Google announced on Friday that it plans to launch YouTube Gaming this summer. The mobile app and website will take on Amazon powerhouse Twitch and newcomers such as MLG.TV by offering video game videos and live streams. “More than 25,000 games will each have their own page, a single place for all the best videos and live streams about that title,” explains the YouTube Blog. “You’ll also find channels from a wide array of game publishers and YouTbe creators.” YouTube already features a wide range of gaming videos, notes The New York Times, “but creating a stand-alone app puts gaming one click closer and adds another square icon to gamers’ phones.”

Samsung debuted its first mirror and transparent OLED display panels at Retail Asia Expo 2015 last week. The pair of 55-inch displays combines Intel RealSense and Samsung OLED technology. The company envisions applications from signage to virtual changing rooms. “While mirrored and transparent LCD displays have been around for a while now, Samsung says its OLED technology (the first of its kind) offers better contrast and viewing angles,” reports The Verge. According to the press release, the Mirror OLED display panel “delivers at least 50 percent higher reflectance than competitive Mirror LCDs.”

Twitter announced that CEO Dick Costolo plans to leave the company at the end of the month. Co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey will serve as interim CEO starting July 1 until a successor is found. Twitter shares jumped eight percent following the announcement. Since the company went public in 2013, Twitter has experienced numerous challenges, including an effective means of attracting new users and developing revenue streams based on advertising. Some are speculating that Twitter is ripe for acquisition, with Google listed as one of the interested parties. Continue reading Besieged Twitter CEO Dick Costolo to Step Down This Month

In a wide-ranging keynote at the Augmented World Expo tradeshow this week, Tom Furness, a pioneer in human interface technology, traced his career innovating in virtual reality and announced the formation of the Virtual World Society. Often called a grandfather of VR, Furness’s groundbreaking work includes developing the first VR flight simulator, first VR consumer product and first retina display. His latest vision is for a network of labs where young creatives and technologists turn their talents to solving Earth’s urgent environmental and social problems. Continue reading AWE: Grandfather of VR Seeds an Industry, Calls it to Action

Luke and Marika Neumann have uploaded a two-minute video to YouTube called “Ghost Towns,” the first 8K content to appear on the site. According to the description on YouTube, the video was shot with “the RED Epic Dragon 6K in Portrait orientation and then stitched together in Adobe After Effects.
 Some shots simply scaled up by 125 percent from 6.1K to meet the 7.6K standard.” Google says that 8K has been supported by YouTube since 2010, but the 4320p/8K setting option was only added this year. While this may be an important milestone, there are currently very view consumers with displays that can support such high-resolution content played at a high frame rate.

Consumers typically use only a small percentage of available apps each month, but their time spent with these apps is dramatically increasing. According to Nielsen, the time spent engaged with these apps has increased 63 percent over the past two years. In Q4 2012, consumers spent a little more than 23 hours per month with apps, while that figure jumped to 37 hours and 28 minutes in Q4 2014. Meanwhile, the number of apps used has only marginally increased: 23.3 apps per month in 2011, 26.5 apps in 2012 and 26.8 apps in 2013. Continue reading Nielsen: Consumers Spending More Time Engaged with Apps

San Francisco startup HackerOne wants to connect problem-solving hackers with companies that have cybersecurity issues. They hope to convince other hackers to behave responsibly regarding security flaws in the process. Tech companies such as Square, Twitter and Yahoo as well as banks and oil companies are currently working with the service. “HackerOne gets a 20 percent commission on top of each bounty paid through its service,” reports The New York Times. “About 1,500 hackers are on HackerOne’s platform. They have fixed around 9,000 bugs and received more than $3 million in bounties.”

The Federal Trade Commission is going after the company behind “The Doom That Came to Atlantic City” in its first ever enforcement action against a crowdfunded project, reports The Washington Post. The game’s Kickstarter campaign launched in 2012 with illustrator Lee Moyer, game designer Keith Baker, sculptor Paul Komoda and special effects guru H.R. Giger attached, and nearly quadrupled its financial goal. However, Portland, Oregon-based The Forking Path never delivered the game. Now the FTC is alleging that Erik Chevalier, the individual behind The Forking Path, spent the funds on himself, rather than developing the game. The order includes a $111,793.71 judgment against Chevaliar.

Augmented reality systems with technology that overlays digital interfaces onto the physical world may eventually edge out virtual reality and significantly impact human perception. While VR products such as Oculus Rift, Gear VR and HTC’s Vive get closer to launch, timelines for augmented reality devices such as Microsoft’s HoloLens and Google-backed Magic Leap remain vague. However, some believe AR is more likely to become integrated into our everyday activities and subsequently affect the way we interact, work and communicate. Continue reading Augmented Reality on Track to Transform Our Everyday Lives

More than 3,000 attendees and 200 exhibitors gathered in Santa Clara this week for the Augmented World Expo, now in its sixth year. The event, which has grown ten-fold since its inception, featured demos involving VR headsets, enhanced glasses, product-scanning apps and brain-scanning headbands. According to a recent Digi-Capital report, augmented and virtual reality is projected to reach $150 billion in revenue by 2020 (when AR is expected to dominate 80 percent of the market). AWE founder Ori Inbar believes “2016 will be the year of shakeups and mergers.” Continue reading AR/VR Leaders Imagine the Future at Augmented World Expo

Tech companies in the U.S. are urging the Obama administration not to impose policies that could potentially weaken encryption systems created to protect the privacy of consumers. “We are opposed to any policy actions or measures that would undermine encryption as an available and effective tool,” stated a letter to President Obama this week from the Information Technology Industry Council and the Software and Information Industry Association, representing companies such as Apple, Google, Facebook, IBM and Microsoft. Continue reading Tech Companies Urge White House to Leave Encryption Alone

Government data surveillance will likely cost cloud computing and tech companies more than originally projected two years ago. According to The Wall Street Journal, “the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation estimated that the revelations of widespread government surveillance by former defense contractor Edward Snowden could cost as much as $35 billion in lost sales and other expenses by 2016, as companies and governments opted not to buy IT products from U.S. companies.” The ITIF now predicts the amount will be much higher since data centers will need to be constructed in local jurisdictions in order to comply with international data sovereignty laws.

As part of its larger effort to become a lifestyle media brand, GoPro is looking to cloud services as an alternative for the increasing amount of content that ends up stuck on SD cards. GoPro founder and CEO Nick Woodman wants to make it easier for users to instantly share photos and video. Although still in early development, the approach would involve uploading footage to a cloud service while the camera charges, where it could be immediately shared or edited. This would eliminate the step of transferring footage from an SD card to editing software. Continue reading GoPro Exec Aims to Connect Action Cameras to Cloud Service

Yesterday we reported that Facebook was scrapping its plan to build a satellite for providing affordable Internet access to developing countries. Quartz points out that Google backed out of its own similar plan earlier this year. Google had hired satellite entrepreneur Greg Wyler, who believes that constellations comprised of numerous small satellites could solve the problems involving cost and slow data speeds common with other satellite Internet services. The article notes that Wyler has left Google and is pursuing satellite efforts with backing from Qualcomm and Virgin Galactic. Meanwhile, Elon Musk’s SpaceX is also developing a constellation of small communications satellites.

Facebook Messenger allows users to make video calls and share photos, audio, text and GIFs. “Doodle Draw” is now available in the Messenger app list, making it the first true game available for the new messaging platform. While Facebook has so far emphasized apps involving content creation and curated content for Messenger, the social network has been “interested in eventually expanding it to a broader set of experiences, including utilities and games if test data looked good,” according to TechCrunch. With “Doodle Draw” for iOS and Android, users share their drawings with friends in order to initiate a guessing game regarding what has been drawn.