Patrick Beja talks with us about Nintendo’s tentative move to mobile phones and tablets and the mysterious NX console platform that’s coming.
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Show Notes
Today’s guests: Patrick Beja, DTNS contributor and host of the Pixels podcast, Le Rendez-vous Tech and The Phileas Club
Headlines:
It’s that time again. Apple Television Rumor time! This one comes from the Wall Street Journal. Apple will supposedly launch a TV service with around 25 channels for around $30-$40 dollars a month. It would include ABC CBS and Fox channels but not NBC because of a dispute with Comcast. However 9to5 Mac has a source that says NBC wants to launch apps on Apple TV, Fire TV and Xbox in the second half of this year. The new NBC app would require a cable subscription in order to us.
Engadget reports that Google has started reviewing some apps before they are available for download in the Google Play Store.
The policy, which has been in effect for a few month, uses a mix of algorithms and human intervention. Google also launched a rating system for Android apps that will label which games are appropriate for various age groups.
Nintendo announced in a press conference that it will partner with mobile game publisher DeNA to make original mobile games using Nintendo characters and worlds. Along with the new games, this autumn Nintendo will launch a cross-platform membership service for mobile devices, PC and Nintendo devices. One of those devices will someday be a new game console referred to as NX. Nintendo called it an “entirely new concept” but we won’t hear any details on that until next year. Ars Technica has one of the best stories rounding up the details.
Engadget reports Microsoft announced Windows 10 will support logins by fingerprint, facial recognition and iris scan. Of course the device it’s running on has to have the right sensor—- but a framework called Hello will make sure the login experience is consistent across different manufacturers. For devices without sensors, a feature called Passport lets you enter a password and device-specific PIN. All the biometric data and the PIN will be stored on the machine.
Engadget notes Sling TV launched today on Xbox One. You can pin Sling TV to your Home screen, control the app with Kinect for Xbox One and Snap with other activities so you can play games and watch Sling TV at the same time. Existing Xbox One owners can try out the service free for a month (up from the usual 7 day trial). If you don’t have an Xbox One you can get 3 months free if you purchase an Xbox One before March 22 2015 from a Microsoft retail outlet or online store.
PC World reports Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang revealed details about the GeForce Titan X at the GPU Technology Conference.
The card has 3072 CUDA cores, 12 GB of RAM and costs $1,000.
Huang claimed the single-precision floating point performance is 7 TFLOPS but only 200 GFLOPs in double-precision. The one benchmark revealed was neural net analysis. Titan X can process the data in 1.5 days compared to 5 days for the Titan Black.
ReCode reports NVidia also announced a self-driving car platform called Drive PX that will go on sale in May for $10,000. This is the platform teased at CES, powered by two Tegra X1 chips and supposedly 3,000 times faster than DARPA’s DAVE platform. The platform also can be trained and Huang said it gets smarter with every OTA update. NVidia hopes to expand its partnerships with Tesla, Audi and BMW. He’ll probably get his wish with Tesla since Elon Musk joined him on stage to talk about security with self-driving cars.
ReCode reports Facebook has launched the ability to send payments through Facebook Messenger at no cost. Once you’ve tied your debit card to your Facebook account, you can click a dollar sign icon to open a payment screen in messenger. If someone sends you money and you don’t have a debit card attached, Facebook will hold the money for you until you get it set up. No payment can be sent without a PIN or thumbprint scan. The rollout will start in selected US cities and progress internationally later.
3D printing start-up, Carbon3D, has developed a new 3-D printing process that works fast enough to be used for production instead of just protyping reports Re/Code. The process is called CLIP or Continuous Liquid Interface Production. CLIP involves using light and oxygen to grow objects from a pool of resin instead of building the object layer by layer. Carbon3D says CLIP is 25-100 times faster than traditional 3-D writing and can work with a wider array of materials. Carbon3D debuted the technology Monday at the TED conference in Vancouver and said they are turning it inot a shipping product but did not state price.
News From You:
tahras submitted the Verge article that Microsoft marketing chief Chris Capossel told folks at the Microsoft Convergence event that Microsoft is researching a new name for the Project Spartan browser that will come in Windows 10. Testing shows that whatever the name is, it is perceived better if it has the name Microsoft at the beginning. A version of Internet Explorer will also ship with Windows 10 but it will be the last of its name.
KAPT_Kipper wants you to know that you can now pause videos on your Google Chromecast with your TV remote. As long as it is infrared and has a play/pause button. TechCrunch reports that Chromecast uses the HDMI-CEC protocol for the function. So if starting a cast turns your TV on, then this should work for you. The functionality doesn’t work in every app yet but works in many.
tninja3000 sent us the GeekWire report that Microsoft will let third party retailers Amazon, Best Buy and Target sell the Microsoft Band wearable starting today. The fitness and health tracker already available in Microsoft stores costs $199.99 in the US and offers notifications and lightweight apps, and integration with Android, iOS and Windows Phone. The Microsoft Band will also launch April 15th in the UK,for £169.99.
Discussion Section Links:
Pick of the day: streamingnation.com.au
G’day Tom, Jenny and Pals
Travis from Melbourne, Australia here – with a website that might be useful to other Aussies, especially over the next few weeks. It’s streamingnation.com.au, covering news about the local options for streaming video.
There’s two Netflix-ish services who’ve recently launched, being Presto and Stan, but the elephant in the room is Netflix itself (coming next week, baby!)
Streaming Nation also has lists of newly added shows and films, and has recommendations, which I’m keeping for those nights when my wife just can’t make up her mind 
Keep up the awesome work.
Trav.
Messages
I am a cablevision internet subscriber. I don’t have a cable box, only a TiVo . If I subscribed to HBONOW through cablevision, how would I watch? Through apple TV with cable login? Would I have to get a box? If this is the case, why bother? Discounts? Otherwise apple TV would be more convenient, right? Thanks from one of your bosses, Bob
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Comcast in North Georgia cable modem users here. We have a 300 GB limit…. and if you cross the magic threshold, they just start charging you some flat rate for each additional 10 or 50 GB or something (I have NOT done this), so now they just make more money from bandwidth hogs.
Woo hoo. No more bandwidth caps. Just what I asked for, sort of.
whistl
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We asked for legal uses of P2P after the story that Windows 10 updates will be distributed peer to peer. Mink sent us a link to a makeuseof post from August 2013 that mentioned Archive.org, government data sets, BitTorrent Sync, and BitTorrent bundles. Branden from Winterless Salt Lake serves up 6.6 TB of apps and patches via P2P for the 40,000 computers in his school district. And William downloaded the entire BitCoin blockchain shaving a day off the time to get his bitcoin node up and running.
And Mink added the interesting question of “whether “mobile” (slower & less reliable networks with more data caps and using inherently smaller storage devices) will make torrents more or less attractive to users. “
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Hey guys!
A few months back I sent in an audio recording which you played where I discussed the opportunities that are created by GoPro’s new product with builtin wifi/internet service (hopefully). Meerkat would be crazy not to reach out to them for reasons I am sure you can understand. I shot Meerkats support a brief email as well since they are a fun little startup. They could do great things together.
Thanks!
Joe
BOL REUNION!
Just announced: The Buzz Out Loud 10 Year reunion on March 29th at 12:30 pacific /3:30 p eastern and 7:30p GMT! It’s free! Tom, Molly, Veronica, Jason and many other special guests! Tickets for the event at the Hak 5 warehouse are available at http://bit.ly/BOLreunion but if you want to attend online you don’t need even need a ticket. The event will stream live on Alpha Geek Radio and on YouTube with more details forthcoming.
Buzztown’s Back!
PODCAST AWARDS
Also Podcast Awards! Remember yesterday, and the day before, when we told you how you could vote for your favorite podcast in the Podcast Awards? Well guess what, you can vote again today! For example, you could vote for DTNS in the technology category, but you can also support Night Attack in the “Mature” and “Video” categories. Also you can vote for The Instance, Film Sack and our good friends at The Morning Stream and Night Attack. I guess you could also vote for Serial. But only once. Vote once a day at http://www.podcastawards.com/ until March 24th.
Wednesday’s guest: Iyaz Akhtar