Back in January 2018, Roku announced a grand vision for parlaying its streaming TV success into a broader home entertainment platform. The plan was to power not just smart TVs and streaming boxes, but speakers and soundbars with whole-home audio, all of which would be orchestrated by a voice assistant.
Little of that plan has come to fruition since. The company released a set of wireless TV speakers last fall, but they were only compatible with smart TVs running Roku’s operating system, limiting their appeal. Meanwhile, TCL abandoned plans for a Roku-powered soundbar last year, and Roku seems to have scaled back its voice control ambitions.
Now, Roku is taking a second shot at home audio with the Roku Smart Soundbar. Unlike a typical soundbar, this one also doubles as a Roku streaming video player, so you don’t have to use it with a Roku smart TV or even a separate streaming box. It’ll ship in mid-October for $180, and Roku will sell a subwoofer to pair with it for another $180. Unlike last year’s Roku wireless speakers, available only through Roku’s website, the soundbar will be on sale in Best Buy stores.
Google on Wednesday agreed to pay a record $170 million fine and to make changes to protect children’s privacy on YouTube, as regulators said the video site had knowingly and illegally harvested personal information from children and used it to profit by targeting them with ads. Critics denounced the agreement, dismissing the fine paltry and the required changes as inadequate for protecting children’s privacy.
Facebook could soon start hiding the Like counter on News Feed posts to protect users’ from envy and dissuade them from self-censorship. Instagram is already testing this in 7 countries including Canada and Brazil, showing a post’s audience just a few names of mutual friends who’ve Liked it instead of the total number. The idea is to prevent users from destructively comparing themselves to others and possibly feeling inadequate if their posts don’t get as many Likes. It could also stop users from deleting posts they think aren’t getting enough Likes or not sharing in the first place.
Presented in a portrait ratio that takes up the entirety of the viewer’s smartphone, Content has been billed as “Australia’s first ever vertical video series”. It belongs to a small genre of narrative productions told entirely through screens, such as the feature film thrillers Searching and Unfriended, which unfold via laptop and smartphones.
The demo house Amazon built inside one of the towers at its Seattle headquarters to show off its Echo smart speakers has a new room, and an important one: a garage. Inside the garage is a concept electric car—or, more specifically, the immobile insides of such a vehicle—that Amazon uses to show automakers the full spectrum of things its Alexa Auto software platform can do. That includes in-car versions of typical Alexa tasks such as audio streaming, messaging, voice calls, and reminders. And because it’s a car, Alexa can also do things like roll the windows up and down and control the cabin temperature, all at the verbal request of the driver. Amazon has been working hard on Alexa Auto for the past two years. Now it hopes to convince automakers to embed the platform into their new cars.
If there was any doubt before, Q3 2019 has made clear that Snap is betting heavily on Augmented Reality (AR). Earlier this month, Snap announced a $1B fundraise to invest in AR startups. A week later, the Snapchat parent company unveiled the third-generation of Spectacles, its AR sunglasses, which are now available for pre-order. Snap is continuing its emphasis on the AR ecosystem in an announcement today: a major update to Lens Studio, the company’s desktop app for producing augmented reality “Lenses” on the Snapchat messaging platform. The update includes 14 new Landmarker locations, six new templates, and an updated UX that highlights new offerings and provides step-by-step tutorialization for beginners.
Lambda School is an online coding program that’s free until you finish and get a job. The central conceit is an income-share agreement (ISA): students pay nothing while attending the school and then pay a portion of their earnings once they’re employed. The concept, first proposed by economist Milton Friedman in the 1950s as a “human capital contract,” has been heralded by some as a market-based solution to student debt. Everyone is on the same page about the goal: finding a good-paying job.
For all its flaws, Facebook is still be an integral part of many people’s lives, acting as a lifeline to faraway relatives, a trove of professional opportunities, a connection to the neighborhood, or a digital map of experiences lived. Plus, with all the ancillary apps that require (or provide the convenience of) Facebook logins, like Spotify, Tinder, and Airbnb, quitting can feel like fighting your way out of an impossibly tangled web. If you truly want to leave the platform without a trace, you’ll need to put in some effort. Here’s how to do it.
For a hipster office-rental company with a chillax mood and kombucha on tap, the vibe around WeWork these days has gotten pretty gnarly. Is the I.P.O. filing by the We Company, the parent of WeWork, a “masterpiece of obfuscation,” as one savvy Wall Street analyst said this week, a thumbs-down sentiment that is shared by many others?
In her new book, Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language, Gretchen McCulloch challenges the idea that the rise of informal writing signals a trend toward global idiocy. Instead, she marks it as an inevitable and necessary “disruption” in the way human beings communicate. “We no longer accept that writing must be lifeless, that it can only convey our tone of voice roughly and imprecisely, or that nuanced writing is the exclusive domain of professionals,” McCulloch argues. “We’re creating new rules for typographical tone of voice. Not the kind of rules that are imposed from on high, but the kind of rules that emerge from the collective practice of a couple billion social monkeys — rules that enliven our social interactions.”
It’s the eternal Catch-22 of the working world: You can’t get a job without experience, but you can’t get experience without a job. While babysitting, waiting tables, and other part-time jobs have long been the purview of teens looking to pocket some money while waiting to land a “real job,” the skills gained in such positions don’t always equip you for an entry-level gig in a specific profession. This is where internships come in.
It seems that, in this time of unprecedented choice and quality, the so-called golden age of prestige television, most of us still want to watch half-hour shows about vaguely likable people in which everything turns out OK. Ideally from the 90s, but maybe the 00s. And preferably something that we have seen many, many times before. Welcome to the age of non-event TV.
The Silicon Valley company said that journalists would help curate News Tab, a new section inside of the company’s mobile application that will surface the most recent and relevant stories for readers. Facebook said it planned to hire seasoned journalists from various outlets for the roles and would put up job postings on its employment board on Tuesday. News Tab is part of the company’s effort to highlight real-time journalism and news. It will exist outside of the News Feed, Facebook’s never-ending stream of status updates and friend requests.
If words like YouNow, Tanacon, Mikey Barone, or Musical.ly do not ring a bell, Hulu’s latest documentary offering, Jawline, will likely make you feel very, very old. But it will also make you glad you are no longer in high school. The film tracks the distinct breed of teen boy influencer who gains fame, particularly amongst the tween girl set, through livestreaming and niche platforms like Musical.ly (now called TikTok). In this post-YouTube era, these influencers need not have any marketable skills or preternatural talent to become stars. But they do all seem to fit a similar physical mold—pretty faces, toned but lithe physiques, gravity-defying coifs, and, as the title of the doc suggests, a chiseled jawline. And they all trade, like Beatlemania, in hysterical teenage girl lust.
Hearing loss isn’t just the stuff of senior citizens: 1 in 5 teens will experience hearing loss — a rate that’s 30% higher than it was 20 years ago. You know what wasn’t around 20 years ago? Earbuds. At maximum volume, earbuds and AirPods can be as loud as 110 decibels, which is the equivalent of someone shouting directly into your ear. According to the CDC, being exposed to 85 decibels over a prolonged period, or repeatedly, puts you at risk of hearing damage. If you’re listening to your earbuds at the maximum volume of 110 decibels, you’re at risk of hearing loss after just five minutes — barely the length of two songs.
Depop is a sales platform for the secondhand, an impossibly enormous international flea market in app form. If eBay is a bazaar and Instagram is a beauty pageant, Depop is both. Just about anything you can shoot with your iPhone camera you can sell on Depop, so there’s Polaroid film and skateboards and a 1978 Garfield alarm clock and God knows what else, but mostly there are secondhand clothes and accessories, a digital thrift haul exploding out of its users’ literal closets.
In building educational resources for teachers and students, we’ve [Google] spent a lot of time talking to them about challenges they face and how we can help. We’ve heard that students often get “stuck” while studying. When they have questions in the classroom, a teacher can quickly clarify—but it’s frustrating for students who spend hours trying to find answers while studying on their own. Socratic, a mobile learning app we acquired last year, now uses AI technology to help high school and university students when they’re doing school work outside the classroom. It guides them through the resources that are available, and identifies the core underlying concepts that will lead them to answers to their questions.
A.I., most people in the tech industry would tell you, is the future of their industry, and it is improving fast thanks to something called machine learning. But tech executives rarely discuss the labor-intensive process that goes into its creation. A.I. is learning from humans. Lots and lots of humans.
Snap is thinking of the new Spectacles as a test run in the company’s push to bring augmented reality to the masses—a trajectory the company began with its popular face filters. By putting another camera on Spectacles 3, Snap opens up a new realm of AR effects that users can add to their videos and images. It’s not just phoenixes; users can also add colorful filters that morph throughout a video based on how far away objects are in the shot and animated hearts that float around a video but burst when they come into contact with a real-world object. Snap is also opening up the depth map’s features to content creators, enabling to make their own AR filters through its DIY filter maker, Lens Studio.
