Hasta La Gadget!

In each issue of Distro, editor-in-chief Tim Stevens publishes a wrap-up of the week in news.

Can you believe we’ve had the Xbox 360 since 2005? As a child of the two- or three-year console cycle, a system still going strong after eight seems inconceivable. Finally, it’s being put out to pasture — somewhat unceremoniously. The Xbox One is its successor and, with no backwards compatibility for disc-based or downloaded games, those looking to make the leap to the next generation in the fall will already want to start weaning themselves from Microsoft’s current wunderconsole. It’ll make it easier for both of you when it comes time to unplug it.

And you probably will want to unplug it and make the upgrade, though to be fair there’s plenty to be cynical about with the Xbox One. So, I’ll get that out of the way first, starting with the name. Microsoft is trying to send the message that the new Xbox is the only device you’ll need to control your living room. That may be, but One? HTC, of course, called its latest flagship the One, but that was a case of a company distancing itself from previous, complicated naming schemes and going with something simpler. Here, there have been only two previous generations of the Xbox. Calling the third one the “One” is simply confusing. Still, it beats “Xbox Foo,” which is what Microsoft’s initial press release mentioned. Someone, it seems, got the memo on the official name a little too late.

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Added to the list of many Yahoo acquisitions happening recently, PlayerScale is the latest one to get bought out by Marissa Mayer and company. PlayerScale was founded on 2009 and is a startup that creates software infrastructure for cross-platform gaming. What’s perhaps the the greatest news is that the startup won’t be shutting down.

PlayerScale CEO Jesper Jensen says that the company isn’t “going anywhere,” and that the company’s platform “will continue to support the same great games that you love playing today,” saying that PlayerScale “will only get better from here.” However, half of the company’s staff will be joining Yahoo, while the other half will stay at PlayerScale.

PlayerScale says that its platform has over 150 million users, with their user base growing exponentially. The company announced back in January that they surpassed the 100 million-user mark. Overall, Jensen calls the acquisition the “the next big step toward our goal of building the best possible gaming infrastructure platform.”

Today’s PlayerScale acquisition comes just days after Yahoo made its largest buyout ever, purchasing Tumblr for $1.1 billion. The financial details of the PlayerScale acquisition weren’t disclosed, but it probably wasn’t as much as what Tumblr got out of the deal. However, does this mean that Yahoo is getting into the gaming business?

Essentially, PlayerScale’s Player.IO platform offers game developers a place to implement multiplayer and Facebook aspects into their game using PlayerScale’s servers. Many popular mobile and Facebook games are most likely using Player.IO to run certain aspects of the game. With the Yahoo acquisition, the company may be looking into mobile and social gaming, but it’s obviously too soon to tell right now.

VIA: TechCrunch

SOURCE: PlayerScale

Yahoo getting into gaming with PlayerScale acquisition is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Flickr’s one of the elder statesmen of the online photo sharing world, but in recent years its UI has grown a bit long in the tooth when compared to the eye candy provided by other kids on the social sharing block. That’s all changed as of today, as Marissa Mayer’s team has overhauled Flickr’s look on the web and in its Android app. Out goes the old layout, where text and white space commanded almost as much real estate as your photos, and in comes a tiled layout that’s nothing but images.

Filed under: Internet, Software, Mobile

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This week amid word that the company had purchased Tumblr to give its youth segment a boost, the company made use of the press it’d been given for a couple boosts to Flickr. Having acquired Flickr back in 2005 to the tune of $35 million USD, it’s no wonder that a $1.1 billion dollar cost for Tumblr continues to hold sway over the press – especially before it was formally announced. Here with Flickr, Yahoo is bringing on a full a terabyte in storage to compete with Google’s base free offering and makes with a new Android app to boot.

The new Flickr app for Android takes on what’d been released earlier this year for iOS and retrofits it to the Google-made mobile operating system. Flickr’s main draw this week is the ability to retain the full quality of each photo your device takes in full-sized automatic uploads. Announced this week for Google’s social network was a boost in space as well – but without full-sized saving on lock.

Above: Flickr’s new web-based user interface. Below: out with the old!

As Yahoo gives a base boost of 1TB of space, Google+ Photo uploads sits at 15GB, split between Gmail, Google Drive, and Google+ Photos. Yahoo continues to compete against new Google+ photo abilities run by Snapseed as well, working with home-grown instant-fix abilities and retro filters galore.

The Android app works with the endless scrolling abilities that the internet interface also now employs, making full use of the full-sized photo deployment that the Flickr ecosystem will flaunt forevermore. Both the web interface and the Android UI have been updated today alongside an iOS update that adds a few bug fixes coming soon. It would appear that all things follow iOS design, in this case.

[SOURCE: Yahoo on Tumblr]

Yahoo boosts Flickr storage to one terabyte, reboots Android app is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

A formal celebration of Yahoo’s acquisition of Tumblr wasn’t what the internet outfit had up its sleeve for this evening’s festivities. Instead, the company unveiled an update to Flickr at the NYC event with a host of new features that includes a retooled grid UI built out of images and up to 1TB of free storage for users. Yahoo is saying that the advertised storage space is enough room to stash 537,731 “full-resolution” photos per user. On the desktop side, Photostreams and Sets are cleaned up in proper grid fashion as well and a share button rests up top for easy sharing to Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, email and, of course, Tumblr. Single photos will now be displayed full screen — the size options and white background have been nixed for the extra real estate.

The redesign is also coming to mobile devices on iOS and Android. In fact, the Android update should be available in the Play store as early as tonight. Flickr Pro is no longer available for purchase as many of the features have been tacked on to the free account. However, it appears that current paid subscribers won’t encounter any immediate changes. For those that require more space, there’s a paid “doubler” option that will up the storage limit to 2TB for $500 per year and an ad-free route is priced at $50 for 12 months. Take a look at the “Biggr” photos in the video walk through on the other side of the break.

Filed under: Internet, Software

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Source: Flickr, Google Play