Apple to acquire magazine subscription app Texture, future of Android app unknown

It’s official — magazine app Texture is joining team Apple.

Apple announced in a press release today that it has officially signed an agreement to acquire digital magazine service Texture. Texture (formerly known as Next Issue) offers users an option to pay a flat monthly fee for an unlimited digital subscription to all of their favorite magazines, that they can then access from the Texture app.

Texture was founded in 2010, and features upwards of 200 publications that you can peruse for $9.99 per month. It’s basically like Netflix or Hulu, but for magazines, meaning that you not only get to read the ones you already know you like, but you may actually broaden your horizons a bit by virtually flipping through some you may have never checked out otherwise. Texture offers mags covering everything from entertainment to tech to interior design, featuring popular titles like Bon Appétit, National Geographic, Rolling Stone, Wired, and People.

Apple Senior VP of Internet Software and Services Eddy Cue noted Apple’s dedication to maintaining journalistic integrity amidst the acquisition in a statement:

We’re excited Texture will join Apple, along with an impressive catalog of magazines from many of the world’s leading publishers. We are committed to quality journalism from trusted sources and allowing magazines to keep producing beautifully designed and engaging stories for users.

Texture seems pretty stoked about the change as well — according to Next Issue Media’s CEO John Loughlin, anyway:

I’m thrilled that Next Issue Media, and its award-winning Texture app, are being acquired by Apple. The Texture team and its current owners, Condé Nast, Hearst, Meredith, Rogers Media and KKR, could not be more pleased or excited with this development. We could not imagine a better home or future for the service.

As of right now, Apple is offering no word on the financial terms of the acquisition. And if you already use Texture and love it as is, don’t worry — there won’t be any changes for now, and you can keep using the app as you always have. Though with Apple being the buyer, you have to question how long the Android app will be sticking around.

Regardless of its eventual fate, it will be a while before this deal closes and anything official happens. If you’d like to try Texture for the first time, you can get a free trial and discounted pricing for the first three months from Amazon.

See at Amazon

Apple Maps now includes bike-sharing locations in 179 cities

Apple and Ito World have partnered to bring bike-sharing dock information to Apple Maps, TechCrunch reports. Now, in a number of cities, users can just type “bike sharing” or the name of a bike-sharing service into the Apple Maps search bar and it will show you all of the nearby docks as well as the bike-sharing service’s website and phone number. Ito World’s bike share data feed currently includes information for 179 cities in 36 countries.

Apple began working bike-sharing info into Maps last April, but the company’s partnership with Ito World greatly expands the amount of available bike-sharing data. There are a few limitations though. Apple Maps can show you where bike-sharing docks are located but not how many bikes are available or how many docks are currently empty and it can’t give you information on dockless bike-sharing services.

The new feature helps Apple Maps compete with Google Maps, which also lets users search for bike-sharing docks. Apple Maps’ bike-sharing feature is available now.

Via: TechCrunch

Source: Ito World

Texas city drops its bus service in favor of ridesharing vans

Ridesharing companies often dream of changing the face of public transportation, but one of them is going a step further — it’s becoming the only option for public transportation in one community. Arlington, Texas is replacing its bus service with Via’s ridesharing platform. Pay $3 per trip ($10 for a weekly pass) and you can hop in a Mercedes van that will take you where you need to go, whether your hail it through a smartphone app or a phone call.

Service will initially focus on Arlington’s downtown core and key areas like the entertainment districts, hospital and a connection to the Dallas-Fort Worth airport, but it should cover a “large portion” of the city between I-30 and I-20 as of the summer. The vans operate from 7AM to 9PM on weekdays, and 9AM to 9PM on Saturdays.

The low fares are possible thanks to subsidies from the city, which is providing about a third of the overall project’s cost (about $322,500). The Federal Transit Administration is supplying the rest. Whether or not it lasts for a while depends on the initial experience. The city’s initial contract runs for just one year, and it’ll use data gathered from Via’s service to influence its decisions.

A transition to ridesharing is possible in part because Arlington’s existing mass transit options weren’t that great. As The Verge pointed out, the city had been relying on charter buses for 4 years. It would be much harder to rely on ridesharing in cities with well-established mass transit systems, especially in larger cities where you’d need a massive fleet and around-the-clock service to provide adequate coverage. And this isn’t necessarily the first such experiment, as Altamonte Springs, Florida replaced its public transportation with subsidized Uber rides.

This is arguably one of the larger experiments of its kind, however, and it hints at the potential future of ridesharing: it could become the go-to option for public transportation in cities that can’t afford or justify extensive bus or subway routes. It could be particularly important if and when self-driving ridesharing cars hit the mainstream, as ridesharing cars could operate at all hours and take on routes that might be impractical for human drivers.

Via: CBS News, The Verge

Source: Arlington

Eddy Cue said everything you’d expect about Apple’s video strategy

For a session about “Curation in Media,” there wasn’t a whole lot of talk about Apple News at Eddy Cue’s SXSW panel today. Instead, moderator and CNN senior reporter Dylan Byers steered Apple’s senior vice president of Internet Software and Services through a wide range of topics, from today’s acquisition of magazine platform Texture through Apple Music (it now has 38 million subscribers), free speech, live TV, healthcare and the company’s recent foray into video content.

Apple’s first batch of original programming was safe and not particularly well received. Planet of the Apps and Carpool Karaoke both closely mirrored TV formats, and perhaps represented a desire to learn about production and distribution more than they did a real effort to make hit shows. However, the past few months have seen a flurry of activity at Apple, with shows from creators like Ronald D. Moore, Damien Chazelle and M. Night Shyamalan now in the works. Despite the huge investment Apple is making, Cue insists he doesn’t want Apple’s video offering to emulate Netflix.

“We don’t try to sell the most smartphones in the world, we don’t try to sell the most apps, we try to make the best one. Hopefully the other piece happens,” Cue told Byers, echoing what Apple always says but no one quite believes. “We’re making big investments … It’s about finding the right ones. The way we like doing things is not to throw a hundred things against the wall and see which one’s going to be good or not.” Cue also said that Apple is new at this, and so not everything will be a hit. “Everything should be very high quality,” though, and that’s where Cue says Apple “will stand out” when compared to Netflix and Amazon.

Cue also spoke about Apple’s unique spot in the streaming industry. While Netflix can control its web and app offerings, Apple is the only company that has almost full control over both the hardware and software that its videos will appear on. “We’ll have a few surprises,” Cue said, “we think there’s a real advantage in technology .. There are ways to leverage the technology to make the viewing experience even better.” The executive pointed to how its TV app handles live sports — providing a notification when something it thinks you’ll be interested in is happening, even if the game is in its last quarter.

Byers repeatedly pushed Cue on why Apple, with its famously large cash reserves dwarfing the value of Netflix’s entire business, wouldn’t just buy one of its competitors. “Generally, in the history of Apple, we haven’t made huge acquisitions,” Cue said. “The reason we haven’t done that is the old Gretzky quote: ‘Skate to where the puck’s going, not where it is.’”

Evernote will use AI to automate your workflow

As the official note-taker of SXSW 2018, Evernote has a massive job. It has to record and produce recaps of more than 50 sessions across four different convention verticals, while at the same time delivering its own news amid meetings with partners and press. Whew. But it’s also looking to make that job easier for its users, with new tools it’s adding to the Spaces feature it launched two weeks ago.

At a meeting here in Austin, Evernote CTO Anirban Kundu showed Engadget an early version of Spaces, which is meant to facilitate easier collaboration, but also uses AI to deliver better search results and suggest relevant tasks. Kundu previewed some of these AI capabilities during his SXSW speech, including the video below. Evernote said the demo is slow, though, and that the eventual version should perform faster.

The note-taking app uses a method that feels similar to what Google Inbox does, by scanning the text in your documents to look for action items like, “Terrence should remind writers to send their drafts by Monday.” I typed “Taylor needs to go see a doctor tomorrow” into an early version of the text editor, and within seconds a star icon popped up on the left of my sentence. Despite Evernote’s warning about speed, it already seemed pretty quick during my preview.

Clicking on the symbol brought up a window that suggested I add that as a task in Spaces and assign it to Taylor with tomorrow as a deadline. So far, the system works best with sentences that are clearly worded, and may trip over shorthand or rambly speech patterns. But Kundu said his team is working on the algorithm to better understand the myriad ways people jot down notes.

That’s why AI is important in making these new tools effective, Kundu said. People don’t all work the same way, so it’s not as easy as implementing a “rule-based engine” that finds a one-size-fits-all solution. Instead, “AI helps us understand the different ways people work,” he said. “We can’t code up all these things — that’s why we use machine learning.”

A feature that’s coming but that I didn’t get to see is an AI-powered search engine. With Spaces, you’ll have access to documents that weren’t created by you, and trying to find a document in a sea of unfamiliar files is a tough task. Evernote wants to make that slightly easier by guessing what might be more relevant to you based on who you work with, whether your name appears in something and the type of information (financials, slideshows etc) you’re looking for.

Although my preview was brief and limited, I’m already intrigued enough by the potential that I’ve re-installed Evernote on my phone. I can see myself one day pasting a work email into the app and having it create cards for me to manage the many moving pieces of my various projects. Actions isn’t available yet, but it will roll out to Spaces later this year. You’ll have to be a business user to get Spaces, but Evernote does hope to bring these new features to personal accounts eventually.

Catch up on the latest news from SXSW 2018 right here.

Yahoo loses its bid to reject data breach lawsuit

Yahoo (and by extension, its parent/Engadget owner Verizon) now has no choice but to face the majority of claims in a US lawsuit over the internet giant’s multiple data breaches. California Judge Lucy Koh (of Apple-versus-Samsung fame) has denied Verizon’s bid to dismiss numerous claims in the suit, including breach of contract and negligence. The plaintiffs’ claims demonstrated that they would have “behaved differently” if they’d known about Yahoo’s email security woes, Judge Koh said, and that Yahoo’s attempts to limit liability were “unconscionable” given how much it knew about its security problems and how little it did.

The judge had previously shot down attempts by Yahoo and Verizon to dismiss unfair competition claims. In attempting to take down most of the claims, Yahoo had maintained that the lawsuit was based on “20/20 hindsight” and didn’t change that the company had been continuously fighting security threats.

This ruling could put Yahoo and Verizon on the hook for a tremendous sum if the lawsuit is successful. It eventually became clear that all of Yahoo’s 3 billion users circa 2013 were affected by the first big breach, and that’s not including the people affected by the two other breaches between then and 2016. Only a fraction of those users are American, but that could still lead to a costly payout.

Source: Reuters

Huawei’s budget-friendly Honor View 10 ships March 23rd

Huawei’s Honor View 10 is positioned as a budget-friendly alternative to high-priced mobile phones. Our hands-on described it as a “OnePlus-style flagship that won’t break the bank,” while also calling it a “serious contender.” Now you can pre-order the handset for $499 with a shipping date of March 23rd.

The View 10 has two colors to choose from, a light blue and solid black. You’ll get a free case and a set of white earbuds, too. Like Huawei’s fancier Mate 10 and Mate 10 Pro, the View 10 uses a Kirin 970 chipset which power’s the company’s AI. It also uses a 5.99-inch LCD screen with slim bezels; not quite a full-screen phone, but pretty close. The 16-megapixel color camera has a 20MP monochrome companion, though they both jut out of the phone back iPhone-style.

Via: The Verge

Source: Huawei

Researchers turned wood into a better insulator than Styrofoam

The research lab behind the creation of see-through wood has developed a new type of material that could be used as a cheaper, stronger and more environmentally friendly insulator. They’re calling it nanowood and it insulates better than Styrofoam and silica aerogels. “This can insulate better than most other current thermal insulators, including Styrofoam,” Tian Li, a researcher on the project, said in a statement. “It is extremely promising to be used as energy efficient building materials.”

To make the material, the researchers took wood and stripped away two of its natural components — lignin, which makes it brown and rigid, and hemicellulose. That turned the wood white and made it less able to conduct heat. The tubed structures within a tree that transport water and nutrients up the trunk run in one direction, and heat can conduct along those channels. But heat doesn’t conduct across those channels very well and because stripping away the lignin and hemicellulose leaves a lot of gaps in the wood, wood treated to become nanowood conducts heat in that direction even less.

Along with insulating more effectively than currently used materials like Styrofoam, nanowood is also stronger, and it won’t cause the same lung irritations that fibers from glass wool insulators do. The research team also says that it could be fabricated for as low as $7.44 per square meter, can be folded and rolled when less than one millimeter thick and is biodegradable, so it won’t add to landfill waste like the insulating materials we often use now do.

“My research program experiments with nature’s nanotechnology that we see in wood,” project head Liangbing Hu, an associate professor in the department of materials science and engineering at the University of Maryland, said in a statement. “We are reinventing ways to use wood that could be useful in constructing energy efficient and environmentally friendly homes.” The work was recently published in Science Advances.

Via: LA Times

Source: Science Advances

Overwatch League team releases player over hateful speech

Overwatch League player Felix “xQc” Lengyel has been suspended twice for using both homophobic and racist slurs, and he’s now bowing out entirely. Dallas Fuel and Lengyel have announced that they’ve “mutually agreed to part ways” in the wake of his conduct. It was in the “best interest” of both sides to release Lengyel before his contract expired, team owner Mike Rufail said. Lengyel’s latest suspension won’t let him play or practice with any team during Stage 2 of the League’s inaugural season, and letting him go now lets the Fuel sign others during the transfer window while giving Lengyel a chance to sign with someone new.

Not that he necessarily will. In a stream after his departure, Lengyel noted that the Overwatch League would have to “manually approve” his entry into another team. The process is “a little unlikely to be fair” in light of past events, he said. We’ve asked Blizzard for comment on the situation, but it’s clearly up to Langyel as to whether or not he tries to rejoin.

His exit highlights some of the teething troubles the League has had since its debut. Blizzard sidelined Philadelphia Fusion’s Su-min “Sado” Kim after learning that he’d accepted payments to level up other players, while two Shanghai Dragons players (Chao “Undead” Fang and Junjie “Xushu” Liu) were fined for sharing an account. Although Blizzard has a code of conduct, enforcement hasn’t always been consistent.

And to some extent, it was difficult to completely avoid these problems. Many competitors are either new to eSports or haven’t played at such a high level before, and aren’t used to such close scrutiny of their behavior (particularly outside of events). This isn’t to say that the Overwatch League and individual teams don’t share some responsibility, but these issues might pop up less frequently over time.

Source: Overwatch League

First ‘Hearthstone’ expansion of 2018 delves into ‘The Witchwood’

Weeks after laying out this year’s plan for Hearthstone, Blizzard has announced the first expansion of 2018: The Witchwood. Once it lands, the Year of the Raven will begin — and all of 2016’s cards will be retired from the main Standard format. The haunted forest-themed set will introduce 135 cards and several card types that introduce new styles of play. And like the last two content additions, players will get solo content for free. The announcement didn’t give a release date, but if the last two years are any indication, The Witchwood will likely drop next month.

As in every expansion, the set’s big additions are the new card types. The first, Echo, allows you to play as many copies of a card as you have the mana for. In their example, the Hearthstone team presented a 3-mana minion with the ability, which would make it useful later in the game, allowing you to drop an extra one on turn six or two on turn nine. The second new card type, Rush, allows minions to attack on the same turn like the existing ability Charge, but only other minions. Finally, there are some Worgen (read: werewolf) cards that shift while they’re in your hand.

In the Hearthstone team’s adorable lost-in-the-woods promo video, they also showed off a couple of the new legendary-rarity cards that promote innovative deck archetypes. One reduces your hero power to cost one mana if you’ve only included even-numbered cost cards in your deck, while another upgrades your heroic ability if you’ve only got odd-priced ones. In other words, these will enable new gimmicky decks that may or may not pan out, but people similarly underestimated cards like Razakus that ended up dominating the meta for awhile.

As the Hearthstone team promised while outlining the 2018 schedule, The Witchwood will come with its own single-player content: Monster Hunt. This first debuted with last year’s second set, Knights of the Frozen Throne, but the most recent expansion Kobolds and Catacombs kicked solo adventuring into high gear with the Dungeon Run. Much like that adventure, Monster Hunt will have players defeating bosses and drafting decks as they go, though they’ll have to wait two weeks after the set launches before this mode goes live. If you’re really keen to learn the cards, the Hearthstone team will host a livestream on its Twitch channel at 11am PT on March 26th where it will start revealing them.

Source: Hearthstone