In light of the media frenzy kicked up by GTAV, the topic of video games and their link to violence seems worth a revisit. To be frank: video games do not cause violence or aggression. We need to stop arguing about whether or not they do and move on: there’s more important things to discuss.
Inventor Ayah Bdeir thinks she might just have a lock on a reliable, unique way to foster electronics innovation in the average consumer: modular design. To that end, Bdeir has invented littleBits – circuit-board building blocks that quite literally make electronic design a snap.
Marketing firms will stop at nothing to get the attention of consumers. This being the case, it should come as no surprise that they will play with any fetish (within the legal boundaries), no matter how bizarre, to turn heads. Today we’ll explore a few ad campaigns that focus on the southernmost parts of our bodies: feet.
While the Blu-ray Disc Association may not have made any official noises about the existence of 4K Blu-ray discs, a leak from a disc manufacturer reveals that they’re on the way—and they pack 100GB of delicious data.
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Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs – the long-awaited sequel to The Dark Descent – finally released yesterday. After playing, I got to thinking – it does some innovative things with the survival horror genre; it uses techniques that I think any video game designer would do well to note. Let’s look at those.
Roku has updated its Android app with an awesome new feature: you can now stream video from your Android handset to the media box
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For those who have recently been chastised with the swift judgemental
hand of a Google+ suspension, you are not alone. Google+ has had a long
history of not only suspending accounts, but also deleting them. Dating
all the way back to July, 2011 (only one month after its inception), Google +
was deleting what they thought were a large number of fake accounts, only to restore them when users proved their legitimacy.
Hindsight is 20/20. Had we known to follow Yuri Milner’s lead back in
2009 when he and his company Digital Sky Technologies (DST) invested
$200 million in what was a small busines
at the time called, Facebook, for a 1.95% stake — we may all have been
a lot wealthier today. That early bet made this previously-unknown
Russian investor, a billionaire.
After a successful pilot project, Tel Aviv startup Jinni, a provider of natural language processing-based video content recommendations, has been chosen by Xbox to power its Xbox content catalog recommendations over the course of a multi-year licensing agreement. Jinni wouldn’t reveal the terms of the deal, but it will bring their tech front and center to the Xbox and its show and movie library.
Jinni works by categorizing movies according to their “genes,” metadata which the service’s proprietary “Entertainment Genome” tech ascribes to film and video content based on mood, style, plot, setting and more that adds depth to the typical discussion of genre and broad categories. New movies get indexed automatically when released, with Jinni combing user reviews and sympses found on the web and parsing out the relevant data needed to build a kind of virtual genetic code for each. You can see Jinni’s engine at work on its website here.
In its Xbox incarnation, Jinni’s service will use the existing data it gathers from web sources with signals from Xbox users, like Microsoft’s Conversational Understanding technology, which allows computer systems to interact with users with a near-human degree of understanding via speech. This is key to Microsoft’s Kinect goals, and should help Xbox users find new video content in the most natural way possible using speech interface.
“The Jinni solution will be used to power discovery of professional video content, such as TV shows and movies, within the content selection pages,” Yosi Glick, co-founder and CEO of Jinni told TechCrunch in an interview. “Jinni is the only discovery engine that is based on semantics […] So when you ask Jinni for a recommendation it answers like a best friend, who also happens to be a movie expert, and therefore knows exactly what you’ll enjoy watching.”
Video discovery is a hot topic in the new recently, thanks to Apple’s acquisition of Matcha.tv. TechCrunch previously reported that this acquisition was the result of Matcha’s success in providing accurate and useful recommendations to viewers in terms of the types of content they’d be likely to enjoy. Jinni likewise claims a unique “understanding of user tastes” thanks to its proprietary tech.
It’s highly likely that we’ll see Jinni’s tech power content recommendations in the upcoming Xbox One, but Glick is staying mum on that subject for now, saying only that his company “cannot comment on Xbox One at this time.” A multi-year agreement with Xbox likely means the next-gen console, which makes its official consumer debut November 22, is surely in the cards for Jinni, however.
Movie stars and the Gods of Rock ‘n’ Roll are used to seeing their faces plastered all over the world, but Alejandro de Antonio has put their faces somewhere they have probably never been. Depending on their particular artistic field, this talented Spanish artist creates their likeness on a canvas that makes sense, including old-school vinyl records and the metal canisters that film reels used to be stored in. His work is about as close to art imitating life as you can get!
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
