SoundCloud Launches Cheaper $4.99 Streaming Subscription Plan

SoundCloud has introduced a new lower priced subscription plan to entice users to sign up to its music streaming service, less than a year after its paid membership scheme was launched (via The Verge).

The new SoundCloud Go budget tier costs $4.99 per month, half the price of the previous low cost subscription option that rolled out last March. Membership gives users access to over 120 million tracks, no ads, and the ability to save music offline on mobile.

The original $9.99 plan remains as SoundCloud Go+, which includes access to a wider selection of 150 million songs and excludes previews from the library. According to the Swedish company, the Go+ plan will also include additional product features to be announced later this year.

The new budget $4.99 plan means SoundCloud now undercuts Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal, and Google Play Music, all of whose options start at $9.99. SoundCloud will be hoping the new pricing tier turns more of its 175 million users into paying subscribers, although how many is unclear – the company has never released a figure for its paying user base.

SoundCloud Go and SoundCloud Go+ membership plans are available in the U.S., UK, Ireland, France, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Germany, with some regional price differences.

Tag: SoundCloud
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Elliptic Labs’ Inner Peace technology uses ultrasound to detect movement

Why it matters to you

Presence detection technology in our phones and smart home products could help save energy, and quite possibly save lives.

Elliptic Labs, the company that helped Xiaomi’s Mi Mix enjoy a nearly bezel-less display, is taking a stab at presence detection — technology it calls Inner Peace.

It’s a direct follow-up to last year’s Inner Beauty technology, which lets smartphone manufacturers remove the proximity sensor. The technology uses the smartphone’s speaker and microphone, as well as ultrasound, to identify the gesture of moving your phone up to your face. Removal of the sensor means more space inside the device — allowing for different designs like the Xiaomi Mi Mix.

Inner Peace is based off the same technology, and Elliptic Labs is aiming it primarily at Amazon’s Echo and the Google Home ecosystem. The software can be programmed to detect if a home’s occupants aren’t moving, or it can be set up notify users of possible intruders in their home.

More: Xiaomi just released a new selfie stick that doubles as a tripod

What’s key is that smart home devices can switch off when they do not detect someone nearby — potentially saving users some money on energy costs. Inner Peace uses ultrasound to enable a “360-degree dome field of view,” and it has no line-of-sight needs. It works in the dark as well.

The company said it’s working with manufacturers to integrate Inner Peace into products, and we can expect to see the technology in Internet of Things products by 2018. It’s unclear if it requires any hardware to work, but it’s unlikely as Inner Beauty was all software.

The company is demonstrating the technology at Mobile World Congress 2017, and we’ll update this article when we get a closer look.

T-Mobile’s latest promotion gives you three unlimited lines for just $100

T-Mobile’s latest promotion is its best yet.

T-Mobile has relied on deals and promotions to lure customers away from rival carriers in the past, and its latest offer is no different. Starting March 1, the carrier is giving an additional line for free provided you already have two lines or more with T-Mobile.

T-Mobile recently slashed the price of its unlimited plan, offering two lines all-in for $100. Coupled with today’s offer, you can get three unlimited data lines for the same price. The unlimited plan offers unlimited text, calls, and data, although T-Mobile will de-prioritize a line if it exceeds 28GB in a month.

If you’re using two Simple Choice plans with varying data amounts, the free plan will match the lower of the two. You can also use the third line for your tablet, smartwatch, or an in-car hotspot. The price for the third line will be reflected in your account in the form of bill credits.

The promotion is valid for a limited time and kicks off this Wednesday, and is available for new as well as existing customers. The free line itself will continue to stay that way as long as you’re a T-Mobile customer.

Interested? You can add a free line by heading to your nearest T-Mobile store starting this Wednesday.

See at T-Mobile

Pilot whose drone knocked a woman unconscious gets 30 days in jail

Paul Skinner, an aerial photographer whose drone knocked a woman unconscious, has been sentenced to 30 days in jail and slapped with a $500 fine. Skinner flew a two-pound 18-by-18 drone in 2015 to cover the city’s Pride Parade. Unfortunately, the machine hit a building and fell on the 25-year-old woman’s head in the audience, knocking her unconscious. It also injured a man nearby. The photographer was found guilty of reckless endangerment back in January and faced a year of jail time and up to $5,000 in fine. It marked the first time Seattle’s City Attorney’s Office charged someone with mishandling a drone in public.

While 30 days of jail time and $500 in fine are but a tiny fraction of what Skinner faced, his lawyer, Jeffrey Kradel, believes the punishment is still too severe for something that was clearly an accident. He told the Seattle Times that he thinks his client is being used as an example to scare other drone pilots. Assistant City Prosecutor Raymond Lee, however, told Seattle residents that they “should not fear a drone strike falling from the sky” and that Skinner created the situation that ended up harming a couple of people.

Skinner has another hearing scheduled to determined how much he owes the woman for her medical bills. He’ll also have to take a drone safety course even if Kradel goes through with his plan to appeal the verdict.

Via: PetaPixel

Source: The Seattle Times, PDN

Lead an army of cartoon heroes in Epic’s latest game

Epic Games announced Battle Breakers, its new free-to-play title for mobile and PC, at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. The game looks like a Saturday-morning cartoon, complete with larger-than-life characters and a huge, cinematic soundtrack to enhance the gameplay.

Battle Breakers will have hundreds of different heroes to use when you create your battle team, including ninjas, robots, knights and talking dinosaurs. The gameplay is a bit like Advance Wars or The Banner Saga, where you need to position your troops and dole out special powers for maximum impact. While the game is free to download and play, you can expect Epic to push hard to get you to drop some cash for in-game purchases like special heroes and cosmetic upgrades.

You can pre-register for the game right now on Google Play or the Epic website to get a special hero, Dark Beastman, when the game launches. If you love ’80s cartoons and tactical RPGs (as well as free things), Battle Breakers might be worth checking out when it launches “later this year.”

Source: Epic Games

Rise in Arctic Ocean acid pinned on climate change

Climate change isn’t just manifesting in polar regions through ice cracks. Researchers have learned that the Arctic Ocean saw a rapid rise in acid levels between 1994 and 2010, most likely from airborne carbon dioxide (aka a greenhouse dissolving into the water. While this process is happening in many places around Earth, the Arctic increases are serious enough that they may pose a threat to polar bears, seals and other animals that depend on the ocean.

The clue? Scientists were looking at concentrations of aragonite, a mineral that can’t form in highly acidic water. They noticed that parts of the western Arctic Ocean have lower than expected aragonite levels.

Climate change isn’t the only factor — the team notes that changes in ocean currents have seen a greater than usual influx of carbon-rich Pacific water, most likely due to changing ocean patterns that leaves the water ‘stuck’ in the Arctic. However it happens, though, things don’t look good. Computer models suggest that the Arctic Ocean may be ice-free in summers by 2030, and that the entire surface of the Arctic Ocean could have a dearth of aragonite before long. If that happens, the larger Arctic ecosystem might be at risk.

Via: Washington Post

Source: Nature

SpaceX is planning to send two tourists on a trip around the moon next year

Why it matters to you

The ambitious mission will take humans close to the moon for the first time in nearly half a century.

Going anywhere nice on your next vacation? Florida? Europe? The moon?

SpaceX announced Monday it’s sending two private citizens on a week-long trip around the moon next year in the first voyage to the planet since NASA’s final Apollo mission in 1972.

The wealthy individuals recently approached SpaceX about the possibility of making such a journey, and, following discussions, have now paid a “significant” deposit to make it happen. Announcing the plan on Monday, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk refused to offer any details at this stage about the identity of the pair, saying only that they’re not Hollywood stars. However, it’s likely we’ll learn more about them following successful health and fitness tests.

Set to take place toward the end of 2018, the trip is designed to be fully autonomous, leaving the two space travelers to sit back and hopefully enjoy the extremely long flight.

“Like the Apollo astronauts before them, these individuals will travel into space carrying the hopes and dreams of all humankind, driven by the universal human spirit of exploration,” SpaceX said in a release.

Lift-off will be from the very same launch pad used by the Apollo program for its lunar missions — Pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center near Cape Canaveral.

SpaceX said its Falcon Heavy rocket would be used to power the pair into orbit. Interestingly, this is a rocket that hasn’t even had its first test flight, something that’s due to take place this summer. If successful, it’ll be the most powerful vehicle to reach orbit after the Saturn V rocket, used by NASA between 1967 and 1973.

According to SpaceX, the Falcon Heavy has “two-thirds the thrust of Saturn V and more than double the thrust of the next largest launch vehicle currently flying.”

The two-person crew will travel to the moon in the Dragon V2 spacecraft, though this too is yet to be properly tested. Initial trials are due to take place later this year with a crewed test set for the second quarter of 2018, just a few months before the planned moon mission.

More: SpaceX wants to launch a rocket every two weeks from its new Florida site

Clearly, plenty of testing still needs to take place before now and the proposed launch date, so for the late-2018 schedule to remain in place, all of SpaceX’s trial runs will have to go without a hitch.

As for the mission itself, the two space travelers accept that things could go wrong. Speaking to reporters after the announcement, Musk said the astronaut wannabes were “entering this with their eyes open, knowing that there is some risk … They’re certainly not naive, and we’ll do everything we can to minimize that risk, but it’s not zero.” He added that the pair will undergo “extensive” training before the mission.

All things considered, it’s an ambitious timeline, and SpaceX will do well to stick to it. But the announcement indicates the company’s determination to aim high and press ahead with its grand long-term ambitions.

Indeed, SpaceX said its planned lunar mission will take it another step toward deep-space exploration, describing it as “an important milestone as we work toward our ultimate goal of transporting humans to Mars.”

Non-profit aims to preserve the hidden history of video games

It’s relatively easy for developers to preserve classic video games through emulators, museums, remasters and retro consoles. But what about the culture that surrounded it, such as ads, boxes, magazines and gamers’ own experiences? That’s where the newly established Video Game History Foundation wants to help. The non-profit hopes to collect and digitize as many video game artifacts as possible to understand the full context of a game or console. For instance, it’s building an NES USA Launch Collection that covers the atmosphere surrounding Nintendo’s American debut, including the company’s sales pitch as it reassured retailers burned by the video game industry crash.

The organization has a good pedigree. It’s headed up by Frank Cifaldi, well-known for running Lost Levels (the site about unreleased video games) and his journalism work with Gamasutra. This is someone who knows about the culture surrounding games, including those titles that didn’t hit it big or never came to be. He’s joined by game and tech industry vets, including former Googler and game archivist Steve Lin, Game Developers Conference leader Simon Carless, #IDARB developer Mike Mika and Smithsonian video game exhibit creator Chris Melissinos.

The Foundation wants your help to flourish: it’s asking for donations both through its own website and through a Patreon campaign. Contribute enough per month and you’ll have the chance to influence its direction. While there’s no guarantee that this will become the definitive archive for video game culture, there are enough ingredients here to give it a healthy start.

Source: Video Game History Foundation, Patreon

Porsche Design reveals a Windows 2-in-1 convertible

Porsche Design had another Mobile World Congress revelation besides a limited edition version of Huawei’s Watch 2. The design group has also announced a laptop-tablet convertible and detachable hybrid of its own called Book One, which looks like it was designed to rival Microsoft’s Surface Book. It runs on Windows 10 Pro and is loaded with all the feature’s you’d expect on a Windows hybrid: it has Cortana and facial recognition through Windows Hello. Plus, you can take notes and draw all over the tablet’s touchscreen using Windows Ink.

Its other specs and hardware might look familiar, because they’re very similar to Surface Book’s. The device’s 13.3-inch display has a 3,200 x 1,800 pixel resolution, it runs on an Intel Core i7 processor, has 512GB of storage, 16 GB of RAM, two USB-C and two USB 3.0 ports. Even its pricing is pretty similar: at $2,495, it’s just $100 more expensive than the cheapest configuration of Microsoft’s Surface Book. Porsche Design’s 2-in-1 will be available in the US, Canada and 15 other countries across Europe and Asia starting in April 2017.

Click here to catch up on the latest news from MWC 2017.

Source: Windows

One billion hours of YouTube are watched every day

It’s easy to track YouTube’s most popular metric: Check the counter below any video to see how many times it’s been played. It’s harder to know how long viewers watch, which YouTube staff started tracking years ago. Today, those stats passed an auspicious number: Over a billion hours of content are watched every day by users around the globe.

YouTube’s post presents some factoids grappling with that milestone: Watching a billion hours yourself would take over 100,000 years, say. Since more than half of views come from mobile, a good chunk of those billion hours watched per day are seen on devices. And an increasing number of those might be watched without sound given that the total number of auto-captioned videos tipped past the one billion mark two weeks ago.

As the dominant video platform, this daily total will only go up, especially now that YouTube is starting to roll out mobile live streaming. Whether it’s movie trailers, music videos, cooking shows, user-created fiction series, gaming channels, week-by-week recounting of World War One’s events on this date a century ago, or whatever other weird thing you’re into…well, I guess we’re all watching a billion hours of it tomorrow.

Source: YouTube Blog