SARATOGA, Calif. (AP) — Roku, the streaming video device maker, has raised $60 million in its sixth round of funding. Media giant Hearst Corp. and an unnamed institutional investor joined News Corp. and its subsidiary British Sky Broadcasting in the round.
Roku’s service offers an alternative to broadcast, cable and satellite television and first supported Netflix viewing five years ago. The funding comes as the battle for the living room heats up and traditional pay TV subscriptions stagnate in the U.S.
Apple CEO Tim Cook told a conference Tuesday the company has a “grand vision” for remaking TV. Microsoft Corp. last week unveiled a new gaming console, the Xbox One, in which users can flip through channels using voice commands.
Bachmann will leave behind a controversial legacy, likely to be primarily defined by her passionate views on divisive social issues. And while many of Bachmann’s detractors might be quick to bid farewell to a lawmaker who has been one of the foremost opponents of gay rights and abortion, here’s a look back at some of the moments that made her almost impossible to ignore.
NEW YORK — Associated Press president and chief executive Gary Pruitt told staff at a Wednesday town hall meeting that the phone records obtained by the government included “thousands and thousands” of calls in and out of the news organization, according to a staffer who attended.
The AP revealed on May 13 that the Justice Department had seized records for 20 separate phone lines over a two-month period as part of a leak investigation, but has not mentioned how many calls may have been affected.
Pruitt said Wednesday that the Obama administration acted as “judge, jury and executioner” in secretly obtaining the news organization’s records, a criticism he also leveled in a recent appearance on CBS’ “Face the Nation.”
Sony’s PlayStation Vita is getting a major content boost when the PlayStation 4 launches later this year, as all PlayStation 4 games will run on the Vita via Remote Play. The only exceptions offered by Sony Worldwide Studios head Shuhei Yoshida were, “unless the game requires specific hardware like the camera [PS4 Eye].” It also stands to reason that PlayStation Move-specific titles won’t run via Remote Play, nor anything else that requires peripheral hardware (the Buzz! series, for example).
The PlayStation 4’s Remote Play functionality with the Vita is said to be far more robust than its previous PlayStation 3 / PlayStation Portable iteration. Developers can even put Vita-specific controls in their PS4 games, enabling Wii U-esque second screen functionality, Yoshida told us earlier this year. We’ll have our Vitas on-hand at E3 in a few weeks when we expect Sony will offer first hands-on with its next gaming console.
After suffering from severe injures in the Boston Marathon explosion, Sydney Corcoran was worried she would not to make it to her prom this year. But on Tuesday night, not only did the 18-year-old attend her high school rite of passage — she was also crowned prom queen.
Watch Sydney tell her inspiring story in the video above.
“When I was in the hospital, I didn’t think this was going to be possible. Then I got to the rehab and I was up and doing things. It felt like I could do it,” she told WCVB News. “So it was a goal.”
“I am a non-traditional family,” she told ABC News. “Me being a single mom, their dad doesn’t live at home with them. They have three stepbrothers from two moms … that’s not traditional.”
A man missing from Limington, Maine, was found Tuesday morning by the very news crew reporting on his disappearance.
Robert McDonough, 73, was reported missing Monday at 4 p.m., according to WMTW. A news team from the station was providing live updates on the search for McDonough, who suffers from dementia.
The crew was setting up near McDonough’s home at around 7 a.m. Tuesday to continue their report when the missing man walked out of the nearby woods, right onto the camera.
Hypervelocity hit: Comet Tempel 1 obliterates the Deep Impact impactor probe in 2005.
(Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UMD )
The meteor that slammed into Russia in February injured about 1,000 people and freaked out many more. Recent months have highlighted the danger of larger space objects that could bring doomsday if they collide with our planet.
We’ve seen potential proposals that involve vaporizing asteroids and capturing them.
At the recent International Space Development Conference in California, Wie described a plan to send a high-speed spacecraft to intercept a massive asteroid approaching Earth and destroy it with a nuclear warhead.
Today the team behind NVIDIA’s SHIELD device have spoken on the activities and preparations made for showing the device on “P-Relase” day. P-Release signifies the device is ready for production, and what the team has shared today is what went on behind the scenes right up until NVIDIA’s most recent quarterly internal company meeting where CEO Jen-Hsun Huang showed off the very first SHIELD production unit. This device was first introduced back at CES 2013 earlier this year, and it’ll be shipped to the first wave of pre-order users in June.
The first run of SHIELD devices spoken about in this telling of the process was a small set of 220 devices – though its not clear whether this was the first full run of devices or not, the intense construction process behind the device is.
Two weeks before pre-orders for this device were set to go up and a “quick turn” manufacturing team is lead by a man named Brant. Brant spoke briefly to the team about how they’ll go about hands-on testing of this first set of 220 devices, then flew to the contract manufacturer taking the bulk of the assembling for SHIELD.
This quick-turn team has a set of deliverables that includes, amongst other things, a 100 page packet of assembly instructions. Details as small as how long each unit is charged before being shipped are covered in full. The fact that this machine works with elements like directional pads, physical buttons, and a clamshell display mean it’s also significantly more complex to put together than the average smartphone or tablet.
At around 24 hours before SHIELD would be announced fully “P-Release” ready, NVIDIA’s marketing team sat in a room speaking about what they’d be demoing the next day. They added a set of 30 games to the device itself (most of which won’t be on the final device, but will be available through the NVIDIA TegraZone). They plugged an SD card full of media into the device with movies like Thor and Iron Man.
The team made an effort to “wittle down” the app lineup that’d be launched on the device in this session as well. Twitter, Facebook, and Yelp were suggested, and the final set was selected. Though there is a unique set of apps on this device, SHIELD remains “pure android”, as they say, working with an un-skinned version of Android Jelly Bean.
P-Release was revealed to be just three days before publications like SlashGear arrived to test SHIELD out – just days before Google I/O 2013, as well.
The device is now being produced in its first full run, while the initial pre-order set is coming in less than a month. SHIELD is made to work with Android apps on the device itself with its NVIDIA Tegra 4 processor as well as (in Beta mode, for now) streaming from GeForce GTX-powered gaming PCs.
Facebook Pages of high profile celebrities, personalities, brands and companies will now sport a blue checkmark to indicate that these Pages have officially been verified.
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