Samsung is giving Galaxy S8 owners a free case, SD card and 6 months of Netflix

How can you turn down free stuff?

If you already have a Galaxy S8 or S8+, or plan to buy one before May 16, Samsung is handing you three free perks just for downloading its Shop Samsung app. By downloading the app and registering between May 5 and May 16, Galaxy S8 and S8+ owners get a free Clear View Standing cover, 64GB Samsung SD card and six months of Netflix. That’s nice!

Registration doesn’t open until May 5, but you can download the Shop Samsung app early to be ready for the promotion. While you’re there, as part of the promotion you’ll also have the option to buy AKG wireless over-ear headphones for a discounted price of $49 — another nice perk.

Samsung is obviously hoping to boost the install base of its Shop Samsung app that helps you buy even more Samsung products, but this is a very enticing deal that will only take a few minutes of your time to get some really great things. You already dropped big money on your Galaxy S8 or S8+, so you might as well take advantage of deals like this.

Samsung Galaxy S8 and S8+

• Galaxy S8 and S8+ review!
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• Everything you need to know about the Galaxy S8’s cameras
• Get to know Samsung Bixby
• Join our Galaxy S8 forums

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Twitch’s workshops will teach streamers how to be better hosts

Streaming on Twitch might look easy, but it really isn’t. Between the various technical hoops you have to jump through (oh hi, OBS) and the pressure of people watching your every move — or, on the flip-side, streaming to an audience of zero people — you also need to be entertaining. In that spirit, the next way Twitch is investing in its community is with workshops that aim to help folks get better at hosting and interviewing. It’s a little like what YouTube has done before with its Creator Spaces.

This July, Amazon’s billion dollar baby is inviting “established and aspiring” broadcasters to San Francisco for training and to “help level up the hosting prowess and hireability” for folks on the platform. That last bit is key: Twitch knows that burnout is a problem for streamers who feel the need to broadcast nonstop to grow their following.

By helping its broadcasters hone skills needed to get hired for lucrative hosting gigs, Twitch is addressing burn-out head on while also providing the resources needed to build a career outside of streaming. Other details like exactly when this takes place, how many folks can attend and if they’ll have to pay their own way to San Francisco aren’t available at the moment, but more information will be sent out via the Twitch Studios Twitter account.

Source: Twitch

Badoo, the dating app that has more singles than Tinder

Badoo is totally different now.

If you’re looking for a new dating app or even a new social media app to try, consider Badoo, even if you’ve checked it out before. The app has recently updated and has several new features. Like before, you can use it to find nearby people, but you can also swipe to find matches. Badoo claims to be the biggest dating network in the world, so it’s definitely not something to ignore.

Here’s everything you need to know about Badoo, including how it works and what makes it so unique.

What is Badoo?

Badoo is a dating app and social discovery app in one. You can access it from iOS devices, Android devices, and from desktop browsers. It has over 345 million people worldwide – more users than the entire US population – and lets you find people in 190 countries and in 47 languages. There are people using it in every country, according to Badoo, and the average person already has 40 friends on it.

How does Badoo work?

Once you download Badoo, you’ll be asked to sign create an account (you can sign in with Facebook). It will then walk you through a one-time tutorial, which walks you through the main user interface and standout features. The main user interface, which is what you see whenever you open Badoo, has a navigation bar running along the bottom with four buttons that provide access to four core features:

• Discover who’s nearby (globe icon), Play to Match (cards icon), Message center (chat bubble icon), and Profile (person silhouette icon).

Discover who’s nearby shows you nearby Badoo users. To view a person, just tap their image, and then you will see a short bio, the user’s location, verification details, and more photos if available. You can always tap the filter button in the top right corner of the Discover who’s nearby screen to adjust your preferences for location, the type of gender you want to see, and what age range.

Play to Match is just like Tinder. It’s an area where you can see full-screen photos of people you may be interested in, and if you are, simply swipe to the right on their photo. You can also swipe to the left to reject. To view more photos of a person, swipe from the bottom of the screen. And to view their profile in full, just tap on any of their photos.

Message center is where you can see all your connections. You can message with matches or friends on Badoo from here. All connections are listed on this screen, allowing you to simply scroll from the bottom up to view everyone. If you tap the All Connections button on this screen, you will see submenus chats, visits, likes, and favorites, specifically. If someone adds you as a favorite,

Profile is where you go to adjust your Badoo settings and account info, get verified by linking another social profile you have to your Badoo (such as Facebook or Instagram), and to acquire more credits and super powers (more on these later). Tap the edit button in the top corner to add photos (from your Facebook, Instagram, or camera roll) and your ‘about you’ basic details.

Badoo

Does Badoo cost anything?

Badoo is free to download and use, though you need to pay to unlock premium functions.

Super Powers

However, to unlock premium functions (aka Super Powers), like the ability to see who favorited you, you will need a three-month subscription for $24.99 (or a Lifetime Super Powers pass, which is a one-time payment of $59.99 rather than a subscription plan). There’s also options to buy the subscription by six months, one month, and one week. You can pay by credit card, Google Play (on Android), or PayPal.Seven-day trial

There’s a seven-day trial that gives you free Super Powers, so you can see who liked you, chat with popular users, unlock your favourites folder, change your vote, go icognito, be the first to chat to new users, and get your chats to the top of other users’ Message center.

Credits

You can also pay to rise up and increase your popularity, but it’ll cost you credits. Credits cost $1.50 for 100 and go up to $19.99 for 2,750 credits. Other things you can buy with credits include extra shows when people are swiping, more visits, show you’re online, etc.

Badoo

How does Badoo differ from its competitors?

Badoo isn’t just about swiping.

It aims to gives you choice so you can not only match with but also discover people nearby or in any location (just select the city and you’re there). And because users can verify their Badoo profiles through Facebook, a phone call, or photo verification, you know you’re not going to be cat-fished. Badoo even has 5,000 moderators worldwide who check to ensure people are who they say they are.

‘Blackout’ is a VR love letter to NYC’s subway riders

I heard the familiar “ding dong” of the NYC subway as the doors closed and looked over to the person sitting next to me, and all of a sudden, they were telling me their life story. It was like one of those serendipitous moments of human connection that you dream of when you move to a city — before the crushing reality of daily life makes you more cynical. It also wasn’t real.

I was sitting through Blackout, a VR experience that places you inside a subway car alongside virtual versions of real-life New Yorkers. It was one of the most unique encounters I had at the Tribeca Film Festival last week, and it’s among many examples of how VR storytelling is now aiming a bit deeper.

Developed by the NYC VR studio Scatter, Blackout is meant to shine a light on stories from everyday subway riders. The company used DepthKit, its volumetric capturing technology, to record New Yorkers in three dimensions as they told their tales. Their models were then dropped into a virtual environment, which you explore in a VR headset while walking around a physical subway car replica.

“What we wanted people to feel in Blackout was intimacy and a sense of community with strangers around us,” said Yasmin Elayat, Blackout’s co-director. “The idea would be like This American Life for VR. … In each episode we’re talking a certain meta theme or topic.” In the first episode, Scatter explored the idea of what it means to be American and the idea of otherness, topics that feel particularly relevant in the current political climate.

When I stepped into Blackout, I found myself in an L train heading into Manhattan. After some sort of mechanical issue, the train stalled, giving me time to look around the car. The passengers around me weren’t photorealistic. Instead, they looked like semiabstract digital interpretations of their human counterparts. That’s partially due to the technology involved, and partially it’s an aesthetic choice. It gives Blackout a dreamlike vibe rather than a purely realistic tone. There are also some clear cinematic influences, like Wim Wender’s Wings of Desire.

Each time I focused on a person, she was highlighted with a spotlight and I instantly started hearing her story. There was a child of illegal immigrants, who talked about growing up in Long Island and seeing rising racial tensions over the years. There was a busker who spent his life in the city and belted out a beautiful melody. And there was a Muslim-American woman who worried how people perceive her today.

Blackout was unique among the many VR entries at Tribeca because it was an ongoing project. Scatter was scanning new participants throughout the festival, the idea being that you’d encounter new people every time you went through the experience (like the real New York City subway!). Eventually, Scatter plans to release it for home viewing. Without the massive replica subway car, of course.

Check out the rest of our coverage from Tribeca 2017 here.

All Google needs to update business info is a Street View photo

Google is no stranger to using machine learning to improve its products — or save manatees. To that end, the internet juggernaut has announced that its algorithms are capable of successfully pulling business names and phone numbers from Street View photos. In its tests, the technology was successful at “reading” French street signs over 84 percent of the time. Meaning, now a Street View car can roam the streets of a city and fill in a business’ Google Maps profile automatically. It stems from Google’s work using machine learning and computer vision to blur out faces and license plates.

More directly, it builds on the way that Google has been extracting house numbers for Street View for the past few years. It took a lot of doing, though. Datasets made up of multiple versions of the same signs had to be pored over to make up for visual artifacts and blurring. The algorithms then pieced these images together to extract the names and data from them.

Google says that this has been used to improve the location data for around a third of addresses around the world. Perhaps even on the Skyfall island and in Middle Zealand. If you fancy using Google’s dataset for yourself, the framework is available on GitHub.

Via: VentureBeat

Source: GitHub, arXiv, Google Research

ISIS created its own social network to spread propaganda

Social media has been a main tool for Islamic State militants to spread propaganda and recruit members for years now. But as companies like Twitter and Telegram continue to crack down on ISIS accounts, militants appear to be building their own private social networks to further their communications efforts. European Police Office (Europol) director Rob Wainwright said at a security conference in London that a new network was discovered during a two-day operation against Islamic extremism. According to Reuters, Europol conducted the operation along with the United States, Belgium, Greece, Poland and Portugal; it uncovered more than 2,000 extremist “items” across a total of 52 online networks.

“Within that operation it was revealed IS was now developing its very own social media platform, its own part of the internet to run its agenda,” Wainwright said. He didn’t give much other detail on the network itself, but did note that this new platform appears to be a response to increased attention from established companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter to remove extremist material when possible. “We have certainly made it a lot harder for them to operate in this space but we’re still seeing the publication of these awful videos, communications operating large scale across the Internet,” he said.

This news comes at a time when it seems Twitter at least has had some success at blocking ISIS-related material from its service — last summer, the White House said that ISIS Twitter traffic had dropped 45 percent over the last two years. That news came a few months after it was revealed Twitter itself banned 125,000 ISIS-sympathetic accounts. And in late 2015, messaging app Telegram cracked down on dozens of pro-ISIS chat channels. Facebook, Apple, Dropbox, Microsoft and other big tech companies have also been linked to the online fight against ISIS.

But as long as the group can continue to create its own private networks for disseminating propaganda, it’ll be hard to stop them completely. Wainwright said Europol wasn’t sure how much harder it would be to take down ISIS communications on a private network versus working with established tech companies, but fighting back against online propaganda will continue to remain a big part of the fight against ISIS going forward.

Source: Reuters

Google is still adding basic chat features to Allo

Slowly, Google is bringing its Allo chat app’s basic functionality up to speed with the likes of iMessage and Telegram. The application’s latest update adds the encrypted incognito mode to group chats (previously it was only available in one-on-one conversations). As Droid Life notes, you can even set an expiration timer for when your conversation goes out of incognito mode. Then there are link previews, which many other chat apps have had for awhile now. But hey, having Assistant in your chats from the get-go was impressive, right?

And I’d be remiss for passing over the backup and restore feature for chats, which, as the name suggests, enables you to save and resurface conversations. Now we just have to wait to see if Google will sacrifice Allo in a blood ritual at I/O this month before announcing another chat app. It’s kind of the company’s thing.

Via: Droid Life

Source: Google Play

The last Ringling Bros. circus will be streamed on Facebook Live

The Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus will close this month after more than 100 years in operation, but the curious who haven’t taken in the so-called “greatest show on earth” will get one more chance — regardless of whether they buy a ticket. Ringing Bros. announced today that the final performance will be broadcast over Facebook Live, a decidedly modern move for such a traditional show. The show will also be streamed from the Ringling Bros. homepage, as well.

The performance takes place on Sunday, May 21st at 7PM ET and will be broadcast from the Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum just outside of New York City. The use of Facebook Live over something like YouTube just speaks to how dominant Facebook’s streaming service has become in the last year, even when the company is struggling to stop users from broadcasting horrific events. The final show of a pretty legendary circus is certainly will help Facebook frame its service in a more positive light.

RIngling Bros. announced its touring circus would come to an end this past January due to declining ticket sales and rising production costs. But this isn’t the first time they’ve streamed an event live — the final show involving live elephants. The elephants were a hallmark of the circus for decades, but Ringling Bros. had come under increasing fire from animal rights groups to stop using the animals in performances. This May’s performance won’t feature any elephants, but there’s no doubt it’s still the end of an era.

Source: Ringling Bros.

Roku’s Twitter channel brings livestreams to your living room

Twitter just announced a slew of new live content earlier this week and now Roku is giving its users a way to watch it all in their living room. The set-top box company revealed today a dedicated channel for all of Twitter’s live video on its range of streaming devices. This means that you’ll be able to follow along just like you would on any other Roku channel rather than through Twitter on mobile or the desktop.

Of course, this means Roku owners now have the option to watch live coverage of sports, news, politics and more from their sofa and on the biggest screen in their house. Twitter’s live video partners include Bloomberg, BuzzFeed, NBA, MLB, Live Nation and many more so there’s a range of stuff to choose from. And that includes an upcoming 24-hour news option. In addition to streaming the live content, the Roku channel will also feature a Twitter timeline to keep you up to speed on the conversation surrounding whatever you’re watching.

While the new channel will certainly come in handy, Roku is somewhat late to bring a dedicated option to its range of hardware. Apps for Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV and Xbox One added live Twitter streams to those devices back in September while Android TV tacked on the social network’s content in November.

Live Twitter video on Roku is available to all owners of a current-gen streaming device today via the Roku Channel Store. What’s more, you don’t need a Twitter account to watch, so anyone with the proper gear can tune in.

Facebook begins selling low-cost WiFi in India

Facebook’s internet.org is on a mission to bring connectivity to the most remote communities on Earth. And while moonshot projects like Aquila are still in early development, the company is pushing forward with a different strategy: empowering local entrepreneurs to resell internet hotspots through its Express WiFi program, which just officially launched in partnership with Indian telecom Bharti Airtel.

Unlike the company’s failed “Free Basics” program, which enabled users to visit Facebook websites for free and was struck down by Indian courts for violating net neutrality, Express WiFi costs money. Just, not a whole lot of it.

“Our strategy has always been that these programs work if they are financially sustainable for the partners we work with,” James Beldock, Facebook’s product manager for Express Wi-Fi, told TechCrunch. “Facebook’s strategy is to enable partners to make connectivity at scale sustainable, not to dictate pricing.”

For Express WiFi, Facebook partnered with 500 local businesses in four Indian states — Uttarakhand, Gujarat, Rajasthan, and Meghalaya — and have initially rolled out 700 hotspots with 20,000 more to activate in the coming months. These retailers will be able to sell hotspot access at a reasonable rate that they and the ISP decide, not Facebook. The plans will range from around Rs. 10 ($0.15) for 100MB of data to Rs 300 (~$5) for 20 GB of data, per day.

“Express Wi-Fi is designed to complement mobile data offerings by providing a low-cost, high bandwidth alternative for getting online and access apps, download and stream content,” Munish Seth, Facebook’s head of connectivity solutions for Asia-Pacific, said in a statement. Facebook is already operating this service in Kenya and is trialling it in Tanzania, Nigeria and Indonesia.

Given that 184 million Facebook users (9 percent of the network’s entire base) reside in India, there’s little mystery why the company is working so diligently to develop that market. But Facebook isn’t the only one trying to make inroads in India. Google has been pushing its services as well, installing free WiFi in 400 railway stations and offering an offline YouTube app.

Source: Internet.org