Rolandt

Here’s a story that appeared on Dow Jones newswires yesterday: DJ Update: Google, Apple Join to Create Tech Giant By Josee Rose In a surprise move to everyone who is alive, Google said it’s going to buy Apple for $9 billion. Google Chief Executive Larry Page had secret talks with the now deceased Steve Jobs … Continued

The post Here’s what to do when Dow Jones says Google is buying Apple appeared first on without bullshit.

From HUB:

mkalus shared this story from Consumerist.

Despite the technological leaps forward in virtual reality, VR headsets have not yet caught on with the mass market. That may have something to do with the better ones being prohibitively priced and requiring a connection to a computer, while the less expensive ones require you to use your phone for the screen. Facebook is hoping to finally hoping to bring VR to a bigger audience with Oculus Go, a headset with a moderately affordable price point and no need to purchase a powerful PC or kill the battery on your phone.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveiled the $199 Go earlier today at the fourth Oculus developers conference. Much of what was announced today — the price point, the standalone nature — was really just confirming earlier rumors about the device.

According to Oculus, the device’s “high-resolution fast-switch LCD screen dramatically improves visual clarity and reduces screen door effect.

The Oculus Go has speakers with integrated spatial audio built into the headset, though there’s also a headphone jack for private listening. Facebook says the “best” of its mobile VR content library will be available when the devices start shipping in 2018.

On that note, the company didn’t offer up many more details about the ordering process, noting only that it “can’t wait to share more early next year.”

It’s worth noting that Oculus has also dropped the price of the Rift headset permanently, from $499 to $399, reports Ars Technica, after a successful promotion at that price this summer.

In my SXSW panel this year, Ramesh Jain and Anna Dickson and I delved into the implications of Artificial Intelligence (AI) becoming a commodity, which will be a commonplace reality by the end of 2017.  We looked at several classes of services and considered what they were good for.

I’ve been spending a lot of time on the subject over the last few months writing The DAM Book 3. Clearly AI will be important in collection management and the deployment of images for various types of communication.

But I  hate using the term AI to describe the array of services that help you make sense of your photos. There’s actually a bunch of useful stuff that is not technically AI. Adding date or GPS info is definitely not AI. And linking to other data (like a wikipedia page) is not really AI. ( It’s actually just linking). Machine Learning and programmatic tagging comes in a lot of forms – some is really basic, and some is complex.

The term Computational Imaging was pretty obscure when the last version of The Dam Book was published, but it’s become a very common term. I think this is a useful concept to extend to the whole AI/Machine Learning/Data Scraping/Programmatic Tagging stack.

In The DAM Book 3, I’m using the term Computational Tagging to refer to all the computer-based tagging methods that involve some level of automation. This runs from the tags made by the computer in my camera to the sophisticated AI environments of the future. At the moment, it’s not widely-used term (Google shows 138 instances on the web), but I think it’s the best general description for the automatic and computer-assisted tagging that are becoming an essential part of working with images.

The post Computational Tagging appeared first on The DAM Book.

IPhone and iPad owners can now download the latest version of iOS 11: iOS11.0.3.

Similar to all iOS updates, iOS 11.0.3 includes a number of bug fixes aimed at improving the operating system’s overall useability.

The update also includes a fix for an audio and haptic feedback issue that was present on some iPhone 7 and 7 Plus devices.

The full update details are below:

• Fixes an issue where audio and haptic feedback would not work on some iPhone 7 and 7 Plus devices
• Addresses an issue where touch input was unresponsive on some iPhone 6s displays because they were not serviced with genuine apple parts.

To download the latest update, navigate to the Settings app on your iPhone or iPad, select ‘General,’ then select ‘Software Update.’

The post Apple releases iOS 11.0.3, includes fix for audio and haptic feedback on iPhone 7 and 7 Plus appeared first on MobileSyrup.

Along with the reveal of the Oculus Go, a standalone $200 USD lower-end VR headset, the Facebook-owned company also showed off a new, more refined version of its high-end Project Santa Cruz prototype.

The updated prototype is sleeker than last year’s version, but more importantly, now includes six-degrees-of-freedom motion control, commonly referred to as room-scale.

Oculus says that its Santa Cruz prototype is the first headset to offer ‘inside-out’ tracking without the need for wires or additional sensors. Along with the new headset, Oculus also revealed a redesigned Touch controller called the Santa Cruz controller.

The gamepads look similar to the original Touch, only with a slightly more streamlined design that seems more compact. Additionally the controllers feature the same fought ultralight sensors utilized by the Santa Cruz for inside out tracking.

It’s unclear when Santa Cruz is set to be available to the public, though the device most certainly seems to be Oculus’ successor to the Rift.

Oculus says that a developer version of Santa Cruz is set to start shipping in 2018.

The post Oculus says Santa Cruz standalone headset features full motion control appeared first on MobileSyrup.

Facebook has announced a new version of its Oculus Rift virtual reality headset, known as the Oculus Go, which the company will release early next year.

The easiest way to experience VR is here with Oculus Go, an all-new standalone headset available early 2018. #OculusConnect pic.twitter.com/8DiAozlLHB

— Oculus (@oculus) October 11, 2017

Facebook says it’s the most accessible headset yet, as it does not require cables or another device to run off of, such as a PC or smartphone. According to the official blog post, the device is also “super lightweight” and made of a new fabric that is “soft and breathable.”

The Oculus Go also features integrated spatial audio, built-in speakers and a 3.5mm headphone jack for private listening.

Notably, the Oculus Go also uses the same controller as the Samsung Gear VR, the South Korean tech giant’s Oculus-powered mobile-tethered headset. As a result, Facebook says the “developers building for Gear VR are already building for Oculus Go.”

Additionally, Facebook says the “best of [Samsung Gear VR’s] mobile VR content library” will be available on Oculus Go at launch, although specific titles weren’t specified.

The Oculus Go is set to cost $200 USD (which amounts to $248 CAD), with shipments beginning early next year.

A spokesperson for Facebook Canada has told MobileSyrup that there is no information on Canadian pricing and availability at this time. Facebook also revealed a new version of its high-end Santa Cruz virtual reality headset today.

The post Facebook unveils new VR headset, the standalone Oculus Go appeared first on MobileSyrup.

Three weeks in, much of Puerto Rico is still without power. Denise Lu and Chris Alcantara for The Washington Post map the lights at night, based on satellite composite data from NASA.

With more than 80 percent of the island’s 3.4 million people still without power, residents have relied on portable generators as workers across the island try to repair the damaged electrical grid.

In the days after Maria, many residents struggled to access gasoline, food, water, money and a cellphone signal to contact family members.

Painful.

Tags: electricity, Puerto Rico, Washington Post

Last night I started this Twitter poll to find out how many people say 'iPhone 10' vs 'iPhone X'.

Apple reps are trained to say 'iPhone 10' and they will even correct you when you say 'iPhone X'. It's a fun game. You can try it as often as you like and they always respond with 'iPhone 10'. I did this recently in a briefing and then I confessed I was trolling them. We had a good laugh and one admitted it took her a while.

We have been there before with OS X, which followed OS 9. Apple went through 12 versions (10.0 to 10.11) until they called it macOS again. It is going to be interesting to see how Apple brands the successors to the iPhone 8 and iPhone X.

PS: Best comment was from Scott:

My initial reaction was to think "but they're both pronounced the same!" I guess Roman numerals are a bigger thing in the US than in Germany. :-)

Apple trying to make Germans say 10 seems futile. For Americans it's completely natural. The 51st Super Bowl was called Super Bowl LI and Americans have no difficulty decoding this as 50 plus 1.

Speaking of numbers: about one in ten people who saw the poll voted on it. And the results are stable after about 50 votes.

As we move steadily towards widespread legalization and distribution of cannabis, how can we learn more when setting policies?

Here’s a webinar, featuring a rear-view mirror look at what happened when pot became legal in Colorado, and in BC when liquor laws were loosened.

Wednesday, October 25th from 9:00-10:30 am PT. 

But the burning question on so many people’s minds right now, is what will happen when marijuana is finally legalized.  Are there healthier public policy approaches we can take that will reduce harms as marijuana goes mainstream?  Can we learn anything about access, pricing and regulation from alcohol? . . .

. . . Dr. Tista Ghosh is the Medical Health Officer of Colorado, one of the first two states in the USA to legalize the recreational use of marijuana.  She will share some of the lessons they learned and provide some advice on how public health can respond and inform policy as marijuana is legalized.

Dr. Tim Stockwell will speak about the recent loosening of alcohol laws in BC and the impact it has had on public health as well as some of the pricing measures that can reduce excessive consumption.

Thanks to the BC Alliance for Healthy Living.

In 2010, the internet discovered Space Jam, although you could also say it was Space Jam that had earlier discovered the internet. Released in 1996, the film boasted one of the first movie marketing websites, and perhaps the first to actually take advantage of the technology of the web. In 2010, the site was still online and unchanged when it was found by a group of Reddit users who experienced a kind of Proustian memory, rediscovering a childhood and adolescence spent online at a time when that world seemed much smaller, and much friendlier, than it is now.

Our popular culture of the present moment is permeated with nostalgia for earlier iterations of the web, stories of a time when the internet was the milieu of the weird — of “wizards and geeks,” in the words of a 2006 Pew report. Yet these fictional expressions of internet nostalgia are often less concerned with real encounters with the past than with an imagined past that soothes our anxieties about the present — a vision of the internet that never really existed. Depictions of the internet from the 1980s — most obviously William Gibson’s matrix, and Tron — imagined an expansive, topological world more visual than textual, a parallel universe or alternate dimension.

This idea of the internet as an immersive media environment, a created world, still haunts us. Ready Player One, the 2011 novel and soon-to-be Spielberg film, revels in ’80s kitsch, storming through every pop-culture version of cyberspace and imagining the future internet as much closer to Tron than to our present iteration. It suggests the distinction drawn by the Marxist literary critic György Lukács between bad historical fiction, which he characterized as “mere costumery,” and better, which wrestles with the specific “historical peculiarity” of the age represented by a work of fiction. It is increasingly obvious that the internet is less an immersive playground, less a virtual environment, than it is an archive — a Library of Babel that is sometimes incomprehensible, sometimes sinister, but occasionally beautiful. What we encounter in that archive is an experience that is distinctly embodied and stands in stark contrast to the fantasy of virtual space.

If we do think of the internet as an archive, we probably think of it as archiving us. Pieces of our real selves, the detritus of our communications, consumer choices, and other instantly forgettable acts are packaged and sold, the information revealed to us in the form of Facebook ads and sponsored tweets. Otherwise, the internet can seem hyper-ephemeral, with changing web-design aesthetics as distinctive to their eras as fashion trends seemed 30 years ago. (Will someone in 2030, I wonder, discover a Squarespace-style, endlessly scrolling website and find themselves overwhelmed by waves of memory? Will the hip minimalist landing page look as old fashioned as a command-line interface?)

The polymorphous ethos of the web would seem to reject the very idea of preservation. Facebook memories notwithstanding, Wikipedia and similar sites are tormented by “bit rot.” (“I for one can’t wait until academic research just consists of getting 404 errors on defunded websites,” wrote Simon Parsons, a University of London lecturer.) And yet, perhaps through simple neglect, much of this ephemera is preserved in ways that have proven difficult to predict. Archives, internet or otherwise, are full of the mistakes of the past, and those mistakes, the idiosyncrasies attendant in preservation, often tell us much more than do representations of the past that claim authenticity but fall into costumery.

Imagining the internet as an alternate dimension, a space that you could visit that — in the case of Ready Player One — you can shape according to your own or someone else’s childhood memories has perhaps emerged as an antidote to the reality of much of our lives online. This is something like what Sunny Moraine calls the “construction of the unruined past,” a fiction that enables visions of decline and dysfunction in the present. Ready Player One imagines the internet through a fog of nostalgia for a space that retains the consistency of a childhood memory, in contrast with our own experiences of an increasingly hostile web.

The very act of “entering” online space becomes a kind of fantasy of escape in AMC’s Halt and Catch Fire, a period drama about the birth of the personal computer and the world wide web. Halt and Catch Fire transforms nostalgia for 1980s and 1990s computer hardware into a kind of internet teleology, proclaiming that these technologies were created with the purpose of connecting us. During a strategy session where the main characters attempt to figure out how to capitalize on the not-yet-public internet, corporate visionary Joe MacMillan insists, in a dramatic set-piece monologue, “all we have to do is build a door, and let them inside.” That “inside” remains the province of memory and fantasy. The scene is nostalgia disguised as teleology — a product of the present projected onto the past. It retains none of the memory of experiencing the internet’s precursors, or the early web, and it reflects more what we’d like the internet to be than what it is.

This focus on the space of the internet suggests that perhaps we have been wrong about the emphasis in the portmanteau cyberspace all along. “Cyber” has been synonymous with technology’s bleeding edge for a long time, but popular visions of the internet have been preoccupied with the second part: space. We remain enchanted by the notion of the internet as an environment, an open world whose constant renewal and revision is possible, and whose population is an endlessly reinvented parade of avatars, new selves created to suit each permutation of the internet’s environment: selves that are wholly plastic, wholly constructed, and serve to hide, obscure, or at the very least alter the identity of the user. But the risks of life online — and a few of the rewards — reside not in the malleability, and unreliability, of identity online, but in the fact that the internet is a repository of real information about our selves and our lives. Not as we’d like to imagine them, but as they’ve been inscribed and preserved by forces beyond our control.

This is, of course, mostly terrifying. But sometimes it can be beautiful, allowing us to re-encounter previous versions of ourselves, re-inhabit memories that were built when we used different tools to engage with the world. Encountering the internet as an archive perhaps supervenes nostalgia, taking us into a realm of memory in which we are the recording medium.

We don’t only inscribe information onto media; media also inscribes experiences onto us. Technologies, media theorist Wolfgang Ernst reminds us, record information, but they also record the technical and cultural proficiencies necessary to create and access such media. “The phonograph as media artifact not only carries cultural meanings like words and music but is at the same time an archive of cultural engineering by its very material fabrication.” The same is true of books, films and — if we learn how to see it — the internet.

The user who posted about the Space Jam website on Reddit in 2010 wasn’t only enchanted by memories of the film, and the pleasure those memories inspired, but — with its gifs, Easter eggs, and games, not to mention in-jokes written into the code — the “material fabrication” of the site, which stood as a profound relic of the web technology of the 1990s. This user led a whole online community into a shared memory: By following a link, they collectively re-experienced an adolescence influenced by the film, but more profoundly shaped by the web of the 1990s, the years when many of us first came online; it wasn’t just the contents of that web, but the ways in which the muscle memories of navigating it were inscribed into them. That this was Proustian is not an exaggeration: “MY CHILDHOOD HAS RETURNED” proclaims one poster. “This must be how archaeologists feel,” wrote SBNation; “This is a genuine (and genuinely garish) piece of internet history, and it should be left preserved,” wrote Comics Alliance.

The redditors who followed the link rediscovered an abandoned corner of the web because those Warner Brothers servers were still running, frozen in time. But they didn’t just discover a preserved artifact, they rediscovered the way web technology circa 1996 engineered their own experiences: the experience of waiting five minutes for an image to download, waiting twenty for a video (and the rage if someone else in the house picked up the phone). In this archive, we are the memory device, too. While, to return to Lukács for a moment, fiction certainly has the capacity to transmit the “peculiarity” of history, so far, fictional versions of the internet often remain hung up on the costumery of the past and fail to access the memories formed by actually interfacing with the internet of another era.

Space Jam, the website, is an obscure, absurd relic that also precipitated the construction of a profound history, one that rewards reading. Reddit users tracked down the site’s original designers, and then, in 2015, Rolling Stone published a history of the site, interviewing those designers, who remain as surprised as ever that the site went and stayed online. Redditors’ memories opened the door to perhaps the first truly significant history of a website. And that, it seems to me, is remarkable: After 50 years (give or take) of life online, those of us who live here have started to find stories worth telling.

Inside Higher Ed asked a group of “experts” “what should Ivanka Trump read in order to learn about education technology?” I submitted an answer but it was not what they were looking for. So I’m publishing my thoughts (or 500 words, at least) here.

Perhaps the better question is: what should Ivanka Trump not read in order to learn about education technology. It’s clear from her op-ed in The New York Post that she is quite familiar with the slogans and statistics that organizations like Code.org promote. She seems familiar too with the kinds of arguments readily found in tech and ed-tech industry publications and press releases: that computing is inevitable, and progress demands it. We have all heard these stories about the future: new technologies will make education more efficient, more accessible, more scalable; students’ education will become more “personalized”; and/or it will be increasingly oriented towards the demands of the technology industry and a “new economy” – “training” as Trump repeats five times in her op-ed.

“Learning” is only mentioned once. Lots of other words that might be used to describe the purpose of school – higher education or otherwise – are also missing from Trump’s essay. Curiosity. Civics. Citizenship. Scholarship. Research. The liberal arts. We can probably tell a lot already about her reading list by their absence, because again, this reflects the monomaniacal focus on framing education as about “skills” and jobs – a focus shared by the Trump administration and by the educational marketing and storytelling emanating from the tech industry.

Trump contends the White House will push for computer science to alter “not just what we teach, but how we teach.” This would require a shift not only in the curriculum but in the process, the pedagogy. But other than the repeated invocation of “training,” there’s no real sense of what a new pedagogical direction might involve – unless, that is, you read her call for more “problem solving” as some sort of twenty-first century update to “project-based learning.” But I don’t think Ivanka Trump has read much John Dewey.

Problem-solving, Trump suggests, is not being taught in schools today. Of course it is, but in her formulation – one that’s been repeated by former Obama administration officials recently as well – computer science is touted as “the universal language of problem solving.” This implies that all problems are technical problems; all problems are engineering problems. There are no problems of ethics, beauty, or justice – or rather, ethics, beauty, and justice are now subsumed under the realm of “code.” To see coding as a “universal language” also subsumes the needs to communities – scholarly and otherwise – to the needs of the tech industry, to the demands of global capital.

Trump has clearly read enough and knows enough already to recognize education technology is a perfect vehicle for Silicon Valley ideology. And there’s not much about much of that ideology – steeped in individualism and libertarianism – that she or her father oppose.

I’ve also written about Ivanka Trump’s ed-tech industry network – what we know about her ed-tech investments and the people who’ve also invested in the same (and same types of) companies. To claim that she’s uninformed about all this seems to be to be wildly naive.

After conducting hands-on testing with 50 smartphone lenses over four years while traveling to the Grand Canyon, Hawaii, and the French countryside, we think Moment’s Wide 18mm and Tele 58mm lenses are the best for mobile-photography enthusiasts who use their smartphone as seriously as they use any other camera. For more casual smartphone shooters who enjoy taking snapshots, we also have a more budget-friendly pick.

One of the great pleasures of my life is connecting with a wide variety of students as a journalism teacher at the University of B.C. and Langara College.

International students, in particular, bring a different eye and an ability to connect with communities here that many of locals aren’t always capable of.

My students at UBC have come up with a number of interesting stories over the years that have opened my eyes to lives in sub-communities of Vancouver that I have known little about.

One story that one of my students came to me with last year was about underground Chinese restaurants. She had discovered that many of her fellow international students from China were getting their home-cooking fix from impromptu take-out restaurants around the city. The operation she patronized was being run by a couple of Chinese parents who were visiting their daughter, a student, long-term and who had decided to keep themselves busy by turning her kitchen into a take-out operation.

Yes, I know, illegal. Unlicenced. Just like the underground restaurant I used to go to in a bungalow off Commercial Drive, where an aspiring young chef served eight-course meals to select groups of foodies.

Anyway, my former student, Si Chen, tracked down information for me on how many of these there were in the region, what kinds of food, and how to get in touch. And, since my Mandarin is limited to counting to 10 and a few stray words like “central” and “people,” she ordered for me from one particular operation, whose mother/daughter team I got to meet.

Here is my little story that appeared recently in Vancouver magazine about my foray into this little-known (to us white people, anyway) world.

Frequency trails, or currently better known as joyplots, is a visualization method to show multiple distributions at once. Taken individually, each distribution is shown as a density curve, and they overlap each other for a three-dimensional effect. Luis Carli provides an interactive explainer for the method.

I haven’t been able to put my finger on it, but I think there’s something about the overlapping that sort of serves as a visual signal to compare. It seems more direct than small multiples or non-overlapping densities? Or, are people just appreciating the novelty for now?

Tags: frequency trails, joyplot

Liane Hornsey, Uber’s human-resources chief, says ‘bloody’ 4 times in 15 paragraphs https://t.co/z6DJDlFHFf She’s got a bloody hard job

— Stowe Boyd (@stoweboyd) October 10, 2017

Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable | Rebecca Solnithttps://t.co/6RpatqtAJQ http://pic.twitter.com/DcZuE8YIoJ

— Stowe Boyd (@stoweboyd) October 10, 2017

I was invited to give a presentation on advanced aerial imagery techniques using drones at dorkbotSF on September 20, 2017. Here’s the recored presentation, thanks to dorkbot videographer James Young.

Eddie Codel, Advanced Aerial Imagery Techniques with Drones, Dorkbot-SF, 2017-09-20.

Mind the Clap

mkalus shared this story from Fefes Blog.

Na weil ihr Buddy Israel Kaspersky gehackt hat und da die NSA-Tools gefunden hat!

Das ist ja mal supergeil. Israel hackt Kaspersky, entdeckt dabei illegale Angriffstools der Amerikaner, aber Kaspersky sind jetzt die Bösen. Ja nee, klar.

	mkalus shared this story from Free Range Kids:
	That is an interesting thought....

Many, many of you have sent me this interesting piece: Thoughts on Vegas and Why Men Keep Doing This, by Charles Hoehn, author of Play It Away. (Free book here!) It ran on the blog Be Yourself. In trying to parse why Stephen Paddock and a few other men have unleashed massacres (something, thankfully, most men do NOT “keep doing”), Hoehn rolled around some ideas, including that the lack of play can lead to deep depression and pathology.

I, too, believe the drive to play is installed at birth by Mother Nature, for a reason: To teach us, in a way so fun it makes us ignore how hard it is, all the lessons that will serve us the rest of our lives. Lessons in empathy, communication, creativity, team-work, problem-solving, risk-taking, patience, focus, self-control, generosity — you name it. In play, you have to learn to get along with each other well enough to keep the game going. That is huge. Play connects us to people. Taking play out of kids’ lives, especially to give them more structured, supervised time,  is something I caution against.

BUT there are 320,000,000 people in America. And all but one did not unleash a massacre in Vegas. What’s more, the man was 64, so he grew up in the golden era when kids WERE allowed to play outside till the streetlights came on.

So yes to more connecting. Yes to less loneliness. And yes to Hoehn’s plea for more play. There are so any reasons to get back to playing. The fear of turning our kids into mass murderers is not on my list.

Thoughts on Vegas, and Why Men Keep Doing This

mkalus shared this story from jwz.

Previously, previously, previously.

It seems Microsoft was working on a bezel-less smartphone before Samsung, Google and Apple, all the way back in 2014, according to a new report.

The Microsoft Lumia 435 was destined to be one of the industry’s first bezel-less smartphones, however, when that 4-inch Windows-powered device was officially released, it didn’t look like the image below.

The device, which was given the in-development codename of Vela, was going to cost under $200 USD. Microsoft, however, scrapped the idea of a nearly bezel-less phone in late 2014 and went with the less memorable 435 design some of us likely remember.

Microsoft’s prototype  for the phone featured a 5-inch 1280 x 720 pixel resolution display, with a 5-megapixel rear-facing camera. Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 200 processor, 4GB of storage and 1GB of RAM with a 1,800 mAh battery.

The thin top bezel had a speaker grill, while the lower bezel contained the smartphone’s front facing camera, similar to the Xiaomi Mi Mix devices.

Though this smartphone never made it to market, Windows Central — the source of this leak — gave the prototype a full review.

Source: Windows Central

The post Microsoft was working on a nearly bezel-less Windows phone back in 2014 appeared first on MobileSyrup.

Former country superstar Taylor Swift has plans to launch her own social network called ‘The Swift Life.’

No, you aren’t living in an alternative universe where major social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram have already existed for years.

The new app, which is developed through a partnership with Glu, the same studio that has worked on popular mobile games like Katy Perry Pop (which flopped and has been removed from app stores), Britney Spears: American Dream, Nicki Minaj: The Dream and one of the most lucrative mobile games on the market, Kim Kardashian: Hollywood. Fun Fact: Glu also has a Toronto-based office.

A press release about the game reveals few details regarding the project, though Nick Earl, Glu’s CEO, refers to the app as “a new digital entertainment project.” The app itself even goes so far as to borrow key design elements from social networks like Instagram and Tumblr, complete with pop-up ads that look liked they travelled to 2017 in a time capsule from 2005.

For fans of Taylor Switch, the app does have a few exclusive features that actually make sense, though details are scarce. For example, the app will offer what the press release calls “exclusive” content and photos, as well as direct engagement with Swift.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen a celebrity release a bizarre, fan interaction-focused app either. Rihanna released a Samsung-branded promotional app called Anti a few months ago and even actor Jeremy Renner released a music-focused app earlier this year.

Rest assured that given Glu’s track record in the freemium, microtransaction department, The Swift Life will likely be full of in-app purchases. Currently, however, we only know that Swift will be getting her own set of emojis called ‘Taymojis.’

The announcement video was published directly to Swift’s YouTube account and has the star closing off the clip with the line, “I think you guys are really going to like this. I mean, I hope. It would be preferable if you did.”

The Swift Life is set to be available on both Android and iOS.

Look what we made her do.

The post Taylor Swift is launching her own social network, because nothing makes sense appeared first on MobileSyrup.

Amazon has unveiled its first waterproof Kindle, and it begins shipping to Canada on October 31st.

The new Kindle Oasis, which is available starting at $389.99 CAD, is IPX8-certified for immersion up to two meters of fresh water for up to 60 minutes. It also features a substantially larger display than the 2016 Kindle Oasis, coming in at seven inches. The company promises that the 300ppi Paperwhite display allows for over 30 percent more words per page.

If these features sound familiar, it’s because Amazon’s major competitor, Kobo, heavily marketed both of those features in the 2016 waterproof Aura One and recently-released Aura H2O.

The waterproof Oasis also features some distinctly Kindle traits, though. It features an ergonomic design like the much smaller 2016 Kindle Oasis, designed to shift the center of gravity to the reader’s palm. The dedicated page turn buttons also return, as does the feature that automatically rotates the page orientation depending on whether you hold it with your left or right hand.

The e-reader features a thin 3.4mm display and new aluminum back that boasts heightened durability. Despite this new casing, the device comes in at a relatively light 194 grams. In comparison, the 2017 Aura H2O is 207 grams.

The new Oasis comes in two storage options: 8GB and 32GB, the latter of which is designed to hold larger files like audiobooks, comics, newspapers and magazines.

As for software, Amazon is promising several updates such as new font sizes and bold settings, a new accessibility option for dyslexic readers, left-aligned text and automatic light settings facilitated by built-in ambient light sensors.

The new font settings and left-aligned text is also now rolling out as a free, over-the-air update to Kindle Paperwhite (Gen 6 released in 2013) and newer Kindle devices.

The 8GB model is the one priced at $389.99 and it comes with just Wi-Fi enabled, while the 32GB model has both Wi-Fi and cellular connectivity and is priced at $489.99. The company says both are going up for pre-order immediately, and will begin shipping October 31st.

Source: CNW

The post The new $390 Kindle Oasis has a 7-inch display and is waterproof appeared first on MobileSyrup.