After going live on iOS and Android last week, Vine’s successor, Byte, has dropped some more information that “partner program” it’s been teasing since launch, basically its plan to get users paid. None too soon, I’d wager, given the app—a video platform for six-second looping clips—has already become overrun with …
Your phone can do it all. It’s a portable music player, diary, digital camera, communication device, calculator, and just about everything else. But you might not have considered that it can also replace your measuring tape. With the right sensors on board and the right apps installed, you can measure more data with…
Sony’s PlayStation Vue, one of the first services to offer streaming live TV over the internet, is shutting down today. The service launched in March 2015, offering live and on-demand content from more than 85 channels, including many local broadcast stations, to select U.S. markets. Over the years, Vue expanded across the U.S. as it added more channels, more local stations and features like multi-channel viewing on the same screen, among other innovations.
But Vue failed to catch on with a broader audience, despite — or perhaps, because of — its integration with Sony’s PS3 and PS4 devices.
Sony’s decision to name the service “PlayStation Vue” didn’t do it any favors from a branding perspective. Many consumers, if they heard of it at all, assumed it was something only available to PlayStation console owners.
The company also took too long to expand the service to include popular platforms many cord-cutters were using at the time to watch streaming services. It added support for Amazon Fire TV by November 2015, but full support for Google Chromecast, as well as Apple TV and Roku — the latter of which grew to become the most popular connected TV platform in the U.S. — didn’t arrive until the following year. That limited Vue’s availability at a time when people were beginning to look for new streaming options.
Apple’s updated and more detailed Maps experience has now rolled out across the U.S., the company announced this morning. The redesigned app will include more accurate information overall as well as comprehensive views of roads, buildings, parks, airports, malls, and other public places. It will also bring Look Around to more cities and real-time transit to Miami.
The company has now spent years upgrading its Maps experience to better compete with Google Maps, which Apple replaced with its own Maps app in 2012. That launch didn’t go well, to say the least. Apple CEO Tim Cook even had to apologize for how Maps fell short of customers’ expectations and promised Apple would do better going forward.
Over time, Apple has been making good on those promises, by updating Maps with better data and notably, by announcing a ground-up rebuild of the Maps platform back in 2018. Last year, Apple also introduced the new “Look Around” feature in iOS 13 — essentially Apple’s version of Google Street View, but one that uses high-resolution 3D views that offer more detail and smoother transitions.
iOS 13 also brought more Maps features, like real-time transit schedules, a list-making feature called Collections, Favorites, and more.
However, some of these Maps updates have been slow to roll out. Look Around, for example, has only been live in major cities including New York, the San Francisco Bay Area, L.A., Las Vegas, Houston, and Oahu. With the nationwide launch, it’s safe to assume you’re about to see it pop up in more major metros though Apple hasn’t provided names of which ones will get it first. Real-time transit information is offered only also in select major cities, including the San Francisco Bay Area, Washington D.C., New York, and Los Angeles.
Today, Apple is adding Miami to that list of supported cities offering real-time transit, just in time for Super Bowl weekend.
Over the course of 2019, Apple’s improved, more detailed Maps experienced has steadily expanded across the U.S., finally arriving in the North East as of last fall.
Today, the new Maps experience it’s starting to go live across all of the U.S. But that doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll see it right away when you launch the Maps app — the rollout is phased.
“We set out to create the best and most private maps app on the planet that is reflective of how people explore the world today,” said Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of Internet Software and Services, in a statement about the launch. “It is an effort we are deeply invested in and required that we rebuild the map from the ground up to reimagine how Maps enhances people’s lives — from navigating to work or school or planning an important vacation — all with privacy at its core. The completion of the new map in the United States and delivering new features like Look Around and Collections are important steps in bringing that vision to life. We look forward to bringing this new map to the rest of the world starting with Europe later this year,” he added.
The updated Apple Maps includes Look Around and real-time transit in some markets, Collections, Favorites, a Share ETA feature, flight status information for upcoming travel, indoor maps for malls and airports, Siri natural language guidance, and Flyover — a feature offering immersive, 3D views of major metros, as seen from above. The latter is available across over 350 cities.
Going forward, Apple will use the imagery it’s collect to deliver Look Around to more U.S. markets and begin to upgrade the Maps platform in Europe.
Maps’ biggest selling point today, however, may not be the sum of its feature sets. Instead, Maps’ standout feature is its focus on privacy.
While Google does use the data collected from Google Maps for many handy features — like reporting on a business’s busiest times, for example — it’s not a private app. In fact, it’s so not private that Google had to add an “incognito mode” as an option for users who didn’t want their Maps app collecting data on them.
Apple, meanwhile, notes that its app requires no-sign in, isn’t connected to your Apple ID, and its personalized features are implemented using on-device intelligence, not by sending data to cloud servers. In addition, any data collected when using Maps, like search terms, navigation routing, and traffic information, is only associated with random identifiers that continually reset to protect user privacy.
Apple also uses a process called “fuzzing” that converts a precise location where a Maps search originated to a less precise one after 24 hours. And it doesn’t retain a history of what a user has searched for or where they’ve been.
In an era where people assume, usually correctly, that the mere act of launching an app is an agreement to have their data collected, Apple’s increased emphasis on user privacy is welcome and a good reason to try Apple Maps again, if you never came back to it after the shaky launch.
Apple Maps, now used in over 200 countries, is available on iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch and in cars via CarPlay.
Over a hundred new emoji are on their way this year. The governing body in charge of official emoji, the Unicode Consortium, announced the addition of 117 new emoji for 2020, as part of Emoji 13.0. The expansion includes 62 brand-new emoji as well as 55 new gender and skin-tone variants, many of which are new gender-inclusive emoji. Other notable additions this year include the transgender flag — from a proposal co-sponsored by Google and Microsoft — as well as the new smiling face with tear, the two people hugging, pinched fingers, a disguised face, not to mention tons more animals, food items, and other objects.
This year, five of the new emoji — including several of the more inclusive options — were sponsored by Google.
The company is behind the proposals for the variants on person in veil and person in tuxedo, which now include emoji of people who look male, female, and non-binary in a range of skin tones. A gender-neutral Santa Claus was also added.
Above: Google’s new emoji for Android
Google also proposed the new “person feeding baby with a bottle” emoji.
“Until this year, the only emoji that depicts childcare is the ‘breastfeeding’ emoji,” explained Jennifer Daniel, Google’s Design Director for the Android Emoji Program. “Since an inability to breastfeed doesn’t preclude you from nurturing your child, we want to introduce an emoji that everyone can use,” she said.
Emoji have become more inclusive and representative in recent years, with additions in 2019 that offered a hearing aid, wheelchair, prosthetic arm, seeing-eye dog, and others, as well as a gender-neutral couple and more skin tone options.
Google also suggested new emoji focused on empathy for 2020, including two people hugging and a slightly smiling face with tear. The latter is something many people have wanted in order to be able to express a feeling of both appreciation and relief. Daniel noted this emoji works well for other times you are feeling a mix of goodness with a dash of sadness — like when you’re thinking of past memories (as with #tbt, for example) or thinking about good times from your childhood.
Above: Google’s new emoji for Android
A ninja is being added to the people emoji as well.
The animal lineup now includes a black cat, bison, mammoth, beaver, polar bear, dodo, seal, beetle, roach, fly, and worm.
For food, there’s bubble tea, blueberries, an olive, a bell pepper, flatbread, tamale, fondue, and a teapot.
Other additions include a feather, potted plant, rock, wood, hut, pickup truck, roller skate, magic wand, piñata, nesting dolls, sewing needle, knot, flip flop, military helmet, accordion, long drum, coin, boomerang, carpentry saw, screwdriver, hook, ladder, elevator, mirror, window, plunger, mousetrap, bucket, toothbrush, headstone, placard, transgender symbol, transgender flag, anatomical heart, and lungs.
With all the new emoji, what we may need soon is a better system for finding them. Predictive text and emoji suggestions only go so far. But when searching for an emoji you don’t use commonly, Apple’s emoji keyboard on iOS requires a lot of scrolling. And every new emoji addition makes this process more difficult. Google’s Gboard has the right idea, as it also adds a search box for finding emoji. In the meantime, third-party keyboards can help.
Image credits: Google & Emojipedia
Why would anyone want a Walkman in the streaming age? That’s the question I asked myself when I first fiddled with the small Sony NW-A105. One month later, I’ve learned enough about the music player to answer that question and many more. Sometimes its good to cut out the distractions of texts and phone calls and just…
The worlds of virtual and augmented reality have yet to land on the applications and hardware to truly spark mass-market, consumer interest in the space, but meanwhile a startup building mixed reality services for business users has raised a round of funding, underscoring the opportunity in enterprise.
Spatial, which has developed a “holographic” collaboration platform that people use to speak and work together in virtual rooms through the use of strikingly effective avatars — think: a supercharged, virtual reality version of Zoom or a Google Hangout — is today announcing that it has raised $14 million, a Series A that it will be using to continue building out the functionality of its application and its interoperability with a wider range of hardware, as well as to start looking at how it can turn its tech into a platform that could be used by others, for example by way of an SDK.
The funding is being led by WhiteStar Capital, iNovia and Kakao Ventures, with participation from Baidu and individual investors, Instagram cofounder Mike Krieger and Zynga’s Mark Pincus, also participating. Together with Spatial’s last round, $8 million in October 2018, the company has now raised $22 million. It’s not disclosing valuation at this stage, Anand Agarawala, the CEO who co-founded the company with Jinha Lee (CPO), said in an interview.
Other investors include Expa, Lerer Hippeau, Leaders Fund, Samsung NEXT and Andy Hertzfeld (of Macintosh fame).
Spatial’s funding comes at a time when VR and AR startups have certainly seen their share of funding (Magic Leap alone has raised over $3 billion), high valuations, some extremely notable exits, and definitely the release of a number of head sets and apps — but at the end of the day, it’s estimated that there were only 6 million VR headsets sold last year, speaking to how the space has remained niche at best.
Niche in consumer, however, can speak to major opportunity in enterprise, and that is where Spatial is operating, with technology that it has built to be interoperable with any headset or AR glasses — currently including Microsoft HoloLens, Oculus Quest, Magic Leap One, Qualcomm XR2 or an Android/iPhone mobile device — or even a basic PC, if that’s all a person has to use, to let companies build out what might best be described as videoconferencing on steroids: placing people into virtual rooms where they can speak to each other, or look at and manipulate holographic models together, and more.
Spatial itself has seen its business take off in the last year, Agarawala said, with inbound interest from 25% of the Fortune 1,000 bracket of businesses, and its first publicly-named customers, which include very non-tech names like Mattel, Purina/Nestle and BNP Paribas. That in itself is also a sign of how immersive, three-dimensional media is possibly, finally approaching a breakout moment.
That will also be buffered by a raft of new hardware, Agarawala said. He declined to say which companies are likely to roll out new devices but as a developer of key services that spur purchasing, Spatial gets a heads-up (no pun intended) on what is coming around the corner, and Agarawala said the picture is bright and that we might finally be exiting what he described as a “VR winter”.
“It feels like the industry is accelerating this year,” he said. “The industry is firing up 5G and that will also be a big push.” He also pointed out the development over at Amazon, where last month the company announced AWS Wavelength for ultra-low latency 5G computing at the edge, something that will have a direct impact on using and building the next generation of AR and VR headgear.
Given its position with developers, if Amazon is getting into the mix, you know something is up, he added.
The idea of taking what Spatial has built to produce its own applications for customers, and turning that into a platform that others could use, too, is something that the company had always planned to do — platforms are front and centre in Agarawala’s mind, given his pedigree of years working at Google, which acquired his previous startup, BumpTop, in 2010. But that too appears to be getting bumped up, so to speak, because of the positive outlook.
“We have always wanted to open up our platform to let others build applications on our framework, using our avatars, leveraging our cross-platform nature, finding new applications for our hand gestures,” Agarawala said. “We wanted to open that up, but we thought that it would be years out before we did, since it doesn’t make sense for an AR/VR platform to do something like that until there is actual market demand. But there has been so much heat that we might consider doing it this year.”
Krieger’s interest in Spatial comes in the context of him investing in a number of other work-focused collaboration platforms, including Loom, Figma, and Pitch, and that’s key to what makes Spatial interesting: it’s not just tapping the VR/AR space but another very interesting area that has seen a lot of growth with the rapid rise of products like Slack, and will continue to evolve.
“Spatial’s mixed-reality solution will be a key part of the future of work,” said Krieger in a statement. “They’re taking us beyond everyday tools like Zoom and Slack and pointing the way towards what conferencing & collaboration can be like if they were invented today and I’m excited to support the journey.”
Here’s a little video I did with Spatial earlier this month during CES.
Los Angeles-based mobile gaming company Scopely unveiled its newest game, ScrabbleGo, now available for pre-order on Android and coming to iOS later this year.
Working with Hasbro in North America and Mattel globally, the launch of Scopely’s new Scrabble game was two years in the making.
Building on the success Scopely has found with another Hasbro property — Yahtzee — Scopely first reached out to the gaming company to see if they’d be open to working with the relatively young gaming firm on a new title.
Then Scopely had to talk to Mattel and current rights-holder Electronic Arts about moving the game over to its new home.
Under the auspices of Electronic Arts, which had developed the earlier versions of Scrabble for mobile phones, hundreds of thousands of users had signed up to play the popular word game.
“We negotiated a deal and a partnership with EA,” says Scopely chief revenue officer, Tim O’Brien. “We wanted the players in the core scrabble game that EA has today and come over.”
The deal represents a new relationship between Scopely and Mattel and reflects the game development studio’s increasingly international footprint.
“We are always looking for new ways for consumers to experience the Mattel brands they know and love, and digital gaming is a key part of that strategy,” said Janet Hsu, Chief Franchise Officer at Mattel. “Scrabble is a beloved and iconic game with a dedicated fan following. In partnership with Scopely, we look forward to bringing a best-in-class gameplay experience to an international audience.”
Players from the previous versions of Scrabble for mobile will be able to move over to Scopely’s new gaming platform through the partnership with Electronic Arts — and global players can expect to see some expanded features, according to O’Brien.
The new version will include official dictionaries in localized languages that Scopely has licensed and will be incorporating into the gameplay, he said. The new game will also have new social features including regional tournaments, daily and weekly events, and player leaderboards. There’s also a matchmaking system to connect with both friends and other players on the platform of a similar skill-level. A new “dueling” feature puts time limits on how long a player can take to make a word.
“We want to build core Scrabble, but we need to build scrabble for today’s market,” says O’Brien. “We did something that worked really well with Yahtzee… and we make substantially more money on the mobile game then they do on the board game.”
The LA-based gaming company has been on a bit of an acquisition tear since raising $200 million financing, which values the company at a whopping $1.7 billion.
Published globally by Scopely, the new ScrabbleGo game was developed in partnership with PierPlay game studio and joins a gaming portfolio that has amassed more than $1 billion in lifetime revenue. Games in the company’s portfolio include: Looney Tunes World of Mayhem and Star Trek Fleet Command, created with the recently acquired DIGIT Game Studios.
Sci-fi has been fascinated with sentient synthetic life since its earliest days, but Star Trek, in particular, has had quite the tumultuous history with its own consideration of androids and their place in its far future. From classic interpretations of sinister ‘bots to one of the franchise’s most beloved characters,…
Y Combinator graduate OpenPhone is raising a $2 million funding round led by Slow Ventures. The company is working on an app that lets you seamlessly get a business phone number without a second phone or a second SIM card.
Y Combinator, Kindred Ventures, Garage Capital, 122WEST Ventures and others are also participating in today’s funding round.
Compared to Aircall and other enterprise solutions, OpenPhone targets small and medium companies who want a mobile-first, easy-to-use solution to take advantage of a second phone number.
For instance, if you’re a freelancer and you hate handing out your personal phone number, OpenPhone lets you separate your personal and professional life more easily.
OpenPhone works on iPhone, iPad and Android. You can also use a web interface to interact with the app from your computer. It currently costs $10 per month per user. For that price, you get a local number, a toll-free number or you can port an existing phone number. 5,000 people are using OpenPhone right now.
You can then use that number for unlimited calls and texts in the U.S. and Canada. Behind the scene, OpenPhone uses your internet connection to establish voice-over-IP calls.
The startup has been working on collaborative features so that you can use OpenPhone with multiple users. For instance, you can share a phone number with other users so that your team can answer text messages faster and pick up the phone more often. The company has also launched a Slack integration that lets you receive a notification when somebody calls or texts your phone number.
