Facebook strikes music licensing deal with Sony

Facebook has signed a deal with Sony that will let you upload videos containing its music without worrying about them being taken down, Variety reports. Users will be able to upload and share videos on Facebook, Oculus and Instagram that with music licensed from Sony/ATV Music Publishing’s vast catalog. Copyright infringement has become a big problem on the social network, and Facebook has been working hard to strike deals with music labels to avoid takedowns and fines.

Facebook recently inked a similar deal with Universal Music, but Sony is the largest music publisher in the world. With two of the three biggest services signed, it’s expected that Zuckerberg & Co. will ink a deal with the last holdout, Warner Music, soon.

“We are thrilled that in signing this agreement Facebook recognizes the value that music brings to their service and that our songwriters will now benefit from the use of their music on Facebook,” said Sony/ATV Chairman Martin Bandier. “We are looking forward to a long and prosperous relationship.”

It seemed inevitable that Facebook would seek to license music like Google’s YouTube has. In 2016, it had supposedly begun work on a tool to hunt infringing videos similar to YouTube’s Content ID system. And Bloomberg reported in September of last year that Facebook was offering publishers and labels “hundreds of millions of dollars” to okay songs for video uploads. In any case, given the size of Sony’s catalog (3 million songs), it’s now far less likely that your beach music-infused vacation video will be yanked from the site.

Source: Variety

A portrait of Earth and the Moon from 3 million miles away

Sometimes you need to step back to see the big picture, and if your subjects are 249,000 miles apart, you need to step waaay back. Luckily, the spacecraft OSIRIS-REx is moving rapidly away from us and was recently just in the right position, around 3.1 million miles away, so it trained its MapCam instrument towards its former home and captured this poignant portrait of the Earth and the Moon.

NASA/Goddard and the University of Arizona also released an image (below) showing the MapCam’s field of view when it snapped the shot. OSIRIS-REx had recently received a big gravity boost from Earth, sending it on its way to the asteroid Bennu, where it will arrive later this year. On October 2nd, it was in the perfect position — about 13 times the separation between the Earth and Moon — to capture both our home planet and its orbiting pal.

OSIRIS-REx will perform several high-degree-of-difficulty feats. First it will try to scoop up organic materials from Bennu that might be precursors to life, by bouncing gently off it and firing a nitrogen burst to loosen the materials. It then must return to Earth and deliver those samples to scientists, dropping them by parachute onto the Utah desert.

It might be a good idea to get a spacecraft close to Bennu for another reason. “It is also an asteroid that could someday make a close pass or even a collision with Earth, though not for several centuries,” NASA notes. Since it’s around 492 meters (1,614 feet) across — not big enough to destroy the Earth, but big enough to cause a lot of damage — future civilizations might decide to send a rocket to either blow it up or deflect it.

As for the photo, both the Earth and Moon were captured together in three separate image taken in different color wavelengths. Those were combined and color-corrected to make the final composite, “and the moon was ‘stretched’ (brightened) to make it more easily visible,” NASA notes.

The image shows how missions like OSIRIS-REx provide multiple benefits. There are very few photos of both the Earth and Moon together, and like other shots taken of our planet from distant places, it helps us forget our hubris and remember that our planet is both tiny, unique and fragile.

“From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty,” astronaut Edgar Mitchell said shortly after his Apollo 14 mission. “You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch.’”

Source: NASA

Microsoft’s Xbox was the last great CES reveal

CES was a different show 17 years ago. In 2001, the Best of Show award went to the DataPlay disc, a postage-stamp-size memory card that held up to 500MB of data. If you can’t remember it, don’t worry — the company went out of business shortly thereafter as SD became the de facto standard. Microsoft was still the biggest tech company on the planet at that point — Apple wouldn’t release the original iPod for another nine months — and each CES began with a keynote hosted by Bill Gates.

The first 80 minutes of its 2001 keynote consisted of clunky tech that now, in some form or another, lives in Google Home or your smartphone. But then came the reveal of the original Xbox. It arrived with none of the fanfare we expect from modern tech presentations, but, unlike the Pocket PC voice-to-text demo that preceded it, the Xbox debut changed the company’s future.

For once, Microsoft was an underdog, going head-to-head against Sony, Nintendo and Sega for control of the living room. To help sell its vision, the company enlisted a veteran game developer with a penchant for flashy footwear and, of course, a pro wrestler. This is the story of that presentation, from the people who were there.

Bill Gates has become a lot of things — genius, billionaire, philanthropist, malaria’s worst enemy — but back in 2001, he was not an engaging public speaker. “For the first time, let me now unveil Xbox,” he said from the Hilton Theater’s stage. Gates then pulled a black-satin drape off a shoulder-height pedestal and there sat a big, black, vaguely X-shaped box, with a monstrously large gamepad encased in plexiglass below it.

At that point, Microsoft was more or less known for three things: the Office productivity suite, its Windows operating system and a massive antitrust lawsuit. The former pair were things you used every day, but they had as much personality as you could fit into an anthropomorphic paperclip. The latter painted the company as a mustache-twirling villain.

For the next 13 seconds, Gates stood idle with a vacant half-smile on his face, arms glued to the sides of his frumpy blue button-up, shoulders rounded over as he tried desperately to look approachable. According to people in the know, he had a bad habit of putting his hands in front of his face and tenting his fingers — “doing the ‘Mr. Burns’ thing” — which the various PR people around him had warned against doing on camera.

The audience didn’t yet know what this gargantuan new machine was capable of or how it would intrinsically change the company, but they clapped anyway for the console that would eventually cost Microsoft over $4 billion.

The original Xbox was a perfect microcosm of the CES of yore: a massively ambitious piece of tech, but no one knew how it would work or fit into their lives. At the turn of the century, the biggest TV in most houses was a 27-inch standard definition CRT display with a bubble screen, not the $4,000 rear-projection HDTV units or flatscreens we have now. Broadband wasn’t commonplace. We were used to saving game progress to memory cards or game cartridges themselves.

In that context, the Xbox felt like it came from the future. It supported 720p HDTV over component cables. It had a built-in Ethernet jack and four controller ports. It had an 8GB hard drive not only for storing game data but for playing in-game music ripped from your CD collection, too. It would hit retail 10 months later for $300, around two years after Sony’s PlayStation 2 was available. Over time, Sony added these features to the PS2 with sold-separately accessories and baked them into the PlayStation 3 five years later.

“They needed to show people that this was either worth waiting for or that [Microsoft] understood where gaming was going to go,” VentureBeat’s Dean Takahashi said, “and you wanted to bet on them because you could get all this cool stuff.” Prior to VentureBeat, Takahashi chronicled the Xbox and its successor’s inceptions in his books Opening the Xbox and The Xbox 360 Uncloaked.

Enter Seamus Blackley, taking the stage to a low-rent Atari Teenage Riot ripoff song in jeans and a tailored, untucked black oxford. The mood shifted. Gates’ “geek’s geek” persona took a backseat to Blackley’s punk-rock attitude and self-deprecating humor. Suddenly, the keynote went from yawn-inducing to intensely watchable.

Blackley was part of the “rebel force” inside Microsoft that was desperately trying to overturn all the things people didn’t like about the company and make something cool. The Xbox was his and co-creator Kevin Bachus’ baby. Onstage, Blackley’s goal was to convince developers that Microsoft was listening to him and that the console would be easy to make games for.

Before becoming what he calls an “inadvertent, unwilling” spokesman for the console, Blackley was a game developer at Looking Glass Studios where he worked on System Shock and Ultima Underworld. He also was the driving force behind one of PC gaming’s biggest flops, Jurassic Park: Trespasser, essentially a broken tech demo from Dreamworks Interactive.

Despite that failure, he’d built a reputation in the game industry for his aptitude at programming game physics and working with 3D graphics. Fast forward a few years and he was helping comb Gates’ hair in the green room before the pair revealed the console.

Blackley said every disaster scenario was running through his mind; you could see it racing across his face as he anxiously stalked the stage. There was a chance the demos would break or, worse, that the prototype console wouldn’t even turn on.

“At that point, I’m feeling unbelievably tense because I’m looking at Bill as the guy who had potentially just spent several billion dollars on an idea that … I thought of on an airplane and told my friends about. And that if it doesn’t work, this man’s going to kill me,” he recalled. “I’d gone from being nervous and awestruck by the man to being genuinely fearful of having led the company down a multibillion-dollar rabbit hole.”

To reassure the developers in the audience that he and his team knew what they were doing, he donned a pair of bright red shoes. Using the specific hue in games was off-limits at the time because it and a few others would overdrive the color circuit on NTSC TVs. Wearing them onstage was a subtle indicator to the audience of 100 or so “super-important” people who he needed to make titles that his team knew the subtleties of game development, he said.

“That was really a thing I did for game developers because the idea of Microsoft doing a game console was incredibly unpopular still,” he said. “The disdain and hate for Microsoft products, being the evil empire and all, the antitrust [lawsuit], were big things I had to contend with to get people to make games for the console. So I wore ‘illegal red’ shoes and told people I intentionally did that.”

Did it work?

“I don’t know that anybody who is skeptical ever has that moment and says it, right?” he posited. “But what happens is people will show up and make jokes about it and you can talk to them. And then they’ll take a look [at your project].”

To show his success at convincing developers up to that point, Blackley rolled a sizzle reel of game designers breathlessly talking about how the Xbox would unlock gaming’s true potential. “The constraints normally that we have to put up with with consoles, we’ve been freed from, really,” Herman Serano from the Malice team gushed.

“The life that’s in Oddworld is going to manifest itself more clearly,” series creator Lorne Lanning said over a cheesy techno beat while a neon-green X traced behind him.

“You’re gonna see musculature bulging like you’ve never seen before,” Mike Rubinelli of WWF Raw is War boasted. “You’ll probably be able to see veins pulsating if you want. You might even see somebody get goosebumps if the game calls for it. It really does represent the next generation of gaming.”

Not all of these pie-in-the-sky pronouncements came to pass, of course. The Xbox might have been the most powerful, but by the time it was in stores, Sony had an insurmountable 25-million-unit lead. Third-party developers created games for the most popular console’s specifications, and as such many of the advanced hardware features Blackley worked so hard to include were unseen outside of internally-developed games like the ones he was about to demo.

Blackley picked two titles to demonstrate the Xbox’s power: Oddworld: Munch’s Oddysee and Malice. Both showed off just how advanced the Xbox was compared to the PlayStation 2 in terms of graphical prowess and fidelity. They’re hard to watch now, mainly because of the low-res video capture that was available at the time. But in person, the lighting, real-time shadows and sheer amount of creatures onscreen got people excited.

“Even though the [hardware] announcements were expected, the demos were so impressive that they got everybody really riled up,” Takahashi said.

The demos were only using about a fifth of the console’s total power, according to Blackley.

One of CES’s time-honored traditions is tech companies rolling out the biggest celebrity possible to show how cool their brand is by association. Microsoft’s keynote in 2001 was no different.

Pro wrestling’s popularity was at a fever pitch. Commercial breaks during weekly Monday night broadcasts from the World Wrestling Federation (neé World Wrestling Entertainment) and World Championship Wrestling were dominated by video-game ads. Blackley forged a partnership with the now-defunct THQ to produce an exclusive WWF game for the Xbox.

“I really wanted to demo this title very badly, but I didn’t want to do it just on the fifth-powered system,” Blackley said before walking offstage. “So I arranged to bring a 100 percent power Xbox demo system. I want to show you that now.”

Cut to Rocky “The Rock” Maivia’s WWF entrance video and theme song playing in the same venue where Elvis Presley performed 636 consecutive soldout shows. The actor we now know as Dwayne Johnson makes his way from crowd to stage bathed in a sea of colored lights.

Johnson never left character. He was a hulking superhero-size human in a designer suit and shades who was used to arenas full of wrestling fans hanging off his every syllable when he took the mic in his underwear. The self-described “most electrifying man in sports entertainment” spouted signature catchphrases, spoke about himself in third-person and never took his sunglasses off as he bantered with Gates onstage.

If Blackley sounded excited during his intro, though, it was a ruse. The marketing team apparently came up with the idea and told him about it afterward. “I may have actually been super-irritated by it and written nasty emails,” he said. “I actually don’t remember. But it occurs to me that I feel like I may have done that.”

There’s another wrinkle: THQ provided Johnson as a favor to Microsoft, and in those last five minutes of the keynote, Gates never thanked the publisher for that onstage. According to Takahashi, THQ CEO Brian Farrell said, “I scratched their back, and mine is still itching.”

The reveal transcended CES. Microsoft used its position as a broad tech company to compete on a playing field where, at the time, Sony and Nintendo couldn’t. That keynote was a “bully pulpit,” in Blackley’s words. While the Xbox only occupied a fraction of Redmond’s stage time, it signaled that the company knew how to talk to gamers and finally made Microsoft’s ambitions to take over your living room real. Like so many CES reveals, though, it was ahead of its time.

The Xbox went on sale November 15th, 2001. It went on to sell 24 million units to the PS2’s estimated 150 million. Facing mounting losses on the hardware (mostly due to the cost of hard drives), Microsoft effectively killed the console four years later when it released the Xbox 360. That console beat the PS3 to market by a year, giving Microsoft an advantage it hadn’t enjoyed previously. The Xbox 360 would go on to sell 84 million units, leading sales for most of that console generation.

“It isn’t uncommon to see something released at CES that, at that time, doesn’t make sense, but then four or five years later comes to market and it’s a huge hit,” Consumer Technology Association Vice President Karen Chupka said.

Gaming took a backseat at CES when Microsoft bowed out of the trade show in 2012, and while Sony has hosted a few keynotes, the PlayStation has never been the focus. Maybe that’s why the 2001 address was so special.

Click here to catch up on the latest news from CES 2018.

Our first look at Samsung’s massive 146-inch 4K MicroLED TV

Last night, Samsung unveiled its vision for the future of the living room: The Wall, a 146-inch 4K TV made up of MicroLED panels. Yes, Samsung is skipping OLED entirely as it moves beyond its “QLED” LCD technology. The company claims The Wall has all of the benefits of OLED, without any of the downsides, like the potential for burn-in and worries about shortened lifespans. Since each pixel is self-emitting, there’s no backlight like there is with LCDs, and that means it can deliver brighter whites and pure blacks like OLED.

In person, The Wall doesn’t look much different than a very large OLED set. It’s astoundingly bright, colors are rich and vibrant, and the black levels are indeed inky dark. Samsung describes the TV as a scalable product, which can fit almost any size you can imagine (its technology comes from Samsung’s 34-foot cinema display). It’s not just a single screen, it’s actually made up a series of square MicroLED panels. That allows for the size flexibility, but I also noticed that you can easily make out those panels when you’re looking at The Wall up close. When it’s off, it almost looks like a checkerboard. In the image below, you can see that pattern where the flash bounces off the screen.

Devindra Hardawar/AOL

Samsung isn’t commenting on if that checkerboard issue will apply to the final product. In fact, it’s saving most details for a press event this March. There’s no doubt MicroLED is impressive, especially as consumers demand ever-larger sets. But I also can’t imagine that The Wall will be something most people can actually afford over the next few years.

Facebook kills its ‘M’ AI assistant on January 19th

Facebook M is, or was, an artificially-intelligent AI that used human operatives to ensure that its recommendations were on point. “Was,” at least, because the social network has revealed that its shutting down the platform on January 19th after two-and-a-half-years of operation. The news was confirmed to the Verge today, with Facebook saying that the project was an experiment that it learned a lot from. These insights will be used on other internal AI projects, while the human operatives will be found jobs elsewhere in the company.

M launched with some fanfare as a limited trial, only open to a handful of people in San Francisco’s Bay Area initially. The idea was that the system would learn to respond to various queries and requests for assistance through messenger. And, over time, it would become sophisticated enough to become a more sophisticated assistant in the vein of Siri, Alexa or Assistant. Unfortunately, the concierge service that powered it was little more than a way of getting other people to make calls for you, and its utility was perpetually limited.

The fact that Facebook couldn’t, or wouldn’t, find reasons for folks to use its platform seemed likely to kill it stone dead. In addition, there are plenty of other human-run concierge services that charge a pretty penny to to a similar job. Running the service at, what we assume was a steep loss, was probably only worthwhile as a way of testing the waters and hoping that the AI would eventually take over. But since folks seemingly never embraced it, it had to die, so those beta testers in San Francisco have a few days left to get their fill.

A Facebook spokesperson sent us the following comment:

“Today we shared with the people who have access to our M closed beta project, first announced in August 2015, that January 19th is the last day the service will be available. We launched this project to learn what people needed and expected of an assistant, and we learned a lot. We’re taking these useful insights to power other AI projects at Facebook. We continue to be very pleased with the performance of M suggestions in Messenger, powered by our learnings from this experiment.”

Click here to catch up on the latest news from CES 2018.

Source: The Verge

GE made a giant Echo Show rival that lives above your stove

Making your refrigerator the hub of your home is so last CES. This year, it’s all about that range. Your cooking range, that is. On Monday, GE Appliances debuted its latest smart home solution, a voice and motion controlled screen that sits at eye level as you’re using the stove.

The company claims that the kitech range is “the one appliance family and friends gather around while making dinner and conversation at the end of the day” so of course that’s the perfect place to put a 27-inch TV everybody can look at instead of their phones. Phillips just revealed a similar, Google Assistant-powered concept earlier today.

On that screen, you’ll be able to make live video calls, check connected smart home cameras, access online recipes and instructions, and see what’s on your calendar. There is, of course, a stovetop-facing camera as well so that you can share photos of what you’re cooking with the infinite abyss that is social media. Though, given the home kitchen disasters that one can find on YouTube, you’d better hope the screen is fire-resistant as well.

Click here to catch up on the latest news from CES 2018.

CES 2018: Nanoleaf Debuts New $49 HomeKit-Enabled Remote for Controlling Nanoleaf Light Panels

Nanoleaf, the company behind the popular HomeKit-enabled Nanoleaf Light Panels (formerly called the Aurora), today announced the upcoming launch of the Nanoleaf Remote.

The Nanoleaf Remote, priced at $49.99, is a neat-looking dodecahedron-shaped device that’s designed to let you change your HomeKit scenes and dim the lights just by manipulating the remote.

There are 12 sides to the Nanoleaf Remote, each of which can be set to a different HomeKit scene. You can choose lighting scenes that are for the Nanoleaf Light Panels, or more complex scenes that incorporate multiple HomeKit products.

While designed to work with the Nanoleaf Light Panels, the Bluetooth-enabled Remote is a standalone device that works with any HomeKit setup so long as you have a Home Hub, aka a Nanoleaf Rhythm module, an Apple TV, or an iPad. Android users will need the Rhythm module for the Remote to work.

Nanoleaf plans to launch the Remote in the spring of 2018, but it will be shown off at CES. Nanoleaf will also be demonstrating Light Panels in new shapes at CES, prior to a launch later in 2018.

Nanoleaf’s existing Light Panels with Rhythm module can be purchased from the Nanoleaf website for $230.

Tags: HomeKit, Nanoleaf, CES 2018
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CES 2018: Hyper Launches 8-in-1 USB-C Hub With Built-In 7.5W Wireless Charger

Hyper, a brand owned by Sanyo, today announced the upcoming launch of a new HyperDrive USB-C Hub, which is available for pre-order on Kickstarter starting today.

The HyperDrive USB-C Hub, which is compatible with all USB-C equipped MacBook and MacBook Pro models, features a total of 8 ports, including a 4K HDMI port, a Gigabit Ethernet port, a microSD slot, an SD card slot, three USB-A 3.1 ports and one USB-C power delivery port.

In addition, the USB-C Hub has a built-in 7.5W wireless charger and convertible stand that’s designed to charge the iPhone X, iPhone 8, and iPhone 8 Plus.

Using the included stand, which has a hinge that can be set to multiple viewing angles, the iPhone can be charged flat or while standing up in landscape or portrait mode thanks to three included wireless charging coils.

The HyperDrive USB-C Hub has an included retractable USB-C charging cable to allow it to be connected to a MacBook, but it can also be plugged into the wall with a USB-C power source to provide power to the MacBook and to serve as a standalone wireless charging device when not connected to a MacBook.

HyperDrive claims that the USB-C Hub is able to charge an iPhone X faster than 7.5W wireless chargers available from Belkin and Mophie, and it says that the hub operates at a lower temperature than standard wireless charging accessories. The USB-C Hub is designed to operate at 77ºF, with generated heat isolated from the iPhone via an airgap and dissipated through the accessory’s aluminum sides.

There is an LCD display built into the hub to provide details on voltage and current, and it’s designed to be similar in size to other Qi wireless chargers on the market.

Hyper has an early bird special that will allow Kickstarter backers to get one of the new HyperDrive USB-C Hubs for $69, which it says is over 50 percent off the retail price of $149. Once early bird models have been exhausted, the HyperDrive USB-C Hub will be available for $89.

The Kickstarter project from Hyper has an estimated delivery of March 2018 for the first orders and April 2018 for later orders.

Tags: USB-C, Hyper, CES 2018
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CES 2018: Ring Announces New Line of Home Security Devices

Ring, the company behind the well-known Ring video doorbell, today announced the launch of a full home security ecosystem that includes a range of new products like indoor/outdoor security cameras and connected outdoor lights.

The new battery-powered Stick Up Cam, which is compatible with the Ring Solar Panel Charger, is a weatherproof security camera that’s designed to work both indoors and outdoors. It supports 1080p HD video, two-way audio, and a built-in passive infrared motion sensors with zone detection.

The WiFi-enabled Stick Up Cam Elite also works indoors and outdoors, but rather than a battery, it’s powered via standard wall outlet or Ethernet connection. It features the same 1080p video and two-way audio, along with advanced motion sensors with zone detection.

Ring Beams are new smart lights that came from a recent Ring acquisition of Mr Beams, an LED lighting company. Ring Beams, which are lights that are designed to be used outdoors, include a nightlight, a motion sensor, a light designed for a pathway, a and spotlight. Ring Beams integrate with the Ring app and all of Ring’s security cameras and doorbells.

Ring also announced that its professionally monitored customizable home security system, will start shipping out to customers in the spring of 2018. The Ring security system, priced at $199, includes accessories like a Base Station, Keypad, Contact Sensor, Passive Infrared Sensor, and Z-Wave Extender. It also includes 24/7 professional monitoring and cloud video storage for a $10 per month fee.

Additional information about all of Ring’s new products debuting at the Consumer Electronics Show can be found on the Ring website. Ring’s new accessories will be launching later in 2018.

Tags: Ring, CES 2018
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Android Pay and Google Wallet Have Merged to Become ‘Google Pay’

Google today announced it has merged Android Pay and Google Wallet into one consolidated payments service called Google Pay.

Over the coming weeks, Google said users will be able to use Google Pay online, in stores, and across Google products, and Google Wallet’s existing peer-to-peer payment functionality will continue to be supported.

Google Pay is already available in select first-party apps such as YouTube and Chrome, and in Airbnb, Dice, Fandango, HungryHouse, Instacart, and select other third-party apps and websites on Android and in Chrome.

Google Pay branding will be rolled out in apps, websites, and next to payment terminals in stores as Android Pay branding and decals are retired.

Google Pay along with Samsung Pay are Apple Pay’s biggest rivals among mobile payment services. Google Pay also competes with Apple’s recently launched peer-to-peer payment service Apple Pay Cash in the United States.

Tags: Google, Google Wallet, Android Pay, Google Pay
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