In a video titled, The Art of the Sizzle w/ David Bruce, HTC (TPE: 2498) satirically mocks the entire concept of the sizzle video that is designed to make you excited and intrigued by a simple video of a smartphone. There’s no doubt that HTC has participated in some of these sizzle videos, but the reality is that their competitors, namely Samsung, Nokia (now Microsoft), and Apple have really gotten the smartphone sizzle video down.

In fact, if you watch most smartphone introductions nowadays, you are almost guaranteed to watch some sort of a sizzle video in advance. Some companies like to focus on abstract angles and unique system features, while others simply try to make the phone look exciting by doing interesting motions and graphics alongside. A good example of this is Apple’s own iPhone 6 sizzle video. If that doesn’t give you a good idea of what’s in a smartphone sizzle video, then you can watch Samsung’s own Galaxy S5 introduction video.

The truth is that its actually quite hard to get a bunch of press and operators excited about a phone, especially since most phones nowadays are essentially the same phone with incremental upgrades and very little real innovation from one model to another. After all, it isn’t very profitable to be making major technological improvements from generation to generation. So, you need to focus on the exciting parts of the phone and accentuate them with the sizzle reel that gets people excited about your phone and gets their attention in preparation for the actual launch or actual unveiling in person or when people see them in stores.

Apple are the masters of these videos and I suspect that HTC is mostly mocking them with this video, however Samsung likes to do a lot of the same things that Apple does so it isn’t much of a stretch to consider Samsung part of this fad.

The post HTC Brilliantly Mocks the Smartphone Sizzle Video appeared first on VR World.

At Pepcom – San Francisco 2014 we met with the staff of Ring, a video doorbell company that offers home security in a unique way.

Ring Video Doorbell at Pepcom-SF

Originally known as Doorbot, they had a successful crowdfunding campaign raising $250,000 and created a first-generation product by fall 2013. Doorbot decided to change their name to Ring (a privately held company) and redesigned their hardware for the home security market. Ring’s brochure says they have wide angled HD video, smart motion detection, and cloud recording.

Ring founder and CEO Jamie Siminoff said to Techcrunch that Doorbot’s first-generation hardware had shortcomings and was a good learning experience. Siminoff said, “With the Ring doorbell, early on when we were designing it, we decided what we were really doing was designing the alarm system literally turned inside out. Not an alarm system that copied what ADT is doing, what Canary is doing, or even what Dropcam was doing with its window and door systems, but actually building some kind of pre-crime system.”

Lowe’s Big Box DIY (do it yourself) home improvement store recently did a study on Smart Home interest among 2,000 randomly chosen respondents. They found security was at the top of the list.

Next in their survey finding was fifty percent of respondents wanted a DIY solution and not paying a monthly fee to an alarm company.

Thus Ring’s assumptions are right on target for what most home owners want – security- and that they want to install it themselves.

Ring’s motion detector sensor hardware and algorithms are able to detect both near and far movement, during day time or at night.

Ring alerts users to motion as soon as it’s detected

Often criminals ring the doorbell before they try to break into a house. When someone presses the Ring video doorbell, the user can have a near instant look at who is out there. With a smartphone and the Ring app you have two-way communication like a phone call and that makes it easier to talk with whoever is at the door. Wide-angle video is also recorded to the cloud in HD resolution.

Who is that at the door?

Ring’s installation is a simple three steps:
1. Download the free Ring app (iOS and Android)
2. Connect the doorbell to your WiFi network (using the app)
3. Mount the doorbell

The unit specifications are below:

Ring’s Video Doorbell is priced at $249 and begins shipping this week. It comes in four different finishes, and free cloud-based video recording until January 1, 2015, at which time subscription options will be available. The device can record 720p video at 30fps, has infrared LEDs for nighttime recording and features a 5,200mAh rechargeable battery – The unit doesn’t require electric power, but you have to charge the battery – for sure before going on vacation.

BSN* has requested an evaluation unit for testing to confirm that it works as well as the demo we saw at Pepcom- SF 2014.

The post One Ring and You’re on Candid Camera at Pepcom SF appeared first on VR World.

The people at Futuremark have been quietly keeping their new PCMark for Android benchmark fairly quiet. They technically did already announce the benchmark, without any NDAs, but they haven’t quite fully launched the benchmark to the public, only making it available to select press for a preview. We’ve had an opportunity to test this new benchmark and take a look at exactly what it tests and how it tests the devices.

The first and foremost thing you need to know about PCMark is that it is not 3DMark, which is already available for Android. 3DMark’s goal is to inform you purely about the device’s performance in 3D applications, with a specific focus on 3D gaming. It does not take into account daily usage or what kinds of applications you would be using on your phone throughout the day. During it’s testing PCMark for Android tests web browsing, video playback, writing (texting), and photo editing. Considering most people’s phone usage, these four tests would very likely represent a vast majority of most users’ usage of their phones unless they constantly keep Facebook and Twitter open all day.

The PCMark for Android benchmark comprises of the ‘Work Performance’ benchmark which actually tests and scores the ability of the smartphone or tablet to execute these tests and the ‘Work Battery Life’ test which essentially tests the battery life of the device, stopping at 20% of the device’s battery life to determine exactly how much battery life the device is capable of achieving. Of course, at 20% many smartphones and tablets go into power saving mode so they will likely show lower performance but better battery life. In fact, the great thing about PCMark for Android is that we can now see a direct comparison between a device’s performance and it’s battery life. And it of course comes as no surprise that some of the devices that do the best in PCMark for Android’s performance test doesn’t necessarily do so great in the battery life test and vice versa.

So, what we’ve done for you is to combine PCMark for Android’s top 10 battery life devices and taken their performance numbers down so that you can see which devices sacrifice the most performance for battery life. In the future, once PCMark for Android opens up to the public, we’ll get an even better idea of which devices sacrifice the most and which devices don’t.

PCMark For Android Chart

If you’d like to see the fastest Android devices using PCMark for Android, head on over to this page. And if you want to see which devices have the best battery life, check out this page. Judging from the results on those pages, neither of the top devices are surprising since Nvidia has some very powerful processors, but their battery life isn’t necessarily the best. The Tegra 4 powered SHIELD Portable is capable of being the #1 because it does not have to downclock at all due to having active cooling, allowing it to run full throttle all the time. Additionally, the Xperia Z products seem to have the best battery life of the bunch, however, the full line Xperia Z3 series of tablets and smartphones haven’t been tested for battery life yet, so there’s a good chance they will capture the top. But you can already see that the Xperia Z3 Compact retains its reputation as the best battery life smartphone on the market.

We haven’t been given an exact date of when PCMark for Android will become public, but it may come as soon as next week and by then there’s a very good chance we will be able to test it out on the new Nexus 9 (with 64-bit Tegra K1) and Nexus 6 (rumored to have Snapdragon 805). It will also be interesting to see how the battery life of devices like the Nexus 5 will chance with the Android L release as well.

The post PCMark for Android Benchmarks Available appeared first on VR World.

Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) today announced that via an update to Google Hangouts users will be able to make free phone calls to eachother as well as to numbers within the US and Canada.

The search giant is also introducing “affordable” calling rates abroad, which should equate to a few cents a minute. This is a clear extension of the company’s Voice service, which has been rumored to be killed off but really only appears to become integrated into Hangouts. This move makes sense as Google has been quietly trying to integrate all forms of communication, Voice, Video and Chat under one app. Right now, hangouts combines chat (once Google Chat) with video but with this update it it adds voice, simply making Google Hangouts more useful and versatile.

Google Hangouts

This is a clear attempt by Google to also compete with some of the already existing voice, chat and video services that exist as third party solutions. However, those services do not have free calling outside of the application and don’t come as the default messaging app on Android. The one thing to also consider is that even though Hangouts is a great app, it still doesn’t come default on a lot of devices due to manufacturer or carrier customizations. This is changing with the newer crop of smartphones, but that will take some time to really take hold on the whole Android install base. Some carriers, like AT&T (NYSE: T) and Verizon (NYSE: VZ) push their own cloud messaging services which make Hangouts a secondary messaging service to the regular consumer that doesn’t know the power of Google Hangouts.

Google expects to push out the update to Android users over the coming days and a simple update of Google Hangouts will enable free calling via Hangouts. If you have the iOS or web app, Hangouts will already have this functionality the next time you use it. The one thing Google failed to mention, though, is that they didn’t say anything about the Hangouts desktop app or when that functionality will come to those users.

The post Google Introduces Free Calling via Hangouts appeared first on VR World.

WiGig is a technology that has been developed by Wilocity with the help of various industry partners, including Cisco, Marvell and Qualcomm. We’ve been following the company for years and have been able to see their technology develop little by little into a truly mobile technology. They’ve moved from a proof of concept all the way to integrating their technology into laptops and smartphones. From our experience, their laptop technology is far more mature than their mobile technology, however they have made significant strides in terms of improving the technology’s performance and usability. They already have their WiGig technology working in some of Dell’s laptops and as a result they’ve got plenty of ideas for using WiGig for docking laptops wirelessly to displays and storage.

The technology itself is a 60 GHz wireless technology which is capable of delivering in excess of 1 Gbps in bandwidth wirelessly as long as it is within the line of sight of the receiver. However, due to the fact that 60 GHz is still a radio technology it doesn’t necessarily have to exactly be line of sight. Its just that 60 GHz does not penetrate walls necessarily well, which isn’t a bad thing nowdays in a world where we actually have so many 2.4 and 5 GHz signals that they’re interfering with each other and affecting performance. WiGig’s primary applications are within the same room, meaning that you can wirelessly connect your phone to your TV without needing to be connected to the Wi-Fi network and having to cover the entire house with a wireless signal for that purpose alone, or sharing that bandwidth with other devices on the network.

This technology will become part of Qualcomm’s technology portfolio and will actually be interesting to see how many of Wilocity’s current partners who are also Qualcomm’s competitors will receive the technology. The reality is that we’ll likely see WiGig become part of Qualcomm’s product stack but they may also still encourage others to utilize their 802.11ad application in order to help the technology grow since its introduction a few years ago. Qualcomm was actually one of the first adopters of WiGig, so they clearly have been happy with the progress of the technology since their inclusion in 2012.

The post Qualcomm Buys Wilocity, Adds WiGig to Snapdragon 810 appeared first on VR World.

You know, I was worried that Nikon was going to release the Nikon D810 and render my D800 irrelevant or unimportant, but if anything, they’ve done the exact opposite. I know that it isn’t easy trying to improve upon a camera when the sensor you’re working with is near or at the pinnacle of where sensor technology currently sits. However, if you look at what Sony has done with the very same 36.3 Megapixel sensors, it seems like a tale of two worlds. With Sony, you’ve got the a7, a7R and the a7S, all of which have a lot of unique features and encourage you to make a decision. The a7 and a7R are probably the two closest in the a7 family, but they also came out at the same time so you can’t really argue about upgrade fails like the D810.

The Nikon D810 is almost as little of an improvement over the D800 as the D610 is over the D600. The only reason why it isn’t is because the D610 is designed to remedy sensor oil and dust issues that plagued the D600 and nothing more. But obviously, Nikon has done more than that here, as they’ve made some internal upgrades that affect the system’s overall performance. Even if it looks almost identical from the outside.

Nikon D810 Side View

If you look at the D810 against the D800, all you really gain is the new Expeed 4 processor as opposed to the Expeed 3 processor. This processor improvement is supposed to mean that the new processor is going to be 30% faster than the previous generation. This supposedly improves video capability to 1080P at 60p (up from 30p) and increases the battery life up to 1,200 shots, up from about 900 ish. It can also do 40 minutes of video recording, which honestly isn’t much of a concern since if someone’s going to shoot video with a DSLR its going to be on a Canon.

Nikon has also expanded the ISO sensitivity range from 50-25,600 on the D800 to 32 to 51,200 on the D810. Nikon also claims lower noise throughout the range, which is supposed to mean you can get better light sensitivity with the same or less noise. They’ve also added more white balance options, improved group area AF but kept the amount of points the same. The burst fire rates have also been upgraded to 7 FPS in DX crop mode up from 6 in DX crop mode with the D800. They also added an unlimited continuous shooting capability which creates 30 second exposures for star trails.

Nikon appears to be making the D810 the video version of the D800 with improvements to the camera’s overall video usability. This includes added image stabilization features to reduce vibrations and shake. They’ve also added simultaneous recording to memory card as well as external recorder. There is also power aperture control using internal memory cards, built-in stereo and one button zoom image preview. They’ve also upgraded the display to a 3.2 inch 1229k dot dislay as opposed to a 3.0″ 921k dot display on the D800.

D810 Video Rig

Last but not least, they’ve added quiet and quiet continuous modes with the shutter by upgrading the shutter with some more durable and lighter materials. Oh, and its got a much better grip and OLED display on the outside.

Overall, these improvements clearly show that Nikon is getting more serious about video with their cameras. The only problem is that they couldn’t eek out 4K video support on a camera with a sensor more than 4x the size of a 4K video frame. I’m probably not alone in wanting this feature to come to the D810, but honestly if my D800 did 4K video I probably wouldn’t need another camera for probably close to a decade. Maybe Nikon knows that, but I doubt it.

The post Nikon Releases The D810, A Mediocre Upgrade appeared first on VR World.

While this may not be a big deal to some, avid and constant users of Twitter can rejoice today because the platform finally supports GIFs. Google’s own Google+ social network was actually the first of the big three to support GIFs and Facebook’s own Facebook chat that is built into the Facebook desktop client also supports GIFs. However, Facebook has not brought GIF support to any other platform or any other part of Facebook, including the most important part, the Timeline.

You can test it out yourself by simply posting a tweet with a GIF that you’ve uploaded and anyone that wishes to see it simply has to hit play and the GIF will play. Obviously, it would be nice for there to be an option for them to autoplay somewhere on Twitter, but I suspect that would cause undo burden on Twitter’s servers when it may not be necessary. Even the Twitter mobile apps support GIF images, which goes well beyond anything Facebook has been able to do in terms of features. The real truth is that GIF images are popular little snippets of video and people love to communicate things with them because of their ease of use and brevity. The next step for Twitter would be to extract GIFs from links and display them that way, since actually saving a GIF and uploading it is going to be a very unlikely use case.

We won’t get into the whole “GIF vs JIF” pronunciation of the GIF image format, but we will let you guys check it out for yourselves, including some amusing tweets about the feature launch from some Twitter employees that were involved in its development. Like we said, sometimes humor is best conveyed through short snippets of video overlayed with a slight bit of text. So, go ahead and have some fun with Twitter GIFs, even if they need a bit of work.

The post Twitter Now Supports GIFs, Facebook Still Struggling to Do So appeared first on VR World.

Futuremark has today announced their new 3DMark DX11 benchmark called Sky Diver. Futuremark’s announcement of the new Sky Diver DX11 benchmark is clearly a pre-announcement ahead of Computex Taipei next week, which we’ll be covering for you from Taipei.  This makes Sky Diver the fourth benchmark as part of the 3DMark suite of benchmarks slotting in as the 2nd most strenuous test that 3DMark will offer cross-platform to PC and Mobile users ranging from smartphones all the way up to gaming desktops. Sure, it means that there’s yet another test to run, however this is a high-end test specifically designed to be able to run on gaming laptops and mid-range desktops and maybe even the ultra-highend tablet.

With the introduction of 3DMark Sky Diver, here’s how Futuremark’s 3DMark tests break down for different classes of hardware top to bottom (DX11 feature level 11 all the way down to DX11 feature level 9).

3DMark Tests:

Fire Strike, for high performance gaming PCs (DirectX 11, feature level 11)

Sky Diver, for gaming laptops and mid-range PCs (DirectX 11, feature level 11)
Cloud Gate, for notebooks and typical home PCs (DirectX 11 feature level 10)

Ice Storm, for tablets and entry level PCs (DirectX 11 feature level 9)

Futuremark will also be showing Sky Diver at Computex at multiple companies’ booths including ASUS, MSI, GIGABYTE, Galaxy, Inno3D, and G-Skill from  June 3 through June 7th. This will likely become the standard GPU benchmark for laptops where Firestrike is too strenuous and Cloudgate isn’t stressful enough. Anyone that has ever run both benchmarks would know that there is a huge gap between the two different benchmarks in terms of stress on the GPU and system as a whole, so it makes total sense that they would come out with it. We will be sure to include this test in our future benchmarks and to add it into our GPU benchmarks for middle to low end GPUs where Firestrike is may not be very useful.

The post Futuremark Releases, Beautiful, Sky Diver DX11 3DMark Benchmark appeared first on VR World.

Comcast is trying to lie to us, again. Comcast is continually changing their story about why they should be allowed to acquire Time Warner Cable, constantly looking for reasons why it won’t hamper competition or consumer choice. They look towards the fact that our mobile carriers are also our internet service providers and that they are technically competitors with Comcast. Even though, anyone that knows anything about how the mobile industry works knows that mobile industry growth and competition has almost no negative effects on landline based internet. In fact, in a lot of cases users with mobile data coverage end up getting landline service from ISPs like Comcast or Time Warner Cable because they have become so accustomed to having connectivity everywhere. Comcast is arguing that somehow they are in the same industry as our mobile carriers even though neither party’s success actually affect’s the other’s in any way. That would be like saying that Mack trucks is a competitor with Tesla because they both make vehicles, even though neither company has anything to do with another whatsoever.

Now that we’ve addressed that and Comcast’s BS, we wanted to talk about Comcast’s latest set of lies. This primarily has to go around the fact that they are talking about implementing data caps within the next 5 years, but are now saying that they won’t actually have data caps. How do you say? Well, with ‘unlimited’ internet of course! Except, this unlimited internet is actually exactly as it was called by the press. A data cap with an overage fee. You know something that we’ve been experiencing in the mobile industry. Except, in the mobile industry we have more competition and there are actually carriers you can switch to in most areas that actually offers real unlimited. With lanline internet service providers like Comcast, you are usually locked in to 1 or 2 ISPs and you are totally stuck. So, Comcast wants to increase their profitability and to enable themselves to copycat what the mobile carriers are doing. Cap your data and then charge you for overages, you know, overages on a wired connection where bandwidth is far less limited than on wireless connections.

This is all on top of the fact that Comcast is continually charging their users an outrageous amount of money for services if they don’t want to be hampered by Comcast’s network policies. How do you do that? You have to subscribe to their ‘business’ internet plans which are nothing more than unrestricted versions of the exact same internet service delivered to residential customers. An ARS editor is paying $133 a month for his 50/10 Mbps internet service through Comcast Business and that is quite literally double what I’m paying with Time Warner Cable for 55/5 Mbps. So you can imagine my excitement for Time Warner Cable to get acquired by Comcast, because Comcast says that they won’t raise prices on consumers but they also won’t lower them, which is also BS. They will just employ so many restrictions on the people that are paying for the same level of service that they will be forced to pay more (Comcast Business) in order to get rid of them.

Comcast’s Full Page Newspaper Ad promoting the Time Warner Cable Merger, credit DSLReports

But wait, it gets better, Comcast is also trying to market themselves as protectors of Net Neutrality, even though they’re effectively the definition of anti-net neutrality with their fees that they charge Netflix in order to deliver a reasonable level of service to their customers. You know, paid prioritization, the fundamental thing that will ruin net neutrality? In a full page newspaper ad, Comcast tried to buoy support for their Time Warner Cable acquisition deal by promoting themselves as a check list of things that consumers would want. The list goes: Net Neutrality Protection (HA), Faster Internet (Faster how?), More Reliable and Secure Network (How is Comcast any more reliable or secure than Time Warner Cable?), Low Cost Internet Through Internet Essentials (only available to low-income consumers), Over 1 Million Wi-Fi Hotspots (who needs those anymore? do we live in 2004?) and last but not least “All of The Above.” I shit you not, they actually make consumers think that all of those things are going to be delivered by Comcast, at the same time. When in reality you can’t have faster internet speeds if you’re paying for the absolute minimum service (Internet Essentials) and that service is only available to low-income consumers and nobody else.

So, as you can tell, Comcast is full of lies and deceit and they will continue to push legislation and policies that are fundamentally anti-consumer, including the Time Warner Cable deal. Also, don’t forget that Comcast is the reason why the entire state of Pennsylvania (their home state) has a law that FORBIDS any sort of municipal broadband service, because you know, that would be competition.

The post Why Comcast is Lying to Us, Again appeared first on VR World.

Comcast is trying to lie to us, again. Comcast is continually changing their story about why they should be allowed to acquire Time Warner Cable, constantly looking for reasons why it won’t hamper competition or consumer choice. They look towards the fact that our mobile carriers are also our internet service providers and that they are technically competitors with Comcast. Even though, anyone that knows anything about how the mobile industry works knows that mobile industry growth and competition has almost no negative effects on landline based internet. In fact, in a lot of cases users with mobile data coverage end up getting landline service from ISPs like Comcast or Time Warner Cable because they have become so accustomed to having connectivity everywhere. Comcast is arguing that somehow they are in the same industry as our mobile carriers even though neither party’s success actually affect’s the other’s in any way. That would be like saying that Mack trucks is a competitor with Tesla because they both make vehicles, even though neither company has anything to do with another whatsoever.

Now that we’ve addressed that and Comcast’s BS, we wanted to talk about Comcast’s latest set of lies. This primarily has to go around the fact that they are talking about implementing data caps within the next 5 years, but are now saying that they won’t actually have data caps. How do you say? Well, with ‘unlimited’ internet of course! Except, this unlimited internet is actually exactly as it was called by the press. A data cap with an overage fee. You know something that we’ve been experiencing in the mobile industry. Except, in the mobile industry we have more competition and there are actually carriers you can switch to in most areas that actually offers real unlimited. With lanline internet service providers like Comcast, you are usually locked in to 1 or 2 ISPs and you are totally stuck. So, Comcast wants to increase their profitability and to enable themselves to copycat what the mobile carriers are doing. Cap your data and then charge you for overages, you know, overages on a wired connection where bandwidth is far less limited than on wireless connections.

This is all on top of the fact that Comcast is continually charging their users an outrageous amount of money for services if they don’t want to be hampered by Comcast’s network policies. How do you do that? You have to subscribe to their ‘business’ internet plans which are nothing more than unrestricted versions of the exact same internet service delivered to residential customers. An ARS editor is paying $133 a month for his 50/10 Mbps internet service through Comcast Business and that is quite literally double what I’m paying with Time Warner Cable for 55/5 Mbps. So you can imagine my excitement for Time Warner Cable to get acquired by Comcast, because Comcast says that they won’t raise prices on consumers but they also won’t lower them, which is also BS. They will just employ so many restrictions on the people that are paying for the same level of service that they will be forced to pay more (Comcast Business) in order to get rid of them.

Comcast’s Full Page Newspaper Ad promoting the Time Warner Cable Merger, credit DSLReports

But wait, it gets better, Comcast is also trying to market themselves as protectors of Net Neutrality, even though they’re effectively the definition of anti-net neutrality with their fees that they charge Netflix in order to deliver a reasonable level of service to their customers. You know, paid prioritization, the fundamental thing that will ruin net neutrality? In a full page newspaper ad, Comcast tried to buoy support for their Time Warner Cable acquisition deal by promoting themselves as a check list of things that consumers would want. The list goes: Net Neutrality Protection (HA), Faster Internet (Faster how?), More Reliable and Secure Network (How is Comcast any more reliable or secure than Time Warner Cable?), Low Cost Internet Through Internet Essentials (only available to low-income consumers), Over 1 Million Wi-Fi Hotspots (who needs those anymore? do we live in 2004?) and last but not least “All of The Above.” I shit you not, they actually make consumers think that all of those things are going to be delivered by Comcast, at the same time. When in reality you can’t have faster internet speeds if you’re paying for the absolute minimum service (Internet Essentials) and that service is only available to low-income consumers and nobody else.

So, as you can tell, Comcast is full of lies and deceit and they will continue to push legislation and policies that are fundamentally anti-consumer, including the Time Warner Cable deal. Also, don’t forget that Comcast is the reason why the entire state of Pennsylvania (their home state) has a law that FORBIDS any sort of municipal broadband service, because you know, that would be competition.

The post Why Comcast is Lying to Us, Again appeared first on VR World.

So, you know the whole premise that Snapchat is based upon? The fact that you can set a timer for an image and once that image’s time disappears, so does the image? And that somehow is supposed to prevent people from potentially saving those embarrassing or racy photos? Well, that was all a big fat lie. In a settlement that Snapchat has reached with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) they have agreed to a whole host of regulations and oversight of the company’s privacy and security policies since they had misled consumers about both. In fact, Snapchat’s security and privacy will be monitored closely for the next 20 years in order to ensure they aren’t breaking any laws or agreements if they do, they will be appropriately fined.

Quoting the New York Times article on the matter, “Under the terms of the settlement, Snapchat will be prohibited from misrepresenting how it maintains the privacy and confidentiality of user information. The company will also be required to start a wide-ranging privacy program, a sort of probation, and will be independently monitored for 20 years. Fines could ensue if the company violates the agreement.

In its complaint against Snapchat, the commission said the app’s messages, often called snaps, could be saved in several ways, contrary to what the company has said. Users can save a message by using a third-party app, the agency said, or employ simple workarounds that allow users to take a screen shot of messages without alerting another user.

The complaint also said Snapchat transmitted users’ location information and collected sensitive data like address book contacts, despite its saying that it did not collect such information. The commission said the lax policies did not secure a feature called “Find Friends” that allowed security researchers to compile a database of 4.6 million user names and phone numbers during a recent security breach.”

So, not only has Snapchat misrepresented the privacy and security of users’ images, they’ve also been collecting users address book data and GPS data without their willing or knowing consent. What does this mean for Snapchat? They’re going to have to constantly have to make sure they are in compliance with FTC regulations and will likely have to hire more lawyers than they already have as well as compliance officers in order to stay current. Not to mention all of the bad press about Snapchat basically lying to users and telling them one thing while it really does another. Not to mention collecting vast troves of users’ data without even asking their consent, which may affect user trust of Snapchat. Overall, this is not a good thing for the company but it is a good thing for consumers.

As of right now, no fines have been decided upon, but it is likely that once the FTC receives public comment and they vote once again, they will decide whether or not there will be any fines levied upon Snapchat. However, it was established by the FTC that any violations of these new rules set on Snapchat by the FTC will be charged to the tune of $16,000 per infraction with no limitation on amount of charges or fees.

Lets also not forget that the founder of Snapchat allegedly turned down an offer from Facebook worth $3 billion and now, the valuation of his company is in jeopardy with today’s settlement.

The post Snapchat Lied, Your Images are Saved, Settles with FTC appeared first on VR World.

In an attempt to placate the FCC, DoJ, FTC and basically every government agency on earth against their acquisition of Time Warner Cable, Comcast has announced that they will be divesting 3.9 million subscribers from the potential Comcast-TimeWarnerCable merger. This new announcement is a huge farce on the part of Comcast attempting to make it look like they’re seriously divesting from certain markets and giving subscribers to Charter. When in reality this new deal they are proposing actually muddies the waters further than a straight Comcast-TimeWarner acquisition and lines Comcast up for a quiet re-acquisition of those 3.9 million subscribers as well as “New Charter” which will be a new version of the current Charter Communications that will be eastablished to enable this deal.

Time Warner will divest 1.4 million of their video subscribers to “New Charter” which will 100% own the old Charter and 33% of the “SpinCo” which is going to be a publicly traded company that will take on the 2.5 million video subscribers that Comcast has “divested” from, even though 77% of that “SpinCo” remains to be accounted for by Comcast and how much of that remainder they will own. They also haven’t said how much they will be selling these divested customers to the “New Charter” for nor how much of a stake in SpinCo they will have, which i suspect will be bigger than anyone wants to believe. I suspect that Comcast will take a fairly large share of this new “SpinCo” even though Charter will be contracted to operate it and hold 33% of the shares.

This is all being done by Comcast to reduce their overall subscriber base numbers to levels that make them appear smaller and less monopolistic even though the land line internet services are much more important to us and the future of the company. They are not talking about internet subscribers whatsoever but rather video subscribers, which, if you remove 3.9 million from a unified Comcast-Time Warner merger, would bring the new company down from about 33 million to  28 million, a mere drop in the bucket of around 11%. This is merely a symbolic gesture on the part of Comcast to placate the regulators that say that Comcast and Time Warner Cable need to divest in order to be able to move forward with the acquisition. In my eyes, no divestment is good enough to allow the two companies to merge, especially knowing Comcast’s behavior with competitors like Netflix. And the weirdest part is that their plan to divest of the 3.9 million video subscribers would ultimately create Charter as the second biggest cable operator in the nation after Comcast-Time Warner Cable and they would have a pretty significant hand/stake in that venture’s creation, meaning that they wouldn’t have much trouble gobbling it up if they felt like it.

All of this stinks really badly and I simply don’t see how consumers stand to benefit from this acquisition whatsoever. Sure, it furthers Comcast’s thirst for acquisition, more subscribers and more growth as well as Time Warner Cable’s desire to be bought out by someone bigger so that they can move on from their ‘skimpy’ profits. It also satisfies Charter’s desires to expand as they were once a suitor of Time Warner Cable, prior to Comcast, and now they get 1.4 million of Time Warner Cable’s subscribers AND they also get to manage 2.5 million of Comcast’s ‘SpinCo’ new cable operator entity. So, yes, the companies will be happy, but they will ultimately screw the customers more than anything else and this complicated deal serves no real benefit other than scale to Comcast. Their plans to divest are merely a bone to throw to the regulators so that the regulators can say that Comcast made an effort to be ‘fair’ and balance out the market power across the market even though Comcast + Time Warner Cable would still be more than 4 times bigger after the plan to divest as their next biggest cable competitor.

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As many of you have probably been anticipating, GoPro’s Hero 4 is the much awaited update to the already wildly popular GoPro action camera that so many people already coveyt. The current iteration, the GoPro Hero3+ was what many expected could or should be the GoPro Hero4 solved many of the problems that the GoPro Hero3 had, however, it didn’t really improve the overall resolution or framerate of the camera. According to DGISE the new GoPro Hero4 will be released this summer using the already well-known Ambarella SoC that’s already been capable of 4K video encode and decode for quite some time.

However, a lot of people were pretty disappointed with the improvements of the Hero3+ over the Hero3 because it felt like such a long time without any significant improvements. But then, in February we got our answer. GoPro announced that they would be going public as a company and filed for an IPO which ultimately meant that the company would launch the new camera after their IPO in order to ensure a good boost of the shareprice and the company’s value. There’s no doubt that once GoPro releases this camera it will be able to do 4K and will probably do it for about $400 which would make it the cheapest 4K camera, ever, and probably for a long time. This clear technology advantage would likely mean that a lot of people with older GoPros would probably upgrade to the new GoPro and they would also win over a lot of new customers as well, with this new 4K featureset and incredibly reasonable price. Even the cheapest smartphone that can record 4K will cost you $600-$700.

According to the rumor, the new Hero4 will be able to do 13 megapixel stills in addition to the 4K video at 30 FPS, the current holy grail for any camera system hoping to achieve the highest level of quality right now. In addition to that, it is rumored to be capable of 1080P at 120 FPS and 720P at 240 FPS, which means that even if you don’t think you want or need the 4K feature, you can still get some impressive slow motion video capture at 1080P. The camera will also have the ability to capture stills while recording video, which is a great feature for anyone looking to pull stills from a very well shot video.

There is no specific price set for this camera, but I’d expect it to be around $399 with all the bells and whistles and that it would launch shortly after GoPro’s IPO becomes a reality. So, simply watching GoPro’s business should indicate to us when we can see the Hero4. Sure, its risky to do things this way, but I just don’t see them rationally waiting this long to do a Hero4 with 4K video playback and launch it BEFORE their IPO. It just doesn’t make any sense to anyone that knows how well these guys have done for themselves with this camera system. I would also expect to see some new features in the Hero4’s software that will focus on GoPro’s focus on media creation and not just selling hardware to consumes and extreme sports enthusiasts.

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Sony has announced the update to their Alpha A7 full frame mirrorless camera, with the announcement of the Alpha A7s. This is not to be confused with the later released Alpha A7R, which sports an enormous 36.4 megapixel sensor, identical to that of the one in Nikon’s D800, but packed into a body less than half the size of the D800. The original A7 came with a 24 megapixel sensor, while the A7R comes with a 36 megapixel sensor, and now the A7s comes with a 12 megapixel sensor. All of this may seem a bit bizarre and confusing until you realize why the A7S is 1/3 the resolution of the A7R, and that has to do with the fact that the A7s has some of the craziest ISO performance on earth, oh and it supports 4K video at 30 FPS, something only one other photo camera in the world can do. In fact, this may actually be the smallest 4K consumer camera in the world.

The A7s also sports an impressive ISO range of ISO 50 to 409,600 with the standard ISO range for stills ranging from 100 to 102,400 which is still within the range of most professional DSLRs with their expanded ISO ranges. The Expanded range is 50-409,600 and when shooting video you can use ISO 200 to 409,600.

The camera also has a lot of video friendly features and supports 4K video, however, you cannot record the 4K video directly to the Sony or SDXC memory cards within the camera. Sony states that 4K is a ‘Pro-Quality’ feature and as a result requires an optional external 3rd party 4K recorder, which means that Sony isn’t even the company that’s going to sell you what you need to record your own 4K video. Considering that the camera supports All of the fancy Sony Memory Stick standards as well as SDHC and SDXC, there should be no problem recording 4K video directly to a UHS-1 SDXC card, there are even cards being made specifically with very high write speeds for 4K use. I believe that if you have to use the camera’s HDMI output (which does 4K @ 30 FPS) and record that to an external HDMI recorder, this camera has defeated its own purpose of supporting 4K.

That aside, this camera does support NFC and Wi-Fi which means that you can wirelessly stream your images out to your wireless devices incredibly easily, especially if you have a device with NFC which makes pairing effortless. Overall, I think this camera is pretty awesome, but it remains to be seen if the 4K feature is really worth noting considering the fact that it can’t record directly to an SDXC card that’s inside the camera. If they can fix this, then maybe this camera might be worth getting over Panasonic’s GH4.

The post Sony's New A7s Compact Full Frame Camera Takes 12 MP Images and 4K Video appeared first on VR World.

On the other hand, Novafora is a company headed by Shlomo and Zaki Rakib, successful engineer and enterpreneur who worked together at Terayon Communication Systems. Their vision is to create products to video content processing for the Internet era. With this acquisition, there is little doubt that companies such as Qualcomm, Freescale, TI, Philips, Nvidia and others are getting some competition.

Only time will tell how Novafora will pan out, but there is some serious engineering talent in Israel, and being backed by funds that have over 1.3 billion USD just might result in a new star on system-on-chip market.
Last great architecture to come from Israel was no other than Intel Core architecture, also known as “Chip that saved Intel’s bacon”.

The post Israeli-backed company completes acquisition of Transmeta appeared first on VR World.

G4Saurus is enjoying a big can of Whoopas ;)

Pun is definitely intended, and personally, the world would be a better place if the author didn’t mention some of the things which ATI copied badly (anyone remembers the historical SNAFU patchwork called Crossfire pass-through cable… ah, right. Never existed), but the video is a laugh. Over the past several years, it looks like we haven’t seen anything but bashing of the red team, and now the time has come to hit the beach and enjoy the sweet taste of success. And of course, payback is a beach.
You can view the video here.
P.S. Please don’t send any e-mails about the word “beach” in the title. You all know what I meant

The post ATI vs. Nvidia: Payback is a beach appeared first on VR World.

• Vista CUDA driver improvements
• better AMD CPU code optimization on our side

With quad-core, even if clocked much lower, there should be less load since Badaboom is truly multi-threaded application that can take advantage of more cores than you can have in your system (unless your home system has 16 cores :-).
As you can see, guys are really trying to fix as much issues as they appear, and note that AVCHD transcoding should be awesome, since they pushed a lot of work in that department during development of their other product, RapiHD.
My advice is that you download the trial version and send your feedback to the guys – they only have limited amount of various hardware, and it would be of great use for them if you find something weird that they could fix ASAP.

The post Badaboom’s CPU utilization issue explained appeared first on VR World.