Posts Tagged ‘nintendo’

Amazon’s Cloud services are now approved for government use in the US . The Department of Health and Human Services, which includes high-profile bodies like the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), is now able to make use of Amazon Web Services (AWS) to host part or all of its websites. AWS is wildly popular among web developers — services like Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) and Simple Storage Service (S3) provide the backbone to large portions of the web, including ultra-high-traffic sites like Netflix. Although Amazon has servers throughout the world, the government security clearance only covers those physically located in the US. Back in March, an unverified report claimed that Amazon is building a private cloud for the CIA .

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Amazon’s cloud services cleared for US government use

After launching an all-new app for iOS last December, Flickr is finally giving its Android offering a similar overhaul. Announced moments ago on stage at Yahoo’s New York City event , the revamped Flickr for Android is available today for both phones and tablets. “The new Flickr for Android maintains your photos’ original quality, so every image you take, edit, share, or view on your phone or tablet looks spectacular,” wrote CEO Marissa Mayer in a Tumblr post announcing the update.

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Flickr launches redesigned Android app for smartphones and tablets

At today’s press event, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer announced that Yahoo will be opening a brand-new corporate office space in Manhattan to serve as a hub for the company’s local employees. “We’re going to gather all of our 500 New York employees here,” Mayer said. Yahoo will be setting up in the old New York Times building in Times Square. Mayor Michael Bloomberg was on hand to ring in the announcement, offering particularly kind words for Tumblr — which has long operated out of Manhattan.

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Yahoo to open office in New York City’s Times Square

Samsung appears to be making good on its promise to port Galaxy S4 features to the Galaxy S III . A test Android 4.2.2 update, discovered by SamMobile , includes the lockscreen effects and widgets, enhanced screen modes, updated settings, and new S Voice control features found in Samsung’s new flagship. Samsung previously said it would include updates that were “not dependent on hardware,” ruling out gestures like Air View and the smart TV remote app. Continue reading…

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Galaxy S III software leak reveals potential S4-class upgrades

Since the 1960s and PanAm’s ill-fated Moon Flights Club, commercial passenger flights to space have been a tantalizing dream, one that’s expected to finally come to fruition within the next year. For its cover story this week, New York Magazine takes an in-depth look at the industry, including interviews with Buzz Aldrin, Richard Branson, and several others. In it, Virgin Galactic CEO George Whitesides discusses Branson’s plans to bring his entire family, including his 88-year-old mother to space with him, which will likely happen “by the end of the year,” says Branson. Aldrin also discusses his criticism of fellow Apollo generation astronauts eager for the US to return to the moon while staunchly supporting plans to establish a… Continue reading…

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Inside the private push for consumer space travel

Laurene Powell Jobs’ first interview after the death of her husband Steve Jobs was an interview on NBC’s Rock Center with Brian Williams , where she pledged her support for the DREAM act and immigration reform. Now, an in-depth profile in the Wall Street Journal explains why this particular issue caused Powell Jobs to break her silence and step out into the public eye. It seems that it all began in 1995, when she started tutoring low-income students, only to find that those who were in the US illegally were unable to secure financial aid to go to college.

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Why Laurene Powell Jobs broke her silence to support immigration reform

Today is YouTube’s eighth birthday, and to mark the occasion Google is revealing new statistics that underline what a cultural sensation its video site has become. Most staggeringly, over 100 hours of video are now uploaded to YouTube each and every minute. One year ago on this day, that figure stood at 72 hours per minute (it was 48 hours in 2011). So aside from record-breaking viewership — over one billion people now visit YouTube monthly — more and more users are continuing to upload their own clips to the site in hopes of creating the next viral phenomenon

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YouTube users now upload 100 hours of video every minute

Twice a month in California’s Mojave desert, anyone can spend half a day in a war zone. The Fort Irwin National Training Center is meant to give soldiers a crash course in realistic combat before they deploy. The thousand-square-mile base contains everything from fake towns to caves for “insurgents” drawn from a regiment whose role is to provide an opposing force, no matter who the US is fighting.

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Inside Fort Irwin, fake cities provide a training ground for real warfare

Google and other tech companies have come under fire for exploiting a common tax loophole to book revenues through their Irish subsidiaries, but today The Sunday Times is reporting that a former Google UK executive has evidence of further tax avoidance by his one-time employer. Barney Jones worked for Google between 2002 and 2006 and says that during his time at the company, Google relied almost exclusively on its UK sales staff to secure advertising deals in London, effectively closing deals there rather than in Dublin, where it booked the revenues. Google VP Matt Brittin had previously testified to the Commons Public Accounts Committee (PAC) that “nobody” at Google’s UK office was selling Google advertising, last week revising his… Continue reading…

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Former Google UK exec alleges company misrepresented sales to avoid paying taxes

An update to the Google Music app broke compatibility with the ill-fated Nexus Q — but it appears Google may have a new media streamer waiting in the wings to replace it. A recent FCC filing provides some sparse details on a mysterious product referenced as the “H840 Device.” Google is mentioned as the product’s manufacturer, and it’s described as a “fixed base station” with 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi. What’s most intriguing, however, is the product’s purpose: one of the documents states plainly that “The device functions as a media player.” Douglas Adams fans are also likely to get a kick out of the device’s model number, as well. It’s listed as the H2G2-42, no doubt a sly wink towards The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy . The Nexus Q had..

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Google’s potential Nexus Q successor revealed in FCC filing

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What would you like to see Google do next after I/O? – Verge Forums

Chinese telecommunications giants ZTE and Huawei are set to face an EU investigation for anti-competitive behavior. Although the pair have both seen moderate success marketing their consumer devices in the region, the investigation is regarding the companies’ infrastructure equipment, which provides the backbone for the industry. In recent years Chinese companies have taken around a quarter of of the EU market, with sales of around €1 billion (roughly $1.3 billion). But according to European Union Trade Commissioner Karel De Gucht, the success has been due to anti-competitive predatory pricing.

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ZTE and Huawei face EU investigation over predatory pricing

When Cards Against Humanity saw its $4,000 Kickstarter campaign successfully raise almost four times its original goal, its makers were ecstatic. Two years later, the cards-based party game, which is available as a free PDF download or for $25 as a ready-made package, has generated an estimated $12 million in revenue, and in the past year alone was downloaded 1.5 million times from its website. It’s also spawned a reseller culture, with frequent stock shortages leading opportunists to sell the game for as much as $100 on sites like eBay. Despite that, its makers have stayed true to their cause, and have refused several investment and merchandising offers, preferring to go it alone.

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How the $4,000 ‘Cards Against Humanity’ Kickstarter became a multi-million dollar business

Every time a reality TV star’s mouth is pixelated to obscure a curse, the producers are using a technique pioneered for Yul Brynner’s killer robot in Westworld . John Whitney Jr., who created the effect for director and writer Michael Crichton, wanted to simulate how an android might see the world. To do so, he divided the screen into tiny squares, calculating the average color of each one, and filling them with that color, creating a shifting low-resolution version of normal vision.

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How ‘Westworld’s’ killer android created movie pixelation

Google doesn’t want any reselling of Google Glass , and it will even shut down some key functionality if you even try to log into a the headset with multiple Google Accounts. But that doesn’t mean you can’t hack into Glass at all. In fact, Google is encouraging hacking, albeit with clear boundaries. Continue reading…

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Google encourages developers to push the limits by hacking Glass

The Guardian this week published a fascinating in-depth report on the village of Newtok — a remote Alaskan community that, because of climate change, will likely be underwater within the next few years. Experts say it could be just four years before rising sea levels swallow Newtok, and although the community has already agreed to relocate to higher ground, a shortage of money and resources has precluded them from taking action. Meanwhile, erratic climate and weather patterns have convinced locals of the threat that global warming poses. “It’s changing a lot,” Newtok resident Nathan Tom said. “It’s real, global warming, it’s real.” Continue reading…

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Climate change threatens to destroy Alaskan village within four years

Members of the Avengers may not be hitting the small screen, but the peacekeeping and espionage agency that stands behind them, S.H.I.E.L.D., will be coming to ABC with its own set of heroes. The first trailer for Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. aired last night, after being teased on Vine earlier in the day, and the all-too-quick 30-second spot paints the show as a mixture of spy thriller and superpower-studded action. ABC is yet to reveal a release date for the series, but as the network only recently announced that it had ordered a full season based off of the Joss Whedon-directed pilot, development of the show may only just be getting underway

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Superpowers and spies collide in ‘Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.’ first look

The charitable work of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation was the focus of the Microsoft founder’s recent 60 Minutes interview with Charlie Rose, but the longtime richest man in the world got emotional recounting what it was like to “practically grow up” with friend and rival Steve Jobs. Opening up a little about the pair’s final meeting in May of 2011. When asked what he and the late founder of Apple talked about during their meeting at the Jobs’s home, Gates welled up, saying, “what we’d learned, families… anything.” Continue reading…

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An emotional Bill Gates details his last visit with Steve Jobs

If you’ve never owned a cellphone without a data plan, chances are good that you’ve never heard of Google’s SMS Search — a way to query the search engine by sending a text message, getting results back in the form of text rather than a list of web links. It’s probably just as well, since the company recently decided to close the service, reports TechCrunch . A Google spokesperson provided us with the following statement: Continue reading…

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Google’s SMS Search is the latest legacy service to get the axe

The New York Times reports that ABC will become the first network to live stream its local programming to users of its Watch ABC app starting this week. Beginning in New York and Philadelphia, the apps will receive a “live” button that allows viewers to tune in to live programming on their mobile devices. ABC’s move to live mobile TV follows an ongoing row between broadcasters TV companies and streaming startup Aereo, after it received a court victory allowing it to connect viewers to over-the-air broadcasts on web-connected devices. In response to Aereo, CBS invested in a streaming company called Syncbak, but ABC will be the first to strike with live service to mobile devices. As Variety reports , the live streaming service will only be..

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ABC will bring live television to mobile devices starting this week

A more substantial first-look at Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. TV series is set to air tonight , but eager viewers can get an early teaser on Vine. Not surprisingly, the 6-second clip is full of quick cuts and plenty of action, but it ultimately brings its focus to a major twist of the series introduction: that Agent Phil Coulson, a character believed to have died in The Avengers , is still alive. ABC picked up a season of the show based on a pilot written and directed by Joss Whedon, who was in charge of The Avengers as well

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Watch this: ‘Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.’ teaser hits Vine

Without a doubt, Ubisoft’s Watch Dogs is one of the most graphically-stunning games in development right now, and a new gameplay video has the best look that we’ve gotten at the title since last year’s E3 . Our sister site Polygon has six minutes of in-game footage , which features the game’s protagonist infiltrating a facility using his ability to tap into security camera feeds and other technology in the surrounding environment. The resulting gameplay is a cross between stealth games and a high-tech Grand Theft Auto , as the character ultimately flees in a fast and flashy stolen vehicle.

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New ‘Watch Dogs’ gameplay footage is like a high-tech ‘Grand Theft Auto’

As the US military discovers just how useful drones can be, it’s eager to keep them flying as long as can be, and the US Office of Naval Research now has a drone that can fly for two whole days. The Ion Tiger, an experimental surveillance plane that uses a hydrogen fuel cell as its power source, flew for a record 26 hours using pressurized hydrogen back in 2009, but late last month it managed a full 48 hours and one minute thanks to a new cryogenic storage tank filled with liquid hydrogen. That’s not the only way to keep lightweight aircraft flying for lengthy periods, as laser beams and solar panels have recently shown, but the hydrogen could allow planes to fly further afield and at more flexible hours of the day than the other… Continue reading…

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US Navy drone flies two days straight using liquid hydrogen tank

Google may be preparing to unveil an Android gaming service in the vein of Xbox Live or iOS’ Game Center. That’s the indication from a leaked build of Google Play Services obtained by Android Police , which appears to reveal several details about a platform to be known as Google Play Games. The file contains references to achievements, in-game chat, matchmaking, cloud save syncing, and leaderboards, along with a green controller-shaped icon. The service appears to have deep hooks into Google+. Google’s social network looks to handle all user ID information for Google Play Games — for example, you can limit notifications to those sent from people in certain circles, and you’ll be able to share scores directly on Google+

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Google Play Games allegedly leaks with achievements, cloud saves, and in-game chat

One of Iron Man 3′ s defining action scenes is the so-called “barrel of monkeys” scene ( minor spoilers ahead ), in which Tony Stark saves the passengers of Air Force One after a hole is blown in it at 30,000 feet. While it’s a scene that may stretch the laws of physics , it’s also one of the film’s high points — two minutes of edge-of-the-seat drama and visual effects spender. The Los Angeles Times’ Hero Complex blog breaks the whole scene down , covering both VFX needed to pull it off as well as the stunts that made it look so convincing. For starters, those falling passengers were skydivers from Red Bull’s skydiving team, with their gear and parachutes removed in post-production. “It’s something that’s incredibly difficult to fake —..

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Behind the VFX and stuntmen who created ‘Iron Man 3′s’ Air Force One rescue scene