‘Pokemon Go’ launches in Japan under golden arches
Despite being the true home of Pocket Monsters, until today, Japanese fans weren’t able to download the smartphone phenomenon that is Pokemon Go. As rumored, Niantic Labs’ game launches in Pikachu’s homeland with a promotional tie-in with McDonald’s (it’s already offering Pokemon toys with its kids’ meals in anticipation) and the app maker says more sponsored locales and events are on their way.
Ingress, the location-based game that preceded Pokemon Go, ran multiple promotions with companies including McDonald’s and SoftBank in Japan — as well as Jamba Juice in the US. Expect see plenty more sponsored locations in Pokemon Go (well, gotta make some money when the app is free to download), but what exactly do the sponsored locations entail? The good news is that the tie-in doesn’t seem to change much at all — and could even be good news for some players.
It is, however, a substantial sponsorship. Typically, Pokestops (where you pick up items) and Gyms (where you battle other trainers) are centered around cultural points of interest — or just interesting things. The deal struck with McDonalds adds stops and gyms to the locations of almost all of its 3,600 restaurants. My local burger hole is a mere Pokestop, although according to Twitter, there are plenty of gyms to be found in the chain, too.
In a leaked email which resulted in a further delayed launch almost a month after Europe and the US, the company pointed out concerns over poor connectivity in McDonald’s restaurants, as well as people lingering without making any purchases. However, the ubiquitous chain claims that there will be places for users to develop and catch more Pokemon. Not everyone lives in a major city filled with landmarks and cultural curiosities, but there’s pretty much a McDonalds in every town in Japan.
Like Nintendo, McDonald’s has already seen its stock price buoyed following rumors of the collaboration, but whether people will actually choose to enter, pay for something, then capture or battle Pokemon remains to be seen. I stood outside to grab my Pokemon items — after all, there’s no faster way to undo all those calories burnt walking around on the hunt for a Psyduck than paying a visit to a fast-food establishment.
Pokémon Go Launches in Japan, Apple on Course for $3 Billion Profit
Pokémon Go finally launched in Japan this morning after the game’s release was delayed following an email leak about the developer’s sponsored retail partnerships.
Social media excitement reached a peak on Niantic’s announcement that it was “finally broadcasting” in the game’s birthplace, over two weeks after it was released in the U.S., Australia and New Zealand. Pokémon Go is now available in over 30 countries.
The McDonalds sponsorship deal leaked earlier this week is expected to usher in a flurry of business at fast food restaurants around the country as players queue up to capture monsters and train characters at official “gyms”.
Wary of the game’s popularity, McDonalds has warned players “not to become a bother to customers who are eating”, while Japanese authorities have issued safety guidelines in cartoon form for young Pokémon Go players.
The country’s National Centre of Incident Readiness and Strategy for Cybersecurity called on users to bring spare batteries with their smartphones to prepare for emergency communications and to refrain from using their phones while walking.
In the U.S., Pokémon Go had 21 million active users less than two weeks after the game was launched. According to brokerage Needham & Co, Apple is set to make $3 billion in revenue from the game’s in-app purchases in the next one or two years.
Pokémon Go’s ratio of paid users to total users is said to be 10 times that of Candy Crush, which generated over $1 billion of revenue in both 2013 and 2014. Apple’s shares have gained 5 percent market value – about $25 billion – since the launch of Pokémon Go on July 6.
Tag: Pokémon GO
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Amazon’s Moto G4 with lock screen ads has a locked bootloader
Amazon is selling a variant of the Moto G4 exclusively for Prime members for $149, a discount of $50 on the phone’s retail price. The caveat is that the phone comes loaded with lock screen ads delivered by Amazon, and according to a Motorola support document, a locked bootloader.
From Motorola:
Bootloader unlock codes are not available from Moto or Amazon for the Prime Exclusive Moto G (4th Gen.) devices.
The relevant thread on Reddit suggests that this a recent change, with a few customers able to receive their unlock codes for the Amazon edition during the first week of the phone’s launch. There are ways to disable the lock screen ads, but in doing so, you run the risk of losing out on updates.
What do you guys think? Does the $50 discount justify ads on the lock screen?
See at Amazon
Netflix previews ‘Luke Cage’ and more Marvel at Comic-Con
The San Diego Comic-Con is underway, and Netflix kicked things off with a few announcements about its various Marvel superhero series. Luke Cage is due September 30th, and its teaser trailer brings about a minute and a half of Mike Colter fighting bad guys in hallways. The Iron Fist series’ release date is still TBA, but its trailer showed off a hint of what’s to come there as well. Last but not least the preview for The Defenders leaves much more to the imagination but lets us know that as originally promised, Cage, Jessica Jones, Daredevil and Iron Fist will team up to take on bad guys in 2017. Speaking of Daredevil, Netflix also confirmed that the Hell’s Kitchen hero will get a third season which is “coming soon” — check out all the videos below.
Next stop: Hell’s Kitchen. Daredevil Season 3 is coming soon. #Daredevilhttps://t.co/tkWwJNBLJy
— Daredevil (@Daredevil) July 22, 2016
Twitch Creative streamers to raise funds for kids in need
From July 21st to July 31st, you might come across some Twitch streams raising funds for non-profit org Save the Children. Twitch Creative, the streaming website’s portal for artists, has invited broadcasters to take part in its #CreateForKids charity drive for children in need. Interested artists are encouraged to sign up for a campaign page where their viewers can donate, as well set up digital rewards for donors. They can also auction off one of their original pieces to raise additional funds for the drive.
While gaming is still bigger on Twitch, its broadcasts generally reach a wide audience and have the potential to raise big money for good causes. In 2015, streamers collected a total of $17.4 million for charity. All the money raised by the #CreateForKids drive will go towards promoting children’s rights, teaching kids to read and write and providing aid for kids not just in the US, but also in developing countries.
Source: Twitch
Verizon will disconnect its heaviest ‘unlimited’ data users
There’s a limit to “unlimited,” it turns out. Verizon Wireless customers who still have unlimited data plans and who regularly go over 100GB per month will be forced to switch to limited data plans or get kicked off the network on August 31st, Ars Technica reports. Any Verizon customers who rely on their phones to stream entire seasons of Game of Thrones, or are trying to download the entire Library of Congress to their devices, will soon be getting notifications from Verizon that they’ve been flagged as an “extraordinary” data user.
As Verizon explained in a statement, those users truly are extraordinary: “These users are using data amounts well in excess of our largest plan size (100GB). While the Verizon Plan at 100GB is designed to be shared across multiple users, each line receiving notification to move to the new Verizon Plan is using well in excess of that on a single device.”
Verizon stopped offering the unlimited plans in 2011, but there are still a few people grandfathered in to old plans who haven’t made the switch. Any of these “extraordinary” users who don’t voluntarily change plans will find their line dead on September first, but will have 50 days to reactivate their accounts. In the past, Verizon has come under fire from the FCC for throttling its “unlimited” data plans, but in this case about 99 percent of Verizon’s Wireless customers have already agreed to data caps, so it’s unlikely there will be much resistance to Big Red this time.
*Verizon has acquired AOL, Engadget’s parent company. However, Engadget maintains full editorial control, and Verizon will have to pry it from our cold, dead hands.
Apple Creates Country Specific Apple Watch Bands for the Olympics
Apple has created 14 country specific Apple Watch woven nylon bands for the 2016 Olympics. The bands, which were first spotted by GQ, are designed to reflect the national flags of 14 of the major competitors at the games.
The countries included are the U.S., Great Britain, the Netherlands, South Africa, New Zealand, Mexico, Japan, Jamaica, Canada, China, Brazil, Australia, Germany, and France. The bands are only available at the VillageMall Apple Store in Barra da Tijuca, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The bands are $49 each.
One of the first Olympic athletes to acquire one of the bands is Team USA sprinter Trayvon Bromell, who posted a picture of his band on Twitter.
Apple has created special bands in the past, most recently debuting rainbow woven nylon bands for the Pride festival in late June.
Related Roundups: Apple Watch, watchOS 2, watchOS 3
Tag: Olympics
Buyer’s Guide: Apple Watch (Caution)
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How to rollback the MacOS Sierra beta to OS X El Capitan – CNET
Matt Elliott/CNET
If you installed the public beta of MacOS Sierra to give it a spin but have now satisfied your curiosity, you can return to OS X El Capitan while you await Sierra’s final release this fall.
If you followed my earlier advice to install the Sierra beta on a partition, then it’s easy to erase and remove that partition. And if you took the bold step to install the Sierra beta right over El Capitan, then you’ll need to roll back the clock and use a Time Machine backup that predates your installation of the Sierra beta. Hopefully, you followed my advice to create a Time Machine backup before installing the Sierra beta.
Erase and remove partition
Before you remove Sierra, make sure you move any files you may need from that partition to an external drive or a cloud service, including iCloud Drive. (I had a few files I wanted to save from my Sierra partition and simply opened Finder and dragged them to the iCloud Drive folder.)
To erase the partition on which you installed Sierra, you first need to restart your Mac and while it’s restarting, hold down the Option key so you can choose which partition to start. Choose the partition with El Capitan.
- After El Capitan boots up, open Disk Utility
- On the left panel, select the partition you created for the Sierra beta
- Click the Erase button at the top of Disk Utility
- When the confirmation window pops up, click Erase to confirm your intentions.
Screenshot by Matt Elliott/CNET
With the data erased from your partition, you still need to delete the now-empty partition in order to reallocate its space to the rest of your hard drive.
- Select the top-most drive from the left panel
- Click the Partition button at the top
- On the pie graph on the left, click the wedge that represents the partition you just erased.
- Click the “-” button and then click Apply.
Screenshot by Matt Elliott/CNET
After a minute or so, Disk Utility will finish applying changes to your drive and deem the operation successful. Click Done to complete your work here.
Time Machine backup
If you installed the MacOS Sierra beta over El Capitan, it’s time to dig out your Time Machine drive and get to work.
- Connect the external drive you use for Time Machine backups.
- Restart your Mac and hold down Command-R as it boots up to enter recovery mode.
- From the Utilities window, select Restore From Time Machine Backup.
- Select the most recent OS X 10.11 backup and click Continue.
- Select the destination for your backup, which is usually Macintosh HD unless you renamed it.
Time Machine will restore your Mac to this point and you’ll again be running OS X El Capitan.
While you await Sierra’s final release this fall, you can get Sierra’s beautiful wallpaper on your desktop.
Redbox is getting back into streaming and downloads
Redbox’s ill-fated attempt to take on Netflix and Hulu shut down in 2014, but Variety reports that it’s ready to try again. From the ashes of Redbox Instant rises Redbox Digital, which ditches the subscription element entirely in favor of all-video on-demand all the time. It’s focused on the rental and purchase experience, although for now only invited users can try it out.
The app is already live on iTunes, and the screenshots show off the possibility of downloading or streaming videos, and support for Google’s Cast feature. The only problem with video on-demand is that while it’s more convenient than disc rentals at a kiosk, it will probably be more expensive. Most of the online video stores have stayed open (with the exception of Target Ticket), so Redbox may have a better chance with this attempt, but we’ll wait to see the prices before getting too excited about skipping the line at a DVD kiosk.
Source: Variety, iTunes
Here is Facebook’s internet-beaming plane completing its first test flight
One day soon you may access the internet via a wireless-internet-beaming plane rather than fiber optic cable.
Facebook wants to blanket the world with internet using a fleet of solar-powered aircraft called Aquila, and after two years of engineering and scale-model flights, the company has finally completed its first full-scale test flight. It reported on Thursday that on 28 June it conducted a low-altitude test flight that lasted for 96 minutes – more than three times its planned mission length.
The test flight provided Facebook’s aeronautics team with data on Aquila’s performance, including “the autopilot, motors, batteries, radios, ground station, displays, basic aerodynamic handling, structural viability, and crew training,” Facebook said. The company published a blog post, which you can read here, to detail some of its early learnings from the test flight and the data it collected.
The full-size Aquila, which can fly at 60,000 feet on 5,000 watts of power (equivalent to three hair dryers, apparently), has the wingspan “comparable to a commercial airliner’s, but weighs only one-third as much as a car”. Although it was in the air for less than two hours, it’ll eventually remain airborne for months to transmit wireless signal between other aircraft and the ground.
The aircraft’s first full-scale test flight was deemed a success, although it had a structural failure just before landing. It was able to still stick the landing, however. You can see the action unfold for yourself, as Aquila was loaded with cameras so Facebook could release a promo video.
Over next several months, Facebook plans to continue studying the data from this initial flight and conduct more test flights.
AIVAnet 