Posts Tagged ‘microsoft’

Yahoo is among the growing number of media companies that have bid to acquire Hulu, the streaming video service owned by NBC Universal, Fox, and Disney, according to a report by All Things D . The news site reported that the other bidders include DirecTV, Time Warner Cable, William Morris Endeavor, and Guggenheim Digital. Meanwhile, the New York Post reports that Hulu employees are begginning to depart.

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Yahoo among bidders for Hulu, as report says employees head for exits

Google is working on building up wireless networks in sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia and other developing regions, reports The Wall Street Journal . Google is said to be “deep” in the process of funding and building such networks, and is looking to partner with local companies and seeking to have local regulators open up spectrum reserved for TV and other industries. That spectrum may be so-called “white spaces,” the portions that TV companies don’t use but which are still licensed to them. After all, in March, Google announced a trial to deliver wireless broadband to ten schools in South Africa over white spaces, which would seem to be in line with the larger ambitions reported today. Continue reading…

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Google may fund and build wireless networks in Africa, Southeast Asia, WSJ reports

The game console of the future will be a tiny box and a large connection to the cloud. Projections will illuminate across your living room, turning your furniture Pleasantville black-and-white to project the somber tone that the game detects from your heartbeat. “You are the controller” — but this is now more a medical distinction than it is a slogan. Intravenously entangled, from plasma to pixel. Welcome to the future

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Top Shelf 012: ‘Xbox On’

In case you hadn’t heard, Microsoft pulls the wraps off of its next-gen gaming console earlier this week at an event on its Redmond campus. A brand new issue of our slate magazine steps inside the lab where the Xbox One was built for a behind the scenes look at how the new “all-in-one” box came to be. We also offer up our initial impressions of the unit and both its gamepad and Kinect 2.0 peripherals in an extended hands-on.

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Distro Issue 92: Building the Xbox One

Rumors have been flying around about a major visual redesign to Apple’s iOS ever since Jony Ive took on an interface design role following the departure of senior VP and mobile software head Scott Forstall . Most of those rumors have focused on a new, “flat” design that would remove many of the skeumorphic aspects of iOS that have cropped up over the years, and now 9to5Mac’s Mark Gurman has been tipped off to a number of new features and design elements in iOS 7. For starters, Ive will reportedly banish the mismatched “heavy textures” found across iOS in favor of a unified scheme largely featuring more simple black-and-white tones.

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Jony Ive’s iOS 7 redesign reportedly eliminates ‘heavy textures’ for a flat, ‘black and white’ design

The stage lights had barely dimmed at the Xbox One event before the internet started tripping over itself with questions about how the second-hand market was expected to operate — or if there was going to be one at all. Microsoft assured us there would be, but aside from whispers of a used game “activation fee” the finer details were kept under wraps. We may know a little more now, however, as MCV claims to have heard specifics from retailers who have been briefed by Redmond on the trade-in process. Allegedly, shops that wish to buy and sell a title will need to be hooked up to a Microsoft database so that access to the game can be removed from the previous owner’s account and transferred to a new one.

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Retailers reportedly briefed on how the Xbox One used-games market will work

Microsoft’s Bing may be a boy among men in the search-engine wars, but that’s not stopping it from piling on new features . The latest are in its news search, where it just added a “trending topics” carousel that shows timely info in the same category as your query (see the above image), along with a sidebar that displays personalities “you might also like.” Clicking on either will bring up further news results, and Bing also said it’s now extended the article index several years back in time compared to the curt two week period it had before. It’s an interesting change-up over Google’s Knowledge Graph , and Microsoft needs all the help it can get in search, given recent survey results .

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Bing news search now shows related topics and personalities

There’s a public health crisis brewing across hospitals in the US, where many sick children are struggling to obtain the basic drugs and nutrients that could save their lives. Alexandra Robbins takes a deeper look at America’s drug shortage in a piece for the Washingtonian , supplementing shocking statistics with harrowing portraits of the children most directly affected. As Robbins reports, assigning blame can be difficult — some blame drug manufacturers, others blame the FDA — but the numbers speak for themselves; there are currently 300 drug, nutrient, and trace element shortages across US hospitals, the highest number ever recorded. “I’ve never seen anything like this in my entire career, and I’ve been a pharmacist for… Continue reading…

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‘Children Are Dying’: a harrowing look at America’s drug shortage

One of the Xbox launch’s big reveals was that Microsoft added 300,000 servers to Xbox Live, and now GM Matt Booty has detailed to Ars Technica how that’ll improve game play. He said the improved cloud architecture will speed up GPU- or CPU-heavy chores that aren’t dependent on latency — like lighting or cloth dynamics — by pre-calculating them before applying them to a scene. To make that happen, the Xbox One server cloud will provide three virtual devices for “every Xbox one available in your living room.” It’ll be up to game developers to manage transitions between console-only and cloud assisted graphics, though, since the first few seconds of lighting in a new scene will need to be handled by the console before servers can take over. Of course, that means many titles may look better when you’re online, but he added that you’ll still be able to play if the internet is cut and “the game is going to have to intelligently handle that.” Filed under: Gaming , Microsoft Comments Source: Ars Technica

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Microsoft details how Xbox One cloud servers will tackle processor-intensive gaming chores

Somebody at Lego built a life-sized, five-million-brick model of a Rebel X-Wing fighter. Or rather, 32 somebodies, who spent 17,000 hours building the 43-foot-long, 45,980-pound replica — the largest Lego model in the world. Gizmodo reports that the the fighter was assembled at the Lego Model Shop in Kladno, Czech Republic before being shipped to New York City, where it currently sits on display. Lego had other motivations for building the X-Wing than just breaking records — it’s being used to promote Lego Star Wars: The Yoda Chronicles, a new three-part animated series coming to Cartoon Network on Wednesday, May 29th

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Life-sized Lego X-Wing smashes world record with five million bricks

Multibillionaire Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen is set to release his next project this summer: the major label debut of his band, The Underthinkers. The LA Times reports that the record features Chrissie Hynde from The Pretenders, Neville Brother Ivan Neville, and Eagles guitarist Joe Walsh, and that all the money from album sales will go toward educational programs at his Experience Music Project museum in Seattle. You might not guess it, but Allen is an accomplished guitarist, as evinced by the impressive blues shredding in the video below.

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Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen rocks out with Joe Walsh and Chrissie Hynde on major label debut

New weekly shows. New fascinating guests. New exciting antics. Absolutely no pants.

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On The Verge is coming back

US Senators’ indulgent treatment of Apple CEO Tim Cook at this week’s hearing on tax avoidance didn’t escape the writers at The Daily Show. On Wednesday’s episode, host Jon Stewart skewered lawmakers like John McCain (R, AZ) and Claire McCaskill (D, MO) with a supercut of fawning and adoration, punctuated with lines like “you’ve managed to change the world,” ” we love the iPhone and the iPad,” and “I harassed my husband until he converted to a MacBook.” Cook was called in to testify about Apple’s offshore profit shifting — avoiding US taxes on over $100 billion of income by keeping it stashed overseas. After throwing in a shot about Apple Maps, the host ripped the senators for asking Cook what kind of tax code he thought… Continue reading…

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‘The Daily Show’ rips fawning Senators at Tim Cook’s tax hearing

The Xbox One is a next generation console, and as such, it’s built with some future proofing in mind . It can do things you’re not quite ready for just yet, such as play back 4K resolution games, movies, and TV. And it’ll support 3D visuals too, despite the fact that 3D in the home has yet to catch in any meaningful way when it comes to TV, movies, or games.

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Future proofing: Xbox One to support 3D and 4K content

Google wants to blur the lines between its newly revamped Google+ social network and the rest of its services. To that end, the company announced today it will bring users’ Google+ photos to search results, both in Google’s main search results page and in Google+ itself. It’s part of the enhanced photos experience that launched last week at Google I/O . The new feature rolls out today, and signed-in users can find their photos simply by typing in ” my photos ,” which returns a grid of recent images on the search results page. But hidden behind the new functionality are new machine-learning algorithms, which will allow users to make detailed queries using natural language.

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Google uses machine learning to pull your personal photos into search results

Over 30 years after The Warriors took America on a dangerous midnight tour of New York, the city seems like a different world. Graffiti has been sanded, neighborhoods have gentrified, and citizens no longer fear attacks by roving mimes. But the traces of 1970s New York live on beneath repainted facades, and Scouting New York brings us along in a fascinating three-part attempt to find and photograph every location where The Warriors was filmed.

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Tracking ‘The Warriors’ through old New York, in 1979 and 2013

Ask anyone to name an iconic superhero, and Superman will be on the list. But his movies and comic book story arcs have often failed to capture the public’s imagination in the same way as flawed heroes like Batman or Spider-Man. Man of Steel , a new filmic treatment arriving this summer, promises to change this. But while producer Christopher Nolan and director Zack Snyder have made their names in superhero and comic book movies, they’ve done so by making gritty deconstructions of the superhero mythos, particularly Snyder’s adaptation of the notoriously unfilmable Watchmen

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Zack Snyder explains why Superman was subversive all along

Amazon has opened pre-orders for its Kindle Fire tablets in over 170 countries and expanded its Android Appstore in nearly 200 regions . It’s the biggest device rollout the company has embarked on since it entered the tablet market, and sees it take on Apple in terms of availability and distribution. Before today, the Kindle Fire was available in only seven countries — including the US, UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, and Japan.

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Amazon eyes Apple with massive Kindle Fire expansion in over 170 countries

At a press event in Tokyo today, Twitter founder Jack Dorsey announced the long-awaited Japanese debut of Square. It’s a big deal for the company — its first expansion outside of North America, and in the third-largest economy in the world. But Japan also presents some unique challenges. The country is still overwhelmingly cash-based, and Square competitor PayPal launched its own PayPal Here payment system last year without much fanfare. But Dorsey thinks his company can take off where others have failed to

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Square arrives in Japan, its first market outside North America

Lenovo’s just announced its Q4 and full year 2012/13 financial results, and it’s touched new highs on the two most important indices. It earned $127 million on $7.8 billion in revenue for the quarter and $34 billion for the full year, both records for the company, while netting $635 million in profit for the full year — another all-time high. The only sore spot for Q4 was Lenovo’s laptop business, which dropped two percent over last year to $4.2 billion, but that’s a far milder plummet than many PC makers saw — thanks to a 74 percent revenue growth in China. Otherwise, desktop PCs held flat for the company at $2.4 billion during an otherwise down period, and it held firm as China’s number two smartphone manufacturer, seeing shipments grow at 206 percent year-over-year, double the average rate. It remains to be seen if Lenovo can continue to buck the downward PC trend that’s continued unabated with the release of Windows 8 — but if not, maybe we’d finally see some of its smartphones over here.

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Lenovo pulls in best-ever revenue of $7.8 billion for Q4 2012/13, record $34 billion for the year

SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son wants Sprint, and he’s willing to make some significant concessions to get hold of it, like letting the US government choose one of the 10 directors to its board. The Wall Street Journal reported the news today, writing that the director in question will be in charge of overseeing national security issues. At the same time, rival Dish is hoping to derail SoftBank’s bid with a major PR blitz against its Japanese opponent, running full-page color ads in Washington publications like The Washington Post, Politico, and The National Journal, reports Reuters . The ads reportedly compare SoftBank’s proposal to acquire Sprint to the 2006 controversy surrounding Dubai Ports World’s ownership of various ports on… Continue reading…

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SoftBank pledges to work with US government as Dish sparks national security fears

AMD boasted that its Z-60 Hondo chip would bring Call of Duty to thin tablets , and its boasts were for naught, but it looks like the company’s latest processor core is going to see a lot of use in the next generation of cheap laptops. Today, AMD has revealed its basic performance claims for its Jaguar core, the same one that’s reportedly built into the chips in both the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 . The resulting Temash and Kabini APUs could finally have the combination of performance and battery life you’d need in an inexpensive Windows 8 tablet or laptop. While some of AMD’s charts are a little misleading out of context, this one is fairly straightforward: AMD claims that its low-power Temash system-on-chip simultaneously manages to… Continue reading…

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AMD Jaguar: the Xbox One and PS4 cores that could power your next cheap laptop

We still haven’t actually touched the redesigned DualShock 4 destined to ship with Sony’s PlayStation 4, but we’re getting another look at it in this FCC filing. Appearing in wireframe form to show off where its FCC label will be placed, what’s available reveals very little. As we were told, it’s still a Bluetooth 2.1+EDR device and carries a CUH-ZCT1U model number, and its PS Eye-compatible light bar can be seen in the diagram. Of course, what we’re really waiting to see is the system that will accompany this remote control and do battle with the Xbox One for console supremacy, but barring a leak or unexpected revelation that will have to wait until E3 . Hit the source link to check out the docs yourself, or get a better angle on it in our galleries below

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PlayStation 4′s DualShock 4 controller passes through the FCC solo

It’s been a heck of a couple weeks since we last broadcasted: BlackBerry Live, Google I/O, and CTIA all happened. Needless to say, we’ve got quite a bit to talk about — and you didn’t hear it from us, but we might just have a special guest joining us. Seriously, keep that under your hat. Top secret

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We’ve seen the rapid voice search advancements Google has made in Chrome for the desktop , but since Siri is currently the sole method of entering voice queries on the iOS version, iPhone and iPad owners haven’t been given the same treatment. That’s soon going to change, as Google today announced that a forthcoming update to Chrome for iOS will include its own voice search technology. It’s not as simple as hitting a button on Apple’s pop-up keyboard (Siri occupies that spot), but Google has added a microphone shortcut that appears directly above the keyboard. Tapping that will let you take advantage of Google’s often faster (and arguably more accurate) voice search on iPhone and iPad

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Google bringing its own voice search to Chrome for iOS, adds fullscreen mode to Android phones