PayPal is a service that many people use primarily for their eBay purchases, but over the past couple of years, the company has been extending its influence into real-world purchases, additional marketplaces and even partnered with Coinstar. Today, the company is announcing it has taken another step into simplifying the process of shopping through a retailer’s mobile website.
The new service is called “Log in with PayPal” and will allow customers to sign in using your PayPAl credentials in order to avoid the process of having to fill out your shipping and payment information on your mobile device. The service is also being introduced as a way for merchants to complete more sales through mobile as PayPal’s senior director of identity Damon Houghland says nearly half of users leave a shopping site if they can’t remember their password with a quarter of customers completely leaving their carts due to the frustration they feel of having to enter shopping information on a mobile device.
Amped Wireless’ long-gestating TAN 1 may look like a chocolate bar, but you’d probably regret dunking it in your coffee. The high-powered WiFi adapter connects over USB to Windows 8 laptops and tablets, promising to triple the range of your device’s built-in wireless gear. After what seems like an age, the hardware is finally making its way to stores, and will set you back $59.99 when it goes on sale today!.
This week the folks at Rockstar Games have pushed four new videos for the upcoming multi-platform game release for Grand Theft Auto V. One of the videos takes an all-in-one approach, making a combined effort to show each of the hero characters for the game: Michael, Franklin, and Trevor. Each of these characters will be playable by the user in the game as it’s released in the near future – this sort of playability shows Rockstar’s understanding of the gamer in our modern gaming market today: they like choices!
With the first and all-encompassing trailer, Rockstar makes use of YouTube’s ability to jump back and forth through videos and to and from the other three videos so that the viewer will be able to pick and choose their experience before the game is released to the market. The option is also given to watch the three videos all the way through – this one long video is also a combination of the three videos, one on top of the other.
Needless to say, these videos are all NSFW – Not Safe For Work in the least bit (depending where you work, of course).
The first of three presentations surrounds Michael, a fellow who has a family and a home life that’s not especially fantastic. He’s having a mid-life crisis and his wife has cheated on him. Also he’s prone to destroying vehicles and massive amounts of violence. Of course. His experience is outlined by the song Radio Gaga as performed by Queen.
Franklin is up next, his storyline existing in the gang-banger universe, full of gunshots and police traps, trophy guard dogs and what very well may be some drug dealing. Franklin appears to be as dissatisfied with his life situation as Michael, only Franklin wants to get out of the violent world while Michael wants to get deeper.
Finally there’s the character Trevor. He’s a drug dealer who is a very, very bad man. He works with Michael and Frankin, it seems, and it would appear that his satisfaction with the world is based entirely on very bad things. The gamer can expect the cinematics for Trevor to be very NC-17, without a doubt.
The game Grand Theft Auto V will be coming to stores on September 17th, 2013, and will be available for multiple platforms. At the moment it would appear that the PlayStation 4 and next-generation Xbox will not be supported (at least at the outset), but may be in the future. Of course those consoles wont be out for a while anyway – no worries!
BlackBerry’s CEO Thorsten Heins has been the center of attention lately as not only has he predicted the BlackBerry Q10 will sell “tens of million“ of units, but a new rumor is circulating saying he’s planning on revealing the company’s tablet plans on May 15 during the company’s BlackBerry Live event. Now Heins has once again caused another stir as he is making quite the bold prediction.
While Heins was speaking at the Milken Institute conference in Los Angeles yesterday, he said his company doesn’t need to invest more resources in the creation of a new tablet as he believes they will all but disappear from the consumer market within the next five years. “In five years I don’t think there’ll be a reason to have a tablet anymore,” Heins said. “Maybe a big screen in your workspace, but not a tablet as such. Tablets themselves are not a good business model.” (more…)
Hulu announced some specifics today on their streaming business during Q1 of this year. The company said that 1 million Hulu Plus subscribers came on board this quarter, surpassing 4 million subscribers total. The company also announced that during the three-month quarter, over 1 billion videos were streamed.
Hulu has seen its paid subscriber base exponentially grow since Q4 2010, when at the time it had around only 250,000 Hulu Plus subscribers. As for mobile viewing, Hulu says it’s “growing at a significant rate,” and they predict that it will account for around 15% of Hulu’s consumed videos this next year.
Another big step for Hulu is the announcement of two new original series, which the company hopes will allow them to compete more with Netflix and Amazon. Hulu announced Quick Draw and East Los High. Quick Draw is a comedy set in the western style in 1875, and the story revolves around a sheriff who wants to introduce the science of forensics to an unruly Kansas town.
As for East Los High, Hulu that it’s “not your typical high school,” but we have a slight feeling that it may be just that. The show follows around a group of teens as they explore romance and mystery. Sounds familiar, right? Release dates for the these two shows have not been announced yet, but we’ll see them premiere at some point this summer.
You’d think that with Skype firmly under Microsoft’s control, the service would roll out new features to Windows first. Bizarrely, though, that’s not the case. Skype’s video voicemail feature, which previously soft launched on Android, iOS and OS X, is now coming to Windows 7 and up (a Windows 8 version should be forthcoming), hitting the company’s end of April promise. The feature, still labeled a preview, works exactly as advertised, letting users record short video clips that can be sent to and viewed by any contact regardless of their OS. There’s one caveat though: you’ll need to install Skype 6.5 beta for Windows desktop and Flash to test it out. It’s just a risk your vainglorious self will have to take for modernity.
One of the most influential first-person shooters on consoles has got to be Bungie’s Halo series. The series certainly pushed forward the FPS genre to be taken more serious at a time where a keyboard and mouse were seen as the only way a shooter game can be played. But what if Halo was released on one of the first home video game consoles, the Atari 2600? Would it have been as influential during the video game industry’s earlier days?
Microsoft’s former vice-president of game publishing Ed Fries and a co-creator of the Xbox created a version of Halo called Halo 2600 which was released as a playable PC game by using an emulator or by playing it through its Flash port. Soon after its release, Fries worked with Atari Age in order to release an official Atari 2600 version of Halo 2600 back in 2010 in a limited run, which as you would have expected were completely sold out. Lucky for you, Atari Age has restocked Halo 2600 and is selling them for $50 each, although they’re limiting the amount of cartridges you can order to two per customer.
There’s no shortage of single sign-on solutions out there. But whereas Facebook, Twitter and Google all have a heavy focus on social (obviously), PayPal’s take on the field is built around commerce and privacy. Rather than requiring you to set up an account with every site you shop at, entering the same personal information over and over, the stalwart online payment firm wants you to use your PayPal identity across multiple merchants. It uses the same standard protocols (such as OAuth) as its social SSO relatives, but instead of posting meals or books to your feed it sends payment information to shops through a secure channel. When you feel like snagging yourself a pair of fly kicks, all you’d need to do is enter your username and password, or phone number and PIN. All other data, such as shipping and billing address and payment information, would then be passed on by PayPal automatically — leaving you with nothing to do but admire what a beautiful pair of sneakers your precious Mr. Cuddlesworth makes. For more, check out the quick demo video after the break.
The latest trio of trailers in a series of previews of Rockstar Games’ Grand Theft Auto V has hit. These character videos take a deeper look at the tribunal stars of the game: Michael, Franklin, and Trevor.
Be sure to check back later this week for a major update to our continuing coverage leading up to the September 17 release of Grand Theft Auto V.
Earlier this year Microsoft introduced IllumiRoom, a prototype technology that augments TVs and other displays by projecting room-filling visuals that complement what is being shown on the screen. Microsoft Research recently released a video that explains the basics of IllumiRoom.
IllumiRoom can augment your gaming sessions in a number of ways. The most obvious and impressive way is to extend what’s being shown on your TV into the area around it. The resulting effect is halfway between a 3D headset and a cinema. But this is also the most difficult feature to implement because it will require “access to the game’s source code.” Other features of the IllumiRoom include adding spatial cues or matching mood lighting to enhance immersion.
Movies can also be extended using the IllumiRoom, but again the movie would have to be made with this function in mind. In other words, every scene has to be shot in a wide field of view in addition to the usual shots.
As mentioned in the video, the current proof-of-concept prototype uses a Kinect to analyze the color and geometry of the area around the TV and an off-the-shelf projector to display the complementary visuals. But as Microsoft’s researchers imply in their paper (pdf), the goal is to pack all the necessary hardware into one device. This IllumiRoom-capable device will then be “connected wirelessly to a next generation gaming console as a secondary display.” I wonder if we’ll hear more about it on May 21.
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