T-Mobile customers can get $4 tickets to five movies this year

The promotion starts January 23 and will be available through Atom Tickets.

Going to the movies is always something I enjoy doing, but one of the not-so-great aspects of doing so are the high ticket prices. The folks at T-Mobile apparently feel the same way, as the Un-Carrier has announced a new partnership with Twentieth Century Fox in which its customers will be able to buy movie tickets for just $4 each.

This deal starts on January 23, and it’ll be available for five of 2018’s hottest movies, including Maze Runner: The Death Cure, Red Sparrow, Deadpool 2, Atalia: Battle Angel, and Dark Phoenix.

T-Mobile customers will redeem their $4 ticket within the T-Mobile Tuesdays app and then purchase it through Atom Tickets.

In addition to this, T-Mobile will also be running various movie-themed contests so you can have a shot at winning trips to premiers, early movie screenings, and other “VIP experiences.”

Best T-Mobile Deals of January 2018

How to use your desktop in VR

You can use your entire desktop in VR.

The scene from the movie Minority Report in which Tom Cruise’s character, John Anderton, is moving virtual screens around with his hands is imprinted in the minds of techies everywhere. How cool would it be to have a bunch of movable screens surrounding you? You’d be able to enlarge, shrink, and rotate to your heart’s content…

Having your desktop surround you is an option within VR, whether you’re using third-party apps or a feature baked right into the platform’s software. Let’s take a look at the best options when it comes to using your desktop in VR.

HTC Vive

When using SteamVR with the HTC Vive, there’s an overlay menu that contains an option to see your desktop. It’s big, it’s clear, but it’s not customizable like you’d find with the Oculus Desktop or Cliff House.

You can’t create multiple windows and they won’t follow you around, and since you’re in a sort of overlay, you can’t really do anything else while viewing your desktop. While you can use your Vive wands, you can also use your mouse and keyboard when viewing your desktop.

See at Amazon

Windows Mixed Reality

When you first jump into Windows Mixed Reality (WMR), you’ll find yourself in the Cliff House, which serves as a customizable, familiar area in which you can hang out. Cliff House lets you pull apps from a Start menu and place their icons or windows around the area, allowing you to jump into different activities quickly and easily.

Along with apps, you can also place desktop windows pretty much anywhere and at any size. Whether you want to have a bunch of windows placed strategically around your place, or a tight cluster of windows to run all of your apps, you can set up a sizable workstation without much effort. A built-in keyboard is available for use with your motion controllers, but you can also use your keyboard and mouse.

Keep in mind that only one official desktop window can be used at one time, with any others going into a suspended state.

See at Microsoft Store

Oculus Rift

The enormous Rift Core 2.0 update is still in the Public Test Channel through the Oculus app, but it’s brought many great changes to the platform. One of the biggest is Oculus Desktop, which lets you create multiple windows no matter where you are within VR.

All you have to do is open the Dash, choose to place a desktop window, and you’re set. Not only can you create the main desktop with relative ease, you can also pull individual windows apart to create their own “screens.” This way, you can create a workstation with multiple displays surrounding you. You can set these displays to stay where they are, or you can tell them to follow you around as you navigate other experiences and games.

There is a built-in keyboard available that you can virtually type on using your Touch controllers, but your standard physical keyboard is available for when you need to get down to business.

See at Amazon

Third-party apps for desktop in VR

There are several third-party apps that let you use your desktop in VR.

Bigscreen

Bigscreen lets you host a small-scale LAN party from the penthouse of a skyscraper. Sit together — from the comfort of your own VR space — while you game against each other. No screen peeking!

Did one of your friends get ahold of a recently released movie? Watch it together on a theater-sized screen (you can make the screen any size you want, up to a certain enormous point) while you sit in a posh living room. Because of the nature of Bigscreen, only one person needs to have the media on their computer, but keep in mind that when it comes to gaming, each person needs a copy of the game to play together.

Move around the penthouse, from the kitchen to the living room to the patio, to find a space you like, or sit together on a couch and watch the lights of the city twinkle below. Your friends appear as disembodied heads that project voices in 3D space.
If you want to experience a virtual LAN or posh meeting place for you and your friends, definitely check out this free app. Bigscreen is in beta development and is compatible with WMR, Oculus Rift, and HTC Vive.

See at Steam
See at Oculus
See at Microsoft

Virtual Desktop

Virtual Desktop (about $15) essentially lets you live inside your PC. There are a ton of 360-degree desktop environments you can download for free, and you can even design and implement your own 360-degree desktop environment. Sit under the sea, float around in space, or work from the top of the Empire State Building. Limitations here are based on what you can or cannot think up.

Virtual Desktop’s UI is streamlined and very easy to use. Drag and drop most files and they’ll begin to play immediately. You won’t spend your time fooling around trying to get things to work.

You can use voice commands to launch games and other apps, and if you love listening to music, there’s a built-in music visualizer — thanks to MilkDrop — that will melt your brain. Put on some Pink Floyd or Beatles and see what they were seeing when they wrote their music.

Make your screen as big or as small as you want, and curve it to an angle that’s suitable for your vision. Text remains legible no matter how you orient your screen and if you have a multi-monitor setup, you’ll be able to see each monitor within Virtual Desktop.

Use any video player you want to watch movies — the screen snaps up to where it’s supposed to be. Watch 3D videos (side-by-side format) inside Virtual Desktop as though you have a 3D TV, and, of course, play all of your games on an enormous screen. Diablo 3 and Rocket League look fantastic; going back to a regular display will be tough.

See at Steam
See at Oculus

Your desktop

Do you plan on moving your desktop to virtual reality? Have you already moved on from the 2D plane? Which platform or app are you using? Let us know!

Updated January 15, 2018: This article has been refreshed to ensure you’re still getting the best ways to use your desktop in VR.

Twitter faces trademark infringement lawsuit from podcast network

TWiT, aka This Week in Tech, is suing Twitter. The well-known tech netcast says Twitter has broken a number of written and oral agreements and is infringing on its trademark. The two companies started up around the same time in the mid-2000s, with Twitter co-founder Evan Williams telling TWiT’s Leo Laporte that Twitter was simply a “text-based microblogging service”. The two informally agreed that, despite the similarities in their names, their platforms were fundamentally different and were happy to co-exist on the condition, the lawsuit alleges, of “each company continuing its own unique distribution platform.” As far as TWiT is concerned, that’s no longer the case.

According to the lawsuit, in 2009 Laporte became concerned that Twitter was going to develop audio and visual content that could challenge TWiT’s. Williams allegedly then told Laporte “we’re not expanding to audio or visual under the Twitter brand.” But fast forward to May 2017, and Twitter announces its plans to basically do exactly that, delivering original, premium video content exclusively from its platform.

TWiT’s attorneys have since ordered Twitter to stop expanding on its trademark. “Since that time, the parties have engaged in communications with the goal of informally resolving this dispute,” the lawsuit states. “These efforts have not resolved the dispute, and Twitter continues its expansion into TWiT’s business in breach of its agreement with Plaintiffs, refuting its representations and promises made, and infringing on Plaintiffs’ intellectual property rights, all to Plaintiffs’ injury.” Engadget has reached out to TWiT and Twitter for comment.

Via: Techcrunch

Source: Scribd

YouTube taps Kevin Durant for more sports-focused video

Kevin Durant’s YouTube channel is extremely popular; it’s a place his fans can go to learn more about the basketball star through fan Q&As and take a peek inside his workout sessions. That’s why it’s not a huge surprise that, as CNET reports, YouTube has struck a deal with Durant’s startup Thirty Five Media in order to create more sports-centered video content for the service. Details about the deal, including financial terms and length, aren’t available.

In a crowded media landscape, sports are a clear way to attract viewers to a platform. Just last month, Facebook said its eventual budget for sports could be “a few billion dollars,” while Amazon recently snagged the rights for NFL Thursday live streaming. As these deals are snapped up (and increase in price), agreements with individual star athletes, like Durant, can fill in the gaps.

Facebook has previously signed deals with individual stars, including the Balls, a popular family of basketball stars (no pun intended). That series has amassed quite the viewership for Facebook, in part thanks to patriarch LaVar Ball’s antics, and it’s likely YouTube is looking for similar results with the sports stars that it signs.

Source: CNET

Amazon renews ‘The Tick’ for a second season

Amazon decided to take on the quirky superhero spoof The Tick in 2016 despite the fact that the last live-action version of the comic was cancelled before it could complete a single season. But that risk seems to be paying off because Amazon has now greenlit a second season of the show even though the first season isn’t yet finished.

“I am so excited that Amazon wants to continue this wildly fruitful collaboration and that this amazing cast gets to stay together, and that we get to build this mythos further, wider, deeper, and taller,” series creator Ben Edlund said in a statement. “We got a good ball of mud spinning with the right tilt of axis, I’m very happy we have this opportunity to keep peopling it.” Naturally, The Tick also had something to say about the series renewal. “You feel it too, don’t you? Destiny’s warm hand in the small of your back, pushing, pushing. She’s on a roll,” he said.

Series leads Peter Serafinowicz and Griffin Newman will be be returning for season two and additional casting will be announced later on. The 10-episode second season is scheduled to debut in 2019 and production will begin this year. The second half of season one kicks off on February 23rd.

Source: Amazon

Bitcoin tumbles below $10,000, half of its peak value

Bitcoin has crashed to as low as $9,500, falling below $10,000 for the first time since November and neatly halving its December 19th peak of $19,000, according to Coinbase. It has declined steadily since CES 2018 started, thanks to reports that South Korea planned to clamp down on the cryptocurrency. If you hedged your bets with Ethereum, Ripple or Dogecoin, then that didn’t help either, as most virtual currencies have fallen precipitously since yesterday.

Analysts, and nearly everyone else with common sense, have been expecting a correction. “The market was very overheated and had significantly dislocated from trend,” CryptoCompare’s Charles Hayter told CNBC. “A large percentage of investors were expecting this correction and reversion to mean.” He added that the panic was “leading the herd to sell with no other justification than fear.”

Adding to the tension is the fact that China’s central bank reportedly said that the government should ban the centralized trading of the currencies. The nation is reportedly trying to (gently) push crypto-miners out of the country because the energy used by tens of thousands of computers creates pollution. China is also concerned it could spawn an economic crisis — something that a lot of investors are no doubt experiencing right now. (Another unexpected consequence, as Techspot points out, is that graphics card and memory prices have skyrocketed.)

Some investors aren’t too concerned, saying that bitcoin went up way to fast, and is now returning to something of a mean. “All in all, this drop has brought us back to the prices that were traded about a month ago for most coins,” said eToro senior market analyst Mati Greenspan.

Another way of looking at it, however, is that bitcoin, as a currency with an unchangeable limit, is highly susceptible to bubble-type economics. As Engadget noted in a 2013 explainer, the tendency for folks to hoard the currency rather than spending it will almost always cause a boom, followed by a crash. In other words, bitcoin is highly volatile, and it’s just as plausible that it’ll get back to its peak or even exceed it.

Via: CNBC

Source: Coinbase

Google opens an office in China’s Silicon Valley

Google’s often fractious relationship with China may be softening on the news that the search giant is opening a new office in the country. The company already has two facilities in China, located in Beijing and Shanghai, but will now rent space in a building in Shenzhen, the Chinese equivalent to Silicon Valley. The province, which borders Hong Kong, is the home of Huawei, Tencent, ZTE, OnePlus — not to mention the massive Foxconn plant that is also situated there.

As TechCrunch explains, Google Shenzhen is currently based out of a serviced office block, and will start out as little more than a glorified employee co-working space. An internal email, obtained by our sister publication, explains that “a number of Googlers in China […] travel to the Shenzhen area for business.” Consequently, it makes sense to cluster workers in one place, rather than leaving them to work in hotel rooms or elsewhere.

The move could be interpreted as another sign that Google wants to move beyond its decade-long feud with the country. Back in 2010, Google shut down its Chinese search engine in protest against the country’s heavy-handed censorship, which blocks references to anything the Communist Party dislikes. That includes references to pro-democracy campaigns, documents of internal corruption, police brutality, the Taiwanese independence movement and the Tiananmen Square massacre.

But the company can’t ignore such a vast potential market forever, and it’s thought that other pro-China initiatives are laying the groundwork for a return. It doesn’t hurt that Shenzhen is home to key hardware partners, and now that it owns a big chunk of HTC’s business, the need for face-to-face communication is key. And if Google is planning to make nice with China, it’s going to need to make plenty of new friends in a very short amount of time.

Source: TechCrunch

A new ‘Fable’ game is reportedly in the works

A brand new Fable game is in the works, or so says a number of sources close to the rumored project. According to Eurogamer, UK developer Playground has been given the job of creating a new, big-budget revisit to the fantasy world of Albion, and while franchise owner Microsoft said in a statement that it does not comment on rumor or speculation, all signs seem to give the reports credibility. For a start, November 2017 saw Playground openly reveal its plans for its first ever non-racing game, described only as an open-world action RPG. Meanwhile, Xbox boss Shannon Loftis has made no secret of Microsoft’s fondness for the franchise.

According to Eurogamer, the new Fable will be something of a clean break from the previous iterations developed by former studio Lionhead. Original assets exist, but it’s likely that Playground will start again from scratch. Don’t expect its arrival any time soon, either. Sources say it’s still early days for the project, but the pay-off should be massive. Around 200 people have been drafted in to work on the game at Playground’s UK-based Warwickshire offices, which suggests Microsoft is throwing significant investment at the endeavour, and that Albion will return more fantastical than ever before.

Source: Eurogamer

Apple Earns Sixth Place on ‘Top 100 Global Technology Leaders’ List

Thomson Reuters today published its first “Top 100 Global Technology Leaders” list, designed to pinpoint and celebrate “the industry’s most operationally sound and financially successful organizations.” The list’s top five companies are Microsoft, Intel, Cisco, IBM, and Alphabet.

Apple sits in sixth place, followed by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, SAP, Texas Instruments, and Accenture. Thomson Reuters explained that it assessed each company using a 28-data-point algorithm to “objectively identify organizations with the fortitude for the future in today’s complex business environment.”

Specifically, each company saw its performance in eight categories measured before being ranked: Financial, Management and Investor Confidence, Risk and Resilience, Legal Compliance, Innovation, People and Social Responsibility, Environmental Impact, and Reputation.

“Tech companies operate at warp speed confronting competitive, regulatory, legal, financial, supply chain and myriad other business challenges. Oftentimes, their financial success overshadows their operational integrity, making it difficult to identify those organizations with true longevity for the future,” said Alex Paladino, global managing director of the Thomson Reuters Technology Practice Group. “With the Top 100 Global Tech Leaders, we’ve identified the unique data points that embody technology-industry leadership in the 21st century; congratulations to the companies that made the list.”

Outside of the top 10, companies like Amazon, Facebook, Mastercard, Samsung, Qualcomm, and Pegatron made it onto the list. These remaining 90 companies on the list are not ranked, but were measured and added based on the same 28-factor algorithm as the top 10. The entire list was restricted to companies that have at least $1 billion in annual revenue as well.

The full report goes into greater detail and breaks down how each individual category was researched for the companies. For example, the number of granted patents that are issued each year factored into Innovation, and an overall news sentiment and global media score measured a company’s Reputation. For Legal Compliance, Thomson Reuters measured the amount of litigation where the company was a defendant “in the areas of employment/labor, intellectual property, commercial law and contracts, civil rights, and unfair competition.”

The researchers didn’t go into Apple’s performance statistics for each of the eight categories, but they did provide a few tidbits about the overall rankings. In total, 45 percent of the 100 companies are headquartered in the United States, followed by Japan and Taiwan tied in second place with 13 companies each, and then India with five. In terms of continents, North America led with 47 companies, Asia followed closely with 38, Europe had 14, and Australia had one (stock transfer company Computershare).

Apple topped a few lists over the past year, including Interbrand’s “2017 Best Global Brands,” Fortune’s “World’s Most Admired Companies,” and climbing to become the World’s Most Profitable Company on the Fortune Global 500 list. Conversely, in December Apple dropped to 84th on Glassdoor’s annual list of the best companies to work for in the United States, after earning the 10th spot on the same list years prior in 2012.

Tag: reuters.com
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BMW Plans to Turn CarPlay Into Subscription-Based Service Next Year

BMW plans to offer CarPlay as a subscription-based service beginning next year, rather than charge a one-time fee, reports The Verge.

The automaker will charge $80 per year for access to CarPlay starting next year, with no fee during the first year of ownership of a new BMW, according to Don Smith, technology product manager for BMW North America.

BMW currently charges a $300 upgrade fee to drivers who want CarPlay, available in its 2017 model year and newer vehicles.

Smith believes switching to a subscription-based pricing system will provide BMW owners with more flexibility. “This allows the customer to switch devices,” he said, while mentioning Android as a specific example.

BMW doesn’t currently support Android Auto, although Smith said Google Assistant is coming to new BMW models later in 2018.

Smith also argued that the annual fee could actually work out to be cheaper for somebody with an average length lease, as the total cost after four years after the free first year of access would be $240, cheaper than the one-time $300 charge.

Of course, those who don’t trade in their BMW once every four years can expect the CarPlay subscription fees to add up significantly over the long term. All the while, many other automakers now offer CarPlay as a standard feature.

BMW may ultimately decide against this idea if it receives enough negative feedback from customers, but we’ll have to wait and see.

Related Roundup: CarPlayTag: BMW
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