Twitch rolls out subscriptions for Affiliate streamers

Twitch Partners get a lot of perks, including extra emotes, 60 days of past broadcast storage, financial support and the ability for fans to subscribe to their channels for $5, $10 or $25 per month. Starting this week, Twitch Affiliates — streamers who make money on the site but aren’t yet Partnered — will also be able to collect monthly dues from their most dedicated viewers. Affiliate streamers will have the option to offer subscriptions at all three tiers, alongside one custom emote per payment level.

Twitch Affiliates are generally working toward becoming Partners, an exclusive club of the world’s most popular career streamers. Of the more than 2 million active streamers on Twitch, only 17,000 are in the Partner program. On the other hand, the bar to enter the Affiliate program is set purposefully low: To get in, streamers need just 50 followers, and over the past month, an average of three concurrent viewers, seven unique live days and 500 total minutes broadcast.

When Twitch launched the Affiliate path in April, it immediately allowed qualified streamers to start earning money via Cheering, a proprietary in-chat tipping system, and it later allowed Affiliates to make money from games sold directly on their pages. Previously, these options were only for Partners. The Affiliate program is designed to keep Twitch’s “middle class” satisfied (and streaming), potentially avoiding a situation like the one on YouTube, where the financial gap between A- and B-list streamers has been historically extreme.

Samsung will reportedly release Note 7 ‘fandom’ edition soon

Samsung continues to deal with the fallout from its exploding Note 7 devices. The company has been sued for the problem, and has issued short-term fixes, apologies and a hurried recall to try and contain the damage to its brand. Apparently it’s working, as the Galaxy S8 has gotten a record number of pre-orders despite the issues of its predecessor. Now Samsung is looking to sweeten Note 7 lovers up with the Galaxy Note 7 “Fandom Edition.” According to the Wall Street Journal, this FE model will be a refurbished Note 7 with upgraded components.

Refurbished Note 7s have been in the works for a while, but this is the first word of an actual program. A limited run of the FE devices will be available to consumers in South Korea at first. According to the Wall Street Journal‘s sources, Samsung is expected to release up to 400,000 FE devices across the three major telecom providers in the country. The sources also say that a small inventory will be released outside of South Korea in the near future. We’ve reached out to Samsung for comment on the matter, and will update this post if we hear back.

Via: The Verge

Source: Wall Street Journal

NYU lands New York City’s ambitious VR/AR hub

New York City is diving into VR in a big way with the launch of a virtual/alternate reality hub at NYU’s Tandon School of Engineering. It’ll serve to nurture companies and projects relying on the new technologies, with the hopes of cementing NYC as a place where AR/VR can thrive. The hub will be backed by $6 million in funding from the Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment, as well as NYC’s Economic Development Corporation. The city also claims that the NYU lab will also be the first publicly funded VR/AR hub in the country.

While several institutions were in the running to host the hub, NYU won out because it’s already home to plenty of VR projects. CUNY’s Lehman College in the Bronx will also host a workforce development center to support the lab. City representatives had some lofty visions for where the VR and AR market is headed — several brought up Citi Global’s estimate that it could be worth $2 trillion within 10 years. The Mayor’s Office also expects the hub to generate 500 jobs within the next decade.

At a launch event today, there was plenty of excitement about the hub and NYC’s increasing focusing on mixed reality projects. But there’s also still plenty of work left to do before the city’s vision becomes a reality. While it’s going to take up an impressive 15,000 square feet at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, the city hasn’t decided on a final location yet. And it’s unclear if AR and VR companies outside of NYC will be tempted by the hub’s promise of business development help, low rents and local connections to other industries.

Based on the projects already tied to NYU though, there’s plenty of potential for the hub to make a mark in the mixed reality world. Mediviz, for example, is using HoloLens to help doctors and medical students learn about human anatomy. It’s also working on technology that can turn 2D CAT scans into fully explorable 3D renders. MOOR, meanwhile, is a project that helps artists create AR galleries of their 2D art. NYU Tandon also sent out Google Cardboard VR headsets to its 2020 class, along with a short VR experience that lets them explore the surface of Mars.

Source: NYU

‘Crackdown 3’ lives in the shadow cast by ‘Agents of Mayhem’

Microsoft’s biggest hurdle with Crackdown 3 isn’t its rumored troubled development cycle, it’s that Agents of Mayhem exists and is coming out first. Both share a similar premise: You’re a superpowered human given free reign over a cartoony open world. There are plenty of physics-based shenanigans that result from shooting harpoon rifles at snipers and black hole guns at gang members in both, and each has a familiar structure of taking out a crime syndicate from the bottom up.

The difference lies in the execution: There are a lot of cooks working on Crackdown 3 — some brand new to the franchise — while Mayhem’s team is a group of seasoned open-world veterans.

Crackdown 3 is being developed by two studios. Dave Jones (who steered the ship on the first game) and his team at Reagent Games are handling multiplayer while Sumo Digital is shepherding work on the campaign mode. The latter has existed as a gun for hire since 2004, working primarily on racing games, with projects like Little Big Planet 3 and the now defunct Xbox Fitness sprinkled in here and there.

I wasn’t able to speak with anyone from Sumo at Microsoft’s showcase event during E3, but Clint Bundrick, the game’s design director at Microsoft, excitedly told me how Sumo was playing to its strengths and would be focusing heavily on the driving skill. He said that in the original Crackdown it felt like a forgotten part of the four core gameplay tenets: parkour, melee attacks, explosives and driving.

He wasn’t wrong. Driving was the last thing I focused on after finding all the agility orbs I could a decade ago. But once I maxed the driving skill, my Agency Supercar basically became the Batmobile from Batman: The Animated Series, with chain guns tucked into the fenders and a wedgelike front bumper that sent cars flying when I rammed them head on. It was awesome, and I wish I’d worked on beefing up the skill earlier.

“We push way beyond that,” Bundrick told Engadget. “The transforming we really wanted to double down on. We want to make people feel like that was an extension of their arsenal, that it gave them more toys and more tools.” Considering Sumo’s resume, it makes sense for the studio to focus on the driving element.

I just wish I could’ve experienced some of it; the restricted section of the game map I saw didn’t allow for any sort of driving at all. Bundrick teased a future reveal for that, so it’s safe to expect evidence of it at the next big trade show: Germany’s Gamescom in August.

What I played of Crackdown 3 thematically felt a lot like Saint’s Row IV: a missed attempt at recreating something another studio had already done. The basics were in place, but there wasn’t much new to see beyond that. Instead, I was trapped in a claustrophobic section of a new setting, Pacific City, as part of an offline, single-player “skills for kills” mini game.

Sumo Digital

The goal was to off as many faceless enemies as possible in a smallish area in 10 minutes, using weapon drops, explosive red barrels and whatever else I could find. Of course, there were a few tall buildings to scale and agility orbs to collect, so I could jump higher and across bigger distances, but given the short nature of the demo and cozy play space, it didn’t actually feel like I was progressing. Bundrick empathized and said that the full game will be much more of the sandbox players are familiar with.

What I adored about the original was also missing. The demo felt constricted and like I was fighting the floaty physics and weapon targeting as much as the cel-shaded enemies. New bits like being able to double jump or midair dash seemed haphazardly shoehorned in to a decade-old framework.

That’s to say nothing of how light the agent I played as felt. In the original, your cypher had a believable sense of weight and presence in the world. That wasn’t the case here, and when I asked Bundrick about this, his answer didn’t inspire a lot of hope. He said that the game was still in development and that what I’d played was a pre-alpha build. He mentioned that at its heart, Crackdown is a 3D platformer (think: Assassin’s Creed II) and this installment still needs to feel like one. Conveying a sense of weight is difficult but vital for success in the genre, he explained.

Make the hero too heavy and you wind up with an avatar that feels unresponsive. Too light and the character feels incredibly twitchy, like the agent did during my demo.

This is our wheelhouse, right? We know open-world games.

Kate Nelson, Deep Silver Volition

“A lot of the games do both of those well, and Crackdown is a game where you want to feel meaty, you want to feel physical; you want to feel heavy,” he said. “But you’re also kind of a bionic flea jumping through the air and doing all this crazy stuff. So it’s all those tiny details and you continue to work on those all the way throughout.”

Yes, this was a very early build of the game, but there was no evidence of something as fundamental as player animation being a focus or that the work Bundrick described was a priority — especially considering that he compared agents to being bionic fleas. There’s every chance that what I played was a bad or old demo. Those sort of things happen, but Bundrick’s response was more than a little concerning for a game that’s in the final stages of development ahead of its Nov. 7th street date. For now, I’m cautious, having been burned before.

As it stands, the brief portion I played felt like a kid awkwardly slipping into her parents’ clothes, trying to pass for her mom. The closest thing Sumo has made to this type of open-world game was the Colorado level of last year’s Hitman reboot. It showed.

Meaning, while Sumo has to work just to get the basics of its 10-year-old predecessor established (we’re not going to talk about 2010’s awful Crackdown 2 from Ruffian Games), Deep Silver Volition can build on the foundation of 2013’s flawed Saint’s Row IV. The Illinois-based team has been making open-world games exclusively since 2006’s Saint’s Row for the Xbox 360, and its confidence was tangible everywhere I looked.

“This is our wheelhouse, right?” producer Kate Nelson asked during my Mayhem demo at E3. “We know open-world games.”

Saint’s Row IV experimented with the Crackdown formula of collecting power-ups around a perpetually nighttime city to upgrade things like your avatar’s flying power. But unlike Crackdown, advancing those less-than-thrilling skills didn’t happen in real time; they were basically experience points you used to manually upgrade a set of abilities. It was a far cry from the instant gratification of suddenly being able to jump higher or seeing the cab of a semitruck transform into a nitrous-powered battering ram once you got behind the wheel.

Those still exist in Mayhem, but the powers you boost with them are so over the top that maybe the upgrade system won’t be as annoying. Specifically, the Saint’s Row spin-off adds Bayhem-esque abilities and super attacks (e.g., Ball Pit, which encases enemies in giant bouncy balls and sends them flying into the air). That’s on top of a massive city to explore and an authored narrative dripping with Volition’s trademark charm and wit.

Cutscenes are fully voice-acted, and there’s constant chatter among you, your two asymmetrically skilled squad mates and agents back at home base. One of the missions has an internet-porn-obsessed Justin Bieber stand-in to investigate and then eliminate, for instance.

That’s not to say there weren’t issues here and there. Double jumping over elevated ledges didn’t work 100 percent of the time, there were tons of menus to sift through to pick my various powers and abilities, and the targeting system wasn’t as tight as I’d have liked. With how well everything else performed, though, I’m hopeful these can be addressed by the game’s ship date on Aug. 15th.

Deep Silver Volition

What’s more, during my half-hour gameplay session, it felt like I was peeling back another layer of the game’s mechanics every few minutes, with even more to find hidden around the next corner (or an in-game moped). It’s dumb fun but with a surprising amount of depth.

Given Volition’s legacy, though, maybe the level of depth and personality shouldn’t have caught me off guard. After all, this is the studio that beat Rockstar Games at its own, err, game with Saint’s Row: The Third by embracing the absurdity of the medium, versus the way Grand Theft Auto IV buried the lede behind hours of exposition and countless gameplay tutorials.

Mayhem doesn’t suffer from Crackdown’s forced “extreme” personality either. Its tone is earnest, and its laughs are well-earned. Characters felt distinct from one another in terms of abilities, personality and weight too. Nelson attributes the latter to the combat and animation teams sitting side by side. It’s the type of thing that ensures the two disciplines exist in concert so you always feels like a superhuman whether you’re running and gunning or doing a belly flop from the top of a building.

This was Mayhem’s second E3, though, and last year’s demo was as controlled as Crackdown 3’s was this year. A few minor polish issues aside, however, and it’s shaping up to be one of the zaniest and deepest games of 2017. I may have sworn and screamed when Terry Crews appeared during Microsoft’s keynote to introduce Crackdown 3, but that excitement waned when stuttering gameplay appeared on-screen 30 seconds later. Now I’m screaming and swearing for an entirely different reason — because I have to wait two months until I can play Agents of Mayhem again.

AMD and NVIDIA go after Bitcoin miners with new video cards

Dedicated digital currency miners know the importance of good graphics cards — modern GPUs have enough general-purpose computing power to process money formats like Bitcoin much faster than a CPU alone. They’ve never really been suited for non-stop number crunching, though, and it looks like both AMD and NVIDIA hope to change that. CNBC has discovered that ASUS is making currency mining-oriented video cards using both vendors’ chipsets. The AMD-based Mining RX 470 and NVIDIA-based Mining P106 are ultimately using off-the-shelf GPUs (the RX 470 and GTX 1060 respectively), but are fine-tuned for running around the clock.

The two boards use special dual ball bearing fans that are smoother-running and more dust-resistant. You won’t have to worry so much about your card dying after running 24/7 for months on end. ASUS isn’t making any further optimization claims about the RX 470 variant (the tuner software is the same as for its regular cards), but it claims that the P106 is up to 36 percent faster than an unoptimized card at churning through cryptocurrency hashes.

Neither AMD nor NVIDIA is confirming the cards, including whether or not companies beyond ASUS will be selling mining-optimized models. A CNBC source is backing the existence of the NVIDIA board, though, and AMD would be a logical fit when it recently credited the “resurgent” digital currency market for a jump in GPU sales. And there’s clearly a strong incentive for the companies to hop aboard the mining bandwagon. It gives them a customer base full of frequent upgraders, of course, but it also reduces the chances that avid miners will cut into GPU shipments intended for gamers.

Via: CNBC

Source: ASUS (AMD), (NVIDIA)

Videos are the latest way to seduce people on your dating app

The dating app Hinge has just added a video option to its users’ profiles. Now, any of a user’s six profile photos can be swapped for a video that will autoplay whenever someone scrolls through their profile. The videos can be uploaded from Instagram, Facebook or a phone’s camera roll.

Hinge isn’t the first dating app to start working on a video feature. Bumble announced earlier this year that it would be adding Snapchat-like video stories that disappear after 24 hours and Match is also developing a video option that allows for stitched-together videos, photos and voiceover. Neither of those dating services have rolled those features out yet, but Badoo introduced video to its app last year. Other popular apps like Tinder, Happn and OkCupid haven’t announced any plans to add video. However, Tinder bought the video messaging app Wheel in February, so its video feature probably isn’t too far away.

Hinge’s feature is limited to existing videos, meaning you can’t shoot a new one directly in the app. But there doesn’t seem to be a time limit for uploaded videos. The video feature launches today on the updated app.

ESA’s new plan for cleaning space debris uses a magnetic space tug

Why it matters to you

Without a solution to remove derelict satellites, space travel may become hobbled in the future.

Scientists convened in Germany in April for the seventh annual European Conference on Space Debris to discuss ways to address the millions of pieces of junk orbiting our planet. At the top of the list was concern that the problem is getting exponentially worse — in under a quarter century, the amount of space debris large enough to destroy a spacecraft more than doubled, according to experts.

There are now more than 100 million pieces of space junk orbiting Earth, 29,000 of which are big enough to cause major damage. The cloud is made up of retired satellites, metal expelled from rockets, and abandoned equipment.

Equally worrying is the lack of a proven and reliable plan to clean up all this debris. A handful of proposals have been made — from the European Space Agency’s (ESA) plan to shoot large nets at derelict satellites to the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency’s (JAXA) comparatively simple plan to magnetically pull debris out of orbit using an electromagnetic cable.

Philippe Ogaki

Unfortunately, JAXA’s mission failed in February. “We believe the tether did not get released,” leading researcher Koichi Inoue told the Agence France-Presse. “It is certainly disappointing that we ended the mission without completing one of the main objectives.”

Nonetheless, ESA hasn’t abandoned the idea of using magnetic attraction and is now looking into this method for both debris removal and to keep swarms of satellites in close formation.

The new project is lead by researchers at the University of Toulouse in France.

“With a satellite you want to de-orbit, it’s much better if you can stay at a safe distance, without needing to come into direct contact and risking damage to both chaser and target satellites,” Emilien Fabacher, a researcher from Institut Supérieur de l’Aéronautique et de l’Espace, said in a statement. “So the idea I’m investigating is to apply magnetic forces either to attract or repel the target satellite, to shift its orbit or de-orbit it entirely.”

The chaser satellite’s magnetic field would be created by cooling superconducting wires to cryogenic temperatures.

As satellites are already equipped with electromagnets, the method wouldn’t require any additional changes to the derelict satellites. Fabacher’s chaser satellites would also be able to attract and position multiple satellites in a desired formation, according to Finn Ankersen, an ESA expert in rendezvous, docking, and formation flight.

Amazon’s Prime Exclusive Phones program offers steep discounts

Why it matters to you

If you don’t mind putting up with ads on your lockscreen, Amazon’s Prime Exclusive Phones program offers discounts that are hard to refuse.

Amazon’s Prime Exclusive Phones program is a real steal — with a catch. If you’re a member of the retailer’s $100-a-year Prime program and agree to let Amazon stick advertisements on your smartphone’s lockscreen, you can nab a device for a discount. Now, just about a year after the Prime Phones’ launch, Amazon is adding five new devices to the bargain bin lineup: The Nokia 6, the Alcatel Idol 5S, the Alcatel A50, the Alcatel A30 Plus, and the Motorola Moto.

The discounts are nothing to shake a stick at. Here’s what is heading to Amazon Prime Exclusive Phones this month:

• The Nokia 6, HMD Global’s new Nokia-branded smartphone, will go on sale for $180 ($50 off the full retail price). It features a polished aluminum design and a 5.5-inch Full HD IPS display, rounded out by a Snapdragon Qualcomm processor (paired with 3GB of RAM and 32GB of internal storage), a 16MP rear camera and 8MP front camera, dual Dolby Atmos speakers, and a fingerprint sensor. It’s compatible with AT&T and T-Mobile.
• Alcatel’s IDOL 5S, normally $280, will retail for $200 — the largest discount ever offered for a Prime Exclusive Phone. It packs a 2.5D curved glass design, a 5.2-inch Full HD display, a 12MP rear camera and 8MP front camera, a fingerprint sensor, and 32GB of internal storage (expandable up to 256GB via microSD card).
• Alcatel’s A50, normally $150, will hit Prime Exclusive Phones for $100. It boasts a 5.2-inch HD display, a 13MP rear camera and 5MP front camera, 2GB of RAM, and 16GB of internal storage. Uniquely, the A50 ships bundled with the LightUp Snapbak LED cover, a light-up case that illuminates when calls, messages, e-mails, and more come in.
• Alcatel’s A30 Plus will be available for $80 for Prime members ($50 off the full retail price). It features a metallic silver finish and a 5.5-inch HD display, plus a 13MP rear camera and 5MP front camera, 2GB of RAM and 16GB of internal memory (up to 32GB via MicroSD card), and a 3,000mAh battery. It’s compatible with AT&T and T-Mobile, with support for Verizon to come after an update this summer.
• Motorola’s recently announced Moto E4 will be offered at $100 for Prime members ($30 off the full retail price). It’s got a compact metal design, a 5-inch 720p HD display, a respectable pair of cameras (8MP rear and 5MP front), a fingerprint sensor and 2,800mAh battery, and 2GB of RAM paired with 16GB of internal storage. It works with AT&T, T-Mobile, Sprint, and Verizon.

A word of warning before you pull the trigger, though: You’ll have to acquiesce to Amazon’s advertisements. The retailer reserves the right to put “personalized” offers and ads — including deals and product recommendations — on Prime Exclusive Phones’ lockscreens.

That said, Amazon’s devices aren’t without little conveniences. They ship automatically signed into Amazon’s services an apps, including (but not limited to) Prime Video, Prime Music, Amazon’s cloud storage service Prime Photos, and e-book lending program Prime Reading. And they come with Prime’s other benefits, including one free e-book every month, two-day shipping on 50 million items, one-day shipping and same-day shipping in more than 5,000 cities and towns, and more.

It’s not exactly surprising, then, that Prime Exclusive Phones have been a resounding success. According to Amazon, the discounted devices have been “constantly featured” in the top 5 best-selling unlocked phones list on Amazon and among the “top rated” unlocked smartphones on Amazon.com.

Moshi’s Sensecover iPhone 7 case review

When it comes to choosing a case for your iPhone, most options don’t offer much in the way of covering the screen. Ones that have built-in screen protectors like Otterbox and Lifeproof cases are often bulky and austere-looking, but a flip-open folio case provides all-around protection for your phone that is both stylish and functional. Our Moshi Sensecover review puts the clever case through its paces.

The Sensecover’s exterior is wrapped in a fiber-textured nylon that looks smooth, sleek, and modern. That extra bit of texture makes the case a little less slippery by providing some grip for your fingers. The metal accent on the side, with Moshi’s logo, isn’t just decorative — it helps keep the cover closed via a magnet.

While most folio cases require you to flip open the protective cover to to answer calls and check the time, the Sensecover has two key features that makes this unnecessary. The first is a clear window in the front of the case that displays the time, date, and caller information when you receive an incoming call. The second is a thin touch-sensitive metal bar that sits right over the call answer stripe that allows you to swipe-to-answer calls and tap the center to hang up. In practice, the window was as convenient for checking the time as any cover-less slim case; just pull your phone out of your pocket or bag, take a quick glance, and drop it back in. The swipe bar also worked well for answering calls and ending them, though the action has to be deliberate and with slightly more pressure than if you were touching the naked screen.

The microfiber lined interior gently pads your iPhone’s screen from rubbing against the cover.

As with many of Moshi’s cases, the Sensecover is military-grade drop-tested and certified to resist damage from falls several feet high, and the inner TPU shell adds shock absorption and side impact resistance making it a suitable everyday case. Inside, the microfiber lined interior gently pads your iPhone’s screen from rubbing against the cover though isn’t present where the touch strip is located, so it’s a good idea to install the included plastic film screen protector to fend off scratches to the glass from that element.

For those of you that like to show off the branding, there’s a cutout for the Apple logo, and the camera worked flawlessly without noticeable impact to the image quality. Precision cutouts for the Lightning port, speakers, and mute switch keep exposure to dust and dirt to a minimum, while still being generous enough to allow full access to these features. We found the sleep and volume buttons worked well through the case even with the cover closed, though we did have to press slightly harder than normal. The back cover even folds in half for you to use as a stand for viewing video hands-free in landscape.

Moshi manages to pack all these features into a relatively slim case that functions as great as it looks. The Sensecover is available in white, pink, or black, and retails for $45 for the iPhone 7 and $50 for the iPhone 7 Plus, although we spotted it recently for less on MobileFun.com.

Memory card brand Lexar is shutting down as parent company refocuses

Why it matters to you

Lexar memory cards and USB drives won’t be on the market, unless another company decides to buy the discontinued brand.

The future of a popular memory card brand isn’t so looking good. On Monday, parent company Micron announced the decision to discontinue the Lexar brand, which includes memory cards, USB flash drives, card readers, and storage drives. While Micron is discontinuing the Lexar brand, it is also “exploring opportunities to sell all or part of the Lexar business,” according to the announcement.

Jay Hawkins, Micron’s vice president for the consumer products group, said the decision reflects the company’s focus on markets and channels with higher value. According to the company, Micron has the broadest memory solutions portfolio in the industry and is one of the largest memory manufacturers in the world. Along with memory cards, the semiconductor company also develops a variety of computer and mobile memory systems, as well as solid-state storage hard drives.

“I’d like to thank our team members and partners for their contributions to the Lexar business. As difficult as this decision is, the company is making this adjustment in its business to ensure it continues to be well-positioned for the future,” Hawkins wrote.

According to the latest financial reports for the second quarter of the 2017 fiscal year, Micron reported revenues that were 17 percent higher than the first quarter and 58 percent higher than the same time period last year. The growth, however, was largely attributed to a growing demand for NAND and DRAM memory. At the end of 2016, the company reported growth in computing and networking and mobile, as well as seeing record sales for automative as more vehicles incorporate tech that requires embedded memory.

The report for the end of 2016 indicated that memory cards, USB, and other consumer components made up about half of the company’s income categorized as trade nonvolatile, which was 31 percent of the company’s total revenue. In the second quarter of 2017, that number dropped to 40 percent.

The Lexar brand has been around for over 20 years, producing a variety of both budget and high-speed memory cards, along with USB drives and card readers. While brand loyalty isn’t as dominant in memory cards as other photo gear, Lexar is one of the more well-known names in the category alongside SanDisk.

While Lexar may yet be picked up by another company, Micron says they will also continue to offer support to current customers.