TechCrunch
Watchup's Video News App Becomes More Automated And Context-Rich In Its Latest Update
Watchup, the startup aiming to create the tablet version of the daily news broadcast, has released version 2.0 of its iPad app, adding features for both casual and power users.
The Watchup app pulls news videos from a range of sources, such as the Associated Press, PBS NewsHour, and the Wall Street Journal, and it stitches them together into a continuous playlist. Initially, users had to manually choose from Watchup’s videos, but in a recent update the company added the ability to automatically assemble a playlist based on your preferences, and to schedule a daily newscast.
With version 2.0, Watchup says it has made the process completely frictionless. Instead of opening up the app and being confronted with different menus and options, if you start it now, the videos just automatically play.
At the same time, you can take control of the experience if you want. If you drag the upper panel of the app down, you’ll be able to browse all of Watchup’s channels and videos. You can also read more about the topic in a given video by dragging the right panel, which should bring up related news articles. (To show those articles, co-founder Adriano Farano said the app is pulling “the most relevant metadata” from the video, then conducting a Bing search for those terms.)
So if you just want to turn Watchup on and let it play (while you’re getting ready for work, perhaps, or cooking dinner), you can do that. If you want to really control the news you watch and dig into specific stories, you can do that too. Farano described the company’s approach as creating “a video-centric news experience” — the idea is that Watchup can continue to build things around the video, but video should be the core of the app.
Among its various video sources, Watchup has a number of cross-promotion deals, and Farano said the company recently signed its first monetization deal, with Univision paying to promote its presence in the app. He said the business model is still very experimental, and that the company is “open to other revenue streams.”
Heads Up Haters, 70% Of The U.S. Has A Gay Friend On Facebook
Americans are growing more open about their sexual orientation, and that could help defeat prejudice. In honor of Gay Pride week, Facebook ran the numbers and found 70% of U.S. users are friends with someone who lists themselves as gay, lesbian, or bi-sexual. That fact could remind people they’re hurting someone they know when they’re intolerant or use homophobic slurs.
In a past age, sexual orientation was more frequently kept private. That meant people might have had gay friends but didn’t know it.
Without the ability to put a human face on this demographic of people, it may have been easier to view being queer as something abstract, foreign, and less deserving of compassion.
But the world is changing. Facebook allows people to list their sexual preference, and even lets you search for which of your friends are gay or lesbian. Just type “Friends who are gay” into Graph Search and it will bring up “My friends who are men interested in men” and “My friends who are women interested in women”. That makes it harder to hide from the fact that we’re all human
70% is likely a conservative estimate of Americans with gay friends as not everyone lists their orientation on Facebook. The actual percentage could be far closer to 100%. Don’t be afraid to spread the word. If more people knew that, they might think twice about their own prejudice.
Hate is the minority.
Havok's Completely Free 3D Engine For Mobile Game Developers Is Now Available
Hey, aspiring game developers! Listen up.
Way back in March, we outlined Project Anarchy, a new 3D engine from Havok (the same people that built the engine behind some of the world’s biggest games, from Assassin’s Creed to Halo 4) that would be completely free to mobile game developers. At the time, the only target they’d give for when it’d be available was “sometime this spring”.
Well, Project Anarchy has just gone live. It’s a few days outside of Spring in the northern hemisphere — but hey, I’ll forgive’m. Free game engine!
Interested developers can find the engine download here. Heads up, though, Mac Devs: Project Anarchy primarily supports Windows developers for now, with the vast majority of its tools (the WYSIWYG game editor, the animation tool, etc.) all being Windows only. The only Mac-friendly tool seems to be the one meant to let you prepare your project for iOS.
Games built with Project Anarchy can be published without any sort of licensing fees on iOS, Android, or Samsung’s in-the-works mobile OS, Tizen. That last option might seem a bit strange, given that Tizen hasn’t… you know, shipped on anything yet, but there are logical dots that one can connect: Intel bought Havok in 2007. In 2011, Intel dropped support for the flailing MeeGo operating system they’d spent a year working on with Nokia and joined the governing group behind… you guessed it, Tizen. They’ve pretty much got to show love, right?
So, what’s in it for Havok? Why release an engine that doesn’t make them money? Because it does — just not directly. Three of the more obvious draws:
- Intel is making a big push into mobile and, as mentioned, owns Havok. If they can get a few AAA titles to build mobile games on Project Anarchy, they can optimize their chipsets for the engine. If their chips run a few popular games better than anyone else’s, they sell more chips in the long run.
- This potentially helps Havok capture some of those developers that are breaking into the game-making world for the first time on mobile. Remember: they’re still charging for Havok licensing on other, non-mobile platforms (like the Xbox, or the PC); if any of those newfound mobile devs decide to port up to bigger, less portable boxes and stays on Havok’s engine, Havok gets paid.
- In their ToS, Havok reserves the right to “co-market” with your game. In other words, they get to say “Hey! This shiny new mobile game! It was built on Havok!”.
Of course, the mobile development playing field has changed a bit in the last few months. When Project Anarchy was first announced, its biggest draw was that it was totally free for mobile game developers, regardless of whether or not they intended to charge for their app. The closest thing anyone else offered was Unity3D — which, while very, very cheap compared to most pro-grade engines, still charged hundreds of dollars per developer seat for anyone even just looking to dabble with iOS or Android.
Just last month, however, Unity announced that basic iOS and Android publishing support would be free for all small-to-medium sized development houses (perhaps in response to others, like Havok, tiptoeing near their indie game dev turf), with free support for BlackBerry 10 and Windows Phone 8 on the way. They’d continue to offer a Pro package with more advanced functionality, only requiring that developers purchase Pro licenses once they were pulling in $100,000 or more in a fiscal year.
So now, developers have to make a choice: do they develop on Project Anarchy, which is pretty new to this whole indie-game-support thing but free on the two biggest mobile platforms regardless of how much you’re making, or on Unity, which has a rather big community and is on its 4th major iteration, but charges a few grand per developer once you’re big enough to show up on their radar?
Regardless of the pros and cons, everyone wins here. Developers get more options. Players get more games. The world gets more developers learning the ins and outs of pro-grade tools. Hurray!
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