This week at CTIA 2013, Verizon announced a partnership with Latino-centric mobile carrier brand Viva Movil – and they did it with the company’s top shareholder Jennifer Lopez. Speaking about how the Latino population is up at 50 million strong – and growing – Verizon’s own chief operating officer Marni Walden made it clear: this company wants to expand through an exclusive partnership with Viva Movil.
As a sort of a “Part 2″ or even “Part 3″ of the Glass chat series SlashGear has appearing this week and last, today’s words with Google Glass’ lead industrial designer Isabelle Olsson lend some insight on the device’s road to final hardware. Speaking on how the original Glass prototypes eventually became the device you see today, Ollson shared three principals that allowed the team to solidify their process.
As Google Glass continues to be a unique sort of hardware / software platform in the industry, so too do the creators of the wearable computer stay hot commodities for question and answer sessions. In the feature you’re about to see, two members of the main Glass creation and development team discuss the social etiquette involved in the creation of the platform. Steve Lee, Product Director for Glass, and Charles Mendis, Engineer on Glass, spoke up during a fireside chat at Google I/O 2013.
It’s all change for Microsoft and Xbox today, with the new Xbox One shaking things up in the gaming world and meeting Sony’s PlayStation 4 challenge head-on. The Xbox One has a lot to live up to, though: the 360 held the best-selling console torch for some time, and that’s something Sony would just love to steal away with the PS4. Join us after the cut as we run through the next-gen console and how it compares to the 360.
Microsoft just wrapped up its unveiling of the Xbox One, which is the company’s newest gaming console. The whole keynote was only an hour long, but they blazed through a lot of information without really diving deep into detail. Thus, you might have missed some things if you were watching the live stream or our own coverage. With that said, here’s everything that you need to know about the Xbox One so far.
This week the folks behind the web browser Opera have pushed their Android-based mobile edition past Beta into its first full-fledged release. They’ve done so with little fanfare, too – so little that it’s scarcely made waves here in the spring of 2013 – right between Google’s developer conference Google I/O and the technology conference CTIA. It’s a fine browser, all said, with a WebKit engine base and a free download set of innards that’ll have it competing with the other big guns in web browser downloads.
At this years’ Google I/O developers conference, a Fireside Chat with several members of the core Google Glass team proved to reveal much on not just the future of the device, but its origins as well. While earlier in the day a single slide had been shown depicting a set of six original prototypes of what was then called Project Glass, here lead industrial designer Isabelle Olsson had one key prototype on hand to show SlashGear in the plastic, as it were.
As Google’s first wearable computer Glass edges in past its initial run of devices, members of the general public begin to ask: when will the device be delivered in a form that any non-developers will be able to get their hands on? At a Google I/O 2013 “Fireside Chat” with several members of the main Google Glass team, this question was addressed more than once. In short: soon, but not nearly as soon as they’d like.
It’s a return to form here at Google I/O 2013, with none other than Google’s own Vice President of Android Product Management Hugo Barra letting us know that he’d personally fought hard for a more developer-focused single keynote address. As past years had been notably more consumer and product-focused than 2013, it’s not a flash-bang the company has gone for here, it’s a return to form: Google I/O in its purest form.
This week the folks at the development studio known as Instrument have brought a virtual reality demonstration to Google I/O 2013, complete with a multi-display drop from the upper atmosphere down toward the earth in freefall. What this demonstration consisted of was seven 1080p displays, each of them run by their own Ubuntu PC working with a full-screen version of Chrome version 25. A motion tracker works to track the user, their arms, and the angle at which they’re standing – or leaning and falling, as it were.
This week at a fireside chat during Google I/O 2013, Mary Lou Jepsen – currently the head of the Display Division at Google X – let it be known that “there’s no more silicon in Silicon Valley – it’s all iPhone apps.” She quickly added – “or Android apps, I should say.” An overarching theme from her set of words in the extended chat made it clear: she’s not satisfied with the current atmosphere for hardware innovation, particularly when it comes to startup funding.
We went into Google I/O hoping for hardware and gadgetry; instead, we got three and a half hours of software and services – gaming, messaging, Larry Page wistfully envisaging a geeky utopia. You can perhaps excuse us for getting carried away in our expectations. I/O 2012 was a huge spectacle, with lashings of shiny new hardware only overshadowed by skydiving Glass daredevils and Sergey Brin looking moody on a rooftop. In contrast, 2013′s event brought things a whole lot closer back to the developer-centric gathering that the show had originally been established as. Glass was conspicuous by its on-stage absence, and the new Nexus tablets that had been rumored were also no-shows; the emphasis was firmly on how the components of Google’s software portfolio were being refined as the mobile and desktop battles waged on.
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