In high school, Mike was drinking 8 cans of Coke a day. He quit cold turkey and suffered from "horrible horrible migraines, dizziness, blind spots and tunnel vision." The video was produced by Dress Code.
Given my own penchant in the 1980s for black clothing, black eyeliner, and Bauhaus, I was delighted by Dan Adams's TED-Ed video "A brief history of goths."
And if you find yourself in that delightfully dark place, please enjoy these classics:
Google is focusing on battery life in Android O by clamping down on what apps can do in the background. At the same time, Android O includes a new battery settings menu that attempts to present your usage in a more understandable way. Instead of simply showing how much juice an app used, it puts battery use in the context of how you use the phone.
When you see an app at the top of your Nougat battery stats, it's not always clear if that's because you used it a lot (so you'd expect it to be high) or the app is just doing something it shouldn't be doing.
At Google’s I/O developer event on Thursday, the company revealed Seurat, a new tool that allows for rendering of very high resolution immersive content even on mobile VR devices that don’t necessarily have the best specs. To demonstrate Seurat’s capabilities, Google showed off a collaboration with ILMxLAB, which brings cinematic-quality renders from Star Wars to… Read More
Amazon has long relied on customers providing feedback and providing other ranking data as part of the process of encouraging more sales on its platform, and now the e-commerce giant is adding a new twist on this to spur more buying in its books business.
Today, Amazon announced Amazon Charts, a new kind of bestseller list that will give users, for the first time ever, a top 20 list of… Read More
Livestreaming on the YouTube mobile app can certainly come in handy, as we’ve used it at I/O, but Google has held it back just a bit so only certain users can access it. Now, all requirements for mobile livestreaming are being dropped.
A very loose definition of "shed" is allowed, ranging from legitimate sheds to Tiny Houses to structures that are explicitly not even sheds, but these garden buildings are both whimsical and awe-inspiring. Pictured above is the Pricklebum, the Hedgehog Palace of Ludlow, winner in the "unexpected" category. [via Metafilter]
Sand. The indefinite but distinctive quality of Star Trek dialogue. We can beam out of the wilds any time. Space is desaturated now, but still with a brightly diverse cast. 1990s Babylon 5 outfits. Xtreme Klingons. Vulcan on the bridge (Type: Jewish ☐, British ☐, 1950s transatlantic newsreel accent ☑). "Starfleet doesn't fire first." Alien Mason Verger senses death.
Josie Lewis creates beautiful geometric watercolor paintings. In this video, she shows you how if you're ready to move past adult coloring books. (more…)
Google just took the lead with a 2-hour keynote address.
Google I/O 2017 marked a massive improvement in Google Home's capabilities, the importance of which should not be underestimated. With less than a 30 minute slice of the two-hour long keynote address, Google rolled out fresh Google Home features that improve daily functionality of the connected speaker and completely change the possibilities for both requesting and receiving information from it.
Amazon should take note.
Adding push information
It becomes harder and harder to ignore Google Home's presence.
In what may have initially come across as a small development, Google made an important change to the way Google Home works by introducing what it calls "proactive notifications." Up to now, Google Home was always listening and waiting for your input — now, it can pulse its lights to let you know it has something to tell you. When you notice the lights, simply say "hey google, what's up?" and it will give you the timely information that you'll hopefully find useful. Google says what it pushes will be limited to only the most important information, and if done correctly it can be extremely useful.
This is a huge change to the way you're expected to interact with Google Home, and has the potential to dramatically increase use by the average Home owner. By proactively pushing useful information, it becomes harder and harder to ignore Google Home's presence, which creates a loop of using Home more often.
Calling without a catch
One large feature that caught everyone's eyes in the wake of Amazon's recent Echo announcements was free calling from Google Home. You can now simply ask Google Home to call any of your contacts, so long as they have a phone number associated with their contact entry in your Google account. This critically bests the Echo in that it actually dials a phone number — you can call any mobile or landline, rather than dialing someone else's Google Home or phone via the Home app. The outgoing calls from Home can even be masked to look like they're coming from your phone, which makes the experience 100% seamless for the person on the other end.
Call any number at any time — no strings attached.
An important function that really makes voice calling effective is Google's recent implementation of multi-user functionality based on voice recognition. If you say "call mom" it's going to dial your mom ... and if your spouse says the same query it's going to call their mother instead. A decidedly personal experience that just makes sense, but is a difficult technological problem to solve.
An entirely new interface paradigm
Google Home can respond on your phone or TV, too.
The final part of the latest Google Home announcements has less to do with Home itself and more with how it fits into your entire life. Now Google Home is no longer operating in a silo — it's simply the contact point for your voice, and can then give you information on other devices. Google Home can now send content to your phone or TV when applicable, whether that means sending Google Maps directions to your phone when you ask or playing a YouTube video on your nearby TV.
You could easily see this as a direct shot across the bow of the new Amazon Echo Show, which made the important jump to using a screen in addition to voice so that it can always offer you information no matter your query. Google Home and Google Assistant's strength over Amazon here is that Google has potential for deeper integration with more of your screens. Chromecast and Android TV give more options for your big screens and multi-room audio, while Google Assistant being built into just about every Android phone offers a deep hook in billions of devices.
Of course this is only a big feature if you're a household that already has Chromecasts or Android TVs — which isn't necessarily a given — but the potential is there in ways that Amazon can't yet offer.
Your move, Amazon
With these fresh Google Home features, the ball is back in Amazon's court to try and step up and match what Google Home is now capable of. Amazon may have a larger, longer-standing install base of Echo devices, with new hardware coming, but Google's superiority in software and platforms is winning right now.
Whether you’re checking email for work, playing Pokémon Go with your kids or watching your favorite movie, confidence in the security of your device and data is important. And since day one, Android has been built with security in mind. As we’ve grown, so have our security services, which constantly protect the 2 billion active Android devices globally.
We know you want to be confident that your Android devices are safe and secure, which is why we are doubling down on our commitment to security. Today we introduced Google Play Protect—Google’s comprehensive security services for Android, providing powerful new protections and greater visibility into your device security. Play Protect is built into every device with Google Play, is always updating, and automatically takes action to keep your data and device safe, so you don’t have to lift a finger.
Peace of mind in the palm of your hand
With more than 50 billion apps scanned every day, our machine learning systems are always on the lookout for new risks, identifying potentially harmful apps and keeping them off your device or removing them. All Google Play apps go through a rigorous security analysis even before they’re published on the Play Store—and Play Protect warns you about bad apps that are downloaded from other sources too. Play Protect watches out for any app that might step out of line on your device, keeping you and every other Android user safe.
Control within reach, even when your device isn’t
One of the biggest security risks you’re likely to face is simply losing your phone. To help in these times of need, we’re launching Find My Device as part of Google Play Protect. With Find My Device you can locate, ring, lock and erase your Android devices—phones, tablets, and even watches. This feature is built in and enabled on all devices; visit android.com/find or check out the app.
Over the coming weeks we’ll be rolling out these new features to your device. To learn more about Google Play Protect, check out our website or give Find My Device a spin.
No matter how easy or simple storing all your photos in the cloud is, some people prefer to have hard copies of their favorite memories. There is no shortage of services and companies that offer easy creation of photo books, but now Google Photos has the functionality built-in.
Photo books are super easy to make in Google Photos, and of course can be created from the desktop or mobile apps. Once you select the pictures you want, Photos can automatically filter out low-quality and duplicate images.
YouTube is no pushover. It's a gargantuan platform for content creators and, odds are, there is something on there for everyone to enjoy. Personally, I watch stuff there more than on Netflix, Hulu, or Plex — it's usually about something involving video games. Turns out that all of us who watch YouTube collectively view 1 billion hours of videos per day. Think about that for a second.
Watching on mobile accounts for about 60% of watchtime versus other platforms, which isn't all that surprising.
During today's keynote at Google I/O, Google revealed a couple of interesting figures about the upcoming Android O release. Namely, it should be a lot faster in certain regards. Google says that the Pixel, for example, will reboot up to twice as fast on Android O (it does take a while at the moment). It wasn't immediately clear what optimizations allowed for this boosted performance.
As in the hero image of this post, Google also alluded to improved performance for apps at large.
The world's largest operating system is used on over 2 billion devices.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai kicked off I/O 2017 by highlighting the growth of Android — the world's largest operating system now powers over 2 billion devices.
Pichai shared usage statistics for other Google products: Photos launched two years ago, clocking over 500 million users and processing 1.2 billion photos per day. People are watching over 1 billion hours' worth of video on YouTube daily, and Maps is similarly serving directions for 1 billion kilometers on a daily basis.
Drive has also posted an impressive growth, with the cloud storage service crossing over 800 million users. Pichai said that it is "a privilege to serve users at this scale," and that Google is increasingly leveraging machine learning and AI in its products.
On stage at Google IO 2017 today, Google announced Google Lens, the culmination of major improvements the company has made in machine learning. Leveraging Google's computer vision tech, Google Lens can use your phone's camera to identify objects around and give you more information about them.
Google Lens can understand what you're looking at, and Google had some pretty interesting examples on stage to show that off. For example, you can show Lens a flower, and it will serve up more information on what the flower is. A slightly more impressive demo showed Lens recognizing the default Wi-Fi SSID information stored on a routers sticker and using that information to automatically log you into the network.
On top of that, Lens can use your location, orientation and street view to bring up more information about restaurants and other businesses around you. Think of it like Samsung's Bixby, but better.
All of this is part of what Google CEO Sundar Pichai describes as the company's shift from a mobile-first world to AI-first. That push has moved Google towards "an inflection point with vision," Pichai said.
Google Lens will arrive first as part of Google Assistant in Photos.
For more from Google I/O, keep following along with our liveblog.
Last year we announced our vision for the Google Assistant—which helps you get things done through a natural conversation, and is available wherever you need it. Since launching the Assistant last fall, we’ve been improving what it can do for you—from adding the ability to control more smart home devices with your Assistant on Google Home and Android phones to bringing your Assistant to new surfaces like Android Wear. And today, we’re introducing new ways your Assistant can help you do even more.
Ready to help
Of course your Assistant can help answer your questions and find information—but it can also help you get all kinds of useful things done. Today we’re adding a few more:
Schedule new calendar appointments and create reminders. Starting today on Google Home, you can schedule appointments and soon you’ll also be able to add reminders. Since it’s the same Google Assistant across devices, you’ll be able to get a reminder at home or on the go.
Make your home smarter. We now have 70+ smart home partners supporting the Google Assistant across Google Home and Android phones, including August locks, TP-Link, Honeywell, Logitech, and LG.
On Google Home, hands-free help is just an “Ok Google” away. Here are some of the new things you can do with the Google Assistant in your home:
Make hands-free calls with Google Home. In the coming months, just ask your Assistant and it will connect you to mobile phones or landlines in the U.S. or Canada, free. There’s no setup and no need for a phone or additional app. And since we now support multiple people on one Google Home, your Assistant can make sure that you call your mom—not your partner or roommate’s mom!
Enjoy more music, movies and TV shows. You can soon use Spotify’s free music offering, as well as Soundcloud and Deezer, with Google Home. We’re also adding Bluetooth support to Google Home, so you can play any audio from your iOS or Android device. For streaming video lovers, we've already added Netflix, and we have more partners on the way like HBO NOW, CBS All Access, and HGTV.
Get visual responses from the Assistant on your TV with Chromecast. Later this year, we’ll add visual responses from your Assistant on TVs with Chromecast. You’ll be able to see Assistant answers on the biggest screen in your house, whether you're asking "what's on YouTube TV right now?" or "what's on my calendar today?"
Plus, starting today developers can build conversational apps for the Google Assistant on phones. That means that soon you’ll be able to not only get help and answers from Google, but also from third party services.
Conversational
Your Assistant is also continually getting better at having a natural conversation. Almost 70 percent of requests to the Assistant are expressed in natural language, not the typical keywords people type in a web search. And many requests are follow-ups that continue an ongoing conversation.
But conversations can take place in many different ways. Sometimes your Assistant should be the one to start it—so over the next few months, we’re bringing proactive notifications to Google Home. Additionally, a conversation might not always be spoken out loud. So we’re adding new ways to help you have a conversation with your Assistant that’s right for you and the moment.
Starting today, you can also type to your Google Assistant on phones. And for when you want to see what you’ve previously asked, we’ll also soon add history within your conversation.
And in the coming months, with Google Lens—a new way for computers to “see”—you’ll be able to learn more about things around you, and even take action based on your surroundings, while you’re in a conversation with your Assistant. If you see a marquee for your favorite band, you can hold up your Assistant, tap the Lens icon and get information on the band, tickets and more.
Always available
The Assistant is already available on more than 100 million devices and starting today, we’re bringing the Google Assistant to iPhones. Whether you’re at home or on the go, your Assistant is ready to help. The Assistant on iOS is available on version 9.1+.
We’re also expanding to new places. Later this year people in Australia, Canada, France, Germany and Japan will be able to give Google Home a try. Soon the Assistant will also roll out to eligible Android phones in Brazilian Portuguese, French, German and Japanese, and by the end of the year the Assistant will support Italian, Korean and Spanish.
Phew—your Assistant has been busy! We’ll continue working on making the Assistant more useful in your everyday life. Whether you’re calling your friend on Google Home or out on the town with your iPhone, your Assistant is always ready to help.
There are 2 billion Android devices currently in use around the world. Google is now thinking about the next 2 billion devices. In order to do this, Google has a new project called Android Go. It’s a lightweight version of the upcoming version of Android (Android O) with optimized apps and Play Store.
Google focused on devices with very low specs, users with limited connectivity and… Read More
Google is today releasing an update for its Gmail mobile apps that introduces a new Smart Reply feature with suggested quick reply buttons within emails.
The feature is something Google is bringing over from its Inbox by Gmail and Allo apps where similar functionality was already available. Google says that the feature accounts for around 12% of replies sent in Inbox, for instance.
Google Photos is a massive service, with millions of users worldwide uploading over a billion photos a day. Now, Google is improving some of the service’s biggest features, including sharing and more.
Google has announced a number of VR efforts at I/O 2017. Notably, the company confirmed that it is working on a “new category of standalone VR headsets.”
The Pixel’s camera is impressive, and Google just keeps making it better. Using some behind-the-scenes computer wizardry, Google can turn a noisy low-light photo into something gorgeous. There’s also that impressive stabilization, but things are about to get a whole lot more impressive.
It’s already been available for a few months as a developer preview, but now the rest of us can finally get our hands on an upcoming version of Android. Android O Beta starts shipping today, if you point your browser over to android.com/beta. The company used the opportunity to show a number of features that have already been available in the developer preview. Notifications have… Read More
For their film Fire, Saulo Jamariqueli and Dirk Rees put a couple of fire breathers in a dark studio with a reflective surface, then ran the impressive footage through a kaleidoscope filter, making it even cooler. (more…)
With the OnePlus 5 now confirmed for a summer release, design and spec leaks have started to emerge much more frequently. The successor to the popular flagship-on-a-budget OnePlus 3/3T is shaping up to be another powerful device, with rumors also suggesting it will have an in vogue dual camera set-up. Now, thanks to Android Authority, we have an image of an alleged prototype to whet our appetite further.
According to their source, it's just a prototype and isn't necessarily representative of what we can expect from the new device when it drops this summer.
At last year's I/O, Google dipped its toe into the virtual reality waters by announcing Daydream (above). Like Gear VR before it, Daydream requires a phone to be inserted into a headset to operate. However, Variety is reporting that Google is set to unveil a VR headset that is completely standalone—no phone required.
It's not clear what software this device would run, but Android seems like a good choice. Google already has lots of Android VR components ready to go.
A clever ad campaign for Alzheimer’s Research UK – a charity working to prevent, treat and cure dementia – generated more than two million ad impressions, says the agency behind it. The campaign saw the Shazam app apparently having difficulty remembering the names of songs …
At Google’s I/O developer event on Thursday, the company revealed Seurat, a new tool that allows for rendering of very high resolution immersive content even on mobile VR devices that don’t necessarily have the best specs. To demonstrate Seurat’s capabilities, Google showed off a collaboration with ILMxLAB, which brings cinematic-quality renders from Star Wars to… Read More
Amazon has long relied on customers providing feedback and providing other ranking data as part of the process of encouraging more sales on its platform, and now the e-commerce giant is adding a new twist on this to spur more buying in its books business.
Today, Amazon announced Amazon Charts, a new kind of bestseller list that will give users, for the first time ever, a top 20 list of… Read More
There are 2 billion Android devices currently in use around the world. Google is now thinking about the next 2 billion devices. In order to do this, Google has a new project called Android Go. It’s a lightweight version of the upcoming version of Android (Android O) with optimized apps and Play Store.
Google focused on devices with very low specs, users with limited connectivity and… Read More
It’s already been available for a few months as a developer preview, but now the rest of us can finally get our hands on an upcoming version of Android. Android O Beta starts shipping today, if you point your browser over to android.com/beta. The company used the opportunity to show a number of features that have already been available in the developer preview. Notifications have… Read More
Welcome to the roundup of the best new Android games that went live in the Play Store or were spotted by us in the previous week or so.
