Twitch unveils Steam-like store so it can sell games on top of streaming

Amazon-owned Twitch is no longer just about streaming and watching games. It’s now a place where you can buy games, too.

The game-streaming service had already announced plans to launch a digital PC games store, but now, it’s finally unveiling the experience. Twitch said users will be able to purchase games directly from Twitch channels and game pages – whether you’re using the website or the newly launched desktop app. At launch, there around 50 titles available, including For Honor, Telltale’s Walking Dead series, and more.

• What is YouTube Gaming and could it kill Twitch?
• Amazon Prime adds Twitch Prime to offer game discounts, free loot

A feature in the Twitch store, which seems to be a direct competitor to Valve’s Steam platform, will allow partnered streamers to earn 5 per cent of sales that originate from their channel – kind of like Amazon’s own affiliate program, which allows people to earn a small per cent of sales through Amazon links. The move also allows Twitch streamers to collect revenue, and it encourages Twitch viewers to use the new store.

Speaking of Twitch viewers, buying any game on the Twitch store worth more than $4.99 nets you a virtual “Twitch Crate” filled with tools like chat emotes, chat badges, and more. Earning a Twitch Crate further enters you into a contest from now until the end of April. Twitch will pick a winner each week to receive PC gear like the Hyper X Cloud Gaming Headset or the Logitech Pro Mechanical Keyboard.

Twitch will also pick a grand prize winner who will get $500 worth of streaming equipment.

Seattle court strikes blow to Uber driver unionization efforts

A landmark decision by Seattle’s city council, which would allow drivers for ride-hailing apps like Uber and Lyft to unionize despite being classified as independent contractors, has hit a snag according to a report from the Associated Press.

BREAKING: U.S. judge temporarily blocks Seattle’s first-in-the-nation law allowing drivers of ride-hailing companies to unionize.

— The Associated Press (@AP) April 4, 2017

In December 2015, Seattle’s city council voted 9-0 to allow freelance drivers to unionize and collectively bargain for better benefits. Uber immediately sued to halt the plan from moving forward but was stymied by a Washington state judge who ruled in favor of the city late last month.

However, a pair of lawsuits from the US Chamber of Commerce and the Freedom Foundation, alleging that the council’s decision violates federal labor laws, have instigated U.S. District Judge Robert Lasnik to issue a temporary injunction against the city. This is the second such lawsuit the USCC has filed. Its previous effort was thrown out by a judge last August.

“The issues raised in this litigation are novel, they are complex, and they reside at the intersection of national policies that have been decades in the making,” Lasnik wrote in his order. “The public will be well-served by maintaining the status quo while the issues are given careful judicial consideration as to whether the city’s well-meaning ordinance can survive the scrutiny our laws require.”

Source: Associated Press

‘Serious Sam’ returns to VR for a ‘Second Encounter’

If you’re a fan of bombastic early-2000s first-person shooters and you own a HTC Vive or an Oculus Rift, Croteam has you covered. Serious Sam, the studio’s fast-paced, over-the-top and gratuitously violent ode to big guns, explosions and cheesy one-liners now has two more VR games on Steam.

Serious Sam VR: The First Encounter and Serious Sam VR: The Second Encounter are ports of the first two games in the franchise. Or, rather, they’re ports of the HD remasters of those original games. In addition to full single-player campaigns, they feature co-op and multiplayer modes for up to 15 people. And, unlike many VR shooters, none of it is on rails. Both games offer full locomotion via the trackpad, or a teleportation system, and players can adjust the way they move through the virtual space to best suit their play styles.

A third VR title, Serious Sam VR: The Last Hope, was unveiled at E3 last year and is currently available via Early Access. Steam is offering all three VR titles bundled together for 25 percent off until April 11th. The team is also working on a sequel, Serious Sam 4, but there’s no word yet on when it’ll be ready or if it’ll also be available in VR.

Source: Croteam

Stream Coachella live on YouTube without the dusty sweatfest

Spring has sprung in the US and that means it’s time for music festival season. Coachella is typically the first major event of the year and the 2017 installment is set to kick off April 14th. Just like previous years, you’ll be able to watch performances live from the comforts of home on YouTube. There will be three channels of music from the festival’s various stages and the handy scheduling tool returns so you don’t miss the artists you really want to see.

New to the Coachella streaming coverage this year is a look inside the underground dance music Yuma tent. While the schedule tool on YouTube will automatically switch the stream when a preselected artist hits the stage, you can also opt-in for browser alerts. You know, just in case you need a secondary reminder. Even if you miss something, there will be on-demand options for highlights from the weekend. If you’re into 360-degree livestreams, select performances will feature a special mode that does just that.

In terms of scheduled acts, Radiohead, Lady Gaga and Kendrick Lamar are the headliners with Dillon Francis, Phantogram, Bon Iver, ScHoolboy Q, Lorde, Future Islands and many more set to perform. You won’t be able to watch every single act on YouTube, but the streaming schedule usually does a good job of including most of the popular choices. When the time comes in a couple of weeks, head over to the Coachella YouTube channel to stream live music starting Friday, April 14th through Sunday, April 16th.

Web pioneer Tim Berners-Lee wins computing’s highest award

World Wide Web pioneer Tim Berners-Lee just chalked up another accolade, and it’s one of his greatest yet. The Association for Computing Machinery has given him the 2016 Turing Award, frequently considered the Nobel Prize of the computing industry. He’s receiving the award not just for inventing the basics of the web, but designing them in an elegant way. His concepts for links (URLs and URIs) were simple and easy to implement, while making HTML the heart of the web helped anyone publish info in a practical format.

The award also pays tribute to Berners-Lee’s efforts in the years after getting the web off the ground. He fostered the early web by distributing open source code, and he shaped groups like the World Wide Web Consortium (the standards body), World Wide Web Foundation (promoting the web as a basic right) and Web Science Trust (which studies the web’s social effects). The web “is what it is today” because of him, according to the ACM, and he’s still involved in supporting it.

The prize isn’t just about the honorifics — Google also offers $1 million. And it’s safe to say that it’s well-earned in this case. While the internet certainly existed before Berners-Lee fired up the first public web server in 1991, it wasn’t until then that it found a simple framework that could catch on with the mainstream. Modern commerce, news and politics almost certainly wouldn’t be the same without him.

Via: TechCrunch

Source: ACM

‘Lego Star Wars’ and more Lucasfilm nostalgia come to PS Now

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story is out on DVD and Blu Ray today, and (perhaps not-so) coincidentally four classic Star Wars video games have joined Sony’s subscription-based streaming service, PlayStation Now. Oh, and there’s some Lego Indiana Jones titles in there too.

If you’re looking for something light and whimsical, you can relive your favorite on-screen moments from the first three Indiana Jones movies and the first six Star Wars films in Lego form. Or, if you prefer something more serious and brooding, you can take on the role of Darth Vader’s secret apprentice, Starkiller, in Star Wars: The Force Unleashed and its sequel.

Here is the full list of games available as of today on PlayStation Now:

• Star Wars: The Force Unleashed – Ultimate Sith Edition
• Star Wars: The Force Unleashed 2
• LEGO Star Wars: The Complete Saga
• LEGO Star Wars 3: The Clone Wars
• LEGO Indiana Jones: The Original Adventures

Source: PlayStation Blog

iPhone 8 Predicted to Start at $850 to $900 for 64GB Model, $950 to $1,000 for 256GB Model

Apple’s widely rumored high-end iPhone with an OLED display is expected to cost upwards of $1,000, but UBS analyst Steven Milunovich believes that a base 64GB model could start at $850 to $900 in the United States. That price point would be similar to Samsung’s new Galaxy S8+, which starts at $840 to $850.

“iPhone X” concept by designer Gabor Balogh
Milunovich said the flagship iPhone could start at under $1,000 as part of Apple’s “mainstream luxury” pricing strategy. He also believes the 5.8-inch device will be competing at a screen size disadvantage compared to the 6.2-inch Galaxy S8+, leading him to predict Apple will adopt similar pricing as Samsung.

Milunovich thinks that a 256GB model could cost between $950 and $1,000, so the iPhone could very well be the first smartphone in the United States to have a four-digit price tag. He also predicted that the tentatively named iPhone 7s and iPhone 7s Plus will start at their usual $649 and $749 prices respectively.

An excerpt from Milunovich’s latest research note obtained by MacRumors:

Contrary to some perceptions, Apple prices quite competitively. Apple likes to position its entry-level products at the mid-market with “Pro/Plus” products close to competitors at the high end. Therefore, we do not think Apple will stray far from the price point of Samsung’s most expensive model at $840-850 and will keep the entry OLED model at $850-900. Apple’s 256GB OLED model could be $950-1,000, but the 256GB 7 Plus already is $970.

The research note cites UBS Asia hardware analyst Arthur Hsieh, who estimates the factory cost of the tentatively named iPhone 8 could be $70 to $90 higher than the iPhone 7 Plus, which starts at $769. Milunovich’s prices appear to be merely predictions, however, and not based on other inside information.

In addition to an edge-to-edge OLED display with narrow bezels, the iPhone 8 is expected to resemble the Galaxy S8 in many ways, including wireless charging, no physical Home button, and potentially 3D facial recognition and/or iris scanning. Touch ID might be embedded in or under the True Tone display.

Milunovich maintains a “buy” rating for AAPL with a $151 price target. AAPL closed at $144.77 on Tuesday.

Related Roundup: iPhone 8 (2017)
Tags: UBS, Steven Milunovich
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The future of a cleaner, cheaper power grid is batteries

On the southern edge of the island of Kauaʻi sits an unsightly diesel power plant. The rust-covered smokestacks (a by-product of being next to the ocean) that emit a mechanical engine drone are a stark contrast to the serene beauty of the rest of the Hawaiian island. For decades this smoke-belching eyesore was the main source of electricity for Kauaʻi. But now it’s being overtaken by renewable sources — one that’s made possible by batteries like those being built by Tesla.

Even advocates of renewable power sources like wind and solar realize that these methods alone, these won’t stop our dependence on fossil fuels like the hilariously overhyped “clean coal.” “What happens when the sun goes down and the wind stops?” might be an annoying question meant to sideline any talk of a clean energy future, but the reality is, it’s a valid one. Plus, there’s another issue; sometimes renewable resources produce too much energy.

The electrical grid is a heavily monitored system, as demand rises or falls power plants are brought online or turned off. Solar and wind stations are becoming a larger part of this incredibly complex system, but due to fluctuations in weather and the rotation of the planet they are tougher to regulate. If a solar farm is generating more power than the grid requires at that moment, that energy is wasted.

Imagine a bucket with multiple hoses feeding off of it. You want to fill the bucket at the same rate it’s dispersing water so it doesn’t overflow. If you don’t keep up, the flow will sputter to some of those hoses, if you fill it too much, it spills over the edge and the liquid is wasted. If there were extra buckets to hold water created by some of the less reliable sources, that would mean there’s an additional source to fill the bucket that’s ready at any time.

Batteries that act as holding pens for electrons are playing increasingly important role on the grid. A utility might decide to deploy all that stored power during peak hours instead of spinning up a “peaker” (a plant that’s sole purpose is to deliver power to the grid when it’s most needed). On Kauaʻi instead of using fossil fuels to keep the lights on at night, a Tesla-built combination solar and battery station is filling in the role of a night-time peaker.

Unlike the diesel eyesore on the south side of the island, Kapaia project — a partnership between Tesla and KIUC’s (Kauaʻi Island Utility Cooperative) — is vast — 45 acres of solar panels situated among rolling green hills. Panels dip and rise with the contour of the land, feeding the energy of the sun to a 53MWh array of Tesla Powerpacks — white boxes filled with batteries. That’s more than double that of Tesla’s battery Powerpack project in California. Those storage units then release that power onto the island’s grid at night. It’s not spewing anything into the air and, other than birds and gusts of wind, it’s quiet. The acres of solar panels don’t completely fit into the landscape, but they aren’t as intrusive as a diesel-burning power plant.

For the residents of Kauaʻi sites like this aren’t just ecologically friendly, the KIUC’s and other utilities on the island claim renewable energy is saving residents money. “Hawaii was the most dependent state in the country on imported fossil fuels.” Hawaiian Governor David Ige told Engadget. “You know even as as as recent as five years back we were still over 90 percent reliant on imported fossil fuel for our electricity generation. We had amongst the highest energy costs in the country. And when imported oil went to $150 a barrel you know it really strained our economy because so much of our money was going out of state to just to purchase oil.”

To move away reliance on foreign oil, the state has an aggressive goal of 100-percent clean energy by 2045. Kauai has gone one step beyond that with it’s own plan to be 70 percent renewable by 2030. But the utility hit a wall in terms of solar generation, “We’ve been a victim of our own success on Kauai and during the daylight hours, prime sunlight hours with all the solar that’s going on we’re hitting 97 as high as 99 percent renewable penetration,” KIUC CEO David Bissell said.

Adding more solar panels wasn’t going to yield anymore benefits as they were hitting power limits when the sun was its most powerful. The utilities’ next step was to add storage to large — and relatively inexpensive — solar arrays and push that electricity back to customers at night instead of firing up diesel turbines. It’s cleaner and cheaper.

More than anywhere else in the United States, the island state needs energy storage solutions like the Tesla station. It doesn’t have access to a larger grid like the mainland. Each island is its one electrical ecosystem. But there’s a lot the mainland can learn from the steps Hawaii is already taking to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, and batteries are an important part of that long-term plan. Frank Wolak, director of the program on energy and sustainable development at Stanford says that in order for renewable resources to get any real traction, there needs to be storage solutions. “That’s really how it will change the grid. It hopefully will enable increasing amounts of intermittent renewable resources to be added to the grid,” Wolak said.

In California, storage stations have been deployed partially because of clean energy mandates (each utility must add 1,325MW of storage to their system by the end of 2020 and have it running by 2024) but also because of demand. The Mira Loma energy station that Southern California Edison spun up in January was built and deployed quickly to alleviate the loss of the Aliso Canyon natural gas storage facility. It wasn’t just deployed quicker than a peaker, it cost less.

It turns out, those peaker plants that only run a few hours during high demand are pricey. “When you think about that, how much are you really paying for a resource that only runs two percent of the year, you know, per unit of energy it’s producing? You’re really just paying it to just sit around for emergency and that is not cheap.” Mike Vespa senior attorney for the Sierra Club said.

The biggest disadvantage of battery stations is their inability to output electricity for more than a few hours. Meanwhile a peaker can run as long as it’s being fed fuel. But like the automotive world, there’s a transitional technology: The GE Hybrid Electric Enhanced Gas Turbine.

GE’s new battery packs are added to existing peakers and enable utilities to get instant power from the turbines. The battery delivers the electricity needed while the turbines spin up to speed. The hybrid system will then charge itself while the gas engine is running and during shutdown. It’s not as clean as a pure battery station, but like a hybrid car, it belches fewer toxins into the air and for utilities, it’s a better value. “The business case is way more solid. The value is higher as compared to a standalone battery,” said Vibhu Kaushik, Southern California Edison’s principal manager, asset management and generation strategy.

As renewable energy sources transition from feel-good-ecological dreams to fiscally responsible reality, large-scale battery packs are going to become more important to our nation’s grid. The islands of Hawaii might be an extreme case, but what we can learn from places like the KIUC could benefit other states.

Tesla for its part is gearing up to meet energy storage demand both on current sites in Hawaii and in California and futures ones. “Everything is integrated. It’s very productize and modular. We can deploy it on a site know very quickly and we don’t have extra systems needed all over the place and we’re at the lowest cost,” Tesla CTO JB Straubel said.

For decades utilities have been playing a real-time game of trying to keep up with our power demands. We’ve been walking a tightrope of making sure the lights stay on while making sure not to produce too much energy and wasting valuable resources. That’s why Kauai’s combination solar farm and storage facility are are so important. It delivers on the promise of a renewable energy future. Batteries are making our transition to renewable energy sources a possibility. It’s a huge evolution from how utilities have delivered electricity, and if done correctly, you’ll never even notice.

Apple promises to redesign neglected Mac Pro for 2018, updates hardware today

Why it matters to you

Anyone holding out for Apple to innovate on the desktop will have to wait a little longer, but they can buy a faster Mac Pro in the short term.

Apple’s Mac Pro line of desktops has by far received the least upgrades in recent years. It’s been over three years since the machines were given even a specification bump, and that’s left many wondering if Apple had any plans to continue making them.

Today, Apple announced that a new Mac Pro is coming someday that should please its most faithful fans. For now, however, those fans will have to settle for a small increase in specifications, as Daring Fireball reports.

More: New Mac desktops are coming and they’re ‘great,’ says Apple CEO Tim Cook

Apple’s Phil Shiller outlined Apple’s general plan regarding the Mac Pro’s complete overhaul:

“With regards to the Mac Pro, we are in the process of what we call ‘completely rethinking the Mac Pro.’ We’re working on it. We have a team working hard on it right now, and we want to architect it so that we can keep it fresh with regular improvements, and we’re committed to making it our highest-end, high-throughput desktop system, designed for our demanding pro customers. As part of doing a new Mac Pro — it is, by definition, a modular system — we will be doing a pro display as well. Now you won’t see any of those products this year; we’re in the process of that. We think it’s really important to create something great for our pro customers who want a Mac Pro modular system, and that’ll take longer than this year to do.”

As Daring Fireball notes, describing a future product isn’t Apple’s preference. Usually, the company works in silence and then introduces new products with great fanfare. And so coming right out and describing what it’s working on is unusual.

In any case, that new modular Mac Pro won’t be arriving in 2017, and Apple was cagey about whether it would arrive in 2018. In the meantime, Mac Pro users waiting for a modern, innovative machine will have to settle in the meantime for the same Mac Pro with slightly upgraded components.

Those upgrades are relatively small. The $3,000 quad-core Mac Pro with dual AMD FirePro D300 GPUs has morphed into a six-core Mac Pro with dual AMD FirePro D500 GPUs. The $4,000 model now has an eight-core processor and dual AMD FirePro D800 GPUs, replacing the model that is now slotted in at the low-end. Both models have 16GB of RAM and neither has USB Type-C or Thunderbolt 3, and neither are yet reflected in the Apple Store configurations.

According to Apple, Mac revenues are split roughly into roughly 80 percent notebooks and 20 percent desktops. So, while desktops aren’t the most significant portion of Mac revenues for the company, they’re not insignificant either. Roughly 30 percent of Apple users use professional software at least weekly — a significant portion of its user base, but not overwhelming.

Nevertheless, this should be good news for anyone who has been waiting and hoping for a Mac Pro refresh. For now, you’ll have to settle for a slightly faster version of the existing model, but Apple hasn’t forgotten that you also want it to innovate in this market as well. You’ll just have to wait a bit longer to see what it comes up with.

This revolutionary material could be the key to self-repairing smartphone screens

Why it matters to you

A major scientific discovery could pave the way for self-healing smartphone screens.

Dropping your phone is a virtual inevitability, and if you live dangerously — i.e., don’t use a case — it can end badly. A nicked, scratched, or shattered smartphone screen usual means a visit to the local repair shop, but scientists at the University of California may have developed a better alternative: A display that can repair itself.

Chemists at UC Riverside have developed material that can repair itself from cuts and scratches. They’ve torn it in half and observed it stitching itself back together in less than 24 hours, and they’ve stretched it to 50 times its original size, only to see it remain functional.

More: Video shows how the LG Flex can repair itself and health from scratching

The secret is a forgiving chemical bond between molecules.

Two bonds exist in materials, Chao Wang, a chemist leading the self-healing materials research, explained to Science Daily: Covalent bonds, which are strong and don’t readily reform once broken; and non-covalent bonds, which are weaker. The hydrogen bonds that connect water fit into the former, non-covalent category — they break and reform constantly, giving water its fluid property.

The polymer that Wang’s team developed is held together by an ion-dipole bond, a force between charged ions and polar molecules. A polar, stretchable polymer and an ionic salt link tightly together — enough to pull the material together when it breaks.

This material is especially well suited to smartphones because it conducts electricity, Wang told Business Insider. Capacitive touchscreens have electrodes underneath that complete a circuit when in contact with conductive material. That’s how phones recognizes taps, touches, and swipes.

More: Self-healing clothes? It could be a possibility thanks to a squid protein

Self-healing smartphone materials aren’t new — the back cover of LG’s G Flex can heal itself from small scratches. But they couldn’t conduct electricity.

Going forward, the researchers hope to improve the material’s properties. They’re testing it in harsh conditions, such as high humidity. “Previous self-healing polymers haven’t worked well in high humidity,” Wang told Science Daily. “Water gets in there and messes things up. It can change the mechanical properties. We are currently tweaking the covalent bonds within the polymer itself to get these materials ready for real-world applications.”

Wang predicts that this new self-healing material will make its way into phone screens and batteries by 2020.

More: Self-healing thread changes from firm to flexible with just a bit of voltage

“Self-healing materials may seem far away for real application, but I believe they will come out very soon with cellphones,” he told Business Insider. “Within three years, more self-healing products will go to market and change our everyday life. It will make our cellphones achieve much better performance than what they can achieve right now.”