Galaxy S8 and S8+ will be making their debut in India on April 19

Samsung is bringing its 2017 flagships to India next week.

Samsung is all set to launch the Galaxy S8 and S8+ in India on April 19. The phones are up for pre-registration, and the brand confirmed the launch date in a now-deleted tweet. For now, Samsung is just stating that the phones will debut sometime next week, but it’s looking very likely that we’ll see the manufacturer’s 2017 flagships make their debut next Wednesday.

India, get ready to #UnboxYourPhone! Samsung #GalaxyS8 #GalaxyS8Plus, #IndiaLaunch. Stay tuned for details. https://t.co/CE3aFcrvL9 pic.twitter.com/14Z56BOa2k

— Samsung Mobile India (@SamsungMobileIN) April 14, 2017

The phones are set to go on sale starting April 21 in South Korea, the United States, and Canada, and we’ll hear about availability in India in a few days’ time. Unlike the U.S. variants, the Galaxy S8 and S8+ models will be powered by Samsung’s Exynos 8895 SoC. The highlight with this year’s phones is the extra-tall QHD screen, with the Galaxy S8 sporting a 5.8-inch display and the larger model offering a 6.2-inch panel. By cutting down on the bezels, Samsung was able to increase the screen size without making the devices unwieldy to use.

Other specs include 4GB of RAM, 64GB storage, microSD slot, dust and water resistance, 12MP camera with f/1.7 lens, 8MP front shooter, 3000mAh battery (3500mAh on the GS8+), and a fingerprint sensor located at the back.

We’ll know about pricing on the day of the launch, but it’s unlikely Samsung will sell the Galaxy S8 or S8+ for under ₹60,000. Based on the promotional material on its website, it looks like the company will launch the new Gear 360 and Gear VR in the country. We should know more next week, and in the meantime, what do you guys think will be the retail price of the Galaxy S8 and S8+ in India?

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Garmin Fenix 5 review: Smart sports watches don’t come better than this

If you’re an avid runner or cyclist, there’s a good chance that either you or someone you know well is sporting a Garmin watch. Over the past few years, the company’s reputation for building the best sports-tracking wearables has grown.

With the Fenix 5 – reviewed here in its Sapphire Edition configuration for an ultra-tough screen, not the larger maps-on-board 5X or smaller-form 5S versions – we’re seeing the culmination of all that experience in a watch which looks good and seemingly lasts forever with each charge.

With its build quality, durability and long feature list, the Fenix 5 promises a lot. Is it the best sports watch on the market today?

Garmin Fenix 5 review: Design

• Fiber-reinforced polymer body
• Stainless steel bass and bezel
• QuickFit watch bands (22mm)
• 47 x 47 x 15.5mm dimensions

There are three sizes of Fenix 5: The Fenix 5S is the 42mm case option with a chrome bezel around the face; the regular Fenix 5 is a 47mm case with angled, brushed metal frame around the display; and the Fenix 5X is the beast of the bunch with a 51mm case.

As you’d expect, the Fenix 5 is incredibly durable. The fiber-reinforced polymer body may be a really fancy plastic, but it’s strong enough that it almost convinces you it’s made of metal. Underneath, the bottom panel is made from stainless steel with an attractive brushed finish, which is matched by the round bezel around the lens.

To give it that industrial, rugged look the screws holding the casing together are exposed on the top and bottom and feature a hexa-lobe head to dissuade users from trying to pull the watch apart.

One part that is designed to pull off easily, however, is the strap – which holds tightly using a unique clip mechanism, but then pulls off by simply sliding down the “lock”. We’ve found in testing that it holds well regardless of what you put it through, and is among the easiest straps to swap out for another watch band when you need to. The only downside – despite being a 22mm strap – is that it seems to only be compatible with Garmin’s QuickFit watch bands.

The default silicone strap is a soft, flexible material with lots of closely positioned rectangle holes for the clasp to fit into. It also happens to have a tab protruding from the underside of the second loop to hold the strap in place and stop the loops from sliding up and down.

Returning to the watch case and, like many sports-focused wrist gadgets, there are multiple buttons. Pressing these buttons gives an indicator of the watch’s build quality, offering a proper “click” and reassuring tactile feedback.

Most of the buttons have primary and secondary features, depending on whether you press once, or press-and-hold them. On the left side: the top left button activates the light or the feature list; the middle left scrolls upwards through lists and widgets, or launches the main watch menu; the last button the left is used to scroll downwards or dismisses notifications. Switching to the right edge: the top button launches the activity tracking function from the main watch face or acts as the select/enter button within menus; the bottom button is the back/lap button.

Adding to all of this, the Fenix 5 is also rated for underwater use. With its 10ATM certification, you can take it swimming virtually anywhere, even deep sea diving – providing you don’t dive to depths below 100 metres.

Garmin Fenix 5 review: Screen

• 240 x 240 resolution colour panel
• Transflective and LED backlight
• No touchscreen control, buttons only

It’s only when looking at the display that the Fenix 5 may seem a step below the smartwatches from the likes of Apple or Samsung. But the transflective screen technology does have massive benefits, mainly when it comes to battery performance.

Similar to classic sports watches of the past few decades and – more recently – Pebble smartwatches, the Fenix 5’s screen isn’t a miniature version of the same technology used in smartphones. Rather, it’s a basic, unlit LCD panel with a relatively low resolution and refresh rate.

The benefits of this technology are clear. Firstly, it’s on all the time, as a watch face should be, without consuming bucket loads of battery. Secondly, it’s easy to see in any light. Indeed, when light catches it at the right angle it becomes more visible rather than less. It is a colour screen, so some widgets have the odd splash of colour here and there, but for the most part the watchfaces and widgets make use of monochrome themes.

The downside to this, of course, is that with this low resolution and refresh rate, you don’t get high definition graphics and animation. This means finer graphics and text, especially with curves, look a little jagged and unrefined. Still, when you’re looking at arm’s length, that hardly matters.

What really matters is that you can easily and clearly see the time. Even when it’s dark you can just press the light button and illuminate the watch face, as many of us will have been accustomed for decades.

Garmin Fenix 5 review: Software

• Compatible with iPhone, Android and Windows
• Share data with Strava, MyFitnessPal and more

Because there’s no touchscreen, Garmin’s wearable software is controlled entirely by the physical buttons on the side. Don’t let that fool you into thinking it’s limited, however, as there are plenty of layers to the interface running on the latest high-powered watch.

Pressing-and-holding the top right button launches the activity function, where you can quickly start tracking a run, walk, or virtually any other kind of exercise, whether it be indoor cycling, open water swimming or strength training. There are all kinds of sports available within the watch’s software and you can decide which of them to have as your favourites.

That means if you happen to be an avid skier, you can choose to have that at the top of the list of activities to track when you press the button. As well as bespoke sports tracking, there’s a basic “track me” option which doesn’t designate a sport, and an HRV stress tracker for measuring your health/heart condition.

Pressing-and-holding the top left button launches functions specific to the connectivity with your phone. That means you have a “Find my phone” option that gets your phone to play an alert sound until you find it and access the associated Garmin Connect app. There’s also music control, which allows you to play, pause, skip and adjust volume of any music app running on your phone. As well as those, there are options for manually syncing the Fenix 5 with your phone, switching on “Do not Disturb”, saving your location, locking the buttons and switching off the watch.

The user interface you’re most likely to use is the set of full-screen widgets accessed by tapping the up or down buttons on the right side. Here you can scroll through widgets for weather, notifications, calendar events, compass, altimeter, intensity minutes overview and many more. All of which give you a quick snippet of information for any key metrics you choose to have on there.

Garmin Fenix 5 review: Connect app

• Informative daily snapshots
• Intensity minutes goal based on exercise strain
• Calendar mode for in-depth daily insight

The Garmin Connect app is essentially a central hub for all of the masses of data collected by your Fenix watch. Here you’ll be able to see a simple overview showing your daily steps, sleep, calories burned and other snippets, but you can dive way deeper into your stats than what’s available on the brief overview screens.

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You can arrange your Snapshot views to include breakdowns of a few of the metrics you want to keep track of easily. For instance, Steps shows you your current daily tally on top, with a chart beneath showing your progress over the past 30 days. It’s a similar story with the Sleep Snapshot, except that goes back over seven days.

Intensity Minutes is potentially one of the most useful for keeping fit. Using the heart rate/steps/pace data collected during your exercises it calculates how many minutes of vigourous intensity exercise you’re doing and how many moderate intensity minutes. Your weekly target is initially set based on your size, age and weight, and your task is to meet that target.

For example, one 25 minute run counted as 50 intensity minutes, and so three of those runs per week would fill our target. Add in all of the other activities we tested the watch during and we surpassed that goal – hopefully increasing our fitness in the long run (if we keep it up).

There’s a calendar view within the app, too, which shows different colour tabs on each of the days. Tapping on one day gives you a detailed overview of all your activities from that particular day, with a chart showing your heart rate at the top, and a list of metrics and achievements below it.

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The “more” section of the app lets you dive down deeper into many of the tracked metrics, allowing you to view your performance and insights in more detail, while the news feed shows any tracked exercise by you or your Garmin Connect contacts.

What makes all of this even more useful is that you can connect the app and your account to several other popular services. MyFitnessPal, for example, can read and write data to the app, just as exercise sessions can sync automatically with Strava.

However, with all that good stuff said, it was with this software where we experienced our only real problems with the Fenix 5. Mainly, the link with Strava means all of our exercises were pushed to the community, even our indoor kettlebell sessions. Given that Strava is predominantly walking, running and cycling focused (in other words – exercises where you actually move some distance), it seems odd that the Garmin app doesn’t distinguish between types of exercise. It’s a minor issue, easily solved by deleting the activity, but smarter automation would be better.

Garmin Fenix 5 review: Performance

• Advanced GPS and GLONASS reception
• Heart rate/VO2 Max monitoring

All elements of the Garmin’s hardware performed as well as we would expect for a top-of-the-range sports watch. The GPS tracked reliably every time we used it, and hooked onto our location after just a few seconds of activating the activity tracking feature.

The one time it took a little longer than usual to successfully pick up a GPS signal was in the Snowdonian hills, where it seemed to take 20-30 seconds to lock in our location before starting the hike tracking. This was just a blip in an otherwise overall reliable experience. And once it found the signal, it accurately tracked our route up one of mountains.

Every interaction we had was relatively quick, and only limited by the refresh rate of the screen, rather than any lag or performance issues. Pressing buttons would usually result in an almost instant response from the content on screen.

Heart-rate monitoring happens almost without you knowing it and, again, seems to be as accurate as a wrist worn device can be. No results seemed to be anything outside the ordinary, and were in line with what we’ve seen with multiple other devices in the past. It was the same story with sleep tracking.

Garmin Fenix 5 review: Battery

• Up to two weeks in “smartwatch mode”
• Up to 24 hours GPS/HR tracking
• Charges using bespoke cable

As we mentioned referring to the display, the one major benefit of this type of display tech is that the battery lasts a very long time. Compared to Android Wear or Watch OS wearables, the Fenix 5 feels like it goes on forever.

Garmin claims the Fenix 5 can last up to two weeks between charges in smartwatch mode, or up to 24 hours of constant GPS tracking, and our testing showed it should be capable of meeting this promises.

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After 10 full days of wearing the watch, our test unit was down to 18 per cent. Breaking it down, that’s around eight per cent lost per day, or around 12 days of charge. This may seem to come up short against Garmin’s quoted results, but when you consider we used it to track three 25 minute runs using GPS, a couple of indoor strength and cardio sessions, plus an hour-long walk and two shorter treks, the battery held up really well in real life. We also wore it all night, every night to track our sleeping.

Short version: the Fenix 5 has a two week battery, for moderately active users. Possibly less for the more active among you.

Charging is a little different to other wearables. While it has the usual four contact points, it doesn’t charge on a magnetic cradle. Instead, you have to push in the cable until it clicks in place. It’s a little less convenient than some others, but it ensures a reliable, constant connection and means it’s virtually impossible to accidentally knock the Fenix 5 off charge. 

Verdict

If money is no object and you have no issue dropping £500 upward on a great, modern, connected sports watch, then the Fenix 5 will surely leave you satisfied.

It’s got enough smartphone connected-ness about it without hogging your attention, but really excels when it comes to sports tracking – of any kind you care to throw its way.

There are some tiny software kinks to sort out – we had one issue with sleep-tracking thinking our TV-watching was sleep when it wasn’t, plus the push-all to Strava is irksome – but as a piece of hardware it’s sublime.

The Fenix 5 is the clear king among its sports watch competition. Garmin’s reputation as the best sport-focused smartwatch maker is clear to see. 

But the Fenix 5 now from Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com. 

The alternatives to consider…

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Polar M600

If what you’re after is a regular smartwatch with a heavy focus on sports, the Polar M600 might just do the trick. It’s Android Wear, but with Polar’s fitness tracking expertise built in too. If you’re an Android user, it’s worth serious consideration, although it will only give you two days of battery.

Read the full article: Polar M600 review

Samsung Gear S3 Frontier

As smartwatches go, the Gear S3 Frontier’s Tizen based software is easily among the best out there for easy of use. It’s not as finely tuned for sports tracking as the Garmin, but does, sort of cross the line between traditional smart watch and sports watch. It’s not quite as sturdy, or resistant to outdoor conditions, and lacks some of the depth in health tracking available from the Fenix.

Read the full article: Samsung Gear S3 review

Suunto

Suunto Sport Wrist HR

Suunto is often seen as a direct competitor to Garmin in the wearable field, and its latest watch, the Spartan Sport Wrist HR promises to offer “superior accuracy” heart-rate measurements. In fact, it claims to deliver data that’s remarkably close to chest strap HR monitors almost every time.

The Morning After: Friday, April 14th 2017

Hey, good morning! You look fabulous.

This Friday, we’re saying an unexpected goodbye to the NES Classic Edition and preparing for the Model 3’s big reveal in July. Oh, and scientists took a picture of a black hole — you just can’t look at it yet.

Limited time only Nintendo is already shutting down sales of the NES Classic Edition

If you want an NES Classic Edition, then we hope you’ve already got one. Nintendo revealed that the retro box “wasn’t intended to be an ongoing, long-term product.” As such, the last shipments will arrive in April, and then it’s gone. It’s not clear if this discontinuation will also impact the Japanese Famicom Classic, but we’re just hoping for a follow-up SNES Classic Edition with downloadable ROMs and wireless controllers.

EvolutionTesla will unveil the Model 3’s final form in July

Tesla’s first mass-market EV is getting closer to production. In response to a tweet, CEO Elon Musk confirmed plans to unveil the finalized vehicle in July. Fans of the company should also mark their calendars for 18 – 24 months from now, since Musk tweeted that a Tesla pickup should be unveiled around then. Oh, and remember that Tesla semi truck? Expect to see that in September.

But it wasn’t the number one sellerNintendo sold almost a million Switches in March

We’re not surprised to find out that NPD reports the Nintendo Switch counted 906,000 sales in the US during its launch month. What is a little surprising, however, is that despite being the company’s fastest-selling console ever, it was actually outsold by The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. That flagship game somehow moved 925,000 copies on the Switch alone, along with an additional 460,000 sales for the Wii U version.

It’s real; it just lives out of townAstronomers may have taken the first photo of a black hole (but they can’t show it to you yet)

That image above is not the first picture taken of a black hole — it’s an artist’s rendering. However, astronomers operating the Event Horizon Telescope believe they have pulled off the feat. The project used a network of eight connected observatories working over five nights to observe two black holes: Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black at the center of our galaxy, and M87, which resides in a nearby galaxy. The only problem is that they collected so much data (500TB at each of observatory) that they need to ship the hard drives over to MIT for processing. Oh, and since one of them is in the South Pole, it won’t be able to send the drives until October.

Copy, paste, replaceInstagram’s Stories feature has more daily users than Snapchat’s entire service

Sure, Facebook is playing catch up to disappearing daily anecdotes, but Instagram just revealed its Stories feature now has 200 million daily users. That’s good for about a third of the people on Instagram, but more importantly, it’s more than the 158 million daily users Snapchat said it had in an IPO filing a couple of months ago.

TMI?Finally, a good digital masturbator

Kiroo’s Fleshlight Launch looks like “a cross between a sci-fi arm cannon and the cleaning dock for a Braun shaver.” As a connected device, it can be used for teledildonic activities or synchronized action with a movie, and according to Dan Cooper, it’s good at what it does. Also a plus: it doesn’t contain an easily hacked camera.

Advancing in reverseDJI adds an ‘Advanced’ version of its Phantom 4 drone

If you need a UAV and neither of DJI’s existing Phantom 4 (standard and Pro) drones fit the bill, then maybe you’ll find this one has the right fit. The Advanced model splits things down the middle with the Pro’s 4K camera, but fewer onboard sensors. As such, it’s about $300 less and will go on sale for $1,349 at the end of this month.

But wait, there’s more…

• The promise of self-driving cars starts with better ‘eye-sight’
• Trump’s transition team asked NASA about mining the moon
• LG G6 review: Finally back in the race
• The FCC just sold a chunk of the wireless spectrum to T-Mobile

Microsoft hammered by surveillance requests in 2016

US authorities must have spent more time at Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court last year than in 2015. According to Microsoft’s latest transparency report, the tech titan received 1,000 to 1,499 surveillance requests for foreign intelligence purposes (known as FISA) from January to June 2016. That’s at least double the 0 to 499 requests it received within the same period the year before and then again from July to December 2015. Those figures look weird, because the government only allows companies to report FISA requests in a wide range of numbers. We unfortunately don’t know the exact figures, though Microsoft’s report is pretty telling anyway.

Thankfully, the number of users affected by FISAs went down despite the increase in requests. Only 12,000 to 12,499 accounts were affected by the FISA orders in the first half of 2016 compared to the 17,500 to 17,999 affected accounts during the same period in 2015. It’s unclear if one of those belongs to Trump adviser Carter Page whom the FBI monitored with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court’s blessing for possible ties with the Russian government.

The other aspects of Microsoft’s transparency report look much better than the FISA section. To start with, it received 25,837 requests for customer info from law enforcement from June to December, 2016. Most of those came from American authorities, but it’s still a much smaller figure than the 35,572 requests it got in the first half of the year. Even the total number of law enforcement requests in 2016 (61,409) is significantly smaller than 2015’s total (74,311). In addition, Microsoft only received one government request for content removal from US authorities in the second half of 2016.

Finally, Microsoft can now reveal that it received a National Security Letter in 2014 for one of its user’s data, thanks to the USA Freedom Act. An NSL is a subpoena issued by the US government for the purpose of national security. It typically comes with a gag order forbidding companies to reveal they’ve received any. Microsoft included the NSL it got in its larger report for 2014, but it’s only now that it come out and say that it actually got one. Other tech titans also recently revealed the NSLs they received, including Google, which was allowed to disclose receiving eight of them these past few years.

Via: Reuters

Source: Microsoft

YouTube Dark Mode Surfaces in Latest Desktop Chrome Browser Update

Google appears to be testing a Dark Mode feature for YouTube in the latest version of its Chrome 57 desktop browser.

The built-in mode was discovered on Thursday and shared in a Reddit post, and while the setting doesn’t appear by default, a quick command in the developer console is all that’s required to enable it.

YouTube Dark Mode in Chrome with black theme enabled
Follow these steps to enable the YouTube dark mode in Chrome on Mac. Make sure you’re signed in to YouTube before performing the steps.

Press the keyboard combination shortcut Option + Command + I to open the developer tools sidebar.
Click the Console tab.
Paste document.cookie=”VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE=fPQ4jCL6EiE” into the console and press enter.
Close the developer tools sidebar and refresh the YouTube page.
Click your YouTube profile picture, select Dark Mode from the dropdown, and toggle the switch to enable the mode.
Google Chrome is available to download for free on the App Store. [Direct Link]

Tag: Chrome
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Slack Chat Platform Finally Gets Custom Status Message Feature

Team chat platform Slack got a long-awaited feature on Thursday with the addition of status updates, finally allowing users to customize their status message beyond the default “away” setting.

The new “set a status” feature includes five Suggested statuses including In a meeting, Commuting, Out sick, Vacationing, and Working remotely, as well as an input field for typing a custom message – allowing users to display a return time if they’re away, for example.

Each status can be up to 100 characters and users can display an associated emoji to communicate their circumstances, but if an emoji isn’t chosen a speech ballon is shown instead. The emoji appears alongside the username in the chat window, the sidebar, and the chat room members list, while hovering over the emoji or tapping it brings up the full status message.

Some third-party apps can also modify the status message. For example, Zenefits syncs user status with its Time Off Tracking system, while Meekan shows when someone’s in a meeting (and when they’ll be free). Statuses also automatically update when a user is on a voice or video call in Slack.

Statuses can be set from the browser, desktop and mobile versions of Slack. Mac users can click their name in the upper left corner of the sidebar, then select Set a status. On iOS, users should tap the More items icon (…), or edit their status directly from their profile.

Slack is a free download for Mac on the Mac App Store and available for iPhone and iPad on the App Store.

Tag: Slack
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These robots are a match for Japan’s best volleyball players

Why it matters to you

Robotic opponents that can mimic the playing style of a specific team could become more common as teams search for ways to stay ahead of the pack.

Japan is certainly fond of its robots so it’s perhaps little surprise that the women’s national volleyball team has started using them to help improve its game.

Engineers designed a team of opponents that mimic the actions of “blockers” — players that jump close to the net with their arms aloft to prevent an attacker’s powerful shot from coming over to their side of the court.

The setup, as reported by the New Scientist, consists of three pairs of robotic arms that move left and right along a track at a speed slightly faster than that of a human player.

Smashing the ball across the net is one of the most common ways for a team to win points in volleyball, but they have to be able to outwit the opposing team’s blockers who’re waiting to slam the ball immediately down to the ground for their own point.

The unique blocking machine was created by researchers at the University of Tsukuba in partnership with the Japanese Volleyball Association and lets an operator choose the robots’ playing style using computer software.

It’s even possible to program the robots with team-specific tactics or styles of play similar to those of the opponents that the Japanese team is about to face, allowing for more effective pre-game preparation and training.

As you can see from the video above, the robots move swiftly and succeed in blocking many of the shots. But at the moment the robots can only shift into pre-determined positions and don’t react to a player’s specific actions. That should change soon, though, as the developers are working to incorporate motion sensors for an even more realistic experience.

Japanese players who went up against the robots complimented the designers of the technology when they said it felt pretty much the same as playing human opponents.

Of course, this isn’t the first time robots have entered the world of sports. There’s the annual RoboCup soccer tournament, for example, and who can forget this rather bizarre “robot crowd” employed by a South Korean baseball team to replace absent fans.

Survey says: Political polarization isn’t the internet’s fault

It’s easy to blame social media for the rising political polarization in the US when you can use it to hide in a bubble of your own creation. Simply block people who don’t share your viewpoint on Facebook and Twitter, and follow, Like and heart only people who do. According to a study conducted by economics professors from Stanford and Brown Universities, though, you can’t blame it all on social media — not when it’s older Americans who barely use the internet who are becoming more polarized.

The professors used data gathered by the American National Election Survey from 1996 to 2012 on younger, more web-savvy voters aged 18 to 39 and voters 75 years and older. They compared nine different factors, including feelings about political parties, ideological consistency and straight-ticket voting. Take note that around 80 percent of the younger people in the study use social media, while only 20 percent of the older people do.

“We find that the increase in polarization is largest among the groups least likely to use the internet and social media,” the team’s paper, which was published in March by The National Bureau of Economic Research, reads. “Across intermediate age groups, the growth in polarization is consistently higher among older respondents. Polarization increases more for the old than the young in eight of the nine individual measures.”

That doesn’t mean Facebook and the abundance of fake news that can spread through likes and shares don’t play a part. This is just one study, and even the researchers admit social media plays a role in increasing hyper-partisanship — it’s “just not the whole picture.”

Vox asked Matthew Gentzkow, one of the researchers, for possible reasons why hyper-partisanship among older voters is on the rise. He replied:

“I have two main hypotheses. One is stuff that has nothing to do with media at all but is structural, like increasing income inequality. The second is non-digital media, and cable TV and talk radio in particular.”

Since the data they used is a few years old, the study can’t really confirm whether their conclusion still applies to 2016’s presidential elections. The professors are now working to update their results with more recent data, but they said the results are unlikely to change.

Via: The New York Times, Vox

Source: The National Bureau of Economic Research

New York City’s free WiFi kiosks speed up access to social services

When New York City launched its LinkNYC gigabit free WiFi program last year, it was a win for internet accessibility. With over 800 devices currently spread across New York City, the kiosks provide municipal broadband for anyone in WiFi range, as well as charging outlets, free phone calls, maps and directions, 911 access and a built-in tablet anyone can use. While the city unfortunately had to disable the web browsers due to some users’ awkward browsing habits, LinkNYC kiosks are getting a new feature that will help users without internet access quickly find social programs and safety net services.

As Citylab reports, the kiosks are adding an app from Austin-based Aunt Bertha — the so-called “Yelp for Social Services.” Aunt Bertha maintains a database of resources like emergency housing, soup kitchens, food pantries, transportation assistance, or childcare and healthcare providers. It covers everything from government programs and large nonprofits to neighborhood services, then makes all their information searchable by zip code in one place, rather than spread out over each group’s website. According to Citylab, the LinkNYC app will also highlight nearby services based on the kiosk’s location.

LinkNYC is a consortium that includes Alphabet-owned Sidewalk Labs and the kiosks have come under scrutiny for data privacy concerns in the past, but the group expects to have 7,500 total across the city by 2025.

Via: Citylab

Apple Music Debuts Toronto’s ‘House of Strombo’ Concert Series

Top music interviewer and CBC Radio 2 host George Stroumboulopoulos debuted his new House of Strombo music series on Apple Music on Thursday (via Billboard).

The 10-episode show is a spin-off of the Canadian host’s radio series The Strombo Show, which is filmed at his Toronto home in front of a live audience. The show is set to feature video segments, artist interviews, and exclusive behind-the-scenes access. Stroumboulopoulos was interviewed by Zane Lowe on Apple Music’s Beats 1 about the partnership.

Stroumboulopoulos (left) with Zane Lowe

“The bands set-up right in my living room, with a live audience packing the place,” Stroumboulopoulos explained in a statement. “Lights, smoke machines and amplifiers stacked high — it’s every gig in a small space that you’ve ever loved, with the best bands in the world.”

The video segment of the first show features a performance and interview with Canadian group A Tribe Called Red, an Ottawa-based First Nations DJ collective. Apple Music subscribers can view it in the Browse section of the app under the Strombo banner, where playlists and other content can also be found. Going forward, videos for the show will be available in the Connect section of the Strombo page.

A longer 30-minute version of each episode can be found on YouTube. Check out the first offering embedded below.

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