In partnership with HTC, Valve is distributing its Vive Developer Edition to a number of movie studios, development teams and indie studios. The kit includes two Lighthouse base stations, a headset, a pair of single-handed SteamVR controllers, and the necessary cables and instructions. “The massive differences between creating a game that takes advantage of VR and traditional development makes it all the more important for dev kits like these to be distributed broadly, and well before titles are set to begin shipping,” reports Digital Trends. “Teams will need plenty of time to grow accustomed to the quirks of the new tech.”

Animated feature “Minions” — the upcoming prequel/spin-off to the popular “Despicable Me” franchise — is taking a new approach to marketing its summer release. Universal Pictures and Illumination Entertainment have partnered with Amazon in a first-of-its-kind deal to brand the retailer’s delivery boxes featuring characters from the film. The bright yellow boxes “help promote the movie not only by raising awareness about the brand itself, but by noting the date the movie arrives in theaters (July 10),” TechCrunch reports. “The boxes point also to a special Amazon URL. As it turns out, that website, amazon.com/minions, is a dedicated shopping site for all things ‘minions.’”

Amazon Allowance enables parents to establish a weekly or monthly payment schedule to credit their children’s Amazon accounts with a cash balance, similar to offering them gift cards. The service — which works for anyone, not just family members — provides recipients with a means of shopping without a credit or debit card. It is also targeting the next generation of young online shoppers. Retailers such as JC Penney, Target and Walmart have made e-gifting (electronic gift cards) part of their new strategies, according to Bloomberg. CEB projects that e-gifting will reach $14 billion in 2017, more than double last year’s figure.

Apple introduced a new computer language last year called Swift, and while the announcement largely flew under the radar, a number of programmers attending this week’s WWDC have spent the last year writing apps that use Swift. “Red Monk, a firm that has been doing regular rankings of programming languages for the last five years, describes the language’s growth as ‘essentially unprecedented,’” notes Bloomberg. “Just seven months after its inception, Swift had become the 22nd most popular language out of the hundreds of major languages that exist.” Developers consistently give Swift high marks for safety, modernity and expressiveness.

Three years after Apple’s launch of its own iOS Maps app, sensor-equipped vans have been appearing in cities such as Dallas, New York and Los Angeles. “While Apple was known to be gearing up for the launch of a mass transit directions service this fall in a handful of cities, sources have revealed that it is also developing its first entirely in-house mapping database to reduce its reliance on TomTom, using a fleet of mysterious vans to take still photos of business storefronts to replace Yelp photos, and building a 3D Street View feature,” notes 9to5Mac. The vans are collecting information that will be added to the core data Apple has put together for its base map. A shift to the new database is expected by 2017 or 2018.

Streaming music site SoundCloud has been growing in popularity, due in part to its social media integration, and now claims 175 million monthly users. However, the service has been at odds with the music industry since it has not been paying royalties. SoundCloud recently reached an agreement with Warner Music and last week “announced that it had struck a deal covering some 20,000 independent record labels through Merlin, an organization that represents small companies in digital negotiations,” reports The New York Times. “The Merlin deal follows another SoundCloud arrangement announced last month with the National Music Publishers’ Association, which also covers a range of smaller companies.”

Futurist Ray Kurzweil, currently serving as director of engineering at Google, predicts that humans will become artificially intelligent hybrids by the 2030s. Kurzweil believes that our brains will connect directly to the cloud using nanobots, tiny robots constructed from DNA strands. The thousands of computers in the cloud will then augment our intelligence. “Our thinking then will be a hybrid of biological and non-biological thinking,” he said. According to CNN: “The bigger and more complex the cloud, the more advanced our thinking. By the time we get to the late 2030s or the early 2040s, Kurzweil believes our thinking will be predominately non-biological.”

Against the wishes of some of top congressional Democrats, the FCC approved a proposal this week that could provide large cable providers with the ability to raise their prices. The agency voted 3-2 “to limit the power of state and local regulators over cable TV packages and prices,” reports National Journal, and “declared that it will assume that there is ‘effective competition’ for cable services nationwide.” FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler sided with the commission’s two Republicans and the cable industry. Democrats argued that limiting regulations could lead to consumers paying higher prices for access to news, sports and other programming.

Microsoft and Toshiba are joining forces to develop products and services that address the Internet of Things. “This mirrors the combination of IBM’s cloud service with ARM-based IoT development platforms,” reports Electronics Weekly. “The plan is to bring together Microsoft’s Azure IoT Cloud infrastructure with IoT applications running Toshiba’s sensors and wireless comms devices,” including Toshiba’s ApP Lite processor, driving recorders and cloud storage services. “IoT is bringing in a dramatic technology transition that is reshaping the nature of networks, the meaning of service, and the way we live and work,” said Shigeyoshi Shimotsuji, VP at Toshiba.

Magic Leap unveiled a development platform this week at MIT’s EmTech Digital conference as part of the company’s effort to encourage filmmakers, game developers and others to create augmented reality experiences on its platform. The SDK, to be released soon, works with the Unreal and Unity game engines. The company also announced that it spent part of its $592 million in recent funding to build a 300,000 square foot Florida facility for manufacturing its photonic lightfield chip. “This chip powers its augmented reality headset that works by shooting light directly onto your eye, rather than sticking a screen in front of it,” explains TechCrunch.

Twitter and the NBA have teamed up to deliver custom timelines and hashflags graphics for fans online through the first official partnership between the social platform and a major sports league. “Twitter users on most iOS and Android apps can access the NBA Finals timeline by searching #NBA or #NBAFinals on their mobile devices,” reports Mashable. The timeline will include “Tweets” that feature posts related to the Finals, “Commentary” that limits what is shown to select media and analysts, and “Video” that features Vines and clips from the Cavaliers, Warriors and NBA. The timeline will also include the live score of each game.

Hewlett-Packard, 20th Century Fox and James Cameron’s Lightstorm Entertainment announced a five-year partnership yesterday to create a new immersive entertainment experience to market future releases of the “Avatar” franchise. While features of the unnamed project were not discussed, HP will provide cloud-computing services and data security in addition to managing and analyzing collected data, reports Bloomberg. The second “Avatar” film is scheduled for a December 2017 release. Additionally, the filmmakers are working with Disney on a theme park experience and Cirque du Soleil on an “Avatar” inspired show this fall.

Through an exclusive deal with the NFL announced yesterday, Yahoo will host the first free, live webcast of a regular-season football game when the Buffalo Bills take on the Jacksonville Jaguars October 25 in London. “For the NFL, the streamed game is an experiment to understand the complex economics of digital streaming and gauge the audience for watching American football in the rest of the world,” notes The New York Times. “For Yahoo, winning the digital rights to the popular game is a rare victory against more successful rivals like Google and Facebook, who compete with it for attention and ad dollars.”

Amazon is currently testing a new feature called Amazon Stream that helps users browse and discover products on its site — via a grid of daily updated product photos — and then click a button to save them if desired. The service is still under development. “Currently, products on Amazon Stream can only be filtered by ‘Women,’ ‘Men,’ or ‘Your Saves,’ and not by product category, price range, ratings or other criteria,” according to TechCrunch. This could be seen as an attempt to take on the visual style of Pinterest for online shopping, similar to what Amazon Collections tried to accomplish in 2013.

On the eve of its Worldwide Developer Conference, Apple has unveiled the first products from third party manufacturers to integrate its new smart home technology. Apple announced its HomeKit software last year as a framework for Siri and iOS devices to communicate with connected accessories. According to Re/code, iHome’s SmartPlug uses Siri to control lighting, fans and other devices; Lutron Electronics’ Caséta Wireless Lighting Starter Kit offers lighting control and notifications; Ecobee’s wireless thermostat can control heating and cooling using Siri; and Insteon’s HomeKit-compatible hub enables users to control door locks, lighting and more.