It’s time to talk about mental illness in indie development

This is normal.

Heart pounding, hands shaking, head packed with static. The absolute inability to process what anyone is saying, let alone respond to it. Sitting alone at home — lights off because you’ve been inside all day and the sun set hours ago, but your legs have been glued to the chair for just as long — computer screen glowing. Wanting to be outside but unable to deal with the idea of people, conversation, smiling, pretending. Feeling worthless.

This is normal.

That’s the message Kate Edwards and Mike Wilson are trying to cultivate in the independent game development community. Depression, anxiety and other mental illnesses are common, and any person feeling this way is not alone.

“This is part of development, it’s normal,” Edwards says.

“It’s abnormal to not feel this way,” Wilson adds, nodding.

Edwards is executive director of Take This, a five-year-old non-profit organization dedicated to helping people in the video game world talk about and manage mental illnesses. Wilson is the co-founder of Devolver Digital and Good Shepherd Entertainment, two powerhouses in the realm of indie publishing. He deals directly with indies every day, and when he met Edwards, Wilson had seen four developers under his labels hospitalized for mental health problems in just two years.

With this reality as their connective tissue, Edwards and Wilson hit it off. In March, Wilson joined the board of Take This.

“We talk about stigma and, yeah, there’s a huge societal issue there, but I think just for developers, they need to understand this is normal,” Edwards says. “There’s all kinds of other normal things we can talk about with indie development and having to market yourself, but this is one aspect that’s normal and it’s much more prevalent than people think.”

“It’s like bugs in your game,” Wilson says. “They will exist, I don’t care who you are. You will fuck something up and you will need to fix it, and you are also going to have bugs.”

“Mental bugs,” Edwards says.

Playdead

The indie institution

Take This was founded in 2013 by video game journalists Russ Pitts and Susan Arendt, alongside clinical psychologist Dr. Mark Kline. Pitts and Arendt were shocked into action after the suicide of a colleague in 2012, and they started the Take This blog to discuss mental illness in the video game industry. It hit a chord, and the blog blossomed into a non-profit that provides resources and panels on the benefits of having an open dialogue about mental illness. Plus, it publishes white papers on harmful game development practices and hosts the AFK Room at major gaming conventions across the country, offering quiet spaces staffed by licensed clinicians for anyone feeling overwhelmed by the bustling, noisy floors at PAX and other big shows.

Though Take This is concerned with broadening the mental-illness conversation across the video game industry, from AAA to one-man dev teams and even journalists, Wilson is specifically invested in the health of indie developers. Edwards is, too — she was executive director of the International Game Developers Association from 2012 to 2017, and she’s seen first-hand how the indie lifestyle can contribute to depression, anxiety and other illnesses.

Independent development has become a mainstream pursuit over the past decade. High-profile successes, the advent of digital-only publishing and accessible game-dev tools have pushed the indie industry into the spotlight, with triumphant developers pulling in millions from a single title, seemingly overnight. Yet there are even more developers who spend years building a quality game, expecting the big indie payoff, only to see sales fall well below such high expectations.

“In my perception of the last few years, it has gotten worse because the stresses of success are something I think a lot of Indies are not prepared for,” Edwards says. “Well, actually the stresses of both success and failure. We’ve seen it on both sides.”

The stress of success

Hotline Miami is a perfect example of the modern indie mental toll. The game hit Steam in 2012, the brainchild of two-man development squad Jonatan Soderstrom and Dennis Wedin, and published by Wilson’s Devolver Digital. Hotline Miami is the game that put Devolver on the map as an indie publisher — it was an immediate, massive success, selling 300,000 copies on PC in its first four months alone. It’s an ultra-violent, neon-splattered, top-down action game set in 1989, complete with a trippy storyline involving the Russian mob, mysterious janitors and a series of power-endowing animal masks.

“Dennis completed some of those levels of Hotline from an institution,” Wilson says.

Wedin was hospitalized for two weeks during the development of Hotline Miami as he dealt with the end of a romantic relationship.

“I was super depressed during the first game because of my breakup, which was really rough on me,” Wedin says in a Hotline Miami documentary produced by Complex. From the mental health ward, he infused the game with personal tidbits from his relationship — but neither Wedin nor Soderstrom told Wilson about the hospitalization. He only found out about it because he watched the documentary.

Wedin didn’t want anyone at Devolver to worry, Wilson says.

“We were always worried about his partner, Jonatan, because he looked the part,” he recalls. “Dennis is the gregarious rockstar, he’s got a tan, he’s not afraid to travel and talk to press, and the other one is like you’re trying to listen to a game developer.”

This was a wake-up call for Wilson. There’s no physical indicator for mental illness, no solitary mold of person that it affects. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, one in six adults in the United States lives with a mental illness — and of course they don’t all look or act the same way. Sometimes, there is no red flag.

Wedin’s hospitalization went down before Hotline Miami became Hotline Miami — before it turned Soderstrom and Wedin into rich, big-name indie developers. After the game came out, their lives changed dramatically, but not necessarily for the better.

“It’s really hard to feel bad about it because you know you’re privileged to be in this situation, but at the same time, I don’t like my life more now than I did before the game,” Soderstrom says in the Complex documentary. “I kind of like it less.”

“Yeah,” Wedin agrees.

Soderstrom continues, “I can’t feel sorry for myself. I feel like an asshole for not taking responsibility for my life. But I don’t know what to do about it. It’s just a natural thing that I do. And it wasn’t supposed to be a big game. It was supposed to be a great game for a very select few people.”

“For us,” Wedin says. “We made a game for us.”

It wasn’t supposed to be a big game.

Jonatan Soderstrom, Dennaton Games

Take This into the future

Wilson is aware of four Devolver and Good Shepherd developers in the past two years who have been hospitalized for mental illness, but he knows there are more stories out there, even more people wrestling with their demons alone.

“How many people have suffered in silence?” he asks. “Or lost their girlfriend or boyfriend or husband or kids?”

“It’s still a massive pyramid of people,” Edwards adds.

“Anxiety for AAA developers is significantly different from anxiety for indies.”

Indie developers face a specific brand of pressure, much of it internal. Edwards admires the drive that she observes in these folks, but she also sees how the common indie workflow can push developers deeper into their own minds, driving negative introspection and forcing isolation as they try to finish their games at any cost.

“Anxiety for AAA developers is significantly different from anxiety for indies,” Edwards says. “For the AAA developers, often it’s the deadline, it’s the manager, it’s the performance review. …But in the indie space, it’s the same anxiety as the entrepreneur or small business owner has.”

Online tools have made it easier than ever for folks to work from home, but this evolution can be a double-edged sword, keeping developers from engaging with nature, friends, strangers and the non-digital world in general. Edwards recalls an encounter with a specific developer who exemplifies the everyday, overworked indie:

I happen to know they’re extremely introverted, as many people in this industry are, which just compounds the problem. I saw them and I could just tell — I had known them long enough, I could tell they were having issues and I just gave them a big hug, and they just started crying like crazy.

They said, “You’re the first person who has hugged me in months.”

Here’s where Take This comes in. Its mission is to let developers like this one know that they’re not alone, and provide resources for them to improve their mental states. The organization offers resources on finding a therapist, taking antidepressants and anti-anxiety medications, and even supporting friends who are dealing with a crisis.

Take This received a grant this year from Child’s Play, a large charity that provides video games to kids in hospitals, to help it implement the AFK Room at every PAX convention in North America. There are plans to expand the AFK Room to other conventions, as well. To further aid in this goal, Take This recently established a crowdfunding campaign seeking $50,000 by April 30th.

There’s also the new Take This Ambassador Program, which aims to train YouTube and Twitch streamers in discussing mental illnesses, so they can better manage their own crises and pass along valuable information to their audiences. The program is due to roll out this year.

“They’re willing to talk about it, that’s the most important thing.”

“One of the things we’ve had happen over the last couple of years is we’ll have streamers and YouTubers approach us and they really resonate with our mission,” Edwards says. “They say, ‘I’m suffering from mental health issues, I’d love to talk about it on my show, but I’d like to stream for you, I’d like raise money for you.’ It’s just so cool to see that happen. We’re talking a few hundred bucks, maybe a thousand or so, we don’t care. The fact is that they’re willing to do it and they’re willing to talk about it, that’s the most important thing.”

Take This is building an army of indie developers and streamers who are equipped to help people — and themselves — through mental illnesses. It all starts with conversation.

“They’re not afraid to read some instructions and follow them and master something new, but that has to exist and the conversation has to exist,” Wilson says. “Saying that it’s normal is the perfect thing.”

Rocket Lab will try to launch its first commercial mission this month

New Zealand based launch company Rocket Lab has had multiple successful test drives, and now it’s ready for the real thing. The company announced this morning that its first commercial launch is scheduled to occur this month. The launch window will open on April 20th and will last for 14 days. The Electron rocket will lift off from Rocket Lab’s Launch Complex 1 on the Mahia peninsula in New Zealand.

This mission is called “It’s Business Time,” a cheeky change from the previous launches, “It’s a Test” and “Still Testing.” It will include payloads from Spire Global, which has a constellation of Earth-observing satellites in low orbit, and GeoOptics, Inc., an environmental data company. Technically, the company’s second launch had commercial payloads, but it was still a test flight.

Rocket Lab has had two successful tests of its Electron rocket; the last one was just three months ago. “We always set out to create a vehicle and launch site that could offer the world’s most frequent launch capability and we’re achieving that in record time,” the company’s CEO, Peter Beck, said. The company has been aggressively 3D printing the parts for the Rutherford engines, and it hopes to be on a schedule of one launch per month by the end of the year.

Source: Rocket Lab

Apple Music and iCloud Music Library Face Syncing Issues as Users Discover Temporary Fixes

Apple Music and iCloud Music Library sometimes face slight delays when syncing your music between devices like a Mac and iPhone, but since the launch of iOS 11.3 reports about these delays have grown much more frequent. On the MacRumors forums, in Apple’s support communities, and throughout numerous Reddit posts, users have mentioned that when they add new music on their Mac or iPad, it no longer appears on their iPhone.

Some users have said that toggling iCloud Music Library on/off works to kickstart the sync and force a refresh of albums on their iPhone, but that has the potential to cause further problems like deleted music and the removal of some song downloads. Fortunately, one user on the Apple support communities website has shared a helpful temporary fix for the issue, which MacRumors has been able to successfully perform more than five times.

Creating a new, blank playlist works to refresh your Apple Music library
To manually refresh your iPhone’s music library, simply create a new, blank playlist by navigating to the Library tab in the iOS Music app, tap Playlists, tap New Playlist, and tap Done. Once the refresh is done, jump to the bottom of the Playlists page and 3D Touch to delete the empty playlist. Note that this will also update songs added and removed within playlists.

There is no fix for this, but there is a work around until Apple fixes this: just create a blank playlist on the iOS device. This forces a read/write with the library stored in iCloud, then all your changes will suddenly get pulled down. You have to do this every time, it’s essentially a manual refresh now.

Unfortunately, the reverse method doesn’t appear to work as consistently in iTunes on Mac, but desktop users also have another potential easy solution to refresh their library: simply rate a song by loving/disliking it. Afterwards, the Recently Added tab in iTunes should refresh with the addition or removal of content that you made on any other devices connected to the same iCloud account.

On both macOS and iOS, you can also add any other new song, album, or playlist to your library to manually refresh and force the content not syncing across devices to appear. Then, you can delete the new songs after everything else has been updated.

Multiple Apple Music subscribers have opened up support cases on the bug, and Apple support in most instances have said that it’s not a known issue. However, support staff told one user that they will start an investigation after he “rebooted, changed password, signed out of iCloud, switched iCloud music library off,” and more.

Tags: Apple Music, iCloud Music Library
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iTunes 12.6.4 Released as Minor Update to Version With Built-In App Store

Apple has updated its special enterprise-focused version of iTunes that still has a built-in App Store for those who need it.

Download links for iTunes 12.6.4.3 have been quietly made available in an Apple support document related to deploying iPhone and iPad apps in a business environment with iTunes on Mac or Windows PCs.

The update was prepared on March 20 and released on Tuesday, according to German blog iFun.de. The version doesn’t include new release notes, so it is likely a minor update with bug fixes and stability improvements.

Apple removed the App Store in iTunes 12.7 last September, but it released iTunes 12.6.3 shortly afterwards for business customers or anyone who might still need to use the desktop software to install iOS apps.

Those who have already downloaded iTunes 12.6.3 will likely not be prompted about the iTunes 12.6.4.3 update, so they’ll have to update manually by downloading and installing the new version from Apple’s support document.

iTunes 12.6.4.3 can be downloaded by anyone, including those who have already installed iTunes 12.7. If at any point users want to update to iTunes 12.7.4 or later, they can do so manually from the main iTunes download page.
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BAFTA-winning puzzle game ‘The Spectrum Retreat’ is almost ready

Dan Smith was only 18 when he won the BAFTA Young Game Designers Award in 2016 for the prototype of his first-person puzzler. Now, his creation is almost ready to hit your consoles: video game publisher Ripstone Games is releasing The Spectrum Retreat on PS4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch and PC sometime this year. The game puts you in an unsettlingly pristine art deco hotel called The Penrose, where you have to solve color-coded puzzles and take on physics challenges to unravel its secrets and solve the mystery surrounding your stay.

Smith said in a statement that the finished game is built on the mechanics he developed years ago, but “they’re now integrated with a mature, absorbing story and setting,” thanks to Ripstone Games’ help. “We’ve worked closely with Dan as he, along with our in-house artists and programmers, crafted an experience which does justice to the vision he showed in his 2016 BAFTA award-winning demo,” the publisher said. “The puzzles possess a depth which betray Dan’s age and the story provides real emotional heft.”

We don’t know about you, but we’re hoping that The Penrose is a combination of Hotel California and the Overlook from Stephen King’s The Shining — a hotel that messes with your mind and won’t let you leave. The Spectrum Retreat doesn’t have a specific release date yet, but we’ll update you when the company releases more info.

Source: Ripstone Games

Amazon wants developers to build more Echo Button games

When Amazon launched Echo Buttons last year — the Bluetooth devices that bring a new dimension to games on Alexa — the general consensus was that they were a cute addition to the ecosystem, but probably weren’t going to add anything significant to the Alexa experience. However, Amazon has now opened up a beta version of the Gadgets Skill API for the hardware, suggesting that it wants developers to take the accessory’s capabilities further.

Vice president of Amazon Alexa Steve Rabuchin said earlier this year that consumers could expect more compatible games. Indeed, a preview version of the API has yielded an Alexa version of board game classic Trivial Pursuit, and an Alexa-style take on light up memory game Simon is reportedly on its way. Another creation includes light up play back of Dr Martin Luther King’s famous “I have a dream” speech. This isn’t a game, admittedly, but it does nod at other ways Echo Buttons can be used, which Amazon now seems very keen to explore.

Via: Techcrunch

Source: Amazon

Mark Zuckerberg will testify before Congress on April 11th

Last week, Congress asked Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg to testify before the House Energy and Commerce Committee on the topic of data privacy. Now the House of Representatives has confirmed that Zuckerberg has agreed to appear; the hearing will take place on April 11th at 11:00 AM ET.

The focus of the inquiry surrounds how Facebook utilizes the data of its users and how it protects (or, more importantly, doesn’t protect) this important information. The social network has been in hot water over the last few weeks as details of the Cambridge Analytica scandal have emerged; the company gave information on roughly 50 million users to the analytics firm (that’s also been called a “propaganda machine.”)

The Senate Judiciary Committee has also asked Zuckerberg to appear and testify, along with Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. The subject is, once again, data privacy. According to CNN’s sources, Zuckerberg has agreed to appear on April 10th, but we don’t have any confirmation of that as of yet. It’s as yet unclear whether he will testify before both committees or this will be Zuckerberg’s only appearance before Congress on this particular matter.

Source: House Energy and Commerce Committee

Gigabyte Aero 15X review: The best lightweight gaming laptop yet

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang flaunted a Gigabyte Aero 15X at CES as to show how Max-Q tech can make laptops both light and powerful. With the updated 2018 Aero 15X, Gigabyte has shown it’s not just about the graphics. It features an all-new eighth-generation Intel 6-core CPU and with a new 144Hz display, addresses the last model’s biggest shortfall for gamers. At the same time, it retains the clever design, NVIDIA GTX 1070 Max-Q graphics and huge battery, making the Aero 15X the best lightweight gaming laptop you can buy. That said, there are a host of similar laptops coming soon, so Gigabyte might not retain its crown for long.

Hardware

Gigabyte didn’t mess with the design of the original Aero 15X, other than replacing the “Gigabyte” lettering on the screen with a fancy new “Aero” logo. It also kept the brushed black aluminum chassis, port layout, weird webcam and everything else external. Since the last model had a near perfect blend of power, weight and battery life, it’s easy to understand why it stayed the course. Some may call the design bland, but I like that it has Superman-like power under a Clark Kent exterior.

At 18mm (0.7 inches) thick, it is about as thin as its key lightweight gaming laptop rivals, the MSI GS63VR 7RG Stealth Pro and ASUS ROG Zephyrus GX501. It’s a bit heavier than the 4.2-pound MSI, weighing 4.5 pounds, but much lighter than the 4.9-pound ASUS. Suffice to say, it’s thin enough to put in my Peak Design shoulder bag and light enough to carry around without breaking my back.

I’m picky about keyboards for speed typing, but fortunately the Aero 15X has one of the best I’ve tried, thanks to the slightly concave keys, short travel and satisfyingly solid rebound. As before, it’s backlit with Gigabyte’s Fusion tech, which lights up each key individually with up to 16 million colors — the laptop’s only bit of gaming flash.

Like on many other Windows 10 laptops, the touchpad on Gigabyte’s flagship is just okay. The level of friction is good, click pressure isn’t too heavy and tapping works well. However, it occasionally mis-detected my palm, and doesn’t support three- or four-finger Windows 10 gestures used for summoning Cortana and other functions. Gamers and serious graphics users will want a mouse, but the touchpad will at least do in a pinch.

Speaking of peripherals, the Aero 15X has a generous array of high-speed ports for power users. You get one Thunderbolt, three USB 3.1 ports, SD card slot, HDMI 2.0, mini-DP and even an RJ-45 ethernet port. You can squeeze in a generous amount of storage too, thanks to a pair of M.2 PCI-E slots.

The system also features a pair of 2-watt speakers with Dolby ATMOS for gaming. The quality of the sound, alas, isn’t quite worthy of the name, as the Aero 15X, like many laptops, lacks anything approximating bass. The rest of the frequencies, at least, are crystal clear, and the stereo separation is better than average.

The standout design feature is the near bezel-less 15.6-inch display. On top of looking good, it keeps the Aero 15X’s size about the same as many 14-inch laptops. It also helps explain how Gigabyte was able to fit so much power and battery life into such a small chassis. The downside to these small bezels is that the 720p webcam is mounted on the hinge, creating a very unflattering angle for Skype calls.

My review model had a 1080p display, but a 4K (3,840 x 2,160) screen is also available. That option gives you 100 percent Adobe RGB coverage but will no doubt drain the battery a lot quicker.

In any case, the 1080p IPS display is fantastic. It now has an excellent maximum 144Hz refresh rate, which is a big step up from the 60Hz screen that disappointed gamers on the last model, although it’s still lacking NVIDIA G-Sync support, unfortunately. For graphics users, it packs X-Rite Pantone tech, meaning colors are factory calibrated out of the box.

Performance and Battery Life

Gigabyte’s last Aero 15X was already near the top of the performance charts thanks to the Intel quad-core i7-7700HQ processor and NVIDIA GTX 1070 Max-Q graphics. The latest model takes it to another level, though, via Intel’s freshly-announced 6-core i7-8750H CPU. Gigabyte has promised up to 50 percent more processing grunt, and my tests bear that out, showing a CPUMark score of 12,500, compared to around 8,900 on the older model.

As a reminder, Max-Q cards are a bit slower than the non-Max-Q versions, but more battery-friendly. So, you’d expect the new Aero to pack more power than an NVIDIA GTX 1060 laptop, but less than one with a GTX 1070. Sure enough, it falls just short of the Alienware 15 in the 3D Mark 11 test suite, and sits another notch below the aforementioned ASUS ROG Zephyrus. However, it smokes models like the Alienware 13 and latest Surface Book, both of which pack the GTX 1060 chip. Performance is closer to the GTX 1070 than the 1060.

To see how the Aero 15X handled games, I tested Witcher 3, Wolfenstein II and Rise of the Tomb Raider. At 1080p, it handled all of those games incredibly smoothly, hitting 120 fps on Rise of the Tomb Raider — just a smidge below the GTX 1070-equipped Alienware 15. Even on a 4K monitor, the frame rate on Witcher 3 was well over 30 fps, more than acceptable for a laptop so small.

I also edited a couple of videos with the Aero 15X, mixing HD and 4K video, and it really shone. It was snappy and responsive with resource-hungry video, and could render stabilization and other demanding tasks rapidly. Final high-quality, full HD encoding was equally quick.

The Aero 15X has dual fans and two pipes that protect the GPU and CPU from overheating, along with a side air vent to prevent recirculation. However, when gaming, video editing or running an external 4K monitor, the fans crank up and get pretty noisy. During normal use they rarely come on, though, and when they do, the sound is not obnoxious. Most importantly, parts get warm but never hot to the touch. In Gigabyte’s Smart Manager, you can even tweak the fans for quiet, normal and gaming operation.

The Aero 15X’s superpower is its battery life. It lasted a stellar 7:40 in our battery rundown test, nearly long enough to let me continuously watch movies on a Paris/Vancouver flight. That’s about twice as long as the latest GS63VR 7RG Stealth Pro and, miles ahead of the ROG Zephyrus. How did Gigabyte pull this off?

For one thing, the Aero 15X packs a massive 94.24 Wh battery, almost double the 50 Wh unit in the ASUS ROG Zephyrus. It also offloads video playback chores to the integrated Intel UHD 630 graphics, keeping the more power-hungry GTX 1070 idle. You can expect a lot less battery life while gaming, of course, but considerably more than rivals. Again, as with other laptops, I’d expect considerably less battery life with the 4K display option.

Pricing and the Competition

The Aero 15X starts at $2,200 with a 1080p 144Hz display and Windows 10. Stepping up to the 4K screen and Windows Pro will cost you $200 more. It’s also launching the slightly de-tuned Aero 15 with the same Intel i7-8750H 6-core processor and still-excellent NVIDIA GTX 1060 graphics, starting at $2,000.

You can get up to 32GB for the Aero 15/15X, and I’d recommend you do just that if you plan on doing graphics work or heavy gaming. Frankly, 16GB just isn’t enough anymore for power users, thanks to memory bloat in many apps, especially browsers like Firefox and Chrome. I found that Premiere Pro 2018 CC, another memory hog, used nearly 10GB of RAM at times.

At $2,200, the Aero 15X will be competitive with the aforementioned MSI GS63VR 7RG Stealth Pro ($2,400) and $2,300 ASUS ROG Zephyrus equipped with full NVIDIA GTX 1070 graphics. If you’re willing to step down to NVIDIA GTX 1060 graphics, however, the Razer Blade is now considerably cheaper at $1,700.

Wrap-up

With Gigabyte’s refresh of the Aero 15X, it now has few faults, blending class-leading performance, portability and incredible battery life. It also has a wide range of ports, an excellent keyboard, and finally, a fast-refreshing 144Hz screen better suited for gaming. However, a better touchpad would have been nice, and the minimalistic design won’t thrill those who want their gaming laptops to look the part.

As someone who also does a lot video editing, compositing and 3D animation, graphics performance, weight and battery life are all paramount for me. I recently covered the Geneva Motor Show, and needed something reasonably light with enough power to edit 4K video and sufficient battery life to go most of the day. That’s another use case where the Aero 15X really shines, providing all three of those things at once. For people like me, the excellent gaming performance is just a bonus.

All that said, with the launch of Intel’s new high-performance laptop CPU’s, a wave of lightweight, powerful laptops arrived this week from ASUS, MSI, Samsung and others. The new ASUS ROG Zephyrus M laptop, for instance, has nearly identical specs to the Gigabyte Aero 15X, with the same eighth-gen Core i7 CPU, GTX 1070 Max-Q graphics and 144Hz screen. The same goes for MSI’s GS65 “Stealth Thin” laptop, so Gigabyte has a lot of high-powered competition incoming.

Twitter will stream another season of Major League Baseball

Just because Facebook has forged a deal with Major League Baseball to livestream 25 of its day games exclusively doesn’t mean other social networks can’t get a piece of the action. MLB games are also coming to Twitter, now that the two have renewed their partnership. Twitter is livestreaming one day game a week for free from April to September 2018, starting with the Texas Rangers versus the Oakland Athletics game on April 5th at 3:35 PM ET.

MLB’s and Twitter’s friendship started in 2016 when the platform first hosted MLB games as part of its live sports streaming efforts. Like that round, you won’t even need to log into the website to watch this batch — simply go to live.twitter.com/MLB or to @MLB’s official account. Twitter won’t have exclusive rights to the games, but each one will air at the same time a participating teams’ local TV channel broadcasts the event. It’s a great way to watch if you don’t have access to some of the games, but take note that you can only access them if you’re in the US. You can, however, monitor highlights via the @MLB Twitter account (or @LasMayores for Spanish highlights) throughout the season wherever you are.

Via: TechCrunch

Source: Twitter

BlackBerry sues Snap over map and messaging patents

Facebook isn’t the only company facing a patent lawsuit filed by BlackBerry: the Canadian mobilemaker has also sued Snap for patent infringement. BlackBerry is accusing Snap of infringing on six of its patents issued between 2012 and 2014, two of which are also in its complaint against Facebook. According to the court documents Mashable found, those infringement claims affect Snap Map and the ephemeral app’s messaging technology, which BlackBerry says copies the tech it uses for BBM. In BlackBerry’s complaint against Facebook, it said it invented the core aspects of modern messaging, so it’s not surprising that that particular aspect is also part of its lawsuit against Snap.

As Bloomberg noted when BlackBerry sued Facebook, the once-formidable mobilemaker has been looking through its patents and asking companies to pay if it thinks they’ve been infringing on its IPs. The company could have decided to use its library of patents as an additional source of revenue, now that its phones are no longer in demand. Snap hasn’t issued a statement about the lawsuit yet, but a BlackBerry spokesperson told Mashable:

“BlackBerry has a well-earned reputation for protecting and securing our customers’ data and privacy. For more than a year we have been working to establish a dialogue with Snap as we believe there are far more opportunities for partnership than disagreement. While we continue to hold this door open, we also have a strong claim that Snap infringed on our intellectual property, harmed our shareholders, and we have an obligation to pursue appropriate legal remedies.”

The patent infringement claims include SNAP MAPS pic.twitter.com/iPvdsFzhKv

— Kerry Flynn 🐶 (@kerrymflynn) April 3, 2018

Source: Bloomberg