Amazon has launched its own cloud-based gaming system, Amazon Luna, taking on Google Stadia and Xbox Game Streaming. Based around a new, wireless Luna Controller that connects directly to the cloud, along with AWS and a partnership with Ubisoft, it promises instant play across Fire TV, computers, and smartphones, along with baked-in Twitch integration.
In addition to living in a digital age, our lives have also started to revolve around clouds, that is, cloud storage and services. This elusive and ephemeral concept, however, still needs to be tethered to physical realities and limited by physical storage solutions. In other words, that fancy cloud storage you're using to collaborate and store your files ultimately gets stored in the old but proven technology of hard disk drives. That, however, is far from ideal and Microsoft researchers are looking into an old yet new idea of using holograms to store data in a much smaller physical space.
Living in a digital age makes it almost too easy to accumulate clutter in the form of files, especially given how small these files can be. That's true for files you keep locally on your laptop or phone but cloud storage still comes at a cost, even if it's offered for free. To ensure you don't run out of space just because of the trash you've gathered over the months, Google Drive will soon implement a policy that will automatically delete files in its Trash forever after 30 days.
Camera makers are pushing DLSRs, mirrorless ILCs, or even point-and-shoot cameras as the next step after graduating from smartphone cameras. But what they offer in power and quality, they often lose in convenience, especially in posting to social media or even transferring photos to the cloud. To their credit, they are doing their best to make those activities easier and Canon and Google have just made the ultimate next step in making Google Photos backups as painless and as seamless as possible.
Jobs that bosses insisted couldn't be done at home are now being done at home, as are jobs that normally done at home. The sudden rise in remote working setups has naturally resulted in a rise in the use of collaboration software and services, from video conferencing apps like Zoom to cloud storage services like Dropbox. The latter has recently announced new features that offer to keep your personal and work digital lives from descending into chaos and those tools can now be yours if you can pay the literal price.
Google released a phone backup system to Android and iOS users "wherever Google One is available" this week. This system is free, so long as you're using less than the 15GB storage that comes free with a Google Account. You can attain a Google Account for free, and back up your smartphone's data for free, so long as you use less than 15GB to do so.
Google Stadia, the cloud-based game streaming service, requires a fast network to support the type of low-latency gameplay subscribers expect. This makes gaming over cellular networks questionable at best, but times are changing and mobile broadband speeds are quickly evolving. In its latest update, Google says that Stadia players can now stream their game over 4G and 5G networks, but only if they enable the experimental feature.
Google today announced plans to lay a new transatlantic undersea cable that connects the United States to two different points in Europe. The cable, which is named after computer scientist Grace Hopper, will connect New York to the town of Bude in the United Kingdom and the city of Bilbao in Spain. This private cable will be used to bolster Google's services around the world.
Google offers various perks in exchange for buying one of its Chromebooks, something that adds a bit of incentive for those who may be on the fence about these small, fairly limited devices. The available perks are updated semi-regularly to add new opportunities, something that recently happened and involves cloud storage company Dropbox. As of now, Chromebook users have the opportunity to get 100GB of cloud storage for free.
For all the promises and hype generated by proponents last year, the rollout of 5G networks even in major markets has been too slow to truly take hold of consumers' consciousness. That already slow rollout, however, may have hit another hump with more and more countries pushing Huawei out of their 5G infrastructure and plans. These will inevitably delay 5G adoption even further but its overall impact on mobile and Internet use will be minimal, except for one still rising industry, game streaming services from Google, Microsoft, and NVIDIA.
Last year, Wyze announced that it was removing Person Detection from its Wyze Cam after a disagreement with the company that powered the feature. Ultimately, Wyze removed the feature in January, but said that this was merely a temporary measure and that the feature would be returning someday. Wyze is about ready to send Person Detection live again, but there's going to be a big change shipping along with it.
Google revealed a big unification redesign for Gmail and services like Google Docs, Chat, and Meet calling, making the future of work a top priority. This redesign was revealed during the Google Cloud "Cloud Next '20 OnAir" streamed event, before the fact, in the "Productivity & Collaboration" category. This system looks like it'll target the present and near future of work as "your new home for work - right in Gmail."