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Watch These Toys Get Annihilated During a 120 MPH Crash Test http://ift.tt/2i0lWL1
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If you had access to a crash test facility, whenever you weren’t smashing cars you’d probably be spending all of your free time thinking of other things you could launch at a wall at 120 miles per hour. Like toys, which the good people at Switzerland’s Dynamic Test Center did, and were kind enough to film and share the resulting destruction with the world. Unlike cars, whose occupants can survive even a horrific crash thanks to modern safety features, the toys in this video didn’t stand a chance. A jolly plastic Santa is turned into flying shrapnel, while Barbie unfortunately loses both of her legs when her dream car meets its nightmarish demise. [YouTube] Digital Trends via Gizmodo http://gizmodo.com November 28, 2017 at 11:21AM
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Facebook prototypes Messenger Broadcast for businesses http://ift.tt/2nb1I6v Facebook may soon be ready to squeeze more money out of its 1.3 billion user chat app. The company has internally developed “Messenger Broadcast”, a self-serve mass-messaging interface that lets businesses send marketing messages to users. Facebook confirmed to TechCrunch that it’s testing the feature internally, but hadn’t trialed it to the public or with businesses as of late last month. While the company was cagey about the functionality, it appears that businesses design a welcome message, message title, and subtitle, and include a call to action to the user such as visiting the business’ website, prompting a Messenger bot, or tapping to a send preset reply written by the business. Companies can preview their message within the Messenger Broadcast interface or on Messenger itself. As for who the message can reach, the interface outlines that a certain number of users will receive it at no cost to the business. It’s unclear whether businesses will be able to pay for more reach but that seems like a reasonable direction for the product. A Facebook spokesperson told me “We often test products, features and ideas and are always exploring new ways to make is easier for businesses to deliver great experiences to their customers. Once we’ve tested them internally we make a call as to whether or not to ultimately release them. As such we don’t comment on unreleased features.” Messenger Broadcast was first spotted by tipster phwd, which was reshared by The Next Web’s Matt Navarra.
Facebook tells me that regardless of what happens with Messenger Broadcast, it has no plans to change the policy of requiring people to have initiated message threads with businesses before they can message the users with ads or otherwise. That means businesses may need to coax users into pinging them first before they can reach them through Messenger Broadcast. Though again, it’s possible this never rolls out. Facebook will need to be careful here if it does launch the product. If Messenger feels spammy, users might not open chats from friends because they’re lost amongst the ads, or flee back to the status quo of SMS. But with Messenger and Facebook’s acquisition WhatsApp now the dominant cross-platform messaging apps around the world beyond China, Facebook may finally feel Messenger is big and dominant enough to start earning its keep. But Digital Trends via TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com November 28, 2017 at 11:18AM
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PlayStation VR dominates third-quarter VR headset sales http://ift.tt/2zIc0km A new study from market analyst firm Canalys has found that high-end virtual reality headset sales for the previous quarter have exceeded just over a million units for the first time. Of that number, almost half are PlayStation VR headsets, with Oculus Rift units following up with just over a 20-percent market share. The HTC Vive platform brings up the rear with 16 percent of all headsets sold. Although virtual reality acceptance in the mainstream gaming space has been slower than some predicted, sales continues to grow month by month and the third quarter of 2017 has seen the biggest growth in top-tier VR yet. During that three-month period, more than a million VR headsets were sold, with almost half of those being PSVR units. Coming out of the study conducted by Canalys, this data shows a healthy growth in the industry, at least partially driven by recent price cuts. With the Oculus Rift discounted to $400 — $350 in the Black Friday sales — and the HTC Vive squeezing its price down to $600 for its hardware bundle, top-tier virtual reality is more affordable than ever. “VR adoption in the consumer segment is highly dependent on price, and Oculus’ strategy of lowering prices has definitely helped drive adoption,” said Canalys Research Analyst Vincent Thielke. He went on to highlight how upcoming, affordable, midrange headsets like the Oculus Go and HTC Vive Focus, may serve to expand the market even more in the months to come. Canalys is also intrigued by the potential of new entrants in the VR marketplace, including headsets supporting Microsoft’s Windows Mixed Reality platform. There are also new VR headsets from the likes of Pimax which could have a significant impact as they raise the bar for what high-end consumer virtual reality is capable of delivering to users. A notable absence from this latest study, however, concerns entry-level VR headsets. The Samsung Gear VR, and even more economical devices like the Google Cardboard and its contemporaries, are still the most popular VR headsets. Although lacking many of the features of their higher-end counterparts, they are much more numerous, numbering in the millions at last count. Digital Trends via Digital Trends http://ift.tt/2p4eJdC November 27, 2017 at 12:06PM
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Email Is Broken. Can Anyone Fix It? http://ift.tt/2k3VO64 Let's start this story at the end: You can't kill email. Attempting to do so is a decades-long tradition of the tech industry, a cliché right up there with "Uber, but for" and "The Netflix of X." AOL Instant Messenger tried to kill email. So did MySpace. Then Facebook took up the mantle, followed by Slack and Symphony and WhatsApp and HipChat. Through it all, email persists—always dying, never dead. Except email isn't dying. There are 3.7 billion users worldwide who collectively send 269 billion emails every day, according to a report by The Radicati Group. Email is bigger than Facebook. Hell, it's bigger than the internet. That's good news, in some ways. Unlike nearly all its competitors, email is an open standard, not subject to the whims of a single company or person. Nobody owns the SMTP protocol you use to send email, or the POP and IMAP standards used to check it. At this point, no one could even really try; nobody's going to use a new email client that can't send messages to Yahoo addresses because the tech isn't compatible. Lots of people still have Yahoo addresses, too, because their email is an identity just as important as a phone number or home address. We get receipts, bills, and confirmation numbers sent to our email. An email address validates its user, the domain proving you really work where you claim. Not everybody snaps, or WhatsApps, or even texts, but everybody emails. The system is too diverse and too broad for anyone to control it. Which is mostly a good thing. The more interesting question than whether email's heading to the great IMAP server in the sky, is why everyone's so eager for it to get there. Email's been part of our computing lives for more than four decades; it's the most reliable, most universal communication method yet devised online. And as an idea, email has everything going for it: It's free and easy to start using, everyone understands what it is, and it offers a way to reach absolutely anyone. The underlying tech behind email has its challenges, of course. Since things like SMTP and IMAP are so widespread, they're difficult to update. Email is riddled with security problems, because it's only as good as the weakest link in the entire system. Spam's still a mess. But developers say that in general, the infrastructure is fine. And so, while Facebook and Signal and Slack try to usurp email, the folks who run Gmail, Outlook, and some exciting startups are all working on ways to make email work. They're building a future where your email doesn't overwhelm you, but helps you get stuff done—and does some of that stuff for you. They're all betting on the same thesis: The problem isn't email. It's our relationship to email that's broken. And that can be fixed. New DraftIf you'd like to blame someone for the mess inside your email app, Rahul Vohra would be a good place to start. In 2010, Vohra created Rapportive, a browser extension that displays useful information about your contacts alongside their emails. It was hugely successful, which turned out well for Vohra (he sold Rapportive to LinkedIn in 2012) but terribly for your inbox. Lots of other extensions cropped up, angling for space next to your messages. "It takes this Gmail experience that's already kind of showing its age—it's old, it's slow, it leaks memory, it's not efficient, it doesn't work offline—and makes every single one worse," Vohra says. A couple of years ago, after leaving LinkedIn, Vohra found he couldn't stop thinking about how to fix email. He started a company called Superhuman to answer a specific question: What would Gmail look like if you built it from scratch in 2017? Vohra and his team imagined the fastest email client ever, which would work equally well online and off, on phones and on desktops. It would be easy to understand, yet so wildly powerful you might never discover all its features. Most important of all, it would be beautiful. Superhuman doesn't try to keep you out of your inbox or stem the tide of emails. It aims instead to turn users into email-conquering supermachines. Even on the desktop, it's designed as a full-screen experience because for Superhuman's intended user, email isn't a thing you do while you work. Email is work. Vohra talks often about "flow state," the elusive psychological phenomenon of complete immersion in a task, and explains how email should be optimized for flow. He says the app is full of small, helpful tricks to make things faster: you can copy and paste an entire email into a new draft with two keystrokes, or search your entire archive in a tenth of a second. There are few menus or sidebars, only inboxes and messages. For most people, though, Superhuman screams overkill. It's a gorgeous piece of reclaimed wood and a tablesaw, when you might rather just assemble the Ikea pieces. For most users, especially the billions of new internet users signing up for their very first email address, the only way to make email better is to help people use it less. There are people working on that, too. First Things FirstWhen Mikael Berner and Hetal Pandya started building an app they now call Edison (formerly EasilyDo), they weren't really trying to reinvent email. They were more interested in building an assistant that could smartly and automatically manage your contacts, calendar, trips, bills, and photos. Email just happened to be the best source of all that data. Users wouldn't have to input anything—just let the system comb through what you're sending and receiving. They built a full-on email client only after realizing that was a perfect place for people to interact with Edison's AI. If you want to scroll through your inbox in Edison the old-fashioned way, you can. Lots of people do, Berner says. After decades of using email a certain way, users have a hard time changing the way they do it. But if you let it, Edison can do most of the heavy lifting for you. It'll grab the most important messages, shoving them to the top of the list to make sure you respond. It'll unsubscribe to junk mail with a single tap. It'll sort all your vacation-related messages into a handy timeline, and alert you if anything changes. "People love it," Pandya says. "They don't even realize how it's working, but it's a convenience that is amazing." Lots of people building email products believe, like Edison, that the future of email isn't really about communication. The signs are obvious, actually. A massive percentage of emails give themselves away: They’re sent from the no-reply@ addresses you see at the top of receipts and coupons. Rather, email's job is to be a repository for all possible information about you. "We use Slack, we use Messenger, but everything we do in our lives comes into our inboxes," says Arlo Rose, who spearheaded the Alto email project for AOL, which is now part of Oath. "Whether it's going to the Apple Store on the corner, or Bloomingdales at the mall, it all ends up as a digital receipt or a flight confirmation or something else in our inbox. We just have piles and piles and piles of the stuff." Rose says his data shows more than 85 percent of all email fits this category, which he calls "transactional mail." That number is growing. And it's changing the way even the largest email providers think about their jobs. Sincerely YoursOver the last decade or so, the rise in smartphones turned email into a primarily mobile experience, but the rules of engagement never caught up. You'd never sign your name to a text message—so why do it in an email? So much email correspondence involves scheduling or questions, and a lot of conversational fluff just slows down the process. Writing a text message rarely feels taxing, but every email feels like a huge cognitive load. It doesn't help that every email also feels like a ticking time bomb, waiting for your response before some unknown too-late time when everything explodes. Since you can check your email anytime and anywhere, you're expected to be tethered to it always and everywhere. You might turn off notifications, but a rapidly filling inbox exerts an ineffable pull on your attention. Boomerang, another browser extension for email, brute-forces the situation with a feature called Inbox Pause, which only drops messages into your inbox a few times a day. But in a nod to the way things sadly are, Inbox Pause encourages you to turn on an auto-responder saying you won't get this email for a few hours. The brutal truth seems to be that the only way to fix email is to fix our insecurity, neediness, and faux sense of urgency. Which seems unlikely. All developers can do in the meantime is try and help you climb the email mountain a little more easily. That's what Jacob Bank, a hyper-energetic Googler, spends his time thinking about. Gmail's now the dominant email provider—it has 1.2 billion users, and is growing rapidly while all its competitors shrink—which means it has the power to set standards, define norms, and change the way people email. All of which Bank intends to do. Bank likes email's ability to scale from short messages to long, and from quick-fire conversations to the sorts that unfold over months and years. He appreciates email's organizational tools, its searchability, its prioritization options. But making all that work in one place can be tricky. "Sometimes I want to send you a ping and I want you to respond right away," Bank says. "But sometimes I actually want to be respectful of your time and give you the day or the week to respond." The Gmail team has worked hard to enable long, rich, multimedia email. That works fine. The harder problem concerns the rest. Maybe, Bank theorizes, every message should be treated differently. For example, if you get an email from Delta, "we gave a lot of freedom to optimize the UI for finding your boarding pass," he says. Same with all the transactional stuff—if an email comes from a no-reply@ address, why even have a reply window? "And then if you send me a one line email with a question mark at the end, I'm probably going to reply," Bank says. Gmail has an increasingly sophisticated understanding of the content and context of every email you get, so it could cater the experience to each one. It could even help you respond, with a feature like Smart Reply, which suggests three short answers to every message. "Now, can we do this in a way that retains all your muscle memory, and works elegantly across all those [possibilities]?" Bank asks. "That's our challenge." The email ecosystem is too big and distributed for anyone to force users to change. There are cultural differences, generational differences, and a huge corpus of users with long-standing ideas about how things work. But these providers can subtly nudge users in the right direction. Another example: you'll notice that in a long thread of messages, Gmail will move all the signatures down to the very bottom of the thread, essentially yanking them out of the conversation. Which is great, because email signatures are ridiculous. (Especially the ones with logo images.) If Gmail, or Outlook, or someone else can put all these pieces together, email could be in for a turnaround. All the necessary data is sitting right there in your inbox, and companies across the world are working furiously to figure out how to comb through it all and tell you what to do with it. You should root for email to work, because it's the only open, free, universal communications tool we have left. And like it or not, you're stuck with it. Digital Trends via Feed: All Latest http://ift.tt/2uc60ci November 27, 2017 at 12:03PM
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Reliam raises $17 million for its managed services play http://ift.tt/2ibg7OA Reliam, a company that provides managed services for businesses that want somebody else to manage their public cloud deployments on platforms like AWS and Microsoft Azure, today announced that it has raised a $17 million funding round from Boston’s Great Hill Partners. Reliam says that Great Hill has reserved a full $75 million to fund additional acquisitions and growth. In the managed services space, Reliam is an old hand with 16 years of experience and a strong focus on AWS. The company is bringing in some fresh blood as well, though. Simon Anderson, the former CEO of DreamHost, is now Reliam’s new CEO and to some degree, it looks like Reliam will be able to offer the kind of managed services that he wanted to bring to DreamHost, where he also played a vital role in backing the OpenStack ecosystem. After leaving DreamHost, Anderson was entrepreneur-in-residence at Great Hill Partners, so it’s easy to guess how Reliam and Great Hill came to work together on this funding round. “It’s exciting that my collaboration with Great Hill Partners as Entrepreneur-in-Residence has come to fruition with the investment into Reliam,” said Anderson. “Under founder Nate Johnson, Reliam has created a world-class managed services offering and a loyal (and rapidly growing) customer base. Reliam is poised to play a meaningful role in the next phase of cloud adoption with expanded investment in software tools, solutions architects, cloud engineers, and the AWS partner ecosystem. I look forward to my new position at Reliam.” One of the hardest things in managed services is scaling up a company. With Great Hill putting some money aside to fund acquisitions, chances are that Reliam will go out and bring a number of smaller players into its fold as it looks to compete with the likes of Rackspace and others. “I’ve carefully built Reliam to be a platform for growth over the last few years, and it is truly gratifying to secure Great Hill Partners’ expertise and investment,” said Reliam founder and president Nate Johnson. “With this funding, we can build out even more capabilities for cloud managed services to support the explosive adoption of public cloud for all sorts of applications – and utilizing the latest cloud services including serverless computing, machine learning, artificial intelligence and the IoT.” On top of its managed services (currently for AWS and Azure), Reliam also offers traditional hosting, help with migrations, architecture reviews and support for moving to a modern DevOps model. Unsurprisingly, Reliam also offers support for hybrid deployments. Featured Image: Bill Hinton/Getty ImagesDigital Trends via TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com November 27, 2017 at 12:01PM Like You Have Anything Better to Do Than Watch Someone Spend 66 Hours Assembling A Chainmail Shirt11/27/2017
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Like You Have Anything Better to Do Than Watch Someone Spend 66 Hours Assembling A Chainmail Shirt http://ift.tt/2k5oqMd
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No one’s pretending that life in the middle ages didn’t suck. There was the plague, unceasing catapult attacks, and beheading after beheading. But watching Evan Snider painstakingly make a chainmail shirt by hand once again reminds us to be extra thankful to live in this century. In addition to ten days of preparation and planning, the actual assembly of the shirt, made from hundreds of thousands of tiny copper rings that were opened and closed using hand tools, took 66 hours to complete. The timelapse footage of the process, with one frame snapped every five seconds, still takes about 25 minutes to watch, and yet, it’s also kind of relaxing and soothing to see the 25-pound garment come together so slowly. [Vimeo via The Awesomer] Digital Trends via Gizmodo http://gizmodo.com November 27, 2017 at 12:00PM
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Hold Up, the New Jumanji Movie Is Actually... Good? http://ift.tt/2A8VV6e Turns out, I truly am Jack Black in Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle--the upcoming Jumanji sequel that, against all odds, looks to actually be good—because “I just can’t even with this place.” First reactions are in for Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, and things are looking solid for the sequel to the beloved Robin Williams children’s film. The early reviews of the movie, about a group of teens who get transformed into video game characters, are calling it a bright spot of 2017 and one of the best video game films ever made (even though it’s not based on an actual video game). A lot of love is especially being thrown Jack Black’s way for his portrayal of a vapid teenage girl.
I’m...kind of perplexed, people. Honestly. Where did this come from? The idea of making a new Jumanji movie, more than 20 years after the first one, seemed like a bad bet from the very beginning. Then none of the trailers made Welcome to the Jungle look particularly good. Plus, the very idea of putting underage kids in the bodies of adults (including Karen Gillan’s scantily dressed Ruby Roundhouse) seemed uncomfortable at best, immensely disturbing at worst. I expected this thing to be stupid, cheesy, and unpleasant. Advertisement But now? Jumanji 2 is apparently good, and my whole world has turned upside down. Feed me some deadly cake, I guess, because I just can’t even right now. Digital Trends via Gizmodo http://gizmodo.com November 27, 2017 at 11:42AM
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One Does Not Simply Pay Full Price For the Lord of the Rings or Hobbit Extended Trilogies http://ift.tt/2AfinZD There are quite a few permutations of the Lord of the Rings films out there on Blu-ray, but the extended editions are the ones you want, and the extended trilogy pack is down to $26 on Amazon for Cyber Monday, complete with all three extended films totaling 11 hours, plus 26 hours of special features to boot. No wonder it’s the best selling Blu-ray in Kinja Deals history by a wide margin. The Hobbit trilogy is also down to $38, if that’s something you’re into.
Digital Trends via Gizmodo http://gizmodo.com November 27, 2017 at 11:42AM
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Snapchat is assisting your search for the perfect filter with ‘computer vision’ http://ift.tt/2jsb9cz Finding the perfect Snapchat filters will soon get a bit easier. Snapchat recently confirmed that the app now uses “computer vision” to recognize what’s in the photo. Once the app recognizes what’s there, Snapchat displays suggested filters based on what that photo contains, turning up pet puns for a photo of Fido or tasty graphics for food photos. The feature is first launching in a handful of common categories. The app now includes computer vision for recognizing food, pets, sports, and beaches, and Snap Inc. says it is working to expand the object recognition to additional categories. The filter recommendations began rolling out quietly last week, with the company recently mentioning that more categories will be coming in the future. A photo of a pet, for example, will bring up a sticker of “it’s a pawty” while a beachfront shot will put an “ocean view” sticker into the top of that filter carousel, and food photos put a sticker for “what diet?” at the forefront. As Snapchat’s filter options grow, the new features prevent users from having to dig through the options by putting the most relevant filters at the top of the filter options alongside the “smart filters” that add in the date, location, temperature, or speed. The addition isn’t Snap’s first go-round with computer vision either — the technology already powers options like the ability to search through public photos in Stories and find a photo of a dog even if the word “dog” was never actually used. Snap Inc. has also patented a similar object recognition program that could help boost advertising, with companies paying to have their filter pop up when a user snaps a photo of a related object. The update comes as Snap Inc. is preparing a major redesign for Snapchat after reporting disappointing financial results. The company announced a redesign earlier this month, with CEO Evan Spiegel saying that the new design will make Snapchat easier to use. An anonymous source later said that the redesign would be coming on December 4 but Snapchat has not confirmed that information. Snapchat’s user base is currently largely made up of people between the ages 13 and 34 and Spiegel said the redesign is aiming to attract more age groups to the platform, as well as users from more countries.
Digital Trends via Digital Trends http://ift.tt/2p4eJdC November 27, 2017 at 11:38AM
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Mobile application testing service HeadSpin launches from stealth http://ift.tt/2AeMlgm HeadSpin, a mobile application testing service, launched today to give developers a one-stop shop for quality assurance and control for mobile application development. The company’s co-founder and chief executive, Manish Lachwani, knows the mobile appspace better than almost anyone. The former co-founder and chief technology officer of Appurify (which Google bought), Lachwani previously served as the CTO of game developer Zynga and was a principal architect of the Amazon Kindle — developing the first Kindle OS. At Appurify, Lachwani was one of the first to use hosted software to test automation with real devices, and the company’s subsequent acquisition by Google helped pave the way for in-house testing services that enabled Google developers to move faster and break fewer things, the company said. ““No one was enabling developers with automated real world testing, pre-release. All the attention was on post-launch monitoring and testing. In addition, testing and performance management solutions provided developers no visibility into the complex user experiences around the world,” Lachwani said. “As a result, developers were not getting ahead of performance or user experience issues.” HeadSpin is already being used by companies like Tinder, DocuSign, Akamai, Telstra, and Dell. The company’s software provides monitoring of application development before and after an application’s release, the company said. The company monitors code on devices in real networks; it doesn’t use an SDK so there’s no expansion of an application’s code base. “Unlike other solutions, HeadSpin’s data driven platform is able to proactively uncover ‘hidden insights’ through learning. This helps us fix our app issues before launch and have something reliable and repeatable to test or measure,” said Maria Zhang, CTO at Tinder, in a statement. Featured Image: audioundwerbung/Getty ImagesDigital Trends via TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com November 27, 2017 at 11:27AM |
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