Big dumb fun is even better when you add a tornado to the mix.
Source: CNET
Can’t wait for Black Friday? This weekend Best Buy’s presale has some great bargains online and in-store.
Source: CNET
The best PlayStation bundles come from Black Friday sales where you can get the console plus tons of hot games.
Source: CNET
El reputado oncólogo Vinay Prasad cree que no hay pruebas de que la medicina de precisión esté despegando y defiende que las exageraciones sobre los avances perjudican a los pacientes. También reclama que las farmacéuticas justifiquen cuánto les cuesta desarrollar un medicamento
Source: MIT
Las copias digitales de elementos físicos, como fábricas y edificios, aprenden automáticamente de los sistemas reales a los que imitan. Simulan su comportamiento y lo mejoran al instante, lo que traduce en más eficiencia y ahorro de costes, y son aplicables a todos los sectores
Source: MIT
Thanks to record-setting numbers from China, the alien symbiote is devouring the DC superhero film.
Source: CNET
The kids in Madrid’s El Retiro Park are loving their new on-demand joyriding toys. Lime launched its scooters in the Spanish capital this summer.
Spending a weekend in the city center last month the craze was impossible to miss. Scooters parked in clusters vying for pay-to-play time. Sometimes lined up tidily. All too often not.
The bright Lime rides really stood out, though it’s not the only brand in town. Scooter startups have been quick to hop on the international expansion bandwagon as they gun for growth.
Grandly proportioned El Retiro clearly makes a great spot for taking a scooter for a spin. Test rides beget joyrides, and so the kids were hopping on. Sometimes two to one.
The boulevard linking the Prado with the Reina Sofia was another popular route to scoot.
While a busy central bar district was a hot ride-ditching spot later on. Lines of scooters were vying for space with the vintage street bollards.
The appeal was obvious: Bowl up to the bar and drink! No worries about parking or how to get your ride home afterwards. But for Saturday night revellers there was suddenly a new piece of street furniture to lurch around, with slouching handlebars sticking up all over the place. Anyone trying to navigate the pavement in a wheelchair wouldn’t have had much fun.
In another of Spain’s big tourist cities the scooter story is a little different: Catalan capital Barcelona hasn’t had an invasion of on-demand scooter startups yet but scooters have crept in. In recent years locals have tapped in of their own accord — buying not renting.
Rides are a front-of-store sight in electronics shops, big and small — costing a few hundred euros. Even for a flashy Italian design…
Electronic scooters
Take a short walk in one of the more hipster barrios and chances are you’ll pass someone who’s bought into the craze for nipping around on two wheels. There’s lots of non-electric scooters too but e-scooters do seem to have carved out a growing niche for themselves with a certain type of Barcelona native.
Again, you can see the logic: Well-dressed professionals can zip around narrow streets that aren’t always great for finding a place to (safely) lock up a bike.
There’s actually a pretty wide variety of wheeled e-rides in play for locals with the guts to get on them. Some with seats and/or handles, others with almost nothing. (The hands-in-pockets hipsters on self-balancing unicycles are quite the sight.)
In both of these Spanish cities it’s clear people are falling for — and, well, sometimes off — the micro-mobility trend.
But the difference between the on-demand scooters being toyed with in Madrid vs Barcelona’s locally owned two wheelers is a level of purpose and intent.
The Lime rides in Madrid’s center seemed mostly a tourist novelty. At least for now, having only had a couple of months to bed in.
Whereas the organic growth of scooters in Barcelona barrios is about people who live there feeling a need.
Even the unicycling hipsters seem to be actually on their way somewhere.
What does this mean for scooter startups? It’s another example of how technology’s utility and wider societal impacts can vary when you parachute a new thing into a market and hope people jump on board vs growth being organic and more gradual because it’s led by real-world demand.
And it’s essential to think about impacts where scooters and micro-mobility is concerned because all this stuff must piggyback on shared public spaces. No one has the luxury of being able to avoid what’s buzzing up and down their street.
That’s why lots of on-demand scooters have ended up trashed and vandalized — as residents make their feelings known (having not been asked about the alien invaders in the first place).
In Europe there’s a further twist because the spaces scooter startups are seeking to colonize are already well served with all sorts of public transport options. So there’s a clear and present danger that these new kids on the block won’t displace anything. And will just mean more traffic and extra congestion — as happened with ride-hailing.
In Madrid, the first tranche of on-demand scooters seems to be generating pretty superficial and additive use. Offering a novel alternative to walking between sights or bars on a trip to-do list. Just possibly they’re replacing a short taxi or metro hop.
In the park, they were being used 100% for fun. Perhaps takings are down at the boating lake.
Barcelona has plenty of electro-powered joyriding down at the beach front in summer — where shops rent all sorts of wheels to tourists by the hour. But away from the beach locals don’t seem to be wasting scooter charge riding in circles.
They’re stepping out for regular trips like commuting to and from work. In other words, scooters are useful.
Given all this activity and engagement micro-mobility does seem to offer genuine transformative potential in dense urban environments. At least where the climate doesn’t punish for most of the year.
This is why investors are so hot on scooters. But the additive nature of micro-mobility underlines a pressing need for the technology to be properly steered if cities, residents and societies are to get the best benefits.
Scooters could certainly replace some moped trips. Even some local car journeys. So they could play an important role in reducing pollution and noise by taking trips away from petrol- and diesel-powered vehicles.
Because they offer a convenient, low-barrier-to-entry alternative with populist pull.
Not being too high speed also means, in and of themselves, they’re fairly safe.
If you’re just barrio hopping or can map most of your social life across a few city blocks there’s no doubting their convenience. Novelty is not the only lure.
Though, equally, the local-level journeys that scooters are best suited for could just as easily be completed on foot, by bike or via public transit options like a metro.
And Barcelona’s congested streets don’t look any less packed with petrol engines — yet.
Which means scooters are both an opportunity and a risk.
If policymakers get the regulations right, a smart city could leverage their fun factor to nudge commuters away from more powerful but less environmentally friendly vehicles — with, potentially, some very major gains up for grabs.
Subsidized scooters coupled with a framework of congestion zones that levy fees on petrol/diesel engines is one simple example.
A clever policy could open the possibility of excluding cars almost entirely from city centers — so that streets could be reclaimed for new leisure and retail opportunities that don’t demand masses of parking space on tap.
Pollution is a chronic problem in almost all large cities in the world. So reshaping city centers to be more people-centric and less toxic to human health by displacing cars would be an incredible win for micro-mobility.
Even as the hop on, hop off ease of scooters offers a suggestive glimpse of what’s possible if we dare to rethink urban architecture to put people rather than four-wheeled vehicles first.
Yet get the policy wrong and scooters could end up — at very best — a frivolous irrelevance. A joyride that disrupts going nowhere. Yet another nuisance on already choked streets. An optional extra that feels disposable and gets rudely discarded because no one feels invested.
In this scenario the technology is not socially transformative. It’s more likely an antisocial nuisance. And a pointless drain on resources because it’s doing no more than disrupting walking.
Scooter startups have already run into some of these issues. And that’s not surprising given how fast they’ve been trying to grow. Their early expansionist playbook does also risk looking like Uber all over again.
Yet Uber could have pioneered micro-mobility itself. But being ‘laser focused on growth’ seemingly gave the company tunnel vision. Only now, under a new CEO, it’s all change. Now Uber wants to be a one-stop platform for all sorts of transport options.
But how many years did it waste missing the disruptive potential of micro-mobility coming down the road because it was too busy trying to fit more cars into cities — and ignoring how residents felt about that?
An obsession with growth at all costs may well be a side effect of major VC dollars flooding in. But for startups it really does pay to stay self-aware, perhaps especially when you’re rolling in money. Else you might find your investors funding your biggest blind spot — if you end up missing the next even more transformative disruption.
The really clever trick to pull off is not ‘scale fast or die trying’; it’s smart growth that’s predicated upon applying innovative technologies in ways that bring whole communities along with them. That’s true transformation.
For scooters that means not just dumping them on cities without any thought beyond creaming a profit off of anything that moves. But getting residents and communities engaged with the direction of travel. Partnering with people and policymakers on the right incentives to steer innovation onto its best track.
Move people around cities, yes, and shift them out of their cars.
There’s little doubt that Uber’s old ‘growth at any cost’ playbook was hugely wasteful and damaging (not least to the company’s own reputation). And now it’s having to retrofit a more inclusive approach at the same time as unpicking an ‘environmentally insensitive’ legacy that original playbook really doesn’t look so smart.
Scooter startups are still young and have made some of their own mistakes trying to chase early scale. But there are reasons to be cheerful about this new crop of mobility startups too.
Signs they see value and opportunities in being pro-actively engaged with the environments they’re operating in. Having also learnt some hard early lessons about the need to be very sensitive to shared spaces.
Bird announced a program this summer offering discounted rides to people on low incomes, for example. Lime has a similar program.
These are small but interesting steps. Here’s hoping we’re going to see a lot more.
Source: TechCrunch
Microsoft is continuing to invest in a broad spectrum of developers for its Xbox gaming ecosystem with the acquisition of Obsidian and InXile, makers of complex RPGs primarily aimed at PC users. The two studios will join four others snatched up in June, significantly bolstering Xbox’s first-party development resources.
The company announced the acquisitions (rumored for some time) at its XO18 event alongside numerous other interesting developments for the Xbox One and Windows gaming platforms. Xbox Director of Programming Larry Hyrb, better known by his pseudonym Major Nelson, welcomed them to the Microsoft Studios team of owned but independent devs:
Of the two studios Obsidian is probably the best known; Fallout: New Vegas is a modern classic of the open world genre, while Pillars of Eternity and its enormous sequel are a welcome revival of the classic isometric PC RPG. InXile is a bit more niche, though also successful: the Wasteland, Torment, and Bard’s Tale games are similarly appreciated by RPG lovers. The studios will, like the others in Microsoft’s stable, be given significant operational independence, not folded into some internal unit.
Microsoft announced the acquisition of Compulsion, Undead Labs, Ninja Theory, and Playground Games in June. But what’s clear from the more recent gets, that the earlier ones didn’t necessarily indicate, is a big focus on core PC gamers. Microsoft has had a rather mixed mission in that it wants to ensure the success of its Xbox One (and future) consoles, but also wants to bring the huge population of PC gamers into the fold somehow. It would help offset the significant but yet necessarily decisive lead Sony has in the ongoing console wars.
Numerous efforts over the years have failed to impress them and some are in fact still ridiculed. But the collection of some seriously PC-first developers commanding a hardcore audience may help bring some PC gaming wisdom to the Xbox world.
Although console exclusives are not as appreciated as they once were — gamers value cross-platform play far more — it doesn’t help to have a couple to sway undecided buyers or even tempt consumers to buy both. These acquisitions suggest an investment in Microsoft’s first-party development platform that could help close the gap, or prepare a real blitz for the next generation of consoles.
The studios issued videos talking about their take on the development, which you can watch below:
Source: TechCrunch
To offset the creepiness of having Facebook’s camera and microphone in your house, its new Portal video chat gadget needs best-in-class software. Its hardware is remarkably well done, plus Messenger and the photo frame feature work great. But its third-party app platform was pretty skimpy when the device launched this week.
Facebook is increasingly relying on its smart display competitors to boost Portal’s capabilities. It already comes with Amazon Alexa inside. And now, Google’s YouTube is part of the Portal app platform. “Yes, YouTube.com is available through an optional install in the ‘Portal Apps’ catalog” a Facebook spokesperson tells me. You can open it with a “Hey Portal” command, but there currently seems to be no way to queue up specific videos or control playback via voice.
The addition gives Portal much greater flexibility when it comes to video. Previously it could only play videos from Facebook Watch, Food Network, or Newsy. It also brings the device to closer parity with Google’s Home Hub screen, the Google Assistant-powered smart displays from JBL and Lenovo, and the Amazon Echo Show 2 which Google blocked from using YouTube before Amazon added a web browser to the device to reopen YouTube access.
Read our comparison of the top smart display gadgets
YouTube makes the most of the $349 Portal+’s 15.6-inch 1080p screen, the biggest and sharpest of the smart display crop. Whether for watching shows or recipe videos while making dinner, instructional clips while putting together furniture, or Baby Shark to keep the kids busy, Portal becomes a lot more useful with YouTube.
But we’re still waiting for the most exciting thing Facebook has planned for Portal: Google Assistant. A month ago Facebook’s VP of Portal Rafa Camargo told me “We definitely have been talking to Google as well. We view the future of these home devices . . . as where you will have multiple assistants and you will use them for whatever they do best . . . We’d like to expand and integrate with them.” Now a Facebook spokesperson tells me that they “Don’t have an update on Google Assistant today but we’re working on adding new experiences to Portal.”
The potential to put both Google and Amazon’s voice assistants on one device could make Portal’s software stronger than either competitor’s devices. Many critics have asked if Facebook was naive or calloused to launch Portal in the wak of privacy issues like the Cambridge Analytica scandal and its recent data breach. But as I found when testing the Portal with my 72-year-old mother, not everyone is concerned with Facebook’s privacy problems and instead see Portal as a way for the social network to truly bring them closer to their loved ones. With Amazon and Google racing to win the smart display market, Facebook may see it worth the tech insider backlash to have a shot at mainstream success before its boxed out.
Source: TechCrunch
Texas Congressman-Elect and Navy SEAL Dan Crenshaw got in some good jabs, but made peace with the comic.
Source: CNET