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Meerkat vs. Periscope: Twitter’s new app set to dominate growing mobile live streaming space

National Post Tech Desk - Mon, 03/30/2015 - 12:57

Since launching late last week, Twitter’s new mobile live streaming app, Periscope, has exploded in popularity, and has been used by celebrities such as Aaron Paul, Seth Meyers and even Kevin Jonas, leading many to question how long a competing service, Meerkat, will be able to remain relevant.

Meerkat popularized the concept of live streaming in everyday life via a smartphone and an Internet connection last month at SXSW, even though rival services like Ustream have been available on mobile devices for years. But Twitter’s launch of Periscope last Thursday stole much of the initial hype surrounding Meerkat. Twitter acquired Periscope in January 2014 for a reported US$100 million.

In response to Periscope’s launch, Meerkat introduced new features the company hopes will bring the spotlight back on their app – recommendations of people to follow, a simple way to follow users from inside a live stream, and a new way to discover streams your friends like.

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Late last week Meerkat also announced it’s received US$14 million in additional funding, lead by Greylock Partners, as well as a variety of angel investors such as celebrity Jared Leto and YouTube’s founder Chad Hurley. The live streaming app’s latest round of funding reportedly puts the company at a valuation of approximately US$40 million.

Since its early March launch, Meerkat has amassed approximately 300,000 users. However, the service has recently been locked out of accessing Twitter’s social graph – a feature allowing users to bring their Twitter friends over to Meerkat – in an attempt to stifle the competing platform’s growth. Users will still be able to announce on Twitter that they are streaming via Meerkat, but lack of access to social graph also means users will no longer be automatically notified when a friend is broadcasting, unless they manually rebuild their social network in Meerkat.

Many industry observers expect only one mobile live streaming app will survive, given most people will not want to support both Meerkat and Periscope, especially considering both services offer similar features and the ability to easily share live events with friends. Periscope’s integration into Twitter’s ecosystem is similar to how the company amalgamated another one of its companion platforms, the short video sharing platform, Vine. However, removing social graph functionality gives Periscope a distinct advantage over Meerkat in terms of attracting new users.

PeriscopeTwitter's new live streaming application is called Periscope.

Shortly after launch, Periscope landed in the top-30 chart in the U.S. iOS app store, pushing Meerkat down to a ranking in the 500 area. However it’s important to note Meerkat’s highest ranking in the U.S. iOS app store was only 140, leading some to speculate the app’s popularity has been exaggerated by the amount of media coverage the app has recently received.

Along with the ability to sync with Twitter contacts, Periscope also offers a variety of capabilities Meerkat doesn’t, namely uploading replays of past live streams. If a user misses a stream in Meerkat, they’re unable to watch it later.

Neither Periscope or Meerkat are available on Google’s Android platform, although both services reportedly have Android versions of their apps in development.

With files from Business Insider

Amazon.com Inc launches Home Services, a referral marketplace for plumbers, housecleaning and more

National Post Tech Desk - Mon, 03/30/2015 - 11:33

CHICAGO — Amazon.com Inc. is launching a home services marketplace that will connect customers with electricians, plumbers and painters in a move to have its services tied to every product sold on its website.

Amazon Home Services, which launched on Monday, will allow customers to buy 700 services such as car maintenance, TV wall-mounting and house cleaning at upfront prices. The quality of the service will be backed with an Amazon guarantee, which the retailer uses to vouch for products sold by third-party sellers on its website.

A home services marketplace will extend Amazon’s role as a middleman for third-party vendors, which account for about 40% of its sales. It would also help Amazon gain an edge in the fast-growing services industry in the U.S. which the retailer estimates to be around US$630 billion.

“Third-party estimates show that customers spend four times more on services each year than they do on physical products,” Peter Faricy, vice-president, Amazon Marketplace, told Reuters.

“So for us the opportunity is very big,” he said.

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Around 85 million Amazon shoppers buy products that require servicing or installation, the company said. Amazon will roll out the service nationwide in the U.S. with “high coverage” in Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York.

Services marks a new frontier for Amazon, which has focused on selling products as it expanded from books into consumer goods, groceries and media. Local services have been tough for marketplace companies to turn a profit, since offerings must be tailored to each city or region.

Amazon will be in direct competition with Angie’s List Inc., Craigslist Inc., and Yelp Inc. as well as U.S. home improvement chains like Home Depot Inc. and Lowe’s Companies Inc., which have invested in ways to link customers with local plumbers, painters and other service providers.

Amazon will hand-pick service professionals after running background checks and offer to match prices if customers get a lower price for the same service and professional on another site, store or directly from the professional within 30 days of a purchase, Mr. Faricy said.

Amazon Home Services will have a revenue share model with the service providers. The retailer will charge a 5% transaction fee, along with platform fees ranging from 10% for custom services and 15% for standardized services.

© Thomson Reuters 2015

Spotify launches on PlayStation and announces free premium subscription for Fido customers

National Post Tech Desk - Mon, 03/30/2015 - 11:02

Spotify officially launched on PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4 video game consoles on Monday, replacing Sony Corp’s own struggling music streaming music service, Music Unlimited. Rogers Communications Inc. also revealed Spotify, which now has over 60 million active users worldwide, will also be available on Fido customers’ tablets and smartphones through a free 24-month subscription to Spotify-premium.

Both of these moves further solidify Spotify’s brand as being synonymous with music streaming, similar to how Netflix has become the platform many people immediately think of when it comes to online video streaming. Music streaming services such as Spotify, Rdio, Deezer and Google Play Music are increasingly becoming viable deterrents to music piracy in Canada, as well as other regions the services are available in around the world.

According to Rogers more than half of Canadians between the ages of 18 and 34 stream music on mobile smartphones.

“We know our customers love to stream music and Spotify is the obvious choice for us,” said Raj Doshi, Rogers VP of product and hardware management, in a press release.

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Spotify’s new PlayStation app is designed with large television screens in mind and also brings the music streaming platform to 41 countries, significantly more than the 19 regions Sony’s now defunct Music Unlimited service was available in. However, Sony has not specified which of the 58 regions Spotify is currently available in will be missing out on the service’s initial PlayStation app launch.

Sony’s PlayStation 4 and Microsoft Corp’s Xbox One video game console are primarily video game consoles, but the devices also offer services that aren’t gaming related, such as Netflix, Twitch and U.S.-exclusive video streaming services like Hulu. Sony also recently launched a new streaming television platform called PlayStation Vue, a new US$49.99 a month Internet television service, giving users access to networks like CBS, Fox, NBC, Discover, Viacom and AMC, directly from their PlayStation console.

Microsoft’s Xbox One video game console was initially marketed as the only device you need in your living room, with its voice-activated Kinect navigation and ability to run a digital cable connection through the console. Since the Xbox One’s launch in November 2013 the system’s focus has shifted back to gaming, forcing the company to offer an Xbox bundle that doesn’t include its controversial Kinect motion sensor, largely due to the backlash the Xbox One’s initial multimedia-focused direction received.

SonySpotify is now available on PlayStation platforms.

However, Microsoft still offers Xbox Video, a rental movie and television streaming service, and Xbox Music, a music streaming service, on the Xbox One.

Spotify, which launched back in 2008, is available on smartphones, smart televisions and a variety of set-top boxes. The company says it has worked closely with Sony to optimize its service for PlayStation Platforms, allowing players to listen to Spotify while still playing a game on their console. Spotify only launched in Canada in August 2014.

Existing Spotify subscribers receive instant access to Spotify’s PlayStation app. Sony’s deal with the music streaming service is exclusive, which means the service won’t be coming to the Xbox One any time soon. Spotify-premium costs $9.99 a month in Canada. Music Unlimited users with active subscriptions as of March 29, 2015 will be eligible to receive two months of free access to Spotify premium.

Sony announced plans to close Music Unlimited and forge a partnership with music streaming platform Spotify in January 2015.

Two U.S. agents on ‘Silk Road’ case accused of stealing bitcoins

National Post Tech Desk - Mon, 03/30/2015 - 10:18

Two federal agents who investigated the black market bitcoin website Silk Road were charged with stealing the digital currency.

U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency employee Carl M. Force and Secret Service agent Shaun Bridges were charged in San Francisco with wire fraud and money laundering, the Justice Department said Monday in a statement.

Ross Ulbricht, convicted of running the Silk Road site under the moniker “Dread Pirate Roberts,” faces a possible life sentence in prison. He is to be sentenced on May 15.

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Bloomberg.com

GitHub reportedly targeted by Chinese hackers in days-long cyberattack

National Post Tech Desk - Mon, 03/30/2015 - 07:49

NEW YORK — U.S. coding site GitHub said it was deflecting most of the traffic from a days-long cyberattack that had caused intermittent outages for the social coding site, with the Wall Street Journal citing China as the source of the attack.

“Eighty-seven hours in, our mitigation is deflecting most attack traffic,” the GitHub Status account said in a tweet on Sunday. “We’re aware of intermittent issues and continue to adapt our response.”

GitHub supplies coding tools for developers and calls itself the world’s largest code host.

The attackers paralyzed the site at times by using distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attacks, a technique commonly used to disrupt websites and computer networks, according to the Wall Street Journal.

They pushed massive amounts of traffic to GitHub by redirecting overseas users of the popular Chinese search engine Baidu Inc, according to the Wall Street Journal.

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The newspaper said they targeted two GitHub pages that link to copies of websites banned in China – a Mandarin-language site from the New York Times Co and Greatfire.org, which helps Chinese users circumvent government censorship.

A Beijing-based Baidu spokesman said a thorough investigation had determined it was neither a security problem on Baidu’s side nor a hacking attack.

“We have notified other security organizations and are working to get to the bottom of this,” the spokesman said.

On its blog, GitHub said the attack began early on Thursday and involved “every vector we’ve seen in previous attacks as well as some sophisticated new techniques that use the web browsers of unsuspecting, uninvolved people to flood github.com with high levels of traffic.”

GitHub said it believed the intent of the attack was to convince the company to remove a specific class of content.

The Chinese government has repeatedly denied it has anything to do with hacking.

Asked about the report, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said China itself was one of the world’s largest victims of hacking and called for international dialog to tackle the issue.

© Thomson Reuters 2015

Five books that would make great games: The next adaptations should be literary

National Post Tech Desk - Mon, 03/30/2015 - 06:00

When looking for lucrative intellectual property to exploit, game makers typically turn their gaze to the world of film rather than books.

You don’t need to be a brain surgeon to understand why.

Blockbuster movies are front and centre in pop culture, and it’s easy to imagine the cinematic sequences on the silver screen translated to the nearly equally cinematic medium of modern games.

But as an avid reader, I see possibilities for games lurking within the books I read at least as often as I see them in film. We need look no further than Larry Niven’s classic Ringworld, which clearly served as muse to Halo’s inventors at Bungie, for proof that game makers see potential in books as well.

Below are five novels I think could be transformed into immensely entertaining games. From Iain M. Banks’ 27-year-old sci-fi classic The Player of Games to Pierce Brown’s still-in-the-works Red Rising trilogy, I’d pay good money to play interactive versions of all of these books.

Minor spoiler alert: Best skip any blurbs pertaining to books you might want to read. I don’t give away any endings or twists, but I do get into some overarching plot details you might want to discover on your own while reading.

The Red Rising trilogy, by Pierce Brown

I could almost feel my thumbs twitching as I read through the first two installments in this raucous, action-packed sci-fi saga about a class-based society spread throughout our solar system and one man’s mission to tear it down.

Its hero – a fierce young man with a wounded soul – is a slave surgically transformed into a member of the ruling class, a breed of super men and women who tower over almost everyone else. Through a series of war games he becomes a brilliant melee combatant and tactician. He eventually ends up fighting on various planets, moons, and space ships, wearing grav boots and power armour while wielding a variety of futuristic weapons.

It’s basically a sci-fi action game waiting to happen. Think Halo, minus the aliens and with a richer story filled with memorable characters and some jaw-dropping narrative corkscrews.

The trilogy has already been optioned for a film, but unless it’s given an immense Avatar-like budget I’m not sure celluloid could do justice to the alien settings, the low-gravity combat, or the story’s epic nature. I’d prefer it as a game.

The Player of Games, by Iain M. Banks

Scottish nationalist Iain M. Banks (who sadly died a couple of years ago at age 59) is perhaps my favourite sci-fi writer. His novels set in the Culture universe present not a stereotypical dystopia, but rather a utopia in which technology has solved virtually all of our problems, from gender identity issues to death. Most of the issues in his books have to do with Culture citizens travelling outside their society and interacting with other civilizations.

Some of his books could be turned into action/adventure games (the excellent space opera Consider Phlebas), others tactical space combat simulations (The Hydrogen Sonata), but if I were to translate only one of his novels into a game I think I’d pick The Player of Games, the second book in the Culture series, released back in 1988.

It’s about a skilled board game player whose abilities are put to the test in a fabulously complex game of strategy called Azad, which is played on multiple three-dimensional boards big enough that the players can walk around them. It involves sophisticated terrain, a huge array of playing pieces, cards, and dice, and some parts of the game are entirely separate games unto themselves. It can take days or even weeks to play.

Mr. Banks never fully describes the rules of the game, focusing instead on its significance as a determiner of social status on the world on which it’s played. But I’d love to see a skilled maker of vaguely similar video games – say, perhaps, Firaxis (of Sid Meier’s Civilization fame)– attempt to ferret out the basic systems and create an experience that approximates what’s described in the book. I imagine it might be something hazily akin to the game of thermonuclear war that James Bond plays against Maximillian Largo in Never Say Never Again, just on a much grander scale.

Bird Box, by Josh Malerman

There’s crazy potential for a thrillingly original horror game in this terrific page-turner.

The book focuses on a mother living with her children in a post-apocalypse world. Her house is insulated from the outside; windows covered, doors locked. As the tale unfolds we come to learn that there is something new and terrible in the world – we know not what – that drives people mad upon sight. It has almost completely destroyed the world’s population. Any excursions outdoors must be made blindfolded, lest she or her children see the thing that drives people mad.

It’s a chilling book filled with the woman’s terrified thoughts as she tries to navigate with her kids outside using only her ears and hands.

Admittedly, a story without any combat and in which the main characters spend much of their time blind poses some problems for the medium of video games, but the answers to these problems could result in some wonderfully inventive – and intense – play mechanics.

Scenarios could be designed so that players spend much of their time in enclosed spaces, scavenging and fulfilling objectives in spaces where they need not be constantly blindfolded. Then certain cues – audio, visual, instinctive – could warn them to cover their eyes, at which point the player character’s hearing might be represented visually, perhaps a bit like that of blind superhero Daredevil. Touch could be simulated via tactile feedback in a controller’s triggers and joysticks.

There would be times when it would become necessary to remove your blindfold in open areas where the mysterious terror might be – perhaps to fiddle with a latch, check a map, or just gain your bearings – and the fear of what might be seen in that moment or two would be palpable.

I want to call every developer I’ve ever interviewed or met right now and beg them to make this game.

The Martian, by Andy Weir

Despite its title, The Martian isn’t about an alien. And it doesn’t involve any combat or action. It’s a story about a human astronaut (who also happens to be a botanist and mechanical engineer) who finds himself stranded alone on Mars for more than a year and must use his wits to survive until a rescue mission can reach him.

So it would make a fine first-person puzzle game, naturally.

The vast bulk of the book’s 369 pages are spent describing the many problems that the astronaut faces – food, water, air, how to travel 3,200 kilometres across unexplored Martian terrain – and the inventive ways in which he deals with them.

Similarly, a game based on The Martian would force players to scavenge and make efficient use of all available resources, coming up with solutions to seemingly catastrophic problems as they arise. Clues to solutions would be scattered around the environment in notes and videos, and Mission Control back on Earth could provide hints as needed.

It could even be moderately educational, providing players with real scientific information delineating the difficulties involved in living on a world so inhospitable to Earth life.

However, if a game were made it wouldn’t be able to beat the film adaption to the screen. Ridley Scott’s take on Andy Weir’s novel, starring Matt Damon as the astronaut, is slated to land in theatres this fall.

Locke & Key, by Joe Hill

This unforgettable series of graphic novels penned by Stephen King’s son tells a brilliantly conceived and expertly executed tale about a group of kids in a big old house who discover magical keys with amazing powers.

A big part of the fun lies in finding out what each new key does, so I won’t ruin any of them here save to say that with perhaps one or two exceptions the concepts are wildly original – and intertwine perfectly with the carefully planned plot.

This is another print work with film aspirations. A TV pilot failed to make the cut on Fox back in 2011, but Alex Kurtzman announced last summer that he plans to make a trilogy of films based on the books.

I’d rather a game.

And I see it as a kind of narrative adventure. Lots of exploration, discovery, and chatting, and little in the way of traditional video game action. Think something with elements of Gone Home, Dear Esther, and The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, but with some Telltale Games-style dialogue thrown in. An interactive story.

Production and presentation would be key. We would see, amongst many other graphical wonders, characters physically gazing inside each others’ heads to see entire worlds at play, so the publisher wouldn’t be able to skimp on budget. The experience needs to be as visual as it is cerebral.

If it were done right and with enough care, I think a game based on Locke & Key could have potential to be the next The Walking Dead, drawing in casual and serious gamers in equal number. Its story, ideas, and characters are that compelling.

Nintendo delays the Legend of Zelda Wii U beyond 2015

National Post Tech Desk - Fri, 03/27/2015 - 16:10

Nintendo co. Ltd’s upcoming Wii U Zelda game won’t hit its originally announced 2015 release date, according to an update released today by series producer Eiji Aonuma.

“In these last three months, as the team has experienced firsthand the freedom of exploration that hasn’t existed in any Zelda game to date, we have discovered several new possibilities for this game,” said Aonuma in a video posted to YouTube.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7y1VKSVeGD0&w=640&h=390]

“As we have worked to turn these possibilities into reality, new ideas have continued to spring forth, it now feels like we have the potential to create something that exceeds even my own expectations,” said Aonuma.

Mr. Aonuma & team will be hard at work on #Zelda and have decided not to show it @ E3. Thanks for your patience! https://t.co/bwu3nd3fNi

— Nintendo of America (@NintendoAmerica) March 27, 2015

According to a recent Tweet from Nintendo of America’s official Twitter account, Zelda Wii U is also skipping this year’s Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), the annual trade show where the world’s major video game developers, publishers and hardware manufacturers show off their latest games and technology.

Anonuma apologized to fans in the video and explained that is team is, “no longer making a 2015 release our number one priority.”

The last time The Legend of Zelda Wii U was shown off was during The Game Awards in December, emphasizing the title’s open nature and explaining that the company intends to make considerable changes to the formula Zelda titles typically follow.

Zelda Wii U was announced during E3 2014.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SECWlFInyFM&w=640&h=390]

The last Zelda game, The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, was released in 2011 for Nintendo’s Wii.

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