Fido Pulse plans – $5 / per day in the U.S. and $10 / per day in tons of international destinations

TORONTO (April 29, 2016) Fido Roam is coming soon to Fido Pulse plans so customers can stay connected while travelling without sweating the bill. Launching in mid-May, new and existing Fido Pulse plan customers will be able to use the data, text and talk from their Fido Pulse plan while globetrotting outside of Canada for $5 / day in the U.S. and $10 / day internationally in tons of destinations. So whether they’re planning on sightseeing or soul-searching, Fido keeps its customers connected, hassle free.

“Fido Roam is another great value add for our Fido Pulse plan customers. It’s affordable and easy to use so that our customers can worry less about finding a Wi-Fi connection and focus more on doing the things they love while travelling,” said Nancy Audette, Vice President, Fido. “We heard from our customers that they want to roam worry free, and that’s why we’re offering the ultimate roaming solution.”

With 10.6 million Canadians planning on travelling abroad this year and 91% of travelers saying that they bring their smartphone with them when they travel, affordable roaming options are important to Fido customers. Keeping in touch with friends and family, taking photos/videos and sending emails are the top reasons Canadians bring their smartphones abroad, however, only 16% say that they use their phone like they do in Canada, due to high roaming rates*.

Now, Fido Roam will make it easy for Fido Pulse plan jetsetters to keep their social feeds up to date – they just need to turn roaming on and go. For customers that plan on taking an extended soul-searching trip, Fido will only charge them for a max of 10 days per monthly bill, per zone. This means up to 21 days of Fido Roam with no extra roaming charges in that month. Customers will receive a text message as soon as they connect to a partner network, but will only pay for Fido Roam on days when they use their phone in the U.S. or internationally. Customers will only be charged a maximum of $50 (in the U.S.) and $100 (internationally) for roaming on any given monthly bill.

Fido Pulse plan customers will now be able to hit some of the coolest travel locations across the globe from the U.S. (including Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands) to lots of awesome destinations in Europe, the Caribbean, Mexico, South and Central America, Asia, South Africa, Oceania and the Middle East.

Already offering great value, in-market Fido Pulse plans all include call display, voicemail and unlimited text, picture and video messages from Canada to anywhere in the world, as well as Spotify Premium free for 2 years. Plus, customers can choose between a variety of data buckets – up to 10GB and local or Canada-wide calls. Now with the addition of Fido Roam, there’s another great reason to love Fido Pulse plans.

HTC 10 now available from Bell in Canada

The HTC 10 is now available in Canada. The Taiwanese company’s latest flagship was announced earlier this month for the Canadian market, where we learned Bell would be an exclusive carrier partner until the end of June.

As we reported earlier this week, Bell is selling the HTC 10 for an eye-watering $349.99 on a 2-year contract, and $899.99 outright, which comes in slightly lower than HTC’s own price of $999.99 for the unlocked version (which won’t be available until early next month).

As reported in our preview, the HTC 10 is not without its issues, but it’s one of the best Android devices currently available.

See HTC 10 at Bell

HTC 10

• HTC 10 review
• HTC 10 specs
• These are the HTC 10 colors
• Our first photo and video samples
• Meet the Ice View case
• Join our HTC 10 forums

HTC
Verizon

Sprint will begin selling the HTC 10 on Friday, May 13

Sprint has confirmed it will begin selling the HTC 10 phone starting on Friday, May 13. The phone will be priced at $0 down and $26 a month for 24 months.

Sprint’s press release did not mention any pricing for buying the HTC 10 without a contract or payment plan, but it did state the phone would be on sale both online and in its retail stores on May 13. You can check out our full review of the HTC 10 right now for more details.

Where to buy the HTC in the United States

HTC 10

• HTC 10 review
• HTC 10 specs
• These are the HTC 10 colors
• Our first photo and video samples
• Meet the Ice View case
• Join our HTC 10 forums

HTC
Verizon

HTC offers big savings on the One A9 and One M9 during its Mother’s Day celebration

HTC is celebrating Mother’s Day this year by offering discounts on the HTC One A9 and One M9. For a limited time, you can get an HTC One A9 in the garnet color, either unlocked or for Sprint, for $389 without a contract. That’s a savings of $110.

The company is also offering a discount on an unlocked HTC One M9. You can grab the phone in pink for $399, down $250 from its normal price of $649.

HTC is offering free ground shipping for all orders placed with this offer. You can grab these discounted phones from now until Mother’s Day, May 8.

HTC One A9

• Current OS version: Android 6.0
• Current security: Nov. 2015 (More info)
• HTC One A9 review
• HTC One A9 specs
• HTC One A9 photos
• Join our A9 forums

HTC.com

FCC introduces rules to prevent 5G price hike

The FCC is planning to regulate wholesale internet rates charged by cable companies, a move that could indirectly affect consumer wireless data prices. Such business internet services, called “special access,” dictate what wireless carriers pay to supply data to cellular data networks. They also determine rates paid by business and government for services like ATMs, health networks and more. Tom Wheeler’s commission already regulates special access for phone companies like AT&T, but now it wants control of cable operators’ wholesale pricing, a move that has companies like Comcast up in arms (again).

The FCC became interested in the subject after looking into special access rates charged by telecoms AT&T, Verizon, CenturyLink and Frontier. It decided to force those companies to change certain tariffs within 30 days, finding them “unjust and unreasonable.” However, the commission has no power over the special access rates charged by cable companies, which only entered that market recently. After concluding its investigation, it elected to include them in the regulation fun for the first time.

The National Cable & Telecommunications Association (NCTA) and cablers like Comcast are (trying) to have none of this. Their main argument is that they just entered the wholesale market, and the FCC traditionally doesn’t regulate prices for newcomers. “In this upside-down new regime, a competitive cable provider that currently holds a 10 percent share in a market would be treated the same as a dominant incumbent provider serving 90 percent of that market,” says Comcast Senior VP David Cohen.

FCC Commissioner Tom Wheeler (Bloomberg via Getty Images)

The FCC, however, wants to ensure that prices don’t spiral out of control in non-competitive markets. In a statement, it said that “competition in this essential market is uneven … [which could] stifle the ability of business customers to innovate and compete.” It pointed out that excessive wholesale prices could have an especially negative effect on future 5G cellular networks, which will eat up a lot more data than LTE. The decision to regulate cable companies’ business data prices was unsurprisingly endorsed by telecoms like Verizon and Sprint, too.

The decision (proceeding 05-25) was, unsurprisingly, passed by a narrow vote, with the Republican commissioners protesting it robustly. The FCC doesn’t plan to regulate all special access markets, however. Rather, it’s coming up with a way to test regional markets, and both cable and telecom operators considered to be in non-competitive areas would see stricter regulations. It will take several months to determine the final rules, and the commission is now taking public comments.

Japan’s most powerful X-ray satellite is dead

JAXA has given up trying to rescue its doomed X-ray satellite. The Japanese space agency has announced that it’s discontinuing Hitomi’s operations. Previously known as Astro-H, the x-ray observatory was designed to study black holes, galaxy clusters and other high-energy phenomena. Unfortunately, it started tumbling and spinning through space shortly after launch, ultimately losing contact with its ground team. JAXA thought the $300 million spacecraft tried to re-establish contact, but in its announcement today, the agency revealed that the signals it received were from another source altogether.

According to Nature, Hitomi might have perished due to a basic engineering error that started a sequence of unfortunate events. Apparently, one of the systems designed to keep it facing the right direction went on the fritz when Hitomi passed the South Atlantic Anomaly. That’s a region over South America that exposes satellites to extra doses of radiation. After that particular system stopped working, the observatory started relying on a set of gyroscopes to face the right direction. The bad news was the gyroscopes weren’t working properly, as well, so the space observatory spun out of control. Hitomi fired a thruster in an effort to right itself, but it fired in the wrong direction, causing the spacecraft to spin even faster.

In the end, Hitomi broke apart and lost its solar array paddles that were supposed to harness energy for a decade of data-gathering in space. Without those paddles, JAXA cannot restore the observatory’s functions. The agency’s biggest lost, however, was the satellite’s impressively accurate X-ray calorimeter, which took three decades and three iterations to perfect. It would take $50 million and three to five years to rebuild it for another mission.

Despite Hitomi’s untimely death, it was able to measure the speed of gas emitted by the Perseus galaxy cluster. That can’t make up for JAXA’s loss, but at least the satellite was still able to contribute to our quest to better understand the universe.

Part of JAXA’s statement reads:

“JAXA expresses the deepest regret for the fact that we had to discontinue the operations of ASTRO-H and extends our most sincere apologies to everyone who has supported ASTRO-H believing in the excellent results ASTRO-H would bring, to all overseas and domestic partners including NASA, and to all foreign and Japanese astrophysicists who were planning to use the observational results from ASTRO-H for their studies.”

Via: PopSci

Source: Nature, JAXA

YouTube is changing Content ID to be kinder to video creators

YouTube’s Content ID was meant to make things easier for rightsholders who wanted to ensure that their work wasn’t stolen and reuploaded. However, it never really worked out like that. The reality is that users, whether they are prominent or not, have repeatedly had their earnings frozen after publishers began issuing monetization requests for using small video clips that are legally covered under fair use. Now, Google has decided it wants to “help fix that frustrating experience,” by developing a new solution that will allow channel owners to continue earning from their creations while they fight a potential dispute.

According to David Rosenstein, Content ID Group Product Manager at YouTube, the Content ID update will recognize when a video creator and a rightsholder want to monetize a video and then siphon any money made from video views into a separate purse. YouTube can determine whether a publisher’s claim is valid and pay that money to the deserving party.

As game critic Jim Sterling recently pointed out, games publishers have been trying to make some extra money by flagging channels that use small clips of in-game footage. However, he found that if he invoked more than one claim from different companies, their requests would cancel each other out. Fair use allows creators to include copyrighted work if it’s used for education, criticism or analysis, but Content ID, before today’s announcement, would immediately award any of the revenue generated to the claimant.

Google intends to deploy the new system “in the coming months,” meaning YouTubers will have to continue tiptoeing around the Content ID algorithms for a little while longer.

Via: The Verge

Source: YouTube Creator Blog

Gfinity’s eSports broadcasts now offer multiple perspectives

While Gfinity is known for its eSports stadium in London, the company is also committed to building an audience online. In addition to streaming on Twitch, the company has now launched a new GTV player in open beta. With this, you can have multiple feeds open and change each window depending on what’s important to you. During a Counter-Strike tournament, for instance, I could switch between the “main stream” shown on Twitch, dedicated feeds for each team, and a few player facecams. In addition, I could change the audio between full broadcast style commentary and strictly in-game music and sound effects.

For the viewer, it’s a more flexible and customisable experience than Twitch and YouTube. If you’re a fan of a particular team, or want to gather tips on how they play, you can have a dedicated player feed as your main window. Or, to make it feel more like an “event,” you might want to switch in a couple of facecams during a knock-out Street Fighter competition like Evo. Gfinity also offers an integrated chat window on the right-hand side, meaning you can comment on the game (or hand out some friendly smack-talk) with some like-minded fans without leaving the action.

Gfinity is gambling at the moment. The company lost £3.6 million (roughly $5.3 million) during its first full year of operations, however its revenues also climbed to £560,828 ($820,587). It’s burning through cash in the hope that it can grow to a size where it’s profitable. That will need to come through physical and digital ticket sales, as well as its partnerships with advertisers, sponsors and league organisers. The arena in Fulham Broadway shows promise, and its ESPN-style commentary is getting better. Along with its new Tournament Builder app for the Xbox One, the company is slowly establishing itself as a premier eSports provider.

Via: MCV

Source: Gfinity

Atari founder Nolan Bushnell is making mobile games

Atari founder Nolan Bushnell has teamed up with a small Amsterdam studio to develop and publish new mobile games. Bushnell created the iconic Atari brand in 1972, and oversaw the release of classic systems such as the Atari 2600. He was ousted from the company six years later and ran a bunch of other businesses before returning to Atari’s board of directors in 2010. Spil Games, meanwhile, is a relatively unknown name that specializes in mobile and browser-based titles. Bushnell has signed on to develop three games with the studio, with the first scheduled for release in early 2017. We’ll soon see if he still has some of that old Atari magic.

Source: Gamasutra

ICYMI: 3D-printed instrument, Humanoid diver and more

Today on In Case You Missed It: Free 3D plans to create your own plastic violin should make the instrument a bit easier to take up; Stanford roboticists created a remotely-operated humanoid diver that can be haptically controlled from afar by its pilots, meaning they can feel what the diver does. And a table tennis projector can coach you on improving your lousy game, so nothing like this ever happens to you.

Sick of those updates popping up during important moments? It can’t be as bad as being live on-air. As always, please share any great tech or science videos you find by using the #ICYMI hashtag on Twitter for @mskerryd.