media

Previous known as Project Lightning, Twitter has just rolled out a new feature that curates and collects tweets about important events and trending topics. Now called Moments, the feature compiles media and information from tweets in a user's timeline that they may have missed into a single slideshow-like presentation. Moments seems to be Twitter's solution to its problem of giving new users a quick and easy to discover new content, as well as offering experienced users more control over their timeline.

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Although it shed off its high-profile name last year, which probably doesn't help its publicity, Kodi, the media center formerly knowns as XBMC, hasn't stopped being the favorite solution of homebrew media centers. And with version 15.0 "Isengard", it has gotten even better, with new features that, honestly speaking, you would have expected to have been there already in this day and age. And for the Android faithful, Kodi brings the gift of its first ever official stable release for the platform, which includes support for 4K resolutions.

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Google is looking to stoke the fires of online journalism with Google News Lab, a suite of tools, services, and training for the modern digital newsroom. News Lab builds on last week's update to Google Trends, which added real-time data on the most topical stories, with guidance and case-studies around how existing services like YouTube and Fusion Tables could be turned to reporting. It's not all online, though, with Google partnering up with various journalism incubators.

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Twitter is readying a new breaking-news and event platform, Project Lightning, which will package tweets and multimedia in the hope of converting new users. While the current Twitter process involves following individuals or companies and manually curating what shows up in your stream, Project Lightning will be a temporary aggregator of content across the Twitterverse, visible to both logged-in users and unregistered newbies alike.

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Many of us have photos and video spread all over the web and across devices. Depending on how you’ve got your cloud storage set up, it’s not likely you've got all your media in one centralized location. Today, Google is taking steps to solve that for us. In Drive, you’ll soon see a new “Google Photos” menu option, which brings all your photo and video storage to a more convenient location. This move was rumored earlier this month, though it’s not exactly what sources claimed Google may end up doing.

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No longer teamed up heartily with Beats by Dre, HP has sought out a new audio partnership for PCs of the future. With Bang & Olufsen, HP has the partnership they're prepared to present for the foreseeable future. Bang & Olufsen and B&O PLAY will be brought to HP’s PCs, tablets, and accessories in the near future, pushing an "exceptional sound experiences for customers." This means Bang & Olufsen will go ahead and "custom tune" every notebook, desktop, tablet, and accessory HP attaches them to in the future.

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Adult children of the 1980's rejoice. Inspector Gadget is back in March 2015! Netflix has announced their new children's programming lineup. It is adding five new shows including remakes and original content to their latest kids programming announcement. Gadget won't be back in is faded, flat color scheme as you remember him. This is a CGI Inspector Gadget series. Netflix is also creating a remake of the British spy cartoon Dangermouse. Also new to Netflix are the shows Bottersnikes and Gumbles, Super 4, and Some Assembly Required.

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Regardless of whether you're a cord cutter, you probably watch your own locally-stored content, and you probably do so on multiple devices. Media software that manages it all while making content available in a convenient and easy-to-use way is the most common way to access and watch locally-stored shows, and while XBMC is a long-standing favorite for this, Plex remains the top option, and for good reason: it is sleek and easy to use, and available for many devices. Roku, of course, is one of the most popular devices.

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There are some universal truths about kids and the media they consume. Kids love flashy, colorful stuff, and they adore repetition. That’s what makes the news that Vine has created ‘Vine for Kids’ so endearing. The new app culls kid-friendly vines from the service proper, then makes them available to the kids! A swipe left or right brings a new Vine, and a tap on the screen lets loose “quirky” sounds. For now, Vine Kids is only available on iOS devices.

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With so much media floating around their platform, Apple has once again rolled out their year-end, best-of awards list. They’ve announced their favorites from 2014, along with a few fun surprises for us. Frozen dominated, with its album being iTunes’ best seller in 2014. Theme song Let It Go was the eighth most downloaded song all year, and two Frozen-themed apps were among the most downloaded of 2014. For the rest of apple’s favorites in 2014, keep reading!

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While there have been plenty of arguments on both sides over the years, a recent survey by BitTorrent Inc. puts some real numbers to just how likely pirates are to actually pay for music and movies. The number of respondents is a little low to paint a general picture of all torrent users, but at least there's evidence that not everyone is a freeloader.

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In his “interesting” open letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook, investor and Tyranny-fighter Carl Icahn laid out his views on Apple’s current pipeline of products. Waxing poetic on the Apple Watch and iPhone are one thing, but Icahn is calling on Apple to go bigger. Literally. If he had his way, Apple would be everywhere in your home, including your living room. Icahn is calling on Apple to make an “Ultra HD” TV, and he wants it to drop sometime in FY 2016.

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